By the time they made it back to the beach, the sky had gone completely dark.

But the moon over the sea was enormous — and brilliantly bright — casting a pale, silvery light over the sand, turning everything into a vast expanse of silver and white.

Du Lai inspected the “SOS” marker he had arranged. Apart from the stones sinking slightly, the shape was exactly as he had left it — meaning no rescue team had come by.

No one had found them.

This result was deeply disheartening. He didn’t dare think about what would become of him if he were trapped here indefinitely. And then there were the children — Xiaodou and Xiaomiao and the rest of them. What would they do?

Had he done so many terrible things that this was his punishment?

“Du Lai, where are we sleeping tonight?”

The young mistress’s voice drifted to him on the sea breeze, carrying a faint tremor, pulling him out of his thoughts.

He turned to look. Fu Miaoxue stood beneath a coconut tree with her arms wrapped around herself, shivering.

With the temperature dropping at night, their damp clothes were being hit by sea wind, making the cold unbearable. The pampered young mistress had never suffered like this in her life, and she promptly sneezed several times in a row — a thoroughly wretched sight.

“Not even a cave we could hide in……” she muttered under her breath, her face a mixture of irritation and misery.

Du Lai sighed inwardly.

Not only was he stranded here, he had this ticking time bomb beside him.

A hundred million, two hundred million — he no longer dared to hope for any of it. He only wished that when the day came for them to escape, he could send this precious cargo on her way safely and without incident, and not offend someone like Fu Lishen.

But……

That would probably be very difficult.

Spending every single day with a woman like her — if he managed to keep his temper, he’d probably lose his mind instead.

Du Lai set the bamboo tubes down one by one, arranging them in rows and pressing them into the sand, then covering them with leaves to prevent the water from evaporating.

Then he took out the knife Fu Miaoxue had given him, walked into the woods, and whittled several branches into shape.

Fu Miaoxue trailed after him like a shadow and asked, “Du Lai, where are we sleeping tonight? The wind is so strong out here. But the forest is so dark, and there are so many bugs……”

“I’ll try to build a tent,” Du Lai said.

“Huh?” Fu Miaoxue looked at the branches in his hands. “How?”

“No idea.” Du Lai let out a sigh. “We’ll just feel our way through it.”

Fu Miaoxue thought he sounded completely unreliable. “So we’re just throwing something together……”

“More or less,” he said.

He had never imagined he’d end up stranded on a deserted island, and had naturally never thought to learn any wilderness survival skills. He had maybe watched a few episodes of a survival program as a child, but watching a show and actually doing it were two entirely different things.

Du Lai could only go off of memory, not caring about quality or appearance — only that they could get something up as fast as possible so that he and Fu Miaoxue could sleep through the night in relative peace.

He split off one long, thick branch, stripped away the side shoots, and drove it straight into the ground. Then he hewed out a dozen or so thinner branches and arranged them around the central pole like the ribs of an umbrella, securing them with strips torn from his shirt, binding everything tightly.

Last, he found some broad leaves and wove them across the branches, overlapping them to form a covering, leaving only a narrow gap at one side for a single person to squeeze through. Over that he layered several palm fronds to block as much wind as possible.

Worried that the leaves might be blown off in the night, he scooped up handfuls of sand and buried them along the perimeter of the tent all the way around.

Du Lai felt he had done his best.

This crude umbrella-shaped tent had taken him about an hour — maybe longer.

When the two of them carefully crawled inside, they discovered the space was oppressively small. They could only curl up on their sides — they couldn’t stretch their legs out, and they couldn’t sit fully upright without pushing the tent top out of shape.

Fu Miaoxue lay on the cool leaves, her heart aching. When had she ever had to endure anything like this?

But today had left her utterly exhausted and deeply hungry. Despite how dreadful the conditions were, the moment she closed her eyes she was asleep.

Du Lai was the same.

There was no awkwardness or stirring of feelings from a man and woman sleeping in close quarters — the moment he lay down, he sank into a deep, heavy sleep.

—