Not long after Zhang Chenguang had set out, the light rain began. He tipped his head back with mouth wide open, but caught barely any drops at all. By the time the brief rain stopped, his tongue had only barely been moistened — nothing more. He greedily wiped at the water on his face and his head, hoping to coax out a few more drops, but it was completely futile.
After that fine, misty drizzle that might as well have not fallen at all, the sky darkened completely. The darkness all around was so absolute it was as if the entire landscape had been submerged in pools of black — if he hadn’t already done a few days of night travel before this, Zhang Chenguang would never have adapted to the deep unease of moving in that kind of darkness. The exploration books and documentaries he’d read and watched had told him that traveling at night and resting during the day was the ideal approach to minimize the body’s water loss and energy expenditure. And so he decided to use the night hours for his trek over these next two days, staying as still as possible during daylight.
But some things you understand better than anyone — and doing them is still harder than climbing to the sky. Especially without water.
The empty bottle he’d retrieved held about one hundred and fifty milliliters of urine. It was hard to fathom that from yesterday to today, this was all his body had been able to produce. The liquid was a deep, dark brown — a profoundly abnormal color, signaling that his body was severely dehydrated and that even his most basic metabolic functions were becoming increasingly difficult.
Drinking this was essentially slow suicide — but it was a slower death than the alternative. At least there was still some moisture in it, even if it was extremely foul, both salty and bitter, and drinking one mouthful would make you gag up three more.
He had already been walking for several hours since abandoning Zhe Ming and Meng Xiao’ai. They had tried at first to keep up with him, maintaining a distance of several hundred meters. He’d glanced back covertly and could still see their forlorn figures in the distance. As the gap widened, their shapes shrank from matchstick-sized to sesame-seed-sized, and then vanished entirely.
He felt no regret. If anything, he felt he had been too slow in making this clearly rational decision.
He would be the only one to walk out of this desert alive. And as long as he was alive, the version of events would be entirely his to tell — both companions died one after the other; he had no choice but to survive on his own, with no way of helping them. When survival is the question at hand, mutual support is a luxury, and loyalty means nothing.
Compared to his all-or-nothing gamble, every step the two behind him took was like walking on the edge of a blade.
Zhe Ming and Meng Xiao’ai had no GPS — only a compass. No water, no guide. Like a three-year-old child abandoned in the middle of heavy traffic, any number of unforeseen events could kill them at any moment.
“That vile, worthless Zhang Chenguang…” The moment they lost sight of him, Zhe Ming’s face had gone chalk-white. “He swore up and down he’d get us through the desert in eight days, said he’d let us experience something nobody else had ever experienced — cough cough cough!! And in the end! He broke every promise and ran off by himself… he deserves to die. If it weren’t for him, I never would have come to this desert, I never would have trusted him so completely…”
Meng Xiao’ai clung to the sleeve of Zhe Ming’s shirt. She was terrified — terrified that Zhe Ming would do exactly what Zhang Chenguang had done and walk away on his own. If that happened, she was truly finished.
“I never thought he was that kind of person… If we’d listened to him from the start, not drunk all our water so fast, held back a little — maybe we’d still have something to drink right now…”
“How can you say that?!” Zhe Ming said with hot indignation. “He didn’t plan this right. Why didn’t he let us bring more water? Could I not carry more?!”
Meng Xiao’ai extended her dry, parched tongue and ran it over her lips. What had once been soft and smooth was now cracked and dry as withered bark. Every movement tore the old scabs open again, drawing thin threads of blood — after several cycles of this, the skin had begun to ulcerate.
“Zhe Ming, what on earth do we do now? Which direction do we go?”
“Southwest — wasn’t it that person who said there was a lake that way?” Zhe Ming couldn’t bring himself to even speak Zhang Chenguang’s name.
“Is there really water over there… How many more days do we have to walk? What if we get lost? I’m so thirsty. I’m scared I’ll die of thirst before I even reach the lake. Will anyone come to rescue us? Can’t the police really find us? Don’t they have advanced equipment? Don’t they have helicopters?”
Faced with Meng Xiao’ai’s relentless stream of questions, Zhe Ming had nothing left to give. His mind was reeling, and he was in no state to manage her feelings — let alone his own, with a throat so raw he could barely speak. A terrifying thought even crossed his mind: if Meng Xiao’ai couldn’t keep going, he couldn’t possibly stay behind and wait to die with her. Zhang Chenguang had left. For the sake of survival, if it came to that — he would have to leave too.
Ha. Was there really such a thing in this world as a love forged through life and death? It turned out to be nothing but fantasies spun by comfortable scholars with full stomachs — “together until the end of time,” “morning and evening, side by side.” Nothing but illusions.
“…Let’s go.” Zhe Ming said. Reflexively, he tried to swallow — but his mouth was so dry that his throat seized and contracted, the upper and lower muscles seeming to stick together. A fresh wave of alarm rolled through him, and his voice turned urgent: “Let’s move quickly.”
Meng Xiao’ai shook her head; her eyes were entirely bloodshot. “Can we just sit here and wait for the police to come rescue us?”
Zhe Ming frowned. “We have no water. If we want to wait for rescue… cough cough… we still need to get somewhere with water first.”
Meng Xiao’ai hadn’t yet noticed the shift in Zhe Ming’s state of mind. She found what he said perfectly sensible, gave a nod, and forced herself to keep walking.
When the flashlight beam swept across the ground, something skittered away with rapid, rustling movements. Zhe Ming strained to identify it for a long time but couldn’t make it out — he scrambled over on all fours to look, and found wave-like tracks across the sand surface, suggesting some kind of creature with a tail.
“Do you think it’s a snake…” Meng Xiao’ai asked quietly.
“Whatever it is, if I catch it, I’ll drink its blood.” Zhe Ming’s eyes burned with longing. The rations they’d brought contained no moisture whatsoever — by comparison, an animal’s body might hold considerably more.
Meng Xiao’ai, to her own surprise, found herself nodding with equal fervor. She desperately wanted to catch something — anything — to put in her mouth and chew, squeeze out whatever juice it might hold, and swallow it down.
But the two of them walked on together for a great distance and caught nothing at all. What they did find, however, was a patch of low, dense grey-green vegetation. The small leaves looked withered and dry, yet instinct told them: wherever there is vegetation, there must be water below the surface. They rallied their remaining strength, pulled out every digging tool in their packs, and began clawing at the sand with frantic desperation.
Desert plants are tenacious. Their root systems tend toward efficiency — rarely branching unnecessarily, with a main taproot driving straight downward. The longest can extend more than twenty meters below the surface.
Water! Water! Water! Meng Xiao’ai bit down and drove her shovel into the sand, every stroke aimed as if to pierce straight through to the earth’s core. She watched the plant’s roots pushing stubbornly downward and thought: even if those roots reached all the way to the other side of the world, she would dig until she found the water.
Zhe Ming also knelt on the ground and clawed at the sand with the fierce, single-minded expression of a soldier charging into battle, the displaced sand rising in clouds behind him. He dug for some time — and then felt something that seemed like sweat running from his head down to his ear. He didn’t think much of it at first and just wiped it away with his sleeve. But as he kept digging, his ear suddenly felt as if it had been set alight — a piercing, stabbing pain.
“Ahh——” He cried out and clapped a hand over his ear. His fingers came away sticky. Something had fallen into his palm — a piece of skin, with some yellowish-red fluid. Within a few seconds, that small piece of skin dissolved away entirely. He reached up again: half his ear was gone.
“Xiao’ai! Xiao’ai!” He screamed, and threw down his tools on pure instinct and stumbled backward.
Meng Xiao’ai had no idea what had happened and assumed he’d hurt his hand. She rushed after him — and found Zhe Ming with half his face covered in blood, and only a small fragment of one ear remaining.
“It hurts!! It hurts so much!!” Zhe Ming thrashed and gulped air desperately, and finally writhed down to the ground in agony, rolling uncontrollably — tumbling down the slope of the dune, his whole body pitching headlong into the sand and going completely still.
“Zhe Ming——” Meng Xiao’ai’s soul nearly left her body with fright. She stumbled after him and slid down, her heart repeating one desperate, wordless prayer — please let nothing be wrong with you, Zhe Ming, please.
Just before dawn, despite severely inadequate sleep, everyone gave themselves a quick rinse and pressed on with the search. Old Wang’s hand was no longer burning, but the pain persisted — he wouldn’t be able to drive again anytime soon. From here on, the others would take turns at the wheel.
He Ma wasn’t used to Old Wang’s vehicle, and on top of his exhaustion, barely minutes after setting out, the vehicle plunged into a deep U-shaped sand hollow. It was stuck going forward and backward, the hollow was deep, and even the tow rope was of no help — it nearly dragged the other vehicles in with it.
“Work around it — go in circles and you’ll work your way out,” Old Wang said with gestures, wishing he could just do it himself.
But He Ma’s experience driving in desert terrain was limited. He sweated through it but remained stuck in the hollow.
Long Ge sighed and waved He Ma off. “I’ll take it.”
“Let me try.” Ba Yunye was eager to have a go.
“It seems these past few years of easy living have made me so soft that even you have no faith in my driving anymore.” Long Ge thumped his chest, then pointed at Ba Yunye. “You — step aside!”
With that, he pulled He Ma out of the driver’s seat, dropped in himself with a heavy thud that sent a shudder through the vehicle and shook loose a shower of dust from the roof.
“Beep——” He honked on instinct, then reversed.
The vehicle reversed halfway and then surged down the hollow. He used the momentum of that descent to drive back up — but got halfway and slid back down again.
“Oh, come on — are you even managing?” Ba Yunye asked, unable to hide her exasperation.
Long Ge didn’t bother responding. The vehicle moved like a skateboard riding the curve of the U-shape, going up and down along the slope repeatedly. Several times the front half of the tyres cleared the rim — only to slide back in. But with each pass, the vehicle’s position at the edge of the hollow extended a little further than the last.
Ba Yunye began to see the logic in it, and her puzzlement gave way to curiosity — there’s actually a technique to this?
Diao Zhuo watched with his arms folded for quite some time. His expression gradually eased. At this rate, getting out was only a matter of a few more applications of the throttle. “What did Long Ge do before he was a driver?”
“He drove trucks. Covered more than half of China.”
“And before that?”
Ba Yunye paused. She realized she had rarely heard Long Ge mention his earlier years — she only knew he was from Garzê in Sichuan, and that he used to boast about being the most famously handsome Khampa man in his village for miles around. But a man ruined by weight gain — she genuinely could not see any trace of that legendary good-looking young man in him.
“He was in the military,” Diao Zhuo said. “Learned to drive in the army.”
Ba Yunye nodded. “Oh, right — yeah, he was in the military. I think he was a reconnaissance soldier… but which unit exactly, he never says. You can tell from watching him drive?”
“Certain habits and behaviors.”
“His posture when standing or walking doesn’t look anything like someone who drilled parade marching. And these past few years, with the weight gain, he slumps all over the place even when sitting.” Ba Yunye found it surprising. “Maybe because of how he looks now — you’re the only one besides me who could tell he used to serve.”
“He keeps all of his gear sorted by size and color. Back when Old Wang didn’t know him well, he once called him by his full name — and he answered ‘present.’ ” Diao Zhuo kept his eyes on the vehicle working its way up and down the slope. “Also, he honks every single time before he moves, and signals every turn — most people don’t hold onto habits like that, even if they learned them for their driving test. The fact that he still does it instinctively — even in a crisis situation — can only come from sustained, long-term military training. And then there’s the way he folds his blanket. It’s completely different from how any of us just tostle ours up. You’ve traveled with him for years — you must have seen him fold his bedding at some point…”
Ba Yunye blinked, and said with pure, guileless candor: “I’ve never shared a bed with him. How would I have seen him fold his bedding?”
She had a gift for stopping a conversation dead in its tracks with a single sentence. Diao Zhuo had no answer to that. Still, before this moment, he — like most others — had vaguely assumed that Ba Yunye and Long Ge had some sort of relationship beyond the professional. That one casual remark of hers had just punctured that rumor entirely.
After seven or eight back-and-forth passes, more than half the vehicle had cleared the hollow. One last reverse, then a final surge up — and it was completely free. He Ma let out a whistle of delight.
Long Ge climbed out, and his pudgy palm connected with the back of He Ma’s head. “What the hell are you whistling for — drive carefully, damn it!”
“Yes sir!” He Ma snapped to attention and saluted.
Long Ge looked entirely unimpressed. “…That’s just embarrassing.”
Everyone got back in the vehicles and was just about to set off again when the satellite phone crackled with a new message: one of the teams had found a body.