The red-bearded man, limping along, appeared once again with a pack of men — Li Haozhang still among them. After last night’s fierce battle with the carnivorous rabbits, some of them had likely ended up as rabbit fodder. A few reinforcements had arrived, somehow managing to break free of the rabbit swarm’s siege, and they now resumed their pursuit of Ba Yunye’s group. They seemed firmly convinced that as long as they followed the Beidou Rescue Team, they would eventually find Long Ge.
Watching them file into the dense forest with no emotional connection between them, Diao Zhuo suddenly realized they were likely mercenaries.
“Congratulations on getting out alive,” Diao Zhuo said.
“A handful of rabbits — what’s there to be afraid of.” The one speaking was a survivor from the previous group of criminals, apparently trying to prove how tough he was. His face had been half-chewed away by the rabbits, yet he was still bragging: “You could climb the trees — so could we.”
Easier said than done — they had likely clambered up over their companions’ dead bodies. Even so, Diao Zhuo remained deeply skeptical about those carnivorous rabbits. A colony that size simply could not sustain itself over the long term.
The criminals’ guns conveniently served Diao Zhuo’s purpose of summoning all his team members and the mountaineering association volunteers back to their positions. The Swiss Army knives and daggers the group carried were all confiscated by the criminals this time. Fortunately, Ge Mingliang and the others voluntarily surrendered their blades and, by acting frightened, prevented the criminals from doing a full body search — leaving their firearms undiscovered.
Looking around at the men the red-bearded one had brought, they were entirely different from the previous group — it was clear those criminals had been devoured by the rabbits. The red-bearded man surveyed them all with a sinister expression, unreadable. His leg wound had been dressed, and he walked with some difficulty. After a moment he suddenly said: “Search them again — they have guns.”
Several criminals stepped forward. The red-bearded man added casually: “Anyone found with a gun — shoot on the spot.”
Everyone’s heart lurched upward. Ba Yunye only then realized how desperate the situation had been that forced Ge Mingliang and the others to reveal themselves. She’d been blaming him for not speaking sooner. Now what could be done… She lowered her head, racking her brain, growing angrier and more deflated the more she thought.
“Start with her.” The red-bearded man jerked his chin toward Ba Yunye, his gaze glacially cold.
The criminals surged forward, and the rescue team and mountaineering association members instantly erupted — shoving and jostling together: “What gives you the right to search a woman?! Have you no shame?!” “Sexual harassment! If you want to search anyone, search us men first!”
“Bang!” The red-bearded man fired a round into the air as a warning.
Everyone fell silent. The criminals proceeded as planned — searching Ba Yunye first, then Diao Zhuo, then going through everyone else in turn. Not a single gun was found.
Ba Yunye stole a glance at Ge Mingliang. He raised an eyebrow and looked at one of the criminals. She understood immediately — they had used the chaos to stuff their guns into the criminals’ own packs. But how were they going to get them back?
The red-bearded man, finding no guns, did not seem especially bothered.
“You dare run?!” Li Haozhang was covered in wounds and had been nursing a burning fury. He stepped forward and started kicking whoever was nearest. Anyone who dared give him a second glance had his gun leveled at them. He was all raw violence and manic energy, wildly beyond the range of normal behavior. Everyone felt something off about him, but with a gun in his hands, they had no choice but to comply for now.
“Get on your knees — all of you!” he screamed hysterically, his voice dripping with contempt. Whether the sight of his companions’ gruesome deaths had dealt him a severe psychological blow, he seemed desperate to find an outlet for his rage.
The members of Beidou Rescue and the mountaineering association were iron-spined men through and through — how could they possibly kneel for Li Haozhang? To a person, they gritted their teeth, prepared to be shot dead before they would live on their knees.
“Why aren’t you kneeling?! Do you want to die?!” Li Haozhang brandished his pistol, finger on the trigger, as if ready at any moment to shoot someone as a warning to the rest.
Ba Yunye glanced at how he was holding the gun and knew immediately that this man had no real firearms training. If he were the only one with a gun, disarming him would take her no more than five seconds.
Li Haozhang pointed his gun at Diao Zhuo, chin tilted up arrogantly. “Kneel, I said — kneel down and I’ll tell you how your old man died~ Oh, you have no idea how miserable it was…”
Diao Zhuo’s eyes sharpened with fury. The effort to contain himself made the veins on the back of his hand stand out visibly. Ba Yunye was half-mad with rage and was about to let fly, when a stone flicked from A’Shui’s hand struck Diao Zhuo on the back. Diao Zhuo snapped back to himself. The raging fire in his eyes seemed doused by that single stone. He nudged Ba Yunye with his elbow, signaling her to hold back.
Ba Yunye clenched her back teeth so tightly they ached, but her mind drew a blank. She suddenly shifted her gaze to the red-bearded man. Maybe — take a gamble and go for the leader first?
She was just about to move when Diao Zhuo suddenly gripped her wrist to stop her. He looked at the red-bearded man and said in English: “We’ve found Long’s bracelet.”
“Where?” The red-bearded man asked with evident interest.
Diao Zhuo pointed his thumb back behind him. “In the middle of those edible mushrooms.”
A few of the criminals who could understand English all quietly suppressed a laugh — Diao Zhuo’s translation of what those mushrooms were called was, to put it mildly, rather sly.
The red-bearded man summoned a man with a snake tattooed on his neck. “You — go take a look.”
The tattooed-snake man acknowledged the order and walked quickly over. This person had not appeared before and had a fierce face — likely one of the criminal reinforcements. The skeletal remains hanging in the trees gave him momentary pause, but before long he walked with complete composure back through the mushroom cluster, picking something up. As he passed Ba Yunye, she looked: it really was Long Ge’s personal bracelet. The string had snapped and many of the beads were missing, but the pendant was still there. She had no idea how it had ended up here.
“Give it to her.” The red-bearded man pointed at Ba Yunye.
The tattooed-snake man shoved the bracelet roughly into Ba Yunye’s hand. He apparently got a clear look at her face as he lifted his eyes, and a flash of surprise and admiration crossed his features. He pressed the barrel of his gun under her chin, forcing her to raise her head, then slowly ran his tongue along the corner of his lips — the look of a man who wanted to take her right then and there.
Diao Zhuo’s expression darkened so visibly that everyone braced themselves for him to go at the man regardless of consequences.
Ba Yunye, brazen as ever with her hands in her trouser pockets, did not lose her temper for once. She smiled and held his gaze for a moment, then reached up and ran a hand across the man’s face, her thumb grazing and teasing his lip. “You hurt me, little brother~”
This very move caused the furrow in Diao Zhuo’s brow to relax.
The tattooed-snake man didn’t understand a word of Chinese, but that didn’t stop a thicker hunger from surfacing in his eyes. He was just about to wrap an arm around her waist when the red-bearded man gave a heavy, deliberate cough. He pulled back the gun sulkily and rejoined the criminal ranks.
The red-bearded man turned and murmured something quietly to the tattooed-snake man, who was visibly startled and looked at Ba Yunye again — the lust in his eyes receding, replaced by a degree of wariness.
Ba Yunye took no notice, turning the bracelet over and over in her hands. Her mind kept circling the same question: why had Long Ge left it here — was it deliberate, or had something happened to him?
The red-bearded man left two men to guard them and led the rest toward the densest part of the mushroom cluster. Some among the criminals also noticed the signal was stronger there and excitedly told him that the GPS could load the rough outline of a regional map.
“Did you get through on the phone?” Diao Zhuo took the risk of whispering to Xiang’an.
Xiang’an nodded, confident: “I got through. They said they’ll send a helicopter to rescue us right away.”
A helicopter? Another suspicion stirred in Diao Zhuo’s mind.
“No talking!” A gun swung toward Diao Zhuo’s head.
“Boom!” Not far away, a cloud of grey-yellow dust rose. Everyone looked toward the sound and saw a set of skeletal remains tumble down from a tree and shatter on the ground.
Diao Zhuo had not been able to shake a sense of foreboding — a foreboding that had nothing to do with the gun pressed against his skull.
Several criminals walked over to look and stood pointing at the trees laden with bones, some even taking out their phones to take photos alongside them, laughing loudly and recklessly. One spat on the remains on the ground and kicked a skull so hard it flew a great distance. Perhaps the oppression of being trapped in the primeval forest for days had left them emotionally unhinged; without a shred of awe, they actually began kicking the skull around as though playing a football match.
Another set of remains dropped from a tree. Diao Zhuo watched carefully this time — the skeleton had not been struck by any external force. It had slid gradually, by itself, off the tree branch from which it had been hanging.
The storm was coming.
“Be ready,” he murmured to Ba Yunye, alerting her to be prepared for sudden changes at any moment.
His words were barely out when one of the guards — the tattooed-snake man — suddenly began convulsing violently all over his body, as if he had stepped on a live wire. Clutching his abdomen, he screamed and howled, writhing like a woman in the final throes of labor.
Everyone stared at the tattooed-snake man in horror. The red-bearded man and the others, noticing something was wrong, came rushing over. Suddenly, Li Haozhang felt something clamp down on his foot. He looked down and found that, without knowing when, his foot had become entangled in a fragment of skeletal hand-bones on the ground. The brown finger-bones were gripping his foot with a solid hold. He pressed down hard and twisted — the bones beneath his foot gave a soft snap and crumbled apart easily. He thought nothing of it and continued with a quick, small-stepped walk toward the tattooed-snake man.
By the time the criminals had gathered around him, the tattooed-snake man had already collapsed in convulsions, spewing a continuous stream of vomit from his mouth.
“What happened to him?” The red-bearded man asked the two guards left behind in a tone of displeasure.
Both were blank-faced, shrugging to indicate that no one had touched the tattooed-snake man — he had just wound up like this on his own.
“A snake?” Li Haozhang asked.
A long-haired criminal swept his fringe back and retorted: “We haven’t seen a single snake this whole way — where would one come from?”
The criminals beat the ground around them with branches, and indeed not a snake was to be seen.
Ba Yunye glanced at the tattooed-snake man, thinking: serves him right for harassing me. It turned out the poisonous mushroom pieces she had secretly palmed earlier had now taken effect. She had crushed them in her hands and deliberately rubbed the remnants on the man’s lips when she touched his face, hoping some of the toxins might transfer. Take one down, count it a win.
The full-village-feast mushroom’s toxicity was indeed potent — the tattooed-snake man was rolling around on the ground in agony, seemingly on the verge of dying right then and there.
“Keep an eye on them.” The red-bearded man pointed at Ba Yunye’s group, and then, true to his established character of ignoring injured companions, limped off with the others toward the mushroom cluster to look for a signal.
Before they had taken many steps, everyone saw the bones hanging in the trees beyond begin to drop, one by one.
“This is a dangerous spot — I think we should all detour around it as fast as possible,” Diao Zhuo said.
“Shut up!” The criminal with “Endure” tattooed on the back of his hand bellowed at him. “None of you are allowed to talk! Not a single sound!”
Diao Zhuo feigned compliance and crouched down, turning his back to use hand signals to tap his knee and warn Ba Yunye: “The bones ahead are very abnormal. Find a way to deal with these men — we need to move fast.”
“We need to get a gun first,” Ba Yunye signaled back in turn.
Diao Zhuo gestured toward the tattooed-snake man and said aloud: “He looks like he’s about to die.”
All three guards’ eyes turned involuntarily toward the tattooed-snake man. Diao Zhuo seized the moment, raising a thumb and forefinger toward Ge Mingliang in a signal — he understood at once.
Ba Yunye gave a nod, and together with Ge Mingliang silently counted to three. Ge Mingliang suddenly lunged at a criminal standing sideways-on, closest to them, and wrenched the gun away in a matter of seconds. At the same moment, Ba Yunye flew forward and seized the wrist of the “Endure” man holding his pistol, then delivered a flying kick that sent the long-haired man’s gun sailing far out of reach before he could raise it.
Diao Zhuo sprinted out to retrieve the gun. Ba Yunye dealt with the “Endure” man and his pistol — after a few exchanges, the “Endure” man ended up pinned firmly to the ground by this former special-forces woman, his gun seized without his even knowing when. The long-haired man, who lunged out to recover his own weapon, was hit by Diao Zhuo with a combination of straight punches and hooks that left him spinning in a dizzy daze, crumpling to the ground like a wet mop, face streaming with blood. Everyone piled on and the three criminals were fully subdued.
But the noise from this side had already drawn the red-bearded man’s attention. Just as they were about to come rushing over, one after another they slammed to the ground — for at some point, the earth had pushed up countless fleshless white bones, as if they had grown up out of the grave-cap mushrooms themselves. The complete skeletal remains hanging in the trees beyond continued dropping one by one — but the later ones did not shatter on impact. They merely piled up and lay there, trembling faintly.