“Master Ba!! Master Ba, save me——” He Ma screamed, gripping her hands with all his strength, feeling his body begin to sink as sand surged in from every direction, as if trying to pull him down into the depths below.

“Stop struggling!!” Ba Yunye shouted. She assumed it was like quicksand in a marsh — the more you thrashed, the faster you sank.

Diao Zhuo arrived on the scene and grabbed them both, one in each hand. “Lie flat! Spread your limbs! Don’t move!”

“Why?!” Ba Yunye cried out.

“Lie flat!” Diao Zhuo had no time to explain to her the physics of density and surface area and their effects on loose sand. All he knew was that even if the sand only covered one of your feet, the effort required to pull you free was equivalent to towing an automobile. Unless he had an excavator, trying to haul either of them out was completely futile.

“Hey!! Diao Zhuo! I’m coming to help you!!” Long Ge shouted.

“No need! Get the vehicles out of here, now!”

Long Ge and Old Wang had no choice but to drive the two vehicles away. The remaining three people lay spread-eagled in the shape of the character “大,” hands linked together, while the one remaining vehicle was buried halfway by the sand pressing in from all sides. Beneath them, they could feel the sand flowing ceaselessly — like countless ants carrying you and shifting you along.

The tremors continued for more than five minutes, then everything fell still. The height and shape of the surrounding dunes had changed — as if they had grown legs. Some new dunes had risen while others had been leveled flat.

At last, the sand stopped moving. He Ma’s face was completely covered in sand, and he couldn’t help but sneeze three times in rapid succession.

Diao Zhuo released both their hands and slowly rose to his feet. After a long moment, he said, “Crisis averted.”

“Ptoo, ptoo, ptoo!” Ba Yunye leapt to her feet, frantically spitting sand from her mouth. “What on earth just happened? Was that quicksand?”

“‘Quicksand’ is a dramatic trick invented by television dramas.” Diao Zhuo explained the concept of sand “liquefaction” to her, and seeing her grow more and more confused until she finally started zoning out, he stopped. He thought: if the sand in this area could “liquefy,” the depth of the underground river was unknown. Even with an actual excavator, they couldn’t be certain they’d reach water quickly.

Whether it was quicksand or liquefaction, the desert had delivered a single, casual strike — with devastating results.

Diao Zhuo patted He Ma on the back to bring him back to his senses. He Ma snapped out of it, tipped the sand from his shoes, and carefully tied his laces. Diao Zhuo also emptied his own shoes of sand, and then noticed He Ma using an unusual method to tie his laces. He watched for a moment, and He Ma generously offered to teach him, explaining that while this method was a little more trouble, it had the advantage of not coming undone easily.

“Not bad — I’ve picked up a new trick,” Diao Zhuo said in thanks.

“Not at all — Team Leader Diao just saved my life!” He Ma said, then suddenly tugged at Ba Yunye’s sleeve and said earnestly, “Master Ba, I thought you were the kind of person who’d forget old friends the moment you saw something more attractive. I never expected you to come and pull me out regardless of the danger.”

“How is it that you still manage to insult me first before you pay me a compliment?” Ba Yunye shot him a sideways glance, though the corners of her mouth curved into a smile.

“So tell me — if both Diao Zhuo and I fell into water, who would you pull out first?”

“Him! You can just drown.”

“I know how to swim,” Diao Zhuo said, completely deadpan, pulling the rug out from under her.

“I can’t swim, so after I jump in, you’d save me right away.” Ba Yunye laughed brightly. “And then give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while you’re at it.”

He Ma also pulled the rug out from under her: “You can swim, and you’re supposedly able to hold your breath underwater for a full two minutes without surfacing. Long Ge said the reason he became friends with you is that he once saw you single-handedly pull two children out of a reservoir.”

Diao Zhuo was taken aback. “You actually did something that heroic?”

“I wasn’t planning to go in — I was leaning over watching and got shoved in by someone!” Ba Yunye flatly refused to admit it. In truth, she’d only been around fifteen or sixteen herself at the time — practically a child herself. She’d managed to pull two children to safety but couldn’t get herself out, and Long Ge had to rescue her. The memory was genuinely mortifying.

At the time, Long Ge had asked her: You’re just a little girl — aren’t you afraid of dying? She’d thought to herself: her grades were terrible, she’d dragged down her class’s average more times than she could count, and nobody would be heartbroken if she died. So she told Long Ge: those two kids probably have parents who love them, so it wouldn’t be right for them to die. Me, I don’t really mind.

Long Ge had said: What kind of nonsense is that? From now on, I’ve got your back.

Long Ge hadn’t put on the weight yet back then — he’d been bold, formidable, one of those hardcore adventurers who seemed indestructible, muscles corded all over him, just like Diao Zhuo was now. She’d been shameless enough to ask Long Ge straight out whether he’d fallen for her. Long Ge had scoffed at her and said he had a wife, and that nobody else could ever measure up. She really had been audacious back then — she’d skipped school and followed Long Ge to Tibet for a trip of about twenty-odd days. When she came back, she had no interest in school anymore and wanted to drive trucks with Long Ge. He’d said no, that her wild nature would lead to accidents on the road — she needed to be tempered a bit more first. He later arranged for her to join the military. After she was discharged, Long Ge took her on as a driver. On the surface, she and Long Ge acted like equals with no sense of hierarchy, but inwardly she understood very clearly: everything she had today was entirely the result of Long Ge’s cultivation. With her rough, adventurous nature, she regarded Long Ge not only as her boss and elder brother, but as a true life-and-death companion.

He Ma let out a sheepish laugh. “Hmph. I bet you were the one who kicked those two kids in.”

“Get lost!”

The two of them started bickering and goading each other again. Diao Zhuo watched Ba Yunye, and realized that beneath this woman’s toughness was a vein of warmth he hadn’t expected. She seemed all bluster and unbridled recklessness on the surface, but if you truly thought her shameless because of it, you’d be gravely mistaken. In reality, she was like an underground river hidden within the desert — one that required you to keep digging deeper to find.

Perhaps sensing his gaze, Ba Yunye turned her head to look at him and suddenly broke into a sly grin. She puckered her lips and made a loud, exaggerated kissing sound — a brazen, unabashed declaration of affection delivered with her trademark brash and uninhibited style.

Diao Zhuo raised his hand, pretending to catch it and close it in his palm — as if to ask, care to guess what I do with it?

Ba Yunye pointed to his chest — let it land on that little heart of yours.

Diao Zhuo gave a cold laugh, made a motion as though tossing it upward, then mimed gripping a baseball bat and swung — sending it flying into the far distance.

Ba Yunye shot him a look, sent He Ma off to check on the vehicles, then pressed a noisy kiss into her own palm. Gripping her hand like a live grenade, she charged at Diao Zhuo and made to slam it hard against his mouth.

What a childish game.

Diao Zhuo caught her hand. “And just where do you think you’re putting that?”

“Take it and be grateful!”

“Is this supposed to be fun?” There was nothing in either hand — this terminally literal-minded man was utterly unimpressed.

“Yes.”

Footsteps approached. It turned out Long Ge and Old Wang had driven the vehicles far away and then come running back carrying two coils of rope to rescue them. Finding them unscathed except for being caked in dust and grit, both men let out a breath of relief.

Ba Yunye pulled her hand back and gave Diao Zhuo a firm shove to express her indignation. He loosened his grip and, as if nothing had happened, turned away.

Old Wang was visibly shaken. “Over there, a small puddle suddenly appeared out of nowhere — bubbling constantly, then it just vanished! The sand there is still wet, ice cold!”

“The Badain Jaran Desert has at least three deep-level fault zones underground. Those fault zones conceal underground rivers, the depth of which is still unknown.” Diao Zhuo’s expression was perfectly composed — no trace remained of that playful wickedness from moments ago. “The underground river likely changed course for unknown reasons, causing unstable water pressure. Most of the desert lakes that appear and disappear are caused by exactly this.”

Ba Yunye gave him a thumbs-up. The things he said were genuinely impressive!

“So relying on desert lakes for water supply is completely unreliable!” Old Wang lamented. “They say only camels can smell water from more than ten kilometers away. Satellite maps, GPS — when it comes to actually finding water, they’re all useless!”

“You can’t quite say that — you still have to trust in science…” Long Ge waved his hand, expertly coiling the rope back up with practiced ease while saying with some relief, “This time, we have young brother Diao to thank.”

“Just basic occupational knowledge.”

“You know so much.” School-failure Ba Yunye wore an expression of undisguised envy. “Knowledge really does change destiny…”

“Would you like to learn?” Diao Zhuo asked. “I can teach you from the very basics.”

“How many years would it take?”

“If you can genuinely settle your mind to it, four years to reach the fundamentals.”

“No thank you…” The academic underachiever waved him off and made a swift retreat.

Meng Xiao’ai felt as though she’d barely slept before she was forced to get up. Time and water were now the two critical conditions for survival. Today seemed to be a Saturday. Her friends and classmates were probably still sleeping in, or getting dressed to go somewhere and enjoy the autumn colors. She, meanwhile, was hovering on the razor’s edge between life and death — unbearably dry and scorching hot during the day, shivering with cold at night.

Why did I come here to suffer? — she thought with regret.

When Zhe Ming held a small cup of water out to her, she grabbed it like a lifeline and drank it with careful, meticulous sips, unwilling to let a single drop go to waste — because the next time she might drink water could be as late as that afternoon.

Once you were on the move, you couldn’t afford to think too much. Every ounce of energy and willpower went into your legs. Your mind became useless — you relied purely on animal instinct, trading steps one leg at a time, just walking, walking, walking.

Zhang Chenguang said that tomorrow they would find a freshwater lake. Once they filled up on water, they could hold on for another two or three days and walk out of the desert.

The three words “freshwater lake” worked like imagining plums to quench one’s thirst — Meng Xiao’ai and Zhe Ming both swallowed involuntarily in unison, though there was barely any saliva left in their mouths.

They crested a dune and spotted, at the base of the slope, a skeleton half-buried in sand. In the vast emptiness of the desert, the sudden appearance of something that wasn’t a dune was a remarkably rousing sight. Zhang Chenguang and Zhe Ming helped support Meng Xiao’ai as the three of them slowly made their way down. Meng Xiao’ai’s hands had become dry and cracked, yet they were still surprisingly soft. This was probably the only time in his life he would have an unimpeachable reason to hold her hand, Zhang Chenguang thought.

Up close, they discovered it wasn’t a skeleton at all, but a camel carcass that had been wind-dried to an extreme degree. Because the skin and muscle had shriveled to little more than a thin membrane, the skeletal structure was sharply prominent beneath — from a distance, it resembled a skull. The animal had clearly been dead for a very, very long time.

“If it had died more recently, we could have drunk its blood!” Zhang Chenguang said with disappointment.

Zhe Ming and Meng Xiao’ai nodded, then were surprised to find themselves genuinely wanting to drink blood to quench their thirst. A terrifying thought suddenly surfaced in Zhe Ming’s mind — if one of them were to die first, would the other two drink the blood of the dead?

The three of them crouched beside the camel carcass as if they might find water somewhere within it, turning over its rigid limbs. Zhang Chenguang discovered it was a wild dromedary.

“Aren’t camels supposed to be the ships of the desert? How could one die out here…” Meng Xiao’ai suddenly asked. “Could it have run into a death worm?”

“Impossible — it probably just got lost,” Zhe Ming said offhandedly.

Zhang Chenguang didn’t believe any of the death worm legends, but a sudden, deep chill ran through him. Camels have an innate sense of direction. A fully watered camel could go thirty days without drinking. And a wild dromedary had exceptional desert survival capabilities — it would even eat cacti covered in sharp spines without hesitation. According to the map, the nearest water source was less than twenty kilometers away. How could this camel have failed to hold on for just one more day?

Did that mean there was no water in this area at all?

The thought genuinely frightened him. All at once, the half-bottle of water in his backpack felt impossibly heavy, as if it were solid gold rather than water. The bitter irony was that in the desert, even a cartload of gold couldn’t buy you a single cup of water.

No — it couldn’t be. The map clearly showed a freshwater lake of considerable size in the southwest.

“Camels are flesh and blood too — it might have fallen ill and died here suddenly.” He said it as much to dismiss their doubts as to reassure himself. He kicked the camel’s body and gave it several firm shoves. “Never mind it. Let’s go!”

Long after the three of them had left, the sand beneath the dried camel carcass trembled faintly, as though something below was leaking downward through a hollow. The half of the carcass that had been buried in sand gradually became partially exposed. Across the fur and hide, large patches of mottled discoloration spread — as if the animal had suffered from some kind of skin disease — and in several spots, the hide had been burned clean through, leaving gaping holes.

They pressed on. No matter how desperately Zhe Ming pleaded with himself through his thirst, Zhang Chenguang gritted his teeth and refused to take out the water. He had already begun to harbor doubts — if there truly was no water ahead, then once this bottle ran dry, his life would enter a countdown. Their only hope then was that the search and rescue teams would find them in time.

Back in 2013, two hikers had attempted to cross the Badain Jaran on foot and ended up lost and without water. They were only saved when a rescue team reached them in time. Zhang Chenguang had read a memoir posted online by one of them, in which the writer described climbing dunes as being “like scaling a wall built from flour,” and walking through the desert as “walking through the large intestine of a monster.”

Looking at their situation now, this was far worse than walking through a monster’s large intestine. This was a fully immersive tour of the deepest hell.

When they made camp and rested at midday, Zhe Ming brought up the water issue again and practically dropped to his knees before Zhang Chenguang, begging for even a tiny amount to drink. Zhe Ming’s chest was tight with suppressed fury and a thin undercurrent of something darker — under normal circumstances, he would have gotten into a proper brawl with Zhang Chenguang without a second thought. But right now he needed something from him. His very life was practically in Zhang Chenguang’s hands, and he didn’t dare push it.

“At least give Meng Xiao’ai a little!” Zhe Ming, with great reluctance, deployed his trump card.

Zhang Chenguang turned his back to Zhe Ming and poured out a small amount of water — barely enough to fill a bottle cap — and watched Meng Xiao’ai drink it down.

That trickle of water was like a few drops of rain falling onto a flaming mountain. It accomplished absolutely nothing.

“Give me a little! Just a little, please!” Zhe Ming begged.

Zhang Chenguang poured out half a bottle cap with a stony expression — barely enough to even moisten the inside of one’s mouth.

Zhe Ming’s face fell as he swallowed it without wasting a single drop. Half a bottle cap was just a few drops — his throat still burned with thirst, as if it were about to shoot flames. In that moment, he truly wanted to kill Zhang Chenguang.

After two hours of rest, Zhe Ming realized he was suffering from heatstroke as well. His body was as limp and boneless as a wad of cotton, and on top of that, his stomach cramped in waves of pain. He drank the last of the Huoxiang Zhengqi Water — all of it — because to him, medicinal liquid was still liquid. Better that than dying of heat or thirst.

“How about this — you two stay here, and I’ll go find water alone. When I find it, I’ll come back,” Zhang Chenguang said.

“If you’re not here, what do we drink?” Zhe Ming asked anxiously.

He kept his face perfectly blank. “Urine.”

Meng Xiao’ai instinctively shrank back, clearly unable to accept that.

Zhe Ming frowned, genuinely baffled. “Urine is salty. How can a person drink salt water when they’re dying of thirst?”

“Urine is not salt water. Bear Grylls said that when there’s absolutely no water, you drink what you can — he drank his own urine himself.” Zhang Chenguang said with conviction.

“To hell with Bear Grylls!” Zhe Ming croaked hoarsely, raising his voice as best he could. “That was fake! A performance!”

“What did you say?” Zhang Chenguang’s face instantly darkened, his eyes fixing on Zhe Ming with cold intensity.

Meng Xiao’ai quickly tugged at the hem of Zhe Ming’s shirt.

“I only meant… urine isn’t drinkable.” Zhe Ming’s face had gone red from holding back, and his voice dropped.

“Then it just means you’re not thirsty enough yet,” Zhang Chenguang said coldly.

Zhe Ming was rendered speechless. His throat was practically on fire, and whatever moisture remained in his body was like oil in a frying pan — sizzling and disappearing into thin air — yet in Zhang Chenguang’s eyes, this apparently still wasn’t desperate enough?

“You two wait here. I’m heading southwest to look for water.” Zhang Chenguang had no patience left for this conversation. He adjusted his backpack straps and made to leave.

“You can’t go!” Zhe Ming suddenly shouted.