Ma Lu had wanted to stay in the secret chamber a bit longer to see if the Pointy Hat had left any other papers, but when he glanced at the Chessboard Map, he noticed a cluster of Xiao Hong dots approaching their location.
Those dots moved quickly. When Ma Lu first spotted them, they were more than five hundred squares away, but in less than half a minute, the distance between them had shrunk to less than three hundred squares.
And from their names on the map, he could tell they weren't all Energized Plants, or to be more precise, not Energized Plants at all.
Ma Lu made a snap decision, leading the four witches out of the secret chamber, then used a passphrase to command the boulder to close again.
He had originally wanted to use the Chessboard Map to plan a route of escape back to the rock wall where the Aircraft was parked.
