“Watch out!” Diao Zhuo warned everyone. “Da Qin wasn’t wrong — there is someone else down here!”
The four of them immediately closed ranks, swinging their flashlights in every direction. The terrain around them rose and fell sharply, with layer upon layer of tree canopy overhead, with only the area where the stream flowed being relatively level. The rotting stench of the corpse was threaded through with a damp, metallic smell that turned the stomach. Whatever unknown terror lurked here might be concealed in any one of these stinking, half-lit corners.
A faint rustling sound came from some indeterminate direction. Every one of them felt their nerves drawn tight as a bowstring bent to the very limit.
Diao Zhuo gripped his high-intensity flashlight firmly. “We are the Beidou Rescue Team! Our mission here is to locate Renlong Duoji and rescue all related personnel! You have nothing to fear! You may choose to leave of your own accord, or you may choose to accept our help!”
“Ahhh—ooo—” An animal-like howl erupted without warning, sounding nothing like a normal human voice.
Everyone swung toward the direction of the sound and shone their lights — but found nothing.
“A wild man?” Ba Yunye murmured. “There are legends of wild men in the Shennongjia area — could it be that we have them in Yunnan too?”
“It can’t be a wild man — Da Qin said the person was wearing clothes.” Xiang’an said.
“Stay alert.” Diao Zhuo warned.
The group swept their flashlights across every surface, seeing only the shadows of trees and rocks. Then suddenly, from above came the sound of small stones skittering loose. Diao Zhuo raised his flashlight and illuminated a pale, blood-smeared face with a grotesque, leering grin that seemed to spring from nowhere — like a ghost materializing from thin air. He wore thin, filthy clothing and looked as though he had crawled out of a mudpit, his features impossible to discern clearly, but unmistakably male. His eyes were wide and fixed like two great copper bells, his lips pulled apart, the gaps between his teeth a dark, dried red — like a mutated human from any number of classic zombie films. Whether he was still breathing was unclear.
The others also looked up and spotted the figure crouching like a dog on a protruding rock above them — they had no idea when he had climbed up there. While they were on the ground examining the corpse just now, he had probably been sitting up there watching them all along.
“Just what the hell are you — human or ghost?!” Ba Yunye barked furiously. “If you’ve got the guts, come down here!”
The man didn’t answer, but he could clearly tell that Ba Yunye was the one who had spoken. He stared at her with something like unsettling interest, swallowed a mouthful of saliva as if he were ravenous, and then launched himself downward with wild excitement.
“How are they doing? Do they need help?” Da Qin had recovered enough to stand up and ask.
His words were barely out when a howl rang through the sky. The others jumped too, pushing forward one by one, clutching their walkie-talkies and calling down to the group below — but Diao Zhuo and the others didn’t respond.
“What do we do? Should one or two more people go down?” Da Qin found a spare safety harness. “Should I head back down?”
Kong Gan was so frightened by the howl that he trembled uncontrollably and hurriedly dropped to his knees to bow in prayer again.
Qi Zi gave a short, derisive laugh and pulled Kong Gan back to his feet. “Ha — there’s no such thing as someone transforming into a monster after death. I think the whole ‘no one ever comes back from those mountains’ thing is just people scaring themselves. Most likely there’s a tiger in there, or it’s a lightning strike zone. Nothing to be afraid of.”
Kong Gan shook his head with the pained, helpless expression of someone watching people ignore the wisdom of their elders.
“If there really is a tiger, that’s pretty frightening too,” Da Qin said uneasily. “If a tiger is actually chasing you down trying to eat you — do you fight back or not? Fight back, and you’re harming a rare and protected animal, and you probably won’t win anyway. Don’t fight back — and then it’s us who have no way out.”
Qi Zi brushed it off and argued back: “Dream on. You’d have to pay admission just to see a tiger.”
“Hey! Where are you going? You—” Liu Ming’s voice rang out. The two bickering men spun around to see someone shaking Liu Ming’s hand loose and bolting. Several of the mountaineering club members rushed after him, but the person cut left and right, and in no time had given all of them the slip.
“Has Kong Gan run off?” Qi Zi asked, slow to catch on.
“Faster than a rabbit!” After a short while, Pang Hou and the others came dragging Kong Gan back. The members of the group who had been silent throughout the journey now seemed too incensed to contain themselves, and they lit into him one after another:
“Saying another step forward means certain death, and that he doesn’t want to be sent to his death or turned into some kind of monster — so we should be the ones to die instead?”
“He was paid to guide us into the mountains and back out again — not to abandon us here in the middle!”
“Completely irresponsible! All he thinks about is money!”
“All right, all right — if someone is dead set on running, you can’t keep them.” Liu Ming waved a hand. “If he wants to go, let him go.”
Da Qin said with a grimace: “Once he’s gone, we won’t have a guide for whatever comes next.”
A’Shui, who had never spoken in front of the group before, suddenly said: “Since he’s never been to those mountains ahead anyway, having a guide or not makes no difference. Better to rely on ourselves.”
The Beidou rescue team members found this quite reasonable and wanted to agree, but couldn’t figure out who had spoken — they only noticed that the mountaineering club members were unusually quiet, and it was rare to hear them speak up at all, let alone vent their frustrations.
“We still need a guide,” Liu Ming said. “We came together as a group, and it’s best if we all go back together.”
Down below, the four of them had instinctively spread apart. The moment the strange man’s feet hit the ground, without any pause whatsoever, he lunged straight at Ba Yunye, his blood-smeared mouth gaping open, charging at her throat like a wild animal.
“Go to hell!” Ba Yunye was not someone who could be touched so easily. With agile grace she twisted aside to avoid him and immediately spun to deliver a kick, sending the strange man face-first into the mud. An ordinary person would take at least a minute or two to struggle back up after a kick like that, but this man seemed to have no sense of pain whatsoever. He pushed off the ground with both hands and immediately came charging at Ba Yunye on all fours again. But this time, before he could even reach her, someone grabbed him from behind and hurled him five meters through the air. He rolled across the ground several times before coming to a stop.
Ba Yunye gave Diao Zhuo a thumbs up.
The man was like an unkillable cockroach — almost in the very second he stopped rolling he hauled himself upright again, and now charged toward Xiang’an, who happened to be closest to him. He looked as if he was absolutely determined to sink his teeth into someone, a greedy and ferocious glint flashing in his eyes. Xiang’an was genuinely startled. He leaped and ran, and the man chased wildly after him, breathing heavily. He had probably slammed his nose in the fall earlier, because blood was now streaming from his nostrils into his wide-open mouth, staining his lips and teeth a vivid, dripping red — making him look all the more frenzied and terrifying.
Xiang’an kept running at full speed. Perhaps catching a glimpse of Ba Yunye out of the corner of his eye and feeling that his panicked flight looked far too undignified, a plan suddenly occurred to him. He abruptly changed direction and lowered his head to charge straight into the man behind him. There was a dull “thud,” and the strange man was knocked down — but before Xiang’an could even catch his breath, the man suddenly shot out both hands, grabbed his legs, and sank his teeth in.
“Ahhh!” Xiang’an cried out in pain, and by instinct kicked hard. The strange man went flipping through the air, landing on his back. Xiang’an pressed his hand over the bitten spot on his calf, a bad feeling rising up inside him — he had a horrible feeling he was about to end up just like the strange man.
Sure enough, the strange man scrambled back to his feet with startling speed and hurled himself at Xiang’an again, who happened to be closest to him. But before he could reach him, Diao Zhuo appeared and struck him down with a single punch, sending him sprawling sideways to the ground. Xiang’an quickly retreated, and with his heart still hammering, pulled up his trouser leg to check — a human’s teeth were no match for a real predator’s, and his skin hadn’t actually been broken.
The strange man tried to flip back upright like a shrimp twice, then dragged himself back up on his own. The moment Diao Zhuo grabbed his wrists, he reflexively snapped his teeth forward to bite. Diao Zhuo was forced to release his grip, and the man surged forward. Diao Zhuo drove into him and knocked him down again, but not hard enough — the man did a carp-flip and lunged at Diao Zhuo again, his bleeding mouth opening and closing without stop, his head swinging back and forth. Diao Zhuo, perhaps disgusted, finally swung a hard palm-strike across his face. The man’s body swayed and he collapsed beside the corpse. Just as everyone expected him to clamber upright again, his hands instead seized the corpse and he began biting into it furiously, with the look of someone savoring a great delicacy. The bloated, reeking corpse and the creature gnawing at it formed together one of the most horrifying scenes that everyone present would never forget for the rest of their lives.
“Pull him away!” Diao Zhuo called out. Tan Lin joined him and they both stepped forward, reaching to grab the man by his clothes.
“Ahh—” The strange man let out another terrifying howl, and with inhuman strength suddenly seized Tan Lin’s wrist and snapped his teeth down toward it.
Ba Yunye arrived just in time. She jammed her small flashlight into his gaping mouth. His teeth and the flashlight collided with a sharp “crack.” She didn’t hesitate — her eyes took on that cold, decisive light. While the strange man was straining to spit out the flashlight, she slipped her right forearm around his throat and locked it tight, her right hand gripping her left fist, while her left hand pushed firmly against the back of his head. This was a killing technique. Caught in the chokehold, the man had no way to escape and no ability to bite anyone.
Until now she hadn’t known who or what this person was, and hadn’t dared to act decisively. But now, seeing him bite at anyone within reach — completely irrational, extraordinarily resistant to kicks and falls, exactly like a zombie from a film — she judged the danger level to be extreme. She shed any lingering impulse to stand back and watch. She wanted to finish him.
“Shall I?” She called loudly to Diao Zhuo. If he said yes, one firm squeeze would cut off the airway and induce unconsciousness.
Diao Zhuo knew that look in her eyes well. Back in Qiang Tang, when she had raised her rifle to shoot, this cool and confident gaze had driven itself deep into his heart.
“Keep him alive.” He said.
Ba Yunye drew a deep breath. Her hand moved with sharp precision, and it seemed as though she adjusted her technique slightly — the strange man convulsed and struggled for a few moments, then went limp all over, half-dead, and collapsed to the ground. Ba Yunye dusted the mud from her forearm. “He’s only unconscious. Not dead.”
Xiang’an gave her a trembling thumbs up. “Master Ba, you really are…”
Ba Yunye was about to ask about his injury when her eyes went suddenly wide and she bellowed — “Watch out!!”
Before the words had finished leaving her mouth, Xiang’an was knocked to the ground by a shadowy figure that appeared from nowhere. A contorted, grotesque face suddenly materialized above him — and just like the strange man from moments ago, this one was lunging for his throat with a bloody, gaping maw.
The other three rushed in at once, all raising their feet to kick — but the new creature hadn’t even managed to get a bite in before he abruptly lost consciousness himself, collapsing entirely on top of Xiang’an, apparently having run out of strength and died.
“What just happened?” Tan Lin blinked in bewilderment.
Xiang’an’s heart was still slamming against his ribs. He struggled to kick the person off himself and cried out bitterly to the heavens: “Why does everyone come after me…”
“Baby-faced meat smells good.” Ba Yunye laughed, reaching out to pull him up. Without any warning, the unconscious creature beside him suddenly bit down — and by instinct Xiang’an threw up his hand to shield her, his hand taking the full force of the bite. This time, it drew real blood.
Everyone felt their scalp go numb. Diao Zhuo swung a hooked punch, and the creature groaned twice, then was felled by the heavy blow and fell unconscious again. Before anyone could exhale in relief, the man Ba Yunye had choked unconscious earlier had somehow crawled over unnoticed and grabbed her leg with both hands, sinking his teeth in.
She cried out in pain. Diao Zhuo and Tan Lin grabbed the man together and dragged him off, but the moment they hauled him upright he snapped at them — they had no choice but to wrestle him to the ground in unison. Tan Lin straddled the man’s back, pinning him so he couldn’t raise his head. Diao Zhuo dug rope and bandages from his pack, gagged his mouth, and trussed him up completely — finally subduing him.
“Tied up like a rice dumpling,” Ba Yunye said with disdain, one eyebrow raised. “You really should learn how to tie someone up neatly.”
Diao Zhuo dragged the rope over to the other man. “I don’t have that kind of hobby.”
“There’s always a first time.”
Diao Zhuo paused mid-step. He looked at Ba Yunye with an expression that carried a weight of meaning, and the corner of his mouth curved. “Your tastes are something else. Just wait.”