It was somewhat comforting that the subsequent dishes were relatively “mild” and didn’t knock him down again.
After rolling on the floor, his face and clothes were covered in dust. While Yi Xiao and the others started eating, Zong Hang went to the bathroom to wash his face.
Splashing cold water on his face, he became distracted, staring blankly at the bathtub in the mirror’s reflection: he had lain there for so long, soaking in water every day; yet one bite of fish had caused such a strange reaction in his body…
He pulled open his collar, looking down at his chest and abdomen: there should have been several bullet holes there, but now the wounded areas only showed faint red patches, like birthmarks.
His tongue secretly probed toward the back of his mouth, where new teeth were emerging.
The same question remained: what exactly was he now?
…
Someone knocked gently on the door. Zong Hang snapped back to reality: “Come in.”
He knew it was Jing Xiu; Yi Xiao would never be so courteous.
After entering, Jing Xiu quietly closed the door behind her.
Zong Hang smiled: “You finished eating?”
As he spoke, he turned the faucet down a bit but didn’t turn it off.
Over these many days, he and Jing Xiu had developed a habit: when talking in the bathroom, they kept their voices very low, using the water sound as cover when necessary.
Jing Xiu said: “Came to check on you.”
She hesitated for a moment: “Zong Hang, don’t overthink it. Allergies are actually very common, many people are allergic to seafood, and severe cases can be fatal. Foreigners are even stranger—they can end up in the hospital from eating peanut butter or kiwi.”
Yes, but the difference was: that they still dared to go to the hospital, but what about him?
Zong Hang was silent for a moment, then jerked his head toward outside: “I want to talk to her.”
“Talk about what?”
There was too much to discuss: why hadn’t he died, why did she save him, how did she do it, what was the purpose of doing all this at such cost, and also, was he still human?
In this world, if anyone could give him answers, it should only be Yi Xiao.
Jing Xiu wasn’t optimistic: “Will she even acknowledge you?”
Zong Hang said: “If you were in my situation, could you hold back from asking? Not asking would be abnormal. Maybe she’s even waiting for me to ask.”
Hearing the bathroom door open, Yi Xiao lifted her eyelids slightly.
Interestingly, a woman went in, and a man came out.
These two talked in the bathroom every night, whispering so quietly, thinking she couldn’t hear.
She could hear them, though it was muffled, like the buzzing of flies—in earlier years, when her hearing was sharp, she could hear through two walls.
She continued eating, pretending not to notice.
In her peripheral vision, Zong Hang stood across from her for a while, finally speaking: “Excuse me, could you put down your chopsticks? I’d like to ask you some things.”
Yi Xiao hadn’t planned to acknowledge him, but her chopsticks paused slightly.
She remembered long ago, when her sister Yi Sa was old enough to handle bowls at the table, teaching her dining etiquette: “Don’t smack your lips while eating, don’t talk, if you need to speak to someone who’s eating, first say ‘excuse me, I’m sorry’…”
Yi Sa had smacked her lips, rice grains all over her mouth and around her bowl, like a pig’s feeding trough, and argued: “Why? My mouth eats, but my ears don’t eat. You talk, my ears listen, what’s wrong with that…”
Yi Xiao had become furious, reaching out to twist her ear: “I’ll show you ears that don’t eat!”
Yi Sa had howled loudly, and Yi Jiuge, feeling sympathetic, came to intervene: “She’s still young, don’t be so impatient…”
Yi Xiao had shouted: “Young what? You can tell someone’s character by age three, she’ll never learn properly…”
…
Yi Xiao came back to her senses, her chopsticks pressing down, picking up a full portion into her bowl, then lowering her head to eat.
Zong Hang hesitated, then steeled himself: “What exactly happened? Why am I so… strange now? What’s happening with my blood vessels?”
Yi Xiao treated him as if he didn’t exist, eating with perfect composure.
Zong Hang could see she was deliberately ignoring him, so he spoke more openly: “Then I’m leaving, I’m going home. I’m afraid my parents will worry themselves sick…”
Yi Xiao let out a laugh.
Without looking at Zong Hang, she just said: “Do you think you’re still Zong Bisheng’s son?”
Her voice wasn’t loud, but the room suddenly fell silent.
Jing Xiu, eavesdropping behind the bathroom door, felt her mind go blank, and as she thought about it, goosebumps rose all over her body.
After who knows how long, she heard Zong Hang’s unbearable shout: “What do you mean? How am I not my father’s son?”
As if deliberately provoking him, Yi Xiao extended her chopsticks toward the steamed fish, jabbing, pinching, and tearing, brutally gutting the fish’s belly: “Want to go home? Fine.”
“How will you explain this to people? Aren’t you afraid they’ll dissect you for research? What if you lose control again and end up killing your parents? Who would be responsible then?”
She put the fish in her mouth, chewed and swallowed it, followed by a sip of porridge, then wiped her mouth corners with a napkin: “Now that you’ve eaten and have strength, get some good sleep. Tomorrow night, help me with something. After it’s done, I’ll gradually tell you some things.”
After thinking, she added: “Don’t think too much about it. If you don’t sleep well and lack energy, causing the task to fail… then I’ll consider you dead, as if I never saved you.”
Damn it, this woman Yi Xiao was truly toxic, the kind that oozed poison from every pore.
Saying such things, yet telling him to “sleep well”—he wasn’t Superman.
Zong Hang tossed and turned all night, finally falling into a hazy sleep at dawn. Even then, he didn’t sleep well, having many dreams. In each dream, he was returning home, facing different hardships, but the ending was always the same—
Zong Bisheng would rush out of the house to embrace him, but during the embrace, his face would suddenly change, violently pushing him away, hysterically shouting: “No, this isn’t my son, this is a fake!”
That kind of despair was more terrifying than being drowned in the lake.
No one woke him up. He remained wrapped in nightmares until evening, when he opened his eyes and let out a long sigh, feeling for the first time that getting up was a relief.
After washing up, he only drank a bowl of porridge before being urged to leave: Jing Xiu had tied her hair up high and wore sunglasses, while he had to be fully equipped, not missing anything from mask to hat.
Going down the stairs and all the way to the back door, there was an old gray van parked outside. In the passenger seat, a middle-aged man eagerly waved to them: “Here, here.”
As soon as they got in and settled, the van started moving.
The back of the van had a row of seats removed, making it spacious, but it was cluttered with various items and bags. Most eye-catching was a large iron bucket filled with thick, blood-red animal organs. Due to the heat, the smell was terrible and had attracted several flies that buzzed around the van.
Zong Hang covered his nose with his hand: “What is this?”
The man turned his head, enthusiastically explaining: “It’s pig lungs…”
Halfway through his sentence, Yi Xiao gave him a cold glance, and the man wisely turned back around, falling silent.
The van drove out of the city onto a dirt road, bouncing along from twilight into the dark of night.
Zong Hang grew drowsy from the bumping, nodding off in his seat. In his half-asleep state, he heard fragments of conversation between Yi Xiao and the man.
“Is it an abandoned farm?”
“Yes, was supposed to move to a new site, but hasn’t finished moving.”
“How many left?”
“About ten or so.”
Zong Hang perked up his ears to listen, but the conversation stopped.
After a while, the van turned and slowed down. Zong Hang thought they had arrived and looked outside: it seemed they had entered something like a farm, but it was half-abandoned, with its sign removed, and in the darkness, he couldn’t tell what it had been used for.
The van stopped, and the man and driver led the way with flashlights, carrying the bucket of pig lungs. Yi Xiao followed with a bag and told Jing Xiu to carry another one. Among all of them, only Zong Hang was empty-handed.
After walking for a while, Jing Xiu deliberately fell behind, peeking into her bag’s zipper, then caught up to him, whispering: “Looks like medical supplies, bandages, and such.”
Just as Zong Hang was about to say something, they arrived.
Before them was a concrete platform four or five meters high, with steps leading up. In the flashlight beam, Zong Hang could see it was a large pond, seemingly for fish farming, surrounded by two to three-meter-high wire fencing. This platform was for…
Viewing? Feeding?
The man and driver carried the pig lungs bucket to the top of the concrete platform, came down, and said goodbye to Yi Xiao: “We’ll go look around elsewhere, come back to pick you up in two hours… won’t disturb you.”
They left a flashlight with Yi Xiao and quietly departed.
Yi Xiao held the flashlight, gesturing to Zong Hang and Jing Xiu: “Come up.”
She walked in front, carelessly swinging the flashlight beam around randomly. In this light, Zong Hang saw large, dark, elongated shadows on the pond’s surface and along the shore…
His heart suddenly began pounding: these were crocodiles!
Yes, at Chen Tu’s house, he had seen Li Zhenxiang feeding A-Long and A-Hu with a large basin of pig lungs.
The earlier conversation also made sense now, “ten or so,” “abandoned farm,” “moving”: this was a rural crocodile farm that was relocating, but hadn’t finished moving, so there were still over ten crocodiles left in the old pond.
Zong Hang felt something was wrong. He looked down at the water-facing side of the concrete platform: there were steel rungs embedded in the concrete wall leading down.
Yi Xiao turned off the flashlight.
Zong Hang’s temple twitched, everything went pitch black, and it took a while before he could make out some vague outlines.
Yi Xiao opened her bag and took out a small flat bottle for him: “One drop in each eye, then roll your eyeballs around—just like when you use regular eye drops.”
Zong Hang did as told.
Whatever this substance was, it was extremely acidic in his eyes. Zong Hang was so stimulated that tears came out. He closed his eyes and raised his hand to pass the bottle to Jing Xiu, but Yi Xiao intercepted it, saying: “She doesn’t need it.”
After a pause, she asked him: “Do you know about crocodiles?”
Zong Hang wiped his eyes: “Yes.”
“How do crocodiles eat people?”
Is that even a question? Zong Hang’s heart was beating heavily, but he tried to stay calm: “They bite them to death and eat them.”
His vision seemed clearer now.
Yi Xiao said: “No, crocodiles’ teeth look sharp, but they’re socket teeth, not very practical. They have trouble biting and chewing effectively, but their bite force is very strong. They prefer to ‘clamp’ with their upper and lower jaws.”
“If they’re big enough, they can swallow prey whole after clamping them, but these below are Siamese crocodiles, three to four meters at most.”
“So their strategy varies with the prey. For large creatures on land, they clamp them and drag them into the water to drown; for large creatures in the water, they clamp them and throw them onto land to die from exposure.”
Zong Hang was becoming somewhat entranced.
“But their teeth are a weakness, still making it hard to chew. They’ll clamp prey in their mouths and slam them against rocks or tree trunks, smashing them to make eating easier. If they can’t smash them, they’ll wait for the prey to rot.”
“You have several ways to deal with them: if bitten, hit their eyes hard, as their eyes are most vulnerable; if not bitten yet, try to prevent them from opening their mouths—they have strong biting force but weak mouth-opening strength, an adult’s arm strength is enough to hold their mouth shut. Watch out for their tails, they’re powerful at tail-whipping, and also…”
She took out a metal object from her bag, a short iron rod with thick iron discs welded to both ends, looking like the character “工” from the front: “This ‘crocodile block’ was hastily custom-made, it’ll have to do. If it bites, stick this in its mouth, it can hold for a while…”
She handed the crocodile block to Zong Hang.
Zong Hang felt a chill run down his spine: “No, why are you giving me this?”
Jing Xiu lowered her head, looking at the bag of medical supplies at her feet, seeming to understand something, and couldn’t help but shudder.
Yi Xiao leaned close to Zong Hang’s ear, her voice as soft as a breath: “Do you know about the three water ghost families?”
What ghost? And writing letters?
“I’m from the Yi family. I took an oath in the ancestral hall, there are some things I can’t tell outsiders unless you pass at least two of the ‘seven trials and eight tests’ to become a brother of the Yi family. ‘Sitting in water’ is no problem for you now, and this second test is ‘breaking the crocodile’…”
What seven trials and eight tests, who wants to be your brother? Zong Hang’s mind was about to explode: “I won’t do it, I don’t even know how to swim…”
He threw down the crocodile block and turned to leave: Crazy! This woman must be crazy. Even if she wanted to train a Marvel superhero, shouldn’t she start from the bottom? Start with breaking a crab or lobster or something, he might grit his teeth and do that, but jumping straight to crocodiles, and wanting him to break them, break your ancestor’s crocodile…
He had only taken a few steps when suddenly Jing Xiu’s scream came from behind, quickly fading away, followed by a huge splash.
Zong Hang’s mind buzzed, and he quickly turned around.
Only Yi Xiao remained on the platform.
He rushed to the edge.
In the center of the pond, Jing Xiu was struggling desperately.