Diao Zhuo turned to look at the vast, densely crowded expanse of grave-cap mushrooms. Everyone followed his gaze. Several criminals lay scattered there in various poses — some still twitching. Behind the mushroom cluster, the hollow eye sockets of skulls hanging in the trees stared blankly outward. The eyes had long since rotted away, yet somehow those empty sockets seemed to be watching them all.

“My hypothesis is that the toxicity of this substance is far lower than that of an ordinary poisonous mushroom, and it metabolizes quickly in the human body. Its power lies in continuous inhalation and sustained effect. As long as a person keeps breathing it in, it keeps working. So whatever produces and releases this toxic gas can only achieve its purpose if people remain in range long enough to keep inhaling.”

As Diao Zhuo spoke, every member of the rescue team and mountaineering association had now come around. Each person pressed their mask tightly over their face, afraid of falling into hallucinations again.

“From what you’re saying, the gas isn’t man-made,” Ge Mingliang said.

Ba Yunye startled and pointed at the grave-cap mushrooms. “Is it those things?!”

“It’s them.” Diao Zhuo said with certainty.

“Damn it, let me set the whole lot of them on fire!” Ba Yunye’s inner renegade surged to the surface. She balled her fists and looked left and right for a source of fuel, completely ignoring the fact that they were standing in a primeval forest.

Pang Hou sat on the ground re-bandaging the wound on his leg and couldn’t help laughing at this. “Hey — is it really a good idea to talk about setting fires in front of the police?”

Ba Yunye hit a snag, forced a dry laugh, and let the thought go.

“This might be a self-defense mechanism the grave-cap mushrooms have evolved.” Xiang’an speculated. “Maybe they actually taste good, and to stop things from eating them, they release a bit of toxic gas to drive any would-be predators out of their minds — so they’re too scrambled to bother picking them.”

Da Qin let out a short laugh that tugged painfully at his wound. He hissed under his breath and, pressing a hand over it, muttered quietly: “Some self-defense mechanism — sounds to me like you’re just hungry…”

“It isn’t that they fear being eaten,” Diao Zhuo said. “It’s that they eat.” This single sentence dragged the atmosphere — which had just begun to lighten — back into something more ominous.

“How do you mean?” Ge Mingliang asked, concerned.

“Everyone think back to the times we dug up the soil beneath the grave-cap mushrooms,” Diao Zhuo prompted. “What did we find?”

Ba Yunye snapped her fingers. “I know — Japanese corpses! Are you saying these grave-cap mushrooms grow by absorbing nutrients from the dead? That they drive passing creatures out of their minds and into unconsciousness, so they can drain them for nutrients?”

Diao Zhuo raised his hand in approval. Then, just as Ba Yunye was beginning to feel rather pleased with herself, he added: “Not entirely correct.”

Ba Yunye shook her fist. “Tell me where I went wrong. One word off and I won’t be gentle with you.”

“Master Ba is always right,” Diao Zhuo said soothingly. “There are just a few things you left out.”

She asked with barely concealed irritation: “Such as?”

“The Japanese remains date back at least seventy or eighty years. The grave-cap mushrooms growing on top of them couldn’t possibly have survived for seventy or eighty years. In fact, when we dug up the Japanese bones, we also unearthed other remains — one was a rabbit, one was a snake. So I believe the nutrients feeding those two particular grave-cap mushrooms came not from the Japanese soldiers, but from the rabbit and the snake. It just happened that Japanese soldiers were buried beneath — and our attention went entirely to those two unlucky souls.”

“That makes a great deal of sense…” Ba Yunye rubbed her chin. “I’ve decided to be civil with you after all.”

Xiang’an stared at the mushroom cluster with a look of deep revulsion. “So they want to use us as fertilizer?”

“Precisely. That’s also why, when we moved closer to the mushroom cluster, our communication devices showed stronger signals — that too was a hallucination.” Diao Zhuo pulled out his phone and GPS; both showed no signal whatsoever. “I asked you whether you’d managed to reach anyone. You said the other party replied that they were sending a helicopter.”

Xiang’an scratched his head and could only blame himself for not catching the obvious contradiction at the time — forget the magnetic anomaly and the towering ancient trees that left nowhere to land; how many people could a helicopter carry? It certainly couldn’t evacuate everyone in one trip. And with armed criminals on site, sending a helicopter in would only force them into a last, desperate stand. So he quickly backpedaled: “Did I say that?”

Everyone looked at him with smiles that could not have been more obviously unconvincing.

“All right, fine — I hallucinated it!” Xiang’an admitted honestly.

Diao Zhuo continued: “This area has the highest density of grave-cap mushrooms, so its demand for nutrients is greatest, and the concentration of toxic gas it produces should be highest. That’s why our symptoms of poisoning were also the most severe. First, hallucinations of wish fulfillment: seeing Long Ge, detecting a signal, even getting a call through. Then, as the toxin seized control of the entire brain, we developed a longing for death and entered a near-death state in which the brain could no longer govern the muscles. Finally, the ability to breathe independently broke down… If we hadn’t come to in time, every one of us would have had a great cluster of grave-cap mushrooms growing out of our bodies.”

Ba Yunye felt an involuntary chill run down her spine. “There’s an old saying — ‘survival of the fittest’ — but the grave-cap mushroom’s way of surviving is just too despicable. It’s nothing but building your own happiness on the suffering of others.”

Against her indignation, Diao Zhuo found himself thinking that perhaps it was precisely because of these creatures — those who built their happiness on the suffering of others — that this stretch of primeval forest had remained beyond the reach of humanity’s economic ambitions, and many rare species had been able to survive and flourish.

“Wait!” Ba Yunye seemed to have another flash of insight. “Actually, the grave-cap mushrooms haven’t done anything wrong. It was we who stumbled into their world uninvited. They haven’t invaded our daily lives. Besides, perhaps those tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were done in by them — which would make the grave-cap mushrooms anti-Japanese resistance heroes. They should be renamed Resistance Mushrooms.”

This conclusion aligned precisely with Diao Zhuo’s own thinking. He reached out and ruffled her hair lightly, then caught sight out of the corner of his eye that one person was still lying motionless on the ground. He looked more closely — it was River Horse. The oxygen mask over his nose and mouth had been removed by someone, and his lips were now faintly blue, his face pale.

Diao Zhuo moved quickly and pressed the portable oxygen canister back over River Horse’s nose and mouth.

He noticed a shoe print on River Horse’s face. No need to wonder who had put it there.

He glanced back. Ba Yunye stood there with one hand in her pocket, looking like her usual unruly self, meeting his gaze seriously. A flicker of cool disdain crossed her eyes. “Why bother saving him? He’s in league with that man surnamed He.”

Diao Zhuo thought of the exchange he’d had with River Horse during their confrontation, and did not move the oxygen canister.

So A’Shui was River Horse all along — he had embedded himself in the mountaineering association group and followed them the entire way. No wonder he kept himself so thoroughly covered, and never dared to open his mouth more than absolutely necessary. Ba Yunye had plenty of anger and nowhere to put it. She couldn’t be bothered dealing with Diao Zhuo about it and turned her back on them both.

The surroundings had gone quiet. All their companions were safe and sound — but Long Ge was still nowhere to be found. Ba Yunye’s mood plummeted again. She shoved her rain-soaked fringe off her forehead, then stamped her feet hard on the ground twice in frustration.

Diao Zhuo’s brow was deeply furrowed. He alternated between testing River Horse’s breathing and checking his pulse. The other rescue team members had all heard something of River Horse’s unexplained departure — no one dared to say a word.

“The most important thing right now should be to keep looking for the person, shouldn’t it?” Xiang’an broke the silence.

“Since his bracelet fell in the middle of the mushroom cluster, he shouldn’t be far from here.” Diao Zhuo looked back at the group. “Everyone split up and search.”

Ba Yunye perked up at that, and decided to treat River Horse as invisible. “Really?”

“Take oxygen and masks with you.” He reminded them. “He may be in the same state we were.”

“If he’s also been poisoned and is hallucinating…” Ba Yunye asked, “is he still alive?”

“From the point of losing consciousness to actual death, there should still be a window of time — this particular toxin isn’t directly lethal after all.” Diao Zhuo offered what reassurance he could.

Qi Zi brushed the mud from his clothes, and with a mind to give the two of them a moment alone, said: “Master Ba, why don’t you stay here and look after Da Qin and Pang Hou? The rest of us will go search.”

Ba Yunye lowered her head with mild displeasure. Once everyone else had gone, she said to Diao Zhuo with a touch of petulance: “Since you’re being so magnanimous, you might as well rescue the red-bearded man’s lot too.”

“That’s different.” He had no intention of saving the criminals. He pointed at River Horse. “Along the way, he helped you.”

“I don’t care whether he helped me or not. He’s the one who walked off with Zhang Chenguang’s thermos! He went to find He Zhengren! He’s the undercover agent they planted in our club to keep tabs on us! And now he’s disguised himself as part of the mountaineering association — all to find Long Ge! Even if he isn’t necessarily working with those criminals, his goal is the same as theirs!”

“Calm down.” Diao Zhuo, seeing that River Horse’s condition had stabilized, stood and stepped closer to Ba Yunye. “Do you trust me?”

Time seemed to flow backward. Earlier, when he had privately confronted A’Shui and uncovered his identity, River Horse had asked him: do you consider yourself a brave and trustworthy man?

“You’re not God — why would I trust you?” she said, giving him a look. But in truth, deep down she did trust him — otherwise she would have strangled River Horse herself, and Diao Zhuo would never have been able to stop her.

Diao Zhuo said quietly: “Trust me — wait for him to wake up and tell you himself.”

Ba Yunye stared back at him, holding his gaze for a long moment, before looking away at something in the distance. She could tell that Diao Zhuo must have identified A’Shui as River Horse long ago, and had learned some truth from him directly — that was why he was so willing to help him. She thought back on the three years she and River Horse had spent taking clients out together: countless laughs, shared dangers. Something in her chest softened. She exhaled slowly, and the tension in her shoulders — tight from anger — eased with it.

“Does he have some unavoidable reason? Is it that He Zhengren and the others are threatening him with his wife and children?”

Diao Zhuo smiled and shook his head.

Ba Yunye’s brow furrowed, and she thought again before asking: “Don’t tell me… he’s also a police officer?”

“Does he seem like one?”

“Not at all.”

“Let him explain it to you himself.”

She gave River Horse a kick in the foot and said with sarcasm: “Damn — height-boosting insoles. No wonder I didn’t recognize him.”

Diao Zhuo suddenly pulled her into his arms.

Truthfully — even with the crisis resolved, after days of relentless exertion, Ba Yunye was inevitably exhausted in both body and spirit. Leaning against Diao Zhuo’s chest, she found a moment of quiet and relief. She thought about the painful memories that had resurfaced in the darkness — and realized that it was precisely those hardships that had made her into the Ba Yunye she was now: fierce and loyal, fearless and full of fight.

Ten or so minutes later, the rest of the rescue team came back one by one. There was no sign of Long Ge anywhere nearby, nor any marker he might have left.

On the bright side: not finding him meant he had not collapsed out here.

The filtration masks had limited effectiveness, and no one could remain in this mushroom-dense stretch of forest for long. But to move on without direction would be wandering blindly — finding him or not would be purely a matter of chance. After everything they had endured, most people were dead on their feet. Whether to press on became a question that offered no good answer either way.

Continue searching — or choose to trust that Long Ge’s extraordinary survival instincts would carry him out of the forest on his own?

Ba Yunye looked around at the companions who had come this far with her, exchanged a glance with Ge Mingliang, then took a long, deep breath. “Let’s… head back.”

Everyone stood where they were and thought it over in silence, their expressions heavy. Drinking water and food were nearly gone. Their equipment was being disrupted by the magnetic field and couldn’t provide navigation or coordinates. If they turned back now, there was still a reasonable chance of getting out intact. If they pushed forward, what unknown dangers might be waiting ahead?

Weighing it all, they agreed: head back.

Ge Mingliang retrieved his and Pang Hou’s guns from among the criminals’ belongings. Everyone gathered their things, hoisted the still-unconscious River Horse onto their backs, and fell into line, following the route they had come in by. Just then, Diao Zhuo suddenly stopped. “Wait.”