Ba Yunye swept her flashlight beam in that direction. “A magazine. Give it here.”
Liu Ming jogged over with the magazine. Ba Yunye took it and checked. “Empty.”
At the same moment, Diao Zhuo was carefully extracting, from a vest pocket on the corpse, a tactical knife and a fully loaded magazine. Ba Yunye deftly ejected a round, weighed it in her palm, and turned it over with a knowing look. “Well. Foreign make.”
Diao Zhuo drew the tactical knife. The blade was coated in dried sap and plant debris — no blood. He glanced at the corpse, and concluded: this was almost certainly the person who, after failing to shoot Long Ge, had taken out their rage by hacking at the vines.
“Has anyone found the handgun?” Ba Yunye asked.
Everyone shook their heads. Ba Yunye thought it likely Long Ge had seized the gun for self-defense, which gave her a measure of comfort.
Xiang’an said in astonishment: “Who on earth did Long Ge cross? They’re trying to wipe him out completely! Could he have accidentally witnessed a drug lord from the Golden Triangle making a deal?!”
That single sentence jolted both Diao Zhuo and Ba Yunye. Someone pursuing Long Ge with a firearm — Long Ge must have seen or obtained something that drove people to this kind of frenzied, ruthless response. The same as with drugs. Was it possible that he had discovered something about He Zhengrun — caught wind of some transaction — and was now, like He Zhengrun before him, targeted for silencing?
Long Ge was still missing. And clearly, the person who had been hunting him was not alone. He had managed to deal with this one — but what of the others? Could he continue to evade them?
“It’s becoming clear,” Ba Yunye said, curling her hand into a fist. “The key to proving Long Ge didn’t kill He Zhengrun is finding Long Ge himself. Once we find him, the whole truth will come out.”
“Right now, it’s not just us looking for him. There’s the police — and these unidentified assailants. And the assailants got a head start on us.” Diao Zhuo pinched the bridge of his nose. A quiet urgency stirred in him.
“Diao Zhuo! Get up here!” Da Qin called from somewhere above.
Without a word, Diao Zhuo slipped off his jacket, draped it over Ba Yunye’s shoulder, and climbed the tree in quick, fluid movements. Ba Yunye laughed softly. “The way you climb tells me you were a mischievous little monkey as a kid.”
Diao Zhuo looked down at her from above. He had a feeling she’d be just as capable of scaling walls and trees. “Birds of a feather.”
With the rescue team’s attention directed upward, Liu Ming’s group quietly drifted toward the hanging green corpse. The sight was genuinely unsettling up close — the entire body was soft and slightly bloated. Another day or two and the body would likely begin to enter a state of severe decomposition, at which point no one should be touching it carelessly.
That all-pervasive green, though. Impossible to account for.
Liu Ming picked up the magazine Diao Zhuo had set on the ground beside the corpse. In a practiced motion, he thumbed out a round and slipped it quickly into his pocket.
“Hey, watch yourselves up there!” Ba Yunye called up loudly. “No snakes doesn’t mean no wasp nests!”
Diao Zhuo spent some time examining the trap from above and worked out roughly how it functioned — a mechanism triggered by the tension of a large branch. Looking at the scrape marks and claw marks on the branch, it became fairly clear what had happened: the foreigner, once hoisted upside down and unwilling to give up, had tried to stabilize himself by grabbing at the branch, intending to free his feet once he had a grip — only to encounter the Hua Lazi snake coiled in the tree, which killed him. The body ended up half-suspended in the branches. When Ba Yunye had touched the lower end of the rope, the trap was triggered once more, and the force of the branch brought the body swinging back down.
The climbers descended one by one and explained the situation above to the others. Ba Yunye said, partly relieved and partly worried: “The fact that Long Ge was collected enough to build a trap like this means he was still in reasonable shape when he got here. But there are so many venomous snakes in this area — I don’t know how he’s doing now…”
“Do we…take the body down?” Da Qin asked uncertainly. “Hanging there all green and glistening — it’s really giving me the creeps.”
“Please — who would dare touch it? Let it hang. When the police get here they’d say we tampered with the evidence.” Liu Ming stepped back several paces, making clear he wanted no part of this and, though it could have been coincidence, there was a faint note of guidance in his tone.
“Leave it to the police. None of us should go near the body again.” Diao Zhuo waved the group back from the corpse.
Darkness had fully descended now. Every moment they delayed setting up camp, the unknown dangers lurking in the dark grew.
“There’s a clearing not too far — lightning struck and burned through it years ago. Fewer trees. It’ll do.” Kong Gan said.
“Burned through? Wouldn’t that take out a whole section of forest?” Xiang’an said, curious.
“Too damp. Couldn’t sustain a real fire.” Kong Gan said with a slight smile, and led everyone toward the spot.
That made sense. They logged the coordinates and sent the location to the police.
“When will the police get here?” Ba Yunye asked with concern.
“Dark now, and the path is rough. Even if they set out right away, they won’t reach us until early morning.” Kong Gan said.
“All right. We get up early tomorrow then.” Ba Yunye ultimately didn’t want to be forcibly intercepted by the police — but knowing they would now deploy more personnel once they understood this was the route Long Ge had taken to flee, she would inevitably cross paths with them. The thought settled over her like a low cloud.
Just before they left, someone’s flashlight swept across the corpse. In her peripheral vision, Ba Yunye noticed the bloated face looked different from when they had first discovered it. She looked more closely — and felt a cold sweat break out across her entire body. “It… its eyes. They’re open.”
In an instant, the rescue team’s collective composure cracked:
“What the— Master Ba, stop messing with us!”
“Diao Zhuo, do something!”
Diao Zhuo trained his flashlight on the corpse. He too was visibly thrown.
Ba Yunye was right. The corpse’s eyes were, genuinely, open. The dilated pupils — pitch black, unfocused — stared out from that greenish, swollen face, each one like a dark abyss, no focal point, as though fixed on no one and everyone at once.
Multiple flashlight beams converged on the corpse’s face, illuminating it in sharper, more horrifying detail. Not only had the eyes opened — everyone noticed something else, even more alarming:
“It! Has! Grown! Green! Hair!” Xiang’an nearly screamed, forcing out each word as though the syllables took physical effort.
And so it had. Fine green fuzz had appeared at some point on the corpse’s eyebrows and forehead, and in the beam of the flashlights, the strands appeared to shift subtly left and right.
Even Kong Gan stared in stunned disbelief before dropping to his knees and muttering something urgently.
Ba Yunye swallowed. Even the base of her tongue felt stiff. A person with a gun, she wouldn’t flinch at. But this — this grotesque, green-haired corpse… Every supernatural tale she’d read over the years surfaced in her mind at once, and the words escaped before she could stop them:
“Don’t tell me it’s about to reanimate.”
“It’s fine, there are… there are a lot of us.” Xiang’an said this out loud while stooping to grab a rock off the ground, holding it up by his ear, ready to throw at a moment’s notice.
Liu Ming’s group exchanged glances. They weren’t necessarily believers in reanimation — but they didn’t dare make any sudden moves either.
Diao Zhuo lifted one foot to walk toward the corpse. Ba Yunye grabbed him by the arm. “Hey! Don’t go near it! What if it jumps up and bites you? You’ll turn into one of the walking dead!”
“You’re the only one who’s ever bitten me,” he said with a low hum, then reached back and patted the back of her head, signaling her to let go.
The others heard that — and just like that, the spell broke. The creeping atmosphere of horror that had been gathering was dissolved, punctured by the unmistakable intimacy of that one line. Da Qin stepped forward. “I’ll go with you.”
Ba Yunye steeled herself. “Fine. I’ll go too.”
The rest of the rescue team followed suit with their own offers, but Diao Zhuo held up a hand. “Just the three of us will take the lead.” And so, the three of them slowly approached the corpse.
Truth be told, the closer they got, the more distinct the green fuzz on the eyebrows and forehead became — even the lashes were coated in a layer of fine green fibers. Combined with the protruding, fully dilated pupils — no white visible at all — the overall effect evoked something alien and deeply wrong.
Da Qin gave the corpse a cautious poke with his trekking pole. The body swayed twice but showed no sign of lurching into motion. The goosebumps across Ba Yunye’s skin began, very gradually, to recede. Diao Zhuo pulled on a glove, pinched several strands of the green fuzz between his fingers, and extracted them without much effort. He rubbed them together — they vanished, leaving behind a smear of green on the glove like paint.
He thought for a moment, then moved to examine further. Ba Yunye finally couldn’t restrain herself — she grabbed his arm. “All right. It didn’t jump up and bite us. That’s enough. Stop… stop touching it. Let’s go.”
Diao Zhuo peeled off the glove and stepped back from the corpse. “As you say.”
Xiang’an exhaled, his tightly held shoulders slumping with relief. “The legendary green-haired reanimated corpse — I suppose this is what the stories were about. Oh — Tan Lin, this just reminded me of that fur-covered tofu from your hometown in Anhui…”
Tan Lin flicked him in the temple with a finger. “Look who’s talking! You were hiding further back than anyone else just now!”
Ba Yunye wiped the cold sweat from her forehead. “What about the eyes, though? How did they open?”
Da Qin had been close enough to observe, and offered a theory: “Probably related to decomposition. I remember reading something similar in a news story once. And yes, the greenish coloring is genuinely alarming — whether decomposition caused it, only a forensic pathologist would know. But still… science is science. We gave ourselves a fright over nothing.”
The corner of Diao Zhuo’s mouth curved almost imperceptibly upward. “Not ‘we.’ Just the one.”
Ba Yunye gave him a look, then deliberately turned her head away. And in doing so, she noticed something she hadn’t seen before: carved into the trunk of the tree that had served as the base for the trap was a lopsided stroke — the character for “one” — with a small hook at the top, shaped like an arrowhead. She froze, brow furrowed as she studied it carefully. At the base of the tree she found a single bead — one of the ones from Long Ge’s bracelet. As though it had been placed there to prompt recognition in the right person, a small smile came over her face.
Ten o’clock.
She shared this with Diao Zhuo. He was quiet for a moment, then said softly: “The opposite of ten o’clock. Four o’clock.”
Ba Yunye caught on at once. Long Ge’s markers would inevitably be discovered by people watching for them, so — just like with the descending dragon at the beginning — what he was indicating was the direction opposite to where the marker pointed.
Kong Gan finally rose from the ground, saying they should proceed with the original plan and get to the campsite.
Diao Zhuo turned to Ba Yunye. “Still have the energy to keep moving?”
“Please. I’m someone who once cycled around all of Chongqing for fun~”
He smiled. “Once we find Long Ge, the two of us are going to Chongqing.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “What for?”
“To watch you cycle.”
She gave an amused huff.
Diao Zhuo walked over to Kong Gan. “Is it possible to travel at night?”
Kong Gan looked somewhat taken aback — this was likely beyond even his own experience of moving through the jungle. Cradling his bamboo basket, he stood in place for some time, deliberating. While he remained silent, the others waited without pressing. Not one person raised an objection to Diao Zhuo’s request.
Darkness surrounded them completely. Above, the stars were dense and vast. Some nocturnal creature — an owl, perhaps, or something else — blinked from the dark, its eyes flickering in and out of visibility. Occasionally there came the beat of wings, or a strange and mournful cry, and in its aftermath the surrounding silence felt deeper than before.
Ba Yunye waited quietly. Then, unbidden, a memory surfaced — a scene from before she had enlisted. Long Ge, seeing her off, had said to her: “Whatever hardships come your way, you swallow them yourself. Don’t count on anyone else to carry them for you. You learn to drive. You learn to shoot. No matter how many people come at you, you knock every last one of them flat. When you’re discharged, you come work with me — but I don’t keep people who aren’t useful. So you’d better be worth something.” His words were harsh, but every time she had returned from a training rotation, she would find new supplies of pain-relief patches and other things in her dormitory, and she always knew — without needing to be told — that he had arranged to have them smuggled in.