“This trip, I’m running a loss-making operation…” Before setting off, Ba Yunye said breezily to Sister Jin, ribbing her with a grin. “Not a single client, and I’m footing the bill for fuel, accommodation, and meals myself. This is what they call — the wind howls and the Yi River runs cold, Master Ba rides out with pockets empty and bold.”
Sister Jin burst out laughing, her voice nearly drowning out the ringtone on Ba Yunye’s phone. She glanced over and saw it was Diao Zhuo. Her heart gave a little squeeze — she felt torn, unsure whether she should tell him about her plans later.
As for those two, ever since their last falling-out, they hadn’t truly cut ties. It was just that they were each in different corners of the world; Diao Zhuo was swamped with work, and whenever he headed out for field surveys, he often went completely off the grid. Without actually seeing each other in person, whatever was said amounted to little more than empty promises.
Before news of Long Ge arrived, he had already been assigned another survey — so this call now, most likely, was him having returned and seen the inter-agency investigation notice. When it came to Long Ge’s actions, Diao Zhuo approached the matter with far less emotion and far more consideration of reason and law than Ba Yunye did. Ba Yunye didn’t like discussing Long Ge’s desire for vengeance with him, because every time she did, they ended up in an argument.
“Hey.” She picked up the phone, her tone flat.
“There are suspicious points in this case. Don’t act impulsively.”
That single sentence was like a stream of clear water seeping into Ba Yunye’s heart, which had been growing more and more parched over the past few days. She drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “Tell me — what suspicious points?”
“If He Zhengren had died in Beijing and Long Ge became the prime suspect, I wouldn’t think twice about it. But the fact that he died at a spot along the China-Myanmar border that almost nobody visits — that in itself is the biggest red flag. Follow-up news reports say He Zhengren joined a tour group to Yunnan, then went missing in Nujiang Prefecture, and his body was found by chance by a villager who had gone mushroom-picking and wandered off looking for water. His luggage and valuables were all intact, which means it was the primary crime scene. I looked into it — that location is still several kilometers away from where a vehicle could last reach, so you’d have to go on foot. He Zhengren has mobility issues. Even if Long Ge wanted to cover his tracks and find a secluded spot to kill someone, he wouldn’t drag the man that far on foot. On top of that, He Zhengren had nothing that could be used as an absolute hold over Long Ge, so there’s no way he would have gone along with him obediently.”
Ba Yunye felt a wave of relief wash over her. “But the police said they found evidence—” she said urgently.
“What the police found should be evidence that Long Ge was present around the time of He Zhengren’s death — otherwise, they would have issued an arrest warrant, not a wanted notice.”
“I didn’t expect you to actually believe Long Ge is innocent. I thought you were calling to pressure me into telling Long Ge to turn himself in, or to flat-out talk me out of harboring a fugitive.”
“Is that the kind of person you think I am?”
“No, no, no — you’re towering and mighty like a heavenly god, sharp-eyed and perceptive, seeing all things clearly.”
“Sincerely?”
“Of course.”
“Stop talking nonsense. Stay put in Lijiang and wait for the latest updates from the police. And under no circumstances are you to get the idea of rallying your club’s drivers to go seek justice for him.”
“Uh…” Ba Yunye froze up like a snake whose vital pressure point had been pressed, stumbling over her words for a long moment. “Mm… no rallying, no rallying.” As she spoke, she thought to herself: if it weren’t for the fact that every driver in the club had already scattered and fled, you could at least point me toward a path forward.
“Good girl.”
Ba Yunye felt a simultaneous tingle run down her spine and across her scalp. “That term doesn’t suit me.”
“It’s not a term.”
“A nickname is even more off-limits.”
“It’s earnest hope and encouragement.”
“Thank you for your high standards and strict demands.”
He let out a low, cold scoff. “If I’d had even a shred of standards or demands when it came to you, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
“What great suffering have you endured?”
“You know perfectly well.”
She pressed her lips together, letting out a long sigh. “Since ancient times, even the mightiest hero has been undone by beauty… Brave warrior, take care of yourself.”
“The line ‘even the mightiest hero is undone by beauty’ has rarely, throughout history, been spoken by the beauty herself.”
“That’s because they’d never met a true hero.”
“I’m no hero.”
“I am — you once called me a ‘female hero.'”
“…”
She hung up and turned around — nearly giving herself a fright. The drivers from yesterday had all come back, lined up in a neat row behind her, waiting quietly for her to finish her call. “You… what are you doing here?”
Tu Lang said: “Master Ba, I’ll go with you to find Long Ge.”
The other drivers chimed in one by one:
Shi Tou: “I’m going too!”
Lao Ma: “Even if I have to leave eventually, I’m not going until we find Long Ge! A true man stands by what he’s done — if you did it, own it; if you didn’t, make it clear. What’s there to be afraid of!”
Lao Zuo: “We’re all going! Damn it! It’s not that I’m afraid Long Ge is a murderer — what I’m afraid of is whether something happened to him too!”
Ba Yunye was taken aback. She looked around at everyone, and then suddenly let out a burst of laughter. “You lot… ah!”
Everyone laughed along with her. “We’re the Eagle Club, not the Ostrich Club. When trouble comes, we face it together — nobody here is going to be a turtle tucking its head in its shell!”
“Yesterday you all scattered and ran. Today you’re back here in full force. I thought you came to claim some kind of emotional damages fee or something…”
“Psh! We at least had to go buy a few boxes of instant noodles, crackers, and bottled water to bring along!” They rolled their eyes, their expressions making it clear they had little faith in her intelligence. “Besides, seeing the look on your face while you were on that call — absolutely shameless — we didn’t dare interrupt…”
I had that shameless look again? Ba Yunye was startled. She couldn’t help raising a hand to rub her own face, and then a bold thought suddenly surfaced in her mind — once they found Long Ge, she could make a surprise visit to Diao Zhuo’s project site. Why should Meng Xiao’ai be the only one who got to go, and not her?
That fleeting thought left her unexpectedly wistful with longing.
The terrain of western Yunnan is treacherous, its ecology intricate, and in ancient times it was rarely traversed by human feet — the Records of the Grand Historian, in its “Biographies of the Southwestern Barbarians,” even includes a dedicated account of the region. Nujiang Prefecture sits at the border where China meets Myanmar and where Yunnan meets Tibet; the Nujiang River and the Hengduan Mountains run from north to south through its heart, and the deeply carved, high-altitude terrain is renowned throughout the world. The Gaoligong Mountains within its borders are among the most species-rich areas on the planet.
The distance from Lijiang to where He Zhengren had met his end was roughly six hundred kilometers. Ba Yunye’s group had no heart for taking in the scenery along the way. The moment they got out of the vehicles, without even pausing to rest, each of them put their personal connections to work, fishing for information about the case and Long Ge’s whereabouts.
Word had it that He Zhengren had been stabbed multiple times. Because it had been raining for days, by the time the body was discovered, there was little blood remaining on or around it — so from a distance, the villager who found him had initially thought it was some adventurer who’d had a fall and couldn’t get up. The identity of the “informant” who had provided the tip to police was unknown. All that was known was that the police had followed that lead, uncovering evidence that Long Ge’s recent movements had coincided with He Zhengren’s, and had also extracted a biological sample belonging to Long Ge from the body — enough to immediately identify him as the prime suspect. As for exactly what evidence and what biological sample, only those inside the police investigation knew.
The police had not yet found Long Ge. There were no records of him boarding any flights or trains, but given his professional background and network of contacts, the police believed he could have left Yunnan even without using conventional transport, and were deploying more personnel to track him down.
Ba Yunye sat cradling a takeaway meal, eating without tasting a thing. Long Ge had already gone dark — there was no knowing where he actually was.
“Master Ba! My contact tracked down that the last time Long Ge was seen, he was staying at this guesthouse here.” Lao Ma came rushing in, face full of urgency, and handed Ba Yunye an address. “Ever since tourists were barred from entering, the guesthouses over there have had almost no business — most have shut down. Only two or three are left. As it happens, one had the man who died staying in it, and another had Long Ge. The guesthouse where Long Ge stayed can barely remember him, but the one where the dead man stayed has a much clearer recollection.”
“Obviously — their guest left and turned up dead, then the police came interrogating them. Whether they wanted to remember or not, they had no choice!” Tu Lang cut in.
Lao Ma waved him off with a dismissive click of his tongue. Ba Yunye raised her hand to quiet things down, signaling him to continue. “The guesthouse owner said that not long after the police came and finished questioning them, someone else came asking about the man surnamed He. Nobody else knew who those people were, but the guesthouse owner did… They were a group that helps people ‘get out.'”
Ba Yunye’s brow furrowed. “Go to Myanmar? Smuggling people across?”
Lao Ma nodded. “They’re actually quite principled about it — pay a deposit, they take you across, you pay the remainder. If they fail to get you out, you get your deposit back.”
“Just like us with the driving trips…” Ba Yunye murmured, stroking her chin. Seeing everyone staring at her with expressions of resigned disbelief, she cleared her throat. “Did they tell the police about this?”
“What’s there to tell? Those people may be ‘principled’ about smuggling, but they’re not to be trifled with — and they’re not even Chinese. The guesthouse still has a business to run. The police already came asking questions; why would they voluntarily go and expose those people on top of that? They’d have no future left.”
“He Zhengren used sightseeing in Yunnan as a cover when he actually intended to be smuggled into Myanmar… Is Myanmar really better than China?” Ba Yunye pursed her lips, utterly baffled, and then, almost thinking aloud to herself, murmured: “Did Long Ge kill him to stop him from crossing the border — wanting him to live as a Chinese and die as a Chinese ghost?”
Everyone looked even more exasperated. “Master Ba… weren’t you the one who didn’t believe Long Ge would kill someone?”
Ba Yunye snapped back to attention. “Uh… anything else?”
“I heard something — not sure if it’s true.” Shi Tou said. “The locals in that area say they vaguely heard gunshots. That’s never happened before.”
Ba Yunye hadn’t caught that clearly. “Which area?”
“The same area where the body was found.”
At first nobody took this seriously, and they all started talking over each other: “The government has such strict controls on firearms — even hunting rifles are banned.” “Heh, this place is near the Golden Triangle — could be some deranged drug traffickers having a shootout!” “Give it a rest! This area produces marble — could it be the sound of quarry blasting?”
Seeing that nobody believed him, Shi Tou said insistently: “The person who heard the gunshots is a veteran who fought in the Sino-Vietnamese War. How could he possibly mistake the sound?”
Ba Yunye shook her head. As someone who was essentially a living map, she turned it over quietly in her mind before saying: “Going up along the Dulong River a little from there, you’d reach the protected primeval forests of Gaoligong Mountain. Nobody goes up there. So why would there be gunshots?”
— “Would Long Ge go into the primeval forest?”
Nobody was quite sure who blurted it out, but the moment the words left their mouth, everyone fell silent.
The primeval forest between the Gaoligong mountain range and the Dulong River is the most remote, most mysterious, and most difficult-to-reach place in all of Yunnan — a landscape that combines high plateau and deep gorge terrain, ranked among China’s ten most extreme adventure routes. Legend has it that the Imperial Japanese Army once suffered more than forty thousand casualties in this very terrain. With its fearsome, punishing landscape and countless stories of mystery and the supernatural, it is not somewhere an ordinary person would casually venture into.
Renlong Duoji — in just a few short years, he had completed solo treks through the Ao-Tai traverse, the Wolf Tower C+V route, Nianbaoyuze, the Rock Route, the outer circumambulation of Meili Snow Mountain, and the Genieqinjia circuit, all without incident. He was a well-known hard-core hiker within the community. For anyone else, charging alone into a forest teeming with danger would be tantamount to seeking death — but for him… it wasn’t entirely impossible.
“The question is — what would he go in there for?” After a long silence, Ba Yunye was the first to speak. “The most urgent priority is to clear his name as quickly as possible, not to add another chapter to his legend as a hardcore trekker.”
“…Who the hell was talking nonsense just now?!” someone shouted — but no one answered.
At that moment, footsteps sounded from the corridor — quite a few of them, by the sound of it. A few seconds later, several men appeared in the doorway. The door was open, but they politely knocked anyway to get everyone’s attention, then pulled out their credentials —
“We’re police officers. You all… are from the Eagle Club, aren’t you?”
Ba Yunye shot to her feet. Lao Ma beside her quickly grabbed her arm, whispering, “Master Ba, stay calm!” She patted his hand, looked up, and said with a smile: “Officers, welcome. Please, come in.”