Chapter 53 Snake Bite

I didn’t even feel scared. It just felt as if my face was cold. But when I pulled it off, my face was burning in pain and I could clearly feel the marks where the fangs had sunk in.

I covered my cheek, unable to believe it. At that moment, I felt a numbness start to spread from the wound.

I remembered when A Ning had died. It had felt so sudden and unrealistic at the time, and I didn’t expect that I would die at the hands of the same thing.

The numbness soon spread throughout my body. When I saw the thing coiled there and looking straight at me, I suddenly realized that something was wrong.

This thing wasn’t a mere animal, damn it. Was it intelligent?

I slowly retreated, thinking that I had to tell Xiao Hua about the situation here before I died.

I took a few steps back, trying to find the crevice in the wall. I went to shout, only to find that my tongue and throat were all numb. I fell on our equipment bag and touched a piece of pottery.

It was from when Xiao Hua and I had tested its load-bearing capacity earlier.

I picked up one of the pieces and wrote a few words, but I didn’t know what I had written. I felt the snake come at me again, but I had no strength to concentrate. Everything was fading away.

My last thought was, A Ning will surely make fun of me if I’ve also been bitten to death by a snake. I wanted to laugh. 

But just as everything was about to disappear, I suddenly heard a strange sound.

I felt violently dizzy, and right when I was about to lose consciousness, everything seemed to stop.

I don’t remember what state I was in at that time, but I clearly remember the severe dizziness, which made me unable to think. I was only awake for a moment, and I remember thinking, how the fuck am I not dead yet? This pain is killing me.

After a long time, I felt someone come up to my side, and the dizziness slowly disappeared. When I woke up, I found Xiao Hua and his Sichuan buddy beside me.

I couldn’t feel anything besides my head. I couldn’t even do anything like talk or move my eyes. I could only see them through the seam of my partially opened eyes, and it was a long time before I gradually recovered.

I didn’t know why I didn’t die. 

As they helped me up, Xiao Hua looked at my face and said, “You’re lucky. If we didn’t save you in time—”

“I’m lucky?” I wondered.

“Something bit your face, probably a snake. Looks like the venom was stuck in your mouth and barely entered your bloodstream through the bite. In the future, your speech will certainly be even worse.”

I touched my cheek and was surprised to find that it was taped. I quickly checked my neck and was relieved to find that everything was fine.

“The snake?” I asked.

He looked around, “It should still be here, but I scattered all the herbs I usually carry with me around. It should be safe here. You’ve been passed out for two hours. Don’t talk, or the wound on your face will scar.” He handed me the water again and made a gesture. “Drink some water and turn your face to one side, otherwise it will leak out from the bite wound.”

I did as he suggested, feeling very surprised. In those two hours, I felt like I had fainted for at least several days. How was it such a short amount of time?

After looking around, I noticed that I was still lying in the place where I had passed out. Since I hadn’t been moved, it really had only been two hours.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“I’m fine. I didn’t meet the snake. When I came back, I saw you lying here, and then—” he pointed to the other side where the charred green corpse lay, “—I saw that. I didn’t know you could fight so well. I thought you were dead.”

“If I die here, the Xie and Wu families will be even.” I coughed a few times.  He asked me what was going on and how it had happened.

I briefly recounted the story, and then noticed that one end of the rope was tied to the rotating bearing nearby. It was hanging straight and taut in the air, and I didn’t know where the other end was tied to. This was a simple single-rope pathway that stretched through the crevice. It seemed that Xiao Hua had successfully reached the other end and set up this rope-way.

He apparently didn’t rush to check on my situation after I fell into a coma, but continued to climb inside instead. He reached the end of the crevice, completed his task, and then came out to see if I was dead or not.

I couldn’t help but feel a little upset. I didn’t know whether this could be considered a ruthless or firm mentality, but he obviously didn’t feel burdened by it. 

I had finally found a difference between the two of us.

But since I didn’t have the physical strength and didn’t want to break our tacit understanding, I didn’t bother expressing this emotion. I knew that when it came to this industry, the habit of desperately rescuing your companions didn’t exist. There seemed to be a kind of prior agreement where two people decided to save themselves if both parties were in danger. It was actually very fair if you thought about it.

It was true that Xiao Hua was uncertain about my situation at the time, and even I would hesitate to go back and rescue someone if I were him.

I couldn’t help thinking of Fatty and Poker-face again. If they were here, the black-haired corpse would’ve had his head cut off before he could scratch my back. Or I would have seen Fatty rush out from those pottery jars and screw everything up. But I would have been saved.

At that moment, I felt an extreme sense of insecurity, more than I had felt before. Although we were three people now, I was really only responsible for myself. It was a very disconcerting thought. At the same time, I suddenly understood why Xiao Hua hadn’t been grateful but angry at me for going into the cave to save him.

He was used to solving his problems by himself. Before he did these kinds of things, he had already accepted that there wouldn’t be any backup or help. He wouldn’t blame anyone for his own death, nor would he blame himself for others’ death.

Was this the Mystic Nine’s mindset? I felt a chill in my heart.

“This rope is so long that no matter how taut it is, our weight will pull it into a downward arc, and the fixed place where the two ends are knotted will be under a lot of pressure. I don’t know if the rope will break halfway after we start climbing.” He looked at me staring blankly at the rope and continued, “I tied the rope at a very high point in the room at the end of the crevice, so the pressure will be more concentrated on this side. Like this, as long as someone is watching, we’ll know in advance before the rope breaks.”

“You sound fucking professional,” I said. “What did you see inside? What’s the machine’s operating room like?”

“Well,” Xiao Hua’s face looked a little strange, “I can’t describe it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

His expression told me that I had to look at it myself to know what it was. I sighed and went to stand up to see how I was fairing. But just as I moved, I felt my elbow press onto something. I looked down and saw that it was that piece of pottery from before.

At the same time, I saw something crooked written beside the pottery piece.

I remembered that I had been trying to write Xiao Hua a message with it before I fell into my coma. I was very disoriented and had no idea whether I had written the information clearly, but now it seemed that I had indeed written something.

I looked at it subconsciously and suddenly froze.

There were a lot of crooked words on the ground, but it had only felt like a few at the time I was writing them.

I took a flashlight and found that it was a long set of numbers.

189652802200059

“What is this?” I asked Xiao Hua.

“Aren’t they your last words?” Xiao Hua asked. “I thought it was your card number and password.”

“My last words?” I was confused and thought to myself, I didn’t know what I was writing at that time. Why would I write these numbers?

But based on the handwriting, I had done it in one stroke. And the strokes were very consistent, too. It was so untidy that I couldn’t tell that it was my handwriting, but I realized that I was really the one who had written it.

This must have been written when I was about to lose consciousness. But why these numbers?

<Chapter 52> <Table of Contents><Chapter 54>

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Updated 11/19/2020