The weather wasn’t particularly good today. It had been overcast since early morning, and by noon, snowflakes had begun to drift down.
To facilitate setting up the tripod, half of the pump house’s roof and side walls had been removed. Ah Peng and his men sat in their vehicles with necks hunched, some with doors open and others with windows down, watching as Si Four directed two men operating the winch to slowly lower the salvage grab into the well.
Having their people handle the salvage operation was Xiong Hei’s idea. Worried they might fish out something unsightly that would be awkward with outsiders present, he had instructed Ah Peng to arrange for two quick learners to operate it on the spot. But salvage work was a specialized skill—how could anyone master it just by memorizing the steps?
After two attempts with the grab, it came up empty both times.
Ah Peng couldn’t help but curse: “Your mother! If you’re bad at book learning, that’s one thing, but how can you be this hopeless at practical skills? Are you disabled?”
Si Four was irritated at being yelled at: “If you’re so capable, you do it! We have professional salvage workers available, but no, you insist on using our guys. If our people were meant to know this stuff, we’d all be salvage company managers by now.”
The others burst out laughing. Ah Peng rolled up his sleeves and strode out of the vehicle: “Fine, I’ll do it myself. Just look at how pathetic you are.”
As luck would have it, this was Ah Peng’s chance to save face. On his first try, the salvage grab went down steadily. When the steel cable reached a certain depth, Ah Peng decisively closed the grab: “I bet we’ve caught something this time.”
Several men gathered around the well to look.
They had indeed caught something. As the winch turned back, the salvage grab came up clutching a large mass of rotting material. Whether it was decomposed cloth or vegetation was unclear—it had practically rotted into mud and water, dripping the whole way up. The stench nearly made several men vomit.
Ah Peng was chagrined, but Si Four had figured something out: “Brother Peng, this grab only caught the light stuff floating on the surface. We need to go deeper—that’s where we might find something.”
That made sense. Ah Peng lowered the grab again, not forgetting to start a bet: “Empty or not? Place your bets now!”
The group eagerly tried to provoke him, rushing to bet on empty. Ah Peng got fired up, thinking to himself that he’d show them by catching something big.
He swallowed hard, lowered the steel cable deeper, then closed the grab again and slowly began winching it back up.
Machine operation was different from manual operation. With hand-pulling, you could judge whether you’d caught something by the resistance, but with machinery, lifting a hundred pounds felt no different from lifting nothing. So the crowd swarmed to the well mouth again—since bets were involved this time, someone even turned on their phone flashlight, desperately trying to shine it down while shouting: “Empty! Empty! Empty!”
Ah Peng stood steady by the winch, feeling that as a leader, he should maintain his composure. Whether it was big, small, or empty, someone would tell him soon enough.
Sure enough, before long, the unanimous cries of “empty” were replaced by a cacophony of discussion.
“Oh wow, there’s something!”
“Holy shit, there is! It’s big! Brother Peng struck gold! Struck gold!”
“What is it? A sack? It’s pitch black.”
…
As the salvage grab gradually rose, the stench of decay grew stronger. The crowd began to feel uneasy, thinking that pulling up a dead chicken or duck would be unlucky. One of the braver ones took the initiative, lying flat and stretching out his arm to shine his phone light as far down as possible. As he extended it, his whole body suddenly jerked, and he nearly dropped his phone down the well. With a cry of “Mother!” he scrambled up and ran.
Half the onlookers didn’t understand what had happened, while the other half thought he was just putting on a show. None took it seriously until the salvage grab drew closer, and then they scattered like exploding ants, screaming and cursing in chaos.
Ah Peng found it amusing and craned his neck to look.
This casual glance proved costly—his hand slipped on the controls, and the salvage grab, just emerging from the well with its load, lunged toward the nearest person. That person’s knees gave way, and they collapsed to the ground with a thud, their pants wet with urine.
Ah Peng finally saw clearly what they had caught.
The salvage grab had brought up half a charred, deflated corpse. Half was correct—the grab’s teeth had closed with too much force and torn a body in two. The half they’d caught was the upper body, with two charred, rigid arms protruding from between the grab’s teeth as if reaching out to seize something. The head was completely skeletal, though still wrapped in a layer of charred flesh. The eyes, nose, and mouth were deeply sunken, with several red maggots scrambling in and out.
Ah Peng shouted: “Stay calm! Everyone stay calm!”
Then he bent over with a “wa” and vomited up everything he’d eaten the day before.
***
Jiang Baichuan couldn’t tell exactly how many days he’d been held captive.
It was worse than prison—at least prisoners could see sunrise and sunset through windows and calculate their days of confinement. Unlike him, who never saw daylight—forget daylight, he barely even saw artificial light.
However, his situation had improved somewhat from the beginning. Ever since that meeting with Yan Tuo, who had instructed him to “play dead as much as possible,” he had devoted most of his energy to perfecting his “at death’s door” act. This performance had earned him slightly better meals, crude bandaging, and a covered chamber pot, allowing him to regain a small measure of human dignity.
Being alive was good enough—the fact that they hadn’t killed him meant he still had value to them.
Jiang Baichuan gradually grew optimistic: after all, enduring humiliation and suffering was like sleeping on firewood and tasting gall. As long as he could eventually escape, these temporary hardships meant nothing.
Among the younger generation, he had the highest hopes for Xing Shen. He believed Xing Shen must be doing something, and though he was imprisoned, that didn’t mean he couldn’t cooperate: the stronger Xing Shen and the others became, the safer he would be, and vice versa—if he couldn’t hold out and revealed something, he would ultimately be harming himself.
So he tried to maintain a calm mindset and stick to a good routine, even creating an exercise plan for himself, regularly stretching his arms and moving his shoulders and neck to prevent muscle atrophy from sitting too long.
…
One day, as he was doing chest exercises in the dark, he suddenly heard the door outside.
It wasn’t the peaceful sound of someone bringing food, but rather an angry, ominous noise. Jiang Baichuan’s heart pounded, and he quickly lay down and curled into a ball, pretending to be asleep.
The door opened, and the lights came on, filling the room with a yellow glow.
Jiang Baichuan heard Xiong Hei shout: “Get up!”
With such a loud noise, pretending not to wake wouldn’t be believable. Jiang Baichuan opened his eyes in feigned confusion, about to ask what was happening, when Xiong Hei kicked him, making his stomach churn and his vision go dark.
That wasn’t the end of it. The next second, Xiong Hei grabbed him by the neck and dragged him out like a dead dog. Everything else was manageable, but his crudely bandaged, severely swollen foot struck against things as he was dragged, causing him to suck in cold air through his teeth as sweat covered his forehead.
Fortunately, Xiong Hei let go once they reached the cultivation room outside. Jiang Baichuan lay on the ground, shaking like he was having a fit, and it took him a while to recover. When he finally looked up, he saw a pair of short deer leather boots with jeweled ankles.
Lin Xirou! It was Lin Xirou!
Jiang Baichuan shrank back, but deep down, he was very pleased: Xiong Hei was angry, which was a good sign for him. If everything was going smoothly for them, they wouldn’t be losing their composure like this.
The more agitated they became, the more it indicated that his side was gaining the upper hand.
Lin Xirou crouched down.
Xiong Hei grabbed Jiang Baichuan’s hair and yanked his head back to make it easier for Lin Xirou to speak.
Lin Xirou’s face was expressionless: “Let me ask you, how many Feng Dao do you have?”
***
After receiving the news from Ah Peng, Lin Xirou couldn’t wait for detailed photos and demanded that Ah Peng livestream the scene for her.
The other half of the corpse had also been salvaged and placed together with the first half. The face was too severely damaged to identify, but judging by the height, it was likely Han Guan.
Because an ordinary person who died by burning shouldn’t look like this—this was one of her kind, killed first, drained of blood, then doused with gasoline and burned.
She remotely directed Ah Peng to turn the body over and examine it inch by inch, finally finding a knife wound at the crown of the skull, where a semi-transparent brownish-yellow substance had congealed—the last remaining fluid hardened into a crust.
…
How many Feng Dao do you have?
Jiang Baichuan’s heart was nearly bursting from his chest: this question meant that Nie Er had made some moves outside.
His eyes grew hot with emotion—good girl, all these years of treating her well hadn’t been wasted.
He mumbled vaguely: “One, just one…”
Before he could finish, Xiong Hei slammed his head against the ground with a dull thud.
Lin Xirou frowned and glared at Xiong Hei.
Xiong Hei was unrepentant: “That dog won’t tell the truth!”
As he spoke, he yanked Jiang Baichuan’s head up again. The recent impact had been severe, making Jiang Baichuan see stars, and soon he felt warm streams flowing down from his forehead, reddening his eyes and making them sting.
He spoke weakly: “Really, there’s only one Feng Dao.”
Lin Xirou smiled coldly: “Such a hard mouth—do you want to go see your good friend?”
What “good friend”?
Before Jiang Baichuan could process this, Xiong Hei had already thrown a stack of photos onto the ground with a “pa” sound.
The photos were freshly printed, still smelling of ink.
Jiang Baichuan’s mind went blank as soon as he saw the top one.
It was his old companion, Que Die.
Que Die was dead, hanging empty from a tree. Perhaps “empty” wasn’t the right word, but that was the feeling he got—not just dead, but dried like cured meat, his neck stretched grotesquely by the hanging rope.
Jiang Baichuan’s eyes instantly filled with tears as he frantically shuffled through the stack of photos.
It wasn’t just Que Die—the three-person team he had sent to South Ba Lin was also dead, ropes around their necks, hanging from different trees. One of them had ice crystals formed in their hair, indicating it had snowed heavily in South Ba Lin.
The last photo was a panorama shot from a distance, showing all four corpses hanging silently, reminiscent of wind chime strikers or carousel horses in motion.
Jiang Baichuan clutched that photo, staring at it. Though it was just a photograph, he could feel the wind, rain, snow, and bitter cold emanating from it.
He pressed his bloodied forehead against the photo and began to howl in muffled, suppressed grief.
Lin Xirou stood up and said coldly: “Don’t blame us for this. We sent word, asking for someone to come to South Ba Monkey Head to collect the bodies, but your people were all cowards—not one came.”
Jiang Baichuan’s sobbing broke into a laugh: “They were right not to go. One more person there would have meant one more death.”
Lin Xirou also laughed: “Is that so? When you’re hanging from a tree, will you still hope they don’t come? I’ll ask you one more time—how many Feng Dao do you have?”
Jiang Baichuan sniffed: “One, just one. The Dao family has many members, yes, but there’s only one Feng Dao.”
Lin Xirou’s expression gradually turned vicious: “Do you take me for a fool? The Feng Dao you speak of is still paralyzed—how could he have killed our people?”
Jiang Baichuan’s chest pounded again.
Lin Xirou had used the word “killed”—had Nie Er killed A-Xiao?
Well done, indeed.
He felt extremely satisfied inside, and after a pause said: “Feng Dao is paralyzed, yes, but his blade isn’t in his hands, is it? You should know that Feng Dao nourishes his blades with blood. As long as it’s a blade he has fed, even in the hands of another Dao family member, it can kill a Xiao.”