The temporary rescue command center.

“What! A discovery…!!” Officer Liu leaped to his feet. Mindful of the families’ fragile emotional state, he stepped outside while still on the call, lowering his voice to ask: “Whose body is it? Male or female…”

The three students’ families, whose spirits had already sunk low, suddenly became extremely agitated. Everyone trembled uncontrollably while squeezing their eyes tightly shut. They had been desperately hoping the rescue team would bring news — but now that news had finally arrived, not one of them wanted to hear it.

Liu Chengru was the first to break down. Perhaps more than anyone, she understood that Xiao’ai was the weakest of the three and the least equipped to survive. If there was terrible news, it was most likely about her own daughter. Officer Liu had not yet returned when she collapsed into Old Meng’s arms, and everyone rushed over to press her philtrum to revive her. Old Meng, his limbs gone limp, slumped beside his wife, his thoughts much the same as hers — if their daughter had truly met with an accident, the two of them would pay for it with half their own lives.

Officer Liu hung up and walked back. Everyone surged around him, encircling him completely. He quickly pressed his hands downward to calm the atmosphere. “Everyone, please relax! The person found is not one of your children!”

The families all sagged with relief, yet very soon slipped back into a daze, shuffling listlessly to their seats. The feeling of wishing they were dead rather than alive at that moment was something they would never forget for as long as they lived.

As it turned out, the rescue team had found the mummified remains of a male. Based on the expiration dates of food among his belongings, the time of death was estimated at no less than one year prior. Whether he had entered the desert alone or become separated from a group was still unclear; a definitive conclusion would have to wait until the rescue team brought the remains back for examination and next of kin identification.

The other rescue teams searching deep in the desert for the three students received the news and pressed on with their search.

“A mummy?” Ba Yunye let out a breath of relief. “It’s definitely not one of them.”

“Day eight.” Diao Zhuo, having consolidated reports from the other rescue teams, felt no sense of lightness — the pressure, in fact, was heavier than ever. “The students originally planned to reach Bilute Peak in eight to nine days. Yet no one has found any trace of them near Bilute Peak, which means they are still trapped in the desert — and moreover, the water they brought should be completely gone by now.”

“Old Wang, when will we reach the two desert lakes marked on the map?” Long Ge asked.

Old Wang wandered around a while, looking this way and that, then let out a long sigh. “Less than six kilometers.”

“What are you sighing about?” Ba Yunye frowned.

Old Wang shook his head, climbed into the vehicle, and said: “Let’s go over and have a look.”

Diao Zhuo and Long Ge were both sharp enough to read the situation the moment they saw his reaction — as a veteran driver who knew the desert routes, he had almost certainly noticed that the two lakes had “moved on.”

“What are the typical signs near a desert lake?” Long Ge was remarkably humble at that moment, handing Old Wang a cigarette. “Teach us.”

“Nothing special — lots of insects, mosquitoes especially.” Old Wang lit the cigarette, then stretched his hand out to gesture for everyone to get in the vehicle. “Come evening, you wouldn’t believe it… the desert gets very cold at night, but the lake stays warm. Mosquitoes love it.”

Ba Yunye felt she had just learned something new. After getting in, she quietly turned it over in her mind several times before finally asking: “Why would a desert lake be warm at night? Is it because the sun heats it up during the day?”

Diao Zhuo drove on, unhurried. “The desert’s evaporation rate is enormous. Without replenishment from underground water, the daytime sun would dry a lake out entirely. One theory currently circulating in academic circles holds that snowmelt from the Qilian Mountains and water from the Three Rivers Source replenishes the underground rivers of the Badain Jaran Desert through deep underground fault zones, forming lakes that don’t ‘migrate.’ The underground environment is far more stable than the surface — the temperature difference between day and night is nowhere near as extreme as on the desert floor. By nighttime, the lake feels warmer to the human body than the sand, but in reality the water temperature is roughly the same day and night. This also involves questions of thermal radiation.”

Ba Yunye took a long time to respond, inwardly seething with regret — what a jumbled mess of information, if only she had known, she never would have asked in the first place!

Diao Zhuo tilted his head and glanced at her. She clasped her hands together in a gesture of salute. “The way you were just talking reminded me — just a tiny little bit — of my older sister.”

“The way you look right now reminds me — just a tiny little bit — of my granddaughter.”

Ba Yunye clenched her fist and ground her teeth. “You don’t even have a son — where would a granddaughter come from?”

Diao Zhuo pulled out his cigarette case and bit one out. “You call me Grandpa, and won’t I have one?”

“Diao Zhuo, if you weren’t driving right now, I would bite you to death.”

“Go ahead — I can’t wait.” Diao Zhuo promptly extended his right hand toward her.

He Zhengren had finished his bath and was half-reclining on the sofa, watching the news.

“Next, a series of domestic breaking news updates: the search and rescue operation in the Badain Jaran Desert continues. A male body has been discovered; it has now been ruled out as one of the three missing university students. The identity of the male remains is still being confirmed…”

He Zhengren’s hand tightened sharply around the remote control. He slowly sat up.

After sitting in a daze for a moment, he irritably pulled out his phone, only to hear a mechanical female voice informing him that the subscriber was out of service area. He thought for a moment, then dialed a different number. The person who answered was the captain of the Inner Mongolia volunteer unit. “I saw the news. Was it our Beidou Rescue volunteers who found the deceased? If so, we’ll chalk that up as another credit to our name… No? It was a local herder?… What about Diao Zhuo? Still no news?… So the body wasn’t found by him?… What now?… Taken directly to the public security bureau?…”

After a brief, cheerful exchange, He Zhengren hung up. The smile on his face cooled, and he exhaled slowly.

The male body found in the Badain Jaran… it was quite possibly that person. He Zhengren sighed. Business was difficult these days, and he had taken considerable losses — heaven must be using this to tell him: stop while you still can.

He closed his eyes and let his mind drift back to the past. In those days, he and Rao Qinghui had each led their own expedition team, traveling from place to place, sleeping rough and going hungry for the sake of a single data point. Rao Qinghui’s standing as an academic giant was universally recognized, and even in death, his reputation had not diminished. He himself had inherited Rao Qinghui’s unfinished ambitions, taken over a portion of his projects, and authored a series of reports on aquamarine mineral deposits that sent shockwaves through the industry — successfully stepping into Rao Qinghui’s place. Based on the contents of his reports, it was discovered that beyond the rare metal deposits of Koktokay in Xinjiang, aquamarine mineral deposits existed there as well. But the data in his possession was limited. That car accident had all but wiped out Rao Qinghui’s entire team, and a great many survey findings and research materials had never come to light.

He looked around. The room’s décor was tasteful and refined. He savored his current life — incomparably comfortable. A refined life was built from money; without money, where would quality come from? There was a line in Dream of the Red Chamber that put it perfectly —

Everyone knows the immortal life is best, yet gold and silver none can quite forget!

Zhe Ming felt his head buzzing and had no idea how long he had been unconscious. It was only when his tongue felt so dry it seemed to be retreating into his throat that he drifted back to awareness. The wound on his ear had begun to fester, the pain still present — yet compared to the aching thirst, the pain had diminished considerably.

“Zhe Ming… you’re awake…” Xiao’ai weakly crawled over to him.

The night before, she had checked his breathing and found he had merely fainted rather than died, which had reassured her greatly. With great effort she had put the tent together, dragging and pushing until she managed to get him inside. Exhausted and desperately thirsty herself, she had also fallen into a stuporous sleep. She had woken several times during the night, each time certain that dawn had already come, only to look at her watch and realize she had slept for barely an hour or so.

When the first pale light appeared in the eastern sky, Zhe Ming woke, and she woke too — but what to do next, she had no idea whatsoever.

Though she had slept soundly through the night, she woke still utterly drained. Zhe Ming lay flat on his back, eyes vacant, his lips so parched from dehydration that they had shriveled like two dried strips of orange peel. The two of them had gone without a drop of water for over twenty hours. If they could not find a water source soon, or if they were not spotted by rescue personnel, the remainder of their lives amounted to roughly a day and a half.

Xiao’ai struggled to her feet, feeling every muscle in her body draw tight, clenching hard around her bones. “…Let’s try to signal for help.”

“How would we signal…”

“We burn what we don’t need, get some smoke rising — maybe… maybe someone will see it.”

Zhe Ming was in a state beyond caring. Whatever she said was fine by him.

Xiao’ai exerted herself to pull both their clothing out of their packs and heap it together, then dragged her heavy steps outside in an attempt to uproot some of the desert plants. But desert plants are nothing if not tenacious — they were not about to be pulled out by the roots at her hands. She took out a small pair of scissors and clipped at the branches bit by bit. The branches looked bone-dry, but their resilience was extraordinary. With barely any strength left in her hands, she cut for a long time and managed only a small handful.

A fire was kindled. With so little fuel, it gave off a faint crackling sound, and the smoke rose into the air — but it seemed to dissipate at mid-height, blown apart by the wind. Whether anyone could see it was impossible to say. The longer Zhe Ming and Xiao’ai watched, the more their hearts sank. The fire burned for only a short while before slowly dying out, consumed by its meager fuel.

“Burn it all! Burn everything!” Zhe Ming went frantic, hurling every visible item into the ashes.

Except for the tent and their food, everything they had was piled together and set ablaze again. Even his wallet was thrown into the fire.

Something fell out of the wallet. Zhe Ming picked it up — it was the backup battery for the GPS. The thing had somehow slipped into the folds of the wallet and had been wedged there all along.

Zhe Ming let out a sardonic smile and threw the battery into the fire as well. If Zhang Tian’en had not abandoned them and left, burning their belongings would have uncovered this sliver of hope.

Xiao’ai stared at the rising black smoke, her mind blank. She wondered whether Zhang Tian’en had found any water, and whether his GPS still worked. Deep in her heart, she clung to the faintest thread of hope — or perhaps it was delusion — that Zhang Tian’en would find water and still come back to rescue them both.

The truth was that Zhang Tian’en’s GPS had run out of power. It could no longer guide him, and all he had left was a compass.

He had pushed through the night in his search for water, consuming far more energy than the other two, and had even depleted his body of urine. Before dawn had even broken, he could no longer move. When he came to again, he found himself before a seemingly endless rolling sea of sand, with a scattering of low, sparse vegetation.

His mouth was full of sand when he opened it.

He reached out and tugged at a branch of one of the plants. The thorns pierced several small holes into his palm, yet drew no blood. He stripped the leaves into his mouth and chewed desperately. The leaves had almost no moisture in them — both leaves and stems were astringent. When he finished, not only was his thirst unquenched, his tongue had gone numb.

Survival of the fittest — these nameless plants had adapted to this brutal environment precisely because they had learned not to store too much moisture in their leaves, and not to become too palatable. Otherwise, no matter how deep their roots ran, if their foliage were perpetually consumed as food by other living things, they could never survive.

Zhang Tian’en moved his parched tongue and spat out the leaf remnants, his mouth bitter without end.

If he remembered correctly, he was only about three kilometers from the lake marked on the map.

But the surface temperature would rise soon, and if he kept walking, his body’s water would be consumed at two or three times the current rate. He braced himself on all fours and tried to rise, intending to find a shaded slope and pitch a tent beneath it — but the moment he stretched his limbs out, his muscles seized like overstretched elastic bands, forcing him to curl weakly inward. He rolled down the slope and sank into the soft hollow of sand below.

He noticed that the sand beneath the surface was remarkably cool, and the vegetation somewhat more abundant than above — likely because it was closer to underground water.

Knowing full well that digging out any water was impossible, he clawed at the sand anyway. The sand deeper down was a darker color and icy cold, but waterless. Perhaps a few more meters down one might reach damp sand — but no human being had the strength for that.

He breathed heavily, the world spinning around him. He lay down in the hole he had just dug, raked sand haphazardly over himself, and buried himself up to the neck, only his head exposed. The dehydration had left his face dry and darkened until it nearly matched the color of the sand around him. He lay there like a beached whale, helpless and despairing, mouth half-open. Grains of sand drifted into his mouth on the wind. His life, like the sand in an hourglass, seemed to have very little left…

He didn’t know how long he had lain there when he felt his consciousness slowly blurring. Faintly, he heard the sound of an engine approaching from far away.

Is someone there? He opened his eyes and cried out in a ragged voice: “Help… help me…”

But the sound he produced was so hoarse, so faint, that even his own ears could barely make it out.

The engine sound came and went in spurts, then suddenly fell silent and did not start up again. If it had truly been a rescue vehicle, and it hadn’t found him in this section, the next vehicle — or another team upon spotting the tire tracks — would not search this vicinity again.

Zhang Tian’en wondered whether he had imagined it altogether. He hoped he had.