Entering the core zone, wolves appeared with increasing frequency. Sometimes just one, sometimes a whole pack — packs of wolves would run off at the sight of the vehicle convoy, though a few lone wolves would curiously follow alongside the vehicles for a stretch. Ba Yunye rode in the passenger seat, giving her a better vantage point to observe the surroundings — she had to make sure they didn’t get lost while also deducing Zou Kaigui’s travel route based on the terrain.
Ba Yunye posed a challenge to him. “Let me test you — in uninhabited wilderness, a tire track doesn’t necessarily extend all the way to its destination. If you’re driving along and the tracks just vanish, what do you do?”
For someone like Diao Zhuo — a rough-and-tumble outdoorsman who had spent years planting monitoring devices in the wild — this was no challenge at all.
“Find the iron tower.”
As he spoke, a faint pointed silhouette appeared far ahead at the top of a slope — the very iron tower Diao Zhuo had mentioned. In the early 1970s, China’s three major military regions conducted preliminary surveys of Qiang Tang, leaving behind many triangulation and leveling markers. One iron tower appeared every 50 to 80 kilometers, serving as a major reference point in the uninhabited wilderness of northern Tibet. Follow the towers, and barring other mishaps, you could find your way out.
“I’ve heard that Team Leader Diao does geological exploration in his regular work?” Ba Yunye said, reclining at ease with her legs crossed.
He gave an affirmative sound.
“Away from home for ten days to half a month at a time — sometimes gone for half a year, then on leave for nearly half a year after that?”
Diao Zhuo glanced at her. Her line of work didn’t keep her home much either.
“My eldest sister also went to all kinds of remote wildernesses — no electricity, no water, no signal. The Gobi Desert, snow mountains, primeval forests. Sometimes she’d come back and tell us about it, like listening to a story: bears, wolves, all sorts of bees — quite fascinating. Though I’ve forgotten most of it by now.”
It was a rare occasion for her to be alone with him without resorting to jokes and nonsense. Diao Zhuo found the conversation pleasantly normal. “You and your sister are both off-road tour guides?”
“She was in the same line as you — geological surveying or exploration of some kind.”
“Which brigade?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I was twelve or thirteen when she died in a car accident.”
Diao Zhuo hadn’t expected this turn of events. He was silent for a long time. Her name was Ba Yunye — surely her elder sister couldn’t be…
“Your sister was…”
“Xi Ye.”
He hadn’t heard that name in a long time. The moment it reached his ears, Diao Zhuo’s body went taut. After a prolonged silence he said, “Xiao Zi mentioned that you…” He chose his words carefully. “…have no other family.”
Xiao Zi had told him privately that Ba Yunye had no parents.
Ba Yunye leaned back. “I never said she was my blood sister.”
“Then you two were…”
“I treated her like a blood sister, is all.”
A faint furrow appeared between Diao Zhuo’s brows. His maternal grandfather, Professor Rao Qinghui, had been the leader of a geological survey team. In the accident, his father Diao Jun had died on the spot, while Rao Qinghui, severely injured, was left paralyzed afterward — a once-towering academic figure who could no longer string together a complete sentence.
The accident investigation team had visited multiple times, but Rao Qinghui couldn’t provide effective testimony, so the matter was eventually dropped. Diao Zhuo had made a point of memorizing the names of several investigators, among them an officer named Ran Jinxian, who had left his contact information and said to get in touch if Rao Qinghui’s condition improved. Through Ran Jinxian, Diao Zhuo had heard Ba Xi Ye’s name mentioned, and he’d also heard that she had grown up in an orphanage — which meant Ba Yunye very likely had too. Such a childhood was probably a scar for both of them, better left unmentioned. So he didn’t press further, his mind awash with tangled thoughts.
After lingering on his sickbed only two or three years, Rao Qinghui had passed away. In his final moments, he seemed to have recovered a flicker of awareness and, with trembling hands, left behind characters resembling the letters Y, N, N, M, along with sounds that approximated the number “8” — an incomprehensible final message.
Those letters he had shared with no one — not even Ran Jinxian. Until he understood what they meant, he kept them sealed behind his lips.
The geological survey team had been on a classified mission. Where they went and what they surveyed was known only to a very small number of people. Professor Lu Yang, who had been on good terms with Rao Qinghui, had been fading like a dying candle these past few years — word was he had even been admitted to the ICU once this year. Who else still knew about the matter was impossible to say. Another survivor of the accident, Song Fan, had been less seriously injured than Rao Qinghui. During the investigation, Song Fan had testified that Diao Jun and a woman named Xi Ye had been having an extramarital affair, and that for some reason an argument had broken out and turned violent, which distracted the driver and caused the vehicle to overturn. Song Fan had never changed his story over the years. The matter was hushed up within the profession, and with the key figure already dead and no one to contradict the account, it had slowly faded from memory as time went on.
The incident had dealt a heavy blow to several elders in Diao Zhuo’s family. No one in the household ever brought it up again. Later, his mother remarried, and the accident and its scandal had perhaps become a closed chapter. Diao Zhuo didn’t know the true nature of the relationship between Ba Xi Ye and Ba Yunye, and it was impossible for him to bring up the alleged affair between her sister and his own father, so he quietly steered the conversation elsewhere. “With your wilderness survival skills and experience crossing uninhabited regions, have you ever thought about joining a rescue team?”
She was taken aback. “Beidou Rescue?”
“Other rescue teams would work too.”
“You’re all volunteers.” Ba Yunye smiled. “I’m not as broad-minded as you all. Whenever I think about how some people deliberately put themselves in life-threatening situations, and society has to mobilize enormous manpower, resources, and money to rescue them — I get furious.”
Diao Zhuo didn’t elaborate further. He simply said, “Think about it.”
“If I join Beidou Rescue, will I see you every day?”
“There you go again.” Diao Zhuo sensed the conversation was about to veer.
Ba Yunye pressed, “Will I or won’t I?”
“You won’t.”
“If I join Beidou Rescue, will you see me every day?”
“…No,” Diao Zhuo paused before answering.
“Is it ‘won’t’ or ‘don’t want to’?” Sharp question.
“I’m very busy with work.” Boring excuse.
“No noble motivation, no sustained drive — why would I join?” Ba Yunye declared that she had absolutely no interest. “Why did you join Beidou Rescue?”
“Had nothing better to do,” he deflected.
“You just said you were busy with work.”
“When I’m at work, I really am busy.”
“So when you’re not working, would you have enough time to see me often if I joined the rescue team?”
“You want to see me often?”
Ba Yunye raised an eyebrow and nodded vigorously.
“So you’re giving up on paying off your car loan?”
In the face of money, everyone’s a slave! Ba Yunye laughed again. “I heard from the others that you have a thing going with some head or deputy commander of Beidou Rescue.”
He shot her a sideways glance. “I have a thing going with some man?”
“Or perhaps… a connection?”
Diao Zhuo realized they were likely referring to Beidou Rescue Headquarters’ advisor — He Zhengren, a former colleague of Rao Qinghui who had visited quite frequently while Rao Qinghui was bedridden. Diao Zhuo paused, then said vaguely, “I wouldn’t call it a connection — we crossed paths a few times when I was studying in Beijing.”
The underachiever’s eyes went wide. “You went to a school in Beijing?!”
“A university in Beijing.” He said it one syllable at a time.
“No wonder — you’re from Xi’an, but every now and then there’s a hint of a Beijing accent when you talk.” Ba Yunye said with interest. “Say something in Shaanxi dialect for me.”
“Ni si gua pi.” (You’re an idiot.)
Ba Yunye pretended to humbly seek enlightenment. “What does that mean?”
Diao Zhuo turned to look at her. Her features were striking, her beauty sharp and vivid — the upswept line of her brows gave her a touch of a wandering hero’s flair. When they’d had their IDs checked at the Shigatse checkpoint, he’d seen hers: she was from Yunnan.
“Telling you you’re beautiful.”
Ba Yunye gave a cold laugh. “You think I’ve never taken a client from Shaanxi? — Yao e she, ni cai si gua pi! (Let me tell you, you’re the one who’s the idiot!)”
Diao Zhuo gave her a thumbs up — she’d gotten the accent nine-tenths right. Over these past few days together, he’d noticed she had a smattering of various regional dialects. Apparently she had some talent for languages.
Along the road lay the bleached, wind-dried bones of animals — large and small, scattered haphazardly. Some appeared as whole carcasses, others had been reduced to one or two thick bones, and some looked so ancient they seemed like they would crumble to dust at a touch. The desolate realm of death and the breathtaking beauty of paradise coexisted here perfectly, with no sense of incongruity.
“It’s snowing.” Diao Zhuo spotted it from a distance — everything ahead was a sheet of white. Before long, fine snowflakes began drifting down, whipped along by gusts at force ten, pelting the convoy like cold arrows. The sky turned a murky white; from far away came what sounded like an unusual roaring.
“Not good…” Ba Yunye murmured.
Diao Zhuo’s brow creased — he too sensed an extreme weather event approaching.
Sure enough, they hadn’t gone much farther before a wall of yellow sand was visible in the distance, already enveloping the mountainside. A blizzard had somehow merged with a sandstorm and was sweeping toward them simultaneously — a devastating, utterly unexpected assault.
“We can’t keep going — we need to find shelter.” Ba Yunye grabbed the radio to warn the vehicles behind. “Watch out! Sandstorm incoming!!”
The blizzard and sandstorm advanced with terrifying speed. In almost no time, everything within sight was an opaque wall of yellowish-brown. Dust smothered the sunlight — like Death spreading open two vast hands and slamming them down onto the world.
Shelter was impossible to find quickly. The convoy could only stop where they were. Everyone stayed inside their vehicles, struck silent. A howling gale swept in, and countless grains of sand and grit hammered the windshields in a crackling, pelting barrage. The wind seemed unsatisfied and bore down with a thunderous fury, almost strong enough to flip every vehicle. Sand and dust blanketed sky and earth; inside the vehicles it was pitch dark — like the end of the world. The visual horror, combined with the car body lurching repeatedly as violent gusts tried to roll it to one side, made everyone silently question whether they would survive this.
The forces of nature were especially ferocious in Qiang Tang — like a whip lashing down again and again on arrogant humanity. Let your skyscrapers reach the clouds, let your big data and cloud computing do their best — come here, and you are a relatively low rung on the pyramid of life. Besides being potential prey for wild animals at any moment, you could also find yourself utterly helpless against blizzards and gales. And beyond all this, more terrifying unknown forces lay waiting for you somewhere. Nature had lessons to teach you about what primitive, primal fear truly was. Nature would never be conquered — it was something humanity should hold aloft and revere as a god.
“I genuinely salute Zou Kaigui as a tough son of a bitch,” Ba Yunye said, breaking the silence after ten minutes of sitting still. “When you’re on foot and you run into weather like this, you don’t even know where you’ll get blown to — or whether your head and your backside end up blown to the east or the south.”
Diao Zhuo stared blankly at the curtain of yellow sand. “He didn’t necessarily encounter this.”
“Have you heard the other disappearance stories about Qiang Tang?”
“Tell me.”
“There was a foreign expedition team that organized a trekking crossing of Qiang Tang and vanished. Years later, several of them were found dead in a place far from their planned route. A few years after that, the rest of the group turned up at the same location where the earlier ones had been found — but the entire expedition had actually died at roughly the same time. It was as if someone had moved them there in two separate batches after they’d all died.”
Since the sandstorm outside showed no sign of stopping and the convoy couldn’t move anyway, Ba Yunye simply opened up the floodgates.
“Then there was a convoy — three or four SUVs — that drove in and never came back out. When they were found, the vehicles were still there, all functioning normally, with water and food still left. But every single person was gone. A few years back, I also heard of several men who went trekking, pushing handcarts. Same thing — other travelers later found the carts, food still on board, but the men themselves and some communication equipment had vanished. Abandoning vehicles and food to trek the rest of the way on foot is impossible — you’d never survive. No one knows what they experienced.”
“Did the bodies of these people ever turn up?”
“Never found.” Ba Yunye said. “Online commentators theorized that the trekkers might have been dragged off by wolves or bears preparing for hibernation and eaten. But how could the ones who drove in just vanish off the face of the earth? Nobody could explain that. Even if they met extreme cold, sandstorms, or wild animals, staying in the vehicle would be safer than going out under any circumstances.”
Ba Yunye thought of Zhang Chenguang, who had mysteriously disappeared on Yuzhu Peak — he had abandoned his backpack, and then gone where? Alive, there was no person to be found; dead, there was no body to recover. Yuzhu Peak was an entry-level snow mountain; every year, a fair number of people summited it. So why had not a single person ever found anything belonging to Zhang Chenguang?
Could he have been playing dead — actually hiding away somewhere? Or had someone taken him?
Outside, the wind still raged. Ba Yunye had nothing better to do, so she put on her U-shaped neck pillow, tilted her head, and busied herself editing the little video clips she had filmed over the past two days. As she worked, drowsiness crept over her and she began to doze.
Diao Zhuo was leaning against the steering wheel and had just turned to say something to her when he found her eyes closed, napping quietly and peacefully. He moved his gaze away, but a moment later turned to look at her again.
Unlike other women whose skin was white as snow or whose foundation was layered on like plaster, her skin was a warm honey-brown. She usually liked wrapping her face, ears, and neck tightly with a magic scarf and wearing a pair of dark sunglasses — stylishly cool and handsome. Now, having fallen asleep unintentionally and forgotten to pull up the scarf, her lovely features were on full, unguarded display. Her long, thick lashes trembled faintly with each breath, as though she might wake at any second — alert and playful, ready to look you over with that teasing glint in her eye.
His gaze drifted to her lips.
Were these as soft as her hands?
Damn it. If only she were always this serene and gentle when she slept.
Diao Zhuo leaned back against the other side and closed his eyes to rest. The car stereo happened to be playing a song with a quiet, unhurried melody.
In the south where you are, the blazing sun brings heavy snowfall; in the north where I am, the cold night feels like eternal spring.
The sandstorm passed. The sky was still overcast, but the heavy snow had gradually eased as well.
Ba Yunye had caught a short nap and woke up. She stretched luxuriously, looking thoroughly content. “Did Team Leader Diao sleep well?”
“No.” His neck was terribly sore — she had taken his U-shaped neck pillow.
Ba Yunye rolled her neck around and looked at him. “I suppose that makes us the kind of people who’ve slept together.”
Diao Zhuo thought to himself: once awake, she’s incapable of saying anything proper.
“Aren’t we?” she asked.
“If you say so.” He answered, then opened the door and stepped out, one foot sinking deep into the sand.
The windward side of all seven vehicles had been buried almost halfway in sand. Every vehicle, regardless of original color, had turned a uniform yellow-brown. Unlike the coarse sand of a desert, this sand was fine and dry — blown here by the wind, and one day the wind would carry it away again.
Everyone was busy clearing sand with shovels. Xiao Zi was crying again, as if freshly traumatized. Following the near-mauling by the wolf pack the previous night, her emotional and mental state had already been teetering on the edge. She burst into tears and tantrums at the slightest provocation. Ba Yunye told Diao Zhuo that if she remained unable to calm down, they should send two vehicles to escort her back along the same route to Ritu County.
“That said, who knows what they might encounter on the way back. There’s strength in numbers — if you can bear to keep going, getting out together is best.” Ba Yunye advised. “Think it over yourself.”
“I’m a man of my word, and I’m putting this on the table right now,” Ye Xun said, stone-faced. “The 50,000 yuan I offered earlier was the full fee for filming the entire journey — I’ll give it to you after we get out. If you turn back now, you only get a third. Either way, once we’re out, you leave my company immediately.”
Xiao Zi bit her lip and was silent, unable to make up her mind. After several days in a high-altitude, oxygen-thin environment, her lips had turned a purplish-blue. Physically and mentally, she was long past the point of being fit to continue.
Ba Yunye lowered her binoculars and pointed into the distance. “There are traces of water flow ahead — we can follow the riverbed to find somewhere with water and wash the vehicles.”
The dust-caked convoy wound its way forward along the meandering riverbed. The wheels sank into the soft sand with dull, muffled thuds. Before long, a narrow body of water came into view. Fresh from the sandstorm, the lake was somewhat murky. Nothing grew along its banks, and no name appeared for it on any satellite map. He Ma called it an unnamed lake — Nameless Measures.
Ba Yunye reached in and swirled the water with her hand — ice-cold and bone-chilling. She licked a drop from her fingertip: just as she’d suspected, this was a salt-alkali lake. The water was bitter and brackish.
While everyone was busy washing the vehicles, Xiao Zi screamed again.
Ye Xun erupted. “What the hell are you screaming about now?!”
“Wild yaks!”
Ba Yunye’s heart lurched. She quickly turned around.