Chapter 51
Chapter 51
The group stepped out of the cave with Qingshui leading the way. Her footsteps were light, and her sharp gaze swept over their surroundings as she struggled to piece together a sense of direction.
Truthfully, she was relying heavily on instinct and experience. The terrain in these mountains was even more complicated and unpredictable than she’d anticipated. There were no obvious landmarks, and the sun was often hidden behind the dense canopy.
It was as though they had fallen into a vast green labyrinth.
Yet this same overwhelming complexity had also protected them and kept them alive until now. The Madmen might be insane, but even they seemed constrained by the terrain. It made any large-scale search difficult and gave Qingshui’s group room to maneuver.
They traveled in silence for over an hour. Everyone’s legs had begun to ache and feel like lead, and their breathing had grown ragged, but no one dared suggest stopping to rest.
As they entered a grove of unusually tall trees, an indescribable odor suddenly assaulted their nostrils.
It was a nauseating stench mixed with the heavy reek of blood.
Qingshui stopped abruptly. She threw out an arm to block An Xiaolin, who was following close behind, then grabbed her and darted sideways, pressing them both behind a thick old tree.
Behind them, Lin Hao instantly understood. Still holding Pingping, he pulled the child down with him, and they crouched behind a cluster of dense vegetation.
Everyone held their breath.
About fifty meters ahead, a horrifying game was taking place.
Four relatively large Madmen had each seized one limb of a smaller Madman, holding its arms and legs as though it were a toy. Their faces were contorted with crazed delight as they chanted in unison.
“Three, two, one!”
“Three, two, one!”
Every time they reached “one,” they heaved together, slamming the smaller Madman’s lower body into the trunk of a tree so thick it would have taken two people to encircle it!
“Thud! Thud! Thud!”
The dull impacts were accompanied by the sickening crunch of breaking bones and tearing flesh.
The smaller Madman seemed to have lost the ability to resist long ago. Or perhaps it was immersed in some twisted pleasure born of pain. All it could do was let out muffled giggles.
There was no telling how long the game had been going on. The middle of the massive trunk was already stained with a glaring smear of sticky, dark-red blood, while the smaller Madman’s lower body had been reduced to mangled flesh.
“Hahahaha! This feels so damn good! Hahahahaha!” The Madmen inflicting the violence erupted into even louder laughter.
Qingshui’s fingers tightened slightly at her sides. She quickly surveyed their surroundings, then pointed gently back and to the side, toward the way they had come.
Go back. Find another way around.
Lin Hao and An Xiaolin understood. They nodded gravely.
They needed to be like insects now, crawling soundlessly along the edge of the area.
An Xiaolin drew a deep breath and lowered herself to the ground first. Keeping her body as flat as possible, she began inching forward on her elbows and knees.
Lin Hao held Pingping close and motioned for her to lie down as well. He positioned himself on her exposed side and crawled forward in much the same way.
The ground was covered in fallen leaves and moss, making it difficult to move smoothly. Every shift produced a faint rustle.
An Xiaolin’s forehead pressed against the cold earth. Sweat mixed with dirt and trickled into her eyes, stinging them, but she didn’t dare wipe it away. She kept her full attention on the ground ahead, searching for the next safe place to put her hand.
Halfway past the danger, just as she was about to crawl around a small bush, she found herself staring into a pair of tiny eyes.
Two round, beadlike black eyes stared back at her without blinking.
It was a sparrow.
The little gray-brown bird was perched less than half a meter from the tip of her nose. Its head tilted to one side as though it were intensely curious about the “giant creature” wriggling across the ground.
An Xiaolin’s pupils contracted sharply.
It felt as though all the blood in her body had rushed to her head, only to freeze solid an instant later.
She went rigid, even her breathing coming to a halt. All she could do was scream frantically in her mind: Don’t chirp! Don’t fly away! Please! Just stay there! Don’t move!
Qingshui and Lin Hao had also spotted the sparrow, and their hearts leaped into their throats.
Time seemed to stretch endlessly.
The sparrow cocked its head as though pondering something.
Then it fluttered its wings and lightly hopped onto a low-hanging branch nearby.
The group relaxed ever so slightly.
But before they could fully release their held breath–
“Chirp, chirp!”
The sparrow called twice. Its crisp song rang through the forest, jarringly distinct!
With a flurry of wings, it flew toward a higher branch.
“Hmm?”
In the distance, the rhythmic impacts and crazed laughter stopped abruptly!
One of the Madmen whipped its head around, its blood-red eyes scanning suspiciously toward the birdsong and the exact area where Qingshui and the others were hiding.
“Are there… little bugs?” Another of the Madmen sniffed the air, an intrigued, vicious grin spreading across its face.
Qingshui immediately looked back and whispered as softly as she could to Lin Hao and An Xiaolin, who were still inching forward. “Stay calm! Keep moving! Don’t stop, and don’t look up!”
Any large movement now would give them away instantly.
But it was already too late.
The rustling of branches being pushed aside rose from all around them. It was not just the four Madmen from before. Several more swaying figures slowly emerged from the shadows beneath the trees!
Seven or eight… maybe even more!
What could they do?!
Qingshui’s mind raced. One plan after another flashed through her head, only to be rejected.
Hide?
The undergrowth here might be dense, but it would never withstand a careful search at close range. Especially with a child in tow, there was no way they could conceal their tracks.
Force their way through?
It might have been possible at night. But in broad daylight, even Qingshui could not pull it off.
Cold sweat gradually soaked her back. Every second felt like torment over an open flame. She could hear Lin Hao and An Xiaolin struggling to keep their breathing as quiet as possible, and she could feel Zhou Yaping’s faint trembling as the girl fought desperately to control it.
Then, at that suffocating moment of despair, a low, trembling voice spoke.
“I…”
It was Lin Hao.
He lay beside Pingping with his face pressed against the ground. His voice was muffled, but the words carried clearly to them.
“…I’ll draw them away.”
He raised his head and looked toward Qingshui’s hiding place. His eyes were red-rimmed and filled with fear.
“Qingshui, I… I’ll draw them away. You… take them and go. Just make sure my niece… survives.”
As he spoke, he planted his hands against the ground and prepared to push himself up.
“You!” An Xiaolin stared at him in shock. She wanted to stop him, but did not know what to say.
Just as Lin Hao lifted himself a few inches off the ground, Qingshui snapped in a low voice, “Don’t move!”
Her arm shot out and forced him back down. Her gaze passed over Lin Hao’s head and fixed on the gray-white sky.
“There’s smoke.”
Everyone froze, then followed her gaze.
Sure enough, a thin column of gray-white smoke was curling into the sky above them!
Against the windless morning sky, it was clearly visible!
The Madmen also seemed to notice the sudden anomaly. They stopped, raised their heads, and stared at the wisp of smoke with scarlet eyes, excited noises bubbling from their throats.
“Aaaah… over there… something’s there!”
“Let’s go see! Hee-hee!”
“Go! Go!”
The group of Madmen burst into shrill, clamorous laughter. They turned toward the rising smoke and raced away on all fours. Soon, nothing remained among the trees but the fading echoes of their manic laughter.
The crisis had been resolved in a completely unexpected way.
Only after the last Madman vanished deep into the forest and their surroundings once again fell into a taut silence did the group dare to relax slightly. Even then, no one dared to breathe too loudly.
Qingshui slowly turned to look at the pale-faced Lin Hao beside her.
“Lin Hao.”
Her voice was quiet, but every word was clear.
“Other than you, no one can truly protect your niece.”
Lin Hao’s lips moved as if he wanted to say something.
Qingshui did not give him the chance.
“And yet you were actually thinking of sacrificing yourself just now?” It was impossible to tell whether she was reproaching him or simply stating a fact. “You were going to trade your life for an uncertain promise and gamble that our guilt would make us take care of Zhou Yaping?”
Lin Hao lowered his head, his shoulders trembling faintly.
“I-I know… I know it might have been stupid. But just now… in that situation, I thought that instead of all of us dying together, it would be better… better if I went alone. If the rest of you survived, then after what I did… maybe…”
“No,” Qingshui cut him off firmly. “If you had rushed out there and died while the rest of us escaped by sheer luck, we would not protect her the way you do on the road ahead. When it comes down to life or death, everyone looks out for themselves.”
Lin Hao’s face grew even paler, and his arms tightened unconsciously around Pingping. Zhou Yaping seemed to understand some of what had been said and buried her small face even deeper.
An Xiaolin fell silent as well. She had to admit that Qingshui was right. On an escape route fraught with danger, a young child who required extra care would be in an extremely precarious position if she lost the only person wholly devoted to protecting her.
Entrusting someone to another person’s care and promises of protection meant nothing beneath the crushing weight of survival.
“If you want your niece to survive,” Qingshui said as she rose to her feet and turned her gaze back toward the distant column of smoke, her voice returning to its usual calm, “then first, you need to stay alive. You need to become stronger and more useful, instead of always thinking of yourself as the one who can be sacrificed at any moment. Your life is the foundation of your ability to protect her. Don’t throw it away so easily.”
With that, she ignored the complicated expression on Lin Hao’s face and turned to An Xiaolin.
“Can you stand? We need to leave this area as soon as possible. That smoke… may not be a good sign, but at least it gives us a direction. We’ll head away from it, or move off to the side, and avoid the route the Madmen are taking as they gather there.”
An Xiaolin nodded and struggled to her feet.
Lin Hao silently took Pingping’s hand and stood as well. He glanced at his niece’s pale little face, drew a deep breath, and said, “I understand.”