Bai Yang stared blankly at the radio on the desk, then shouted the next second:
“She’s back! She’s back!”
The two men waiting in the living room stood up simultaneously, resembling two fathers waiting outside a delivery room for their child to be born.
This communication blackout had frightened everyone badly. Although it lasted only two and a half hours, it made Bai Yang and the others realize the serious shortcomings in their current communication methods. This was Ban Xia and Bai Yang’s first communication interruption, and after this close call, Bai Zhen and Wang Ning immediately prioritized building a remote communication relay system, to be developed alongside the image transmission link.
Currently, BG4MSR could only communicate with Bai Yang when she was on her radio—like a landline phone that couldn’t be carried around. No matter where BG4MSR went, she could only communicate from her room.
Old Bai had experienced that kind of life. When Bai Zhen was young, before moving to Nanjing city, his family had spent money to install a landline phone. At that time, households with landlines were the minority in the village, and neighbors might rely on the Bai family’s single phone to communicate with the outside world. Whenever someone called looking for someone, Bai Zhen’s parents would send him out to call them.
Young Bai Zhen would run out to the threshing ground in front of their door and shout at the top of his lungs: “Scabby Head—! You’ve got a phone call—!”
The person called would hurry over, curse him for having no manners, and then run in to answer the phone.
Bai Zhen knew well how inconvenient this was.
So they had to upgrade from a landline to a mobile phone.
Let BG4MSR maintain contact with them anytime, anywhere when she was out.
“…A male Bengal tiger’s territory usually ranges over thirty square kilometers, up to eighty square kilometers at most. Females are smaller, within twenty square kilometers. BG4MSR, do you understand? OVER.”
“Under—stood.”
Bai Yang was rambling on reading materials, like a teacher doing force-feeding education.
Thanks to his dad and Uncle Zhao, he had prepared comprehensive materials. Since BG4MSR had returned safely and it was just a false alarm, Bai Yang immediately began tonight’s work—he wanted to turn BG4MSR into her era’s top tiger expert in one night.
“Pay attention to its hunting methods. Bengal tigers prefer to hunt at dusk, and their usual killing method is throat-locking. Because their bite force is extremely strong, they go straight for the prey’s throat. Large animals suffocate when bitten, small animals have their spines crushed directly. My lady, you must be careful to protect your throat. Do you know there’s an ethnic group called the Padaung? They always wear brass rings around their necks, stretching them very long. Or you could try Hong Family Iron Wire Boxing, OVER.”
“BG4MXH, what’s Hong Family Iron Wire Boxing?”
“Hong Family Iron Wire Boxing! Wulang Eight Trigrams Staff! And Twelve Roads Tan Leg! The three giants of ‘Kung Fu’! Simply put, it’s wearing iron rings on your body… I mean you need to pay attention to protecting yourself, OVER.”
“Okay, I’ll be careful.”
The girl agreed quite readily.
“Then let me tell you about setting traps next.” Bai Yang yawned, the desk clock’s hour hand pointing to two—he rarely stayed up this late.
He released the microphone and rubbed his eyes.
“Sleepy?” the girl asked. “Why don’t you go to bed first?”
“No, no, I need to finish telling you everything I should tell you, otherwise what did I wait so long for? OVER.”
As he spoke, he took some White Flower Oil from the bookshelf, dropped a bit into his palm, rubbed his temples, and then opened the thick stack of materials in his hand. Glancing at the cover, some bigshot had thrown over their student’s master’s thesis titled “Comparative Study of Bengal Tiger Behavior in Habitat and Human-Livestock Activity Buffer Zones.”
“Alright then, I’m listening.”
Ban Xia sat properly.
While reading the materials, Bai Yang thought to himself that these animal experts were enthusiastic, pulling out all their resources.
From the Bengal tiger’s world distribution to their wild habits to worldwide case studies of human-tiger conflicts, most impressive was that someone had planned a complete tiger hunting scheme for him, covering everything from start to finish—from trap design to bait placement to location selection to tool preparation, and finally how to seek sentence reduction in prison.
Time ticked by minute by minute.
Bai Yang read drowsily.
Ban Xia listened with great interest.
“In conclusion, unless necessary, don’t engage in direct conflict with tigers. In 2016, there was a tiger attack incident at the Beijing Badaling Wildlife Park, one dead and one injured, because they got out of their car in the park area… um… a tiger can carry an adult human as easily as carrying a chicken… did you hear that, my lady? You can’t possibly beat a tiger, it would carry you like a chicken!” Bai Yang put down the materials and emphasized again, “You can’t confront it head-on, OVER.”
“Okay, won’t confront it head-on.”
Ban Xia agreed very readily.
Bai Yang was stunned, “Really? You promise not to confront it directly? OVER.”
“I promise you.”
“You guarantee it?” Bai Yang asked, “Guarantee not to be reckless? OVER.”
“I guarantee.”
Bai Yang thought to himself, why is this stubborn lady so agreeable tonight?
If she could promise not to act recklessly, that would naturally be the best outcome. Bengal tigers had very large activity ranges—as long as they left the Meihua Villa area, BG4MSR’s life wouldn’t be threatened. In Bai Yang’s view, she did not need to have a grudge against the tiger.
“I hope none of these things we found will be needed,” Bai Yang said. “That would be best, OVER.”
“But you all spent so much time and effort.”
“Nothing is more important than your safety,” Bai Yang said. “Compared to your safety, what’s this bit of time and effort we spent? OVER.”
“Alright then, I’ll fulfill your wish!”
Bai Yang was startled.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean making all your work wasted effort!”
The girl giggled on the other end.
Bai Yang was dumbfounded.
“I… I don’t understand…”
“I mean everything you did was useless, won’t be needed. I don’t need these things anymore—the problem’s already solved,” Ban Xia explained. “You wasted your effort. Doesn’t that make you happy?”
“What?”
Bai Yang’s eyes widened.
“You forgot OVER.”
“O… OVER.”
“I already took care of that tiger, this afternoon,” Ban Xia continued. “So the crisis is over, BG4MXH. All your effort was for nothing.”
“Then… why didn’t you say so earlier!” Bai Yang was speechless.
This girl had already solved the problem but didn’t tell him, letting him stay up late rambling on like an idiot.
“You forgot OVER.”
“O… OVER.”
“Is it not okay to want to hear you talk, to hear your voice?” The girl was quite crafty.
“You… this…” The young man’s face immediately turned red, at a loss for words.
Fortunately, the other side couldn’t see.
“Although the problem was already solved, I still wanted to hear you finish saying everything,” Ban Xia said. “If you prepared all this but couldn’t tell it to me, that would be a real waste. Now that you’ve finished telling me, you’ve completed all the work perfectly—it wasn’t wasted at all, don’t you agree?”
Bai Yang put down the microphone, his body slumping back against the chair, letting out a long breath.
This was really good news.
But he was curious how the girl had managed it.
“BG4MSR, you say you took care of the tiger? How did you do it? Are you Lin Daiyu? Can you also uproot weeping willows? OVER.”
“That’s a long story, BG4MXH. You told me not to be reckless, and I can do that, but sometimes you can’t help it when the other side is reckless,” Ban Xia said leisurely.
Let’s turn the clock back eight hours.
Eight hours earlier.
At a distance of just one meter, characteristics beyond the biological were greatly diminished and smoothed away. At this moment, what faced off in the bushes was not a highly intelligent human who could master technological power and a fierce wild beast that ate raw meat and drank blood, but two mammals occupying different positions in the food chain. Like in stories where a commoner’s rage leads to two corpses, blood flowing five steps, the world in mourning—at the extremely close distance of one meter, a mighty empire’s army couldn’t resist an assassin’s final dagger and the glorious civilization humans had built over thousands of years was no match for the sharp teeth tigers had evolved over millions of years.
As an apex predator, the Bengal tiger emanated a dangerous aura that struck straight at biological instinct. That musky, thick, overwhelming scent could make any creature flee in terror—this was fear encoded in DNA, fear that ancestors millions of years ago had faced directly, passing it down, hiding it in Ban Xia’s body, making her limbs go numb.
The moment she saw that amber-colored eye, the girl’s mind went blank.
So being scared stiff wasn’t just a figure of speech.
The shotgun was on the grass beside her, about thirty centimeters from her left hand, but Ban Xia didn’t dare reach for it because the shotgun was too long—the motion to fire would be too big.
And the tiger was only a meter away from her.
Ban Xia had no doubt it could snap her neck with just a slight reach of its head, and crush her spine with just a shake—killing her would be barely more difficult than killing a chicken.
The only reason it hadn’t moved yet was because it was observing her.
There were too few humans left in this world, and tigers always carefully observed unfamiliar creatures first.
They were locked in a brief standoff for several seconds. The Bengal tiger crouched in the bushes, half its body hidden by dense foliage—only its head and front limbs were visible. The yellow-white gradient of its fur, the thick dense black stripes, and that terrifyingly large face all matched what Ban Xia had imagined, yet were far more frightening than imagined.
Its size was even more massive than the girl had imagined. So this thing was this big.
So big.
This was the first thought that popped into Ban Xia’s mind when her brain started working again.
Being stared at by a tiger was not a good experience. Those eyes showed none of the emotion a living being should have—it was like a killing machine. For most creatures, this was probably the last face they would see in their lives.
The sun was about to set, and the Bengal tiger’s body was hidden in the shadow of the residential building.
Ban Xia noticed its other eye was blind, with an obvious scar running down half its face from top to bottom.
It was indeed the tiger that had attacked her teacher back then—one of its eyes had been stabbed blindly by her teacher. No wonder this tiger had appeared recklessly before her—its vision wasn’t very good.
Ban Xia stared at it, slowly moving backward to increase the distance.
The teacher had said that when facing large predators, you must never panic and turn to run, whether it’s tigers, leopards, or brown bears—running would trigger their hunting instinct.
The faster you run, the faster you die.
When Ban Xia moved, the Bengal tiger moved too. It pulled back its front limbs, slowly raising its upper body, and then its back half left the ground as well, its fur rustling against the bushes.
It stepped forward, trying to close the distance with the girl. No one knew what was going through the tiger’s mind at that moment—maybe it was about to pounce, maybe it was going to walk away—and now no one would ever know, because the next second a 9mm copper-jacketed steel core bullet entered its forehead, tumbling through its cranial cavity, turning brain tissue into a bloody mush, finally piercing the skull and exiting the back of the head with thick dark red fluid, leaving an irregular hole nearly five centimeters in diameter.
“Bang!”
The 8-gram bullet had an initial velocity of nearly 400 meters per second after leaving the barrel, taking only 0.005 seconds to fly two meters through the air. Death arrived in five milliseconds—no living thing could dodge it. The gunshot was deafening.
The sound waves only had time to spread after the tiger’s death, echoing between the surrounding residential buildings, and startling a flock of birds.
“Bang!”
“Bang!”
“Bang!”
“Bang!”
Four more bullets entered the tiger’s body in the next four seconds—one hit the head, and the other three struck its neck and heart. Each shot was lethal. Ban Xia’s gun wasn’t designed for hunting, but at the ultra-close range of just two meters, the Parabellum pistol rounds had enough power to blow apart a large felid’s skull.
Ban Xia would never draw her gun as fast as she did today again in her life. This was like the life-or-death duels of legendary Wild West gunslingers. She held the gun one-handed, fired the first shot, and then raised her left hand to support the grip for the next four shots. Single-handed shooting wasn’t accurate, but the distance was close enough.
Ban Xia had finished her opponent with the first shot but squeezed the trigger four more times to ensure the kill before collapsing powerlessly to the ground.
The Bengal tiger’s body lay on the grass, dark black blood slowly seeping out from under its fur, staining the green grass red.
The girl slowly backed away several steps, sat down hard, and gasped for breath.
Her legs had no strength, as soft as cotton.
The pistol fell to the ground—her hands were shaking too much to hold it. The trembling spread from her hands to her shoulders, from her shoulders to her waist and legs, and then to her whole body. Finally, Ban Xia’s entire body shook like she had the chills, and she felt nauseous.
Those few seconds of action had drained all her strength. Ban Xia lay down, lay on the grass, right beside the tiger’s corpse. The air was filled with a faint grass scent and the smell of blood. She thought of nothing, and didn’t want to move—both soul and body were like stones, motionless, staring at the now completely dark sky.
The girl slowly closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep.
“Teacher,” she said softly.