Chapter 30 Isolated and Helpless

It was the cold stream that woke me up. When I opened my eyes, I was lying between two mossy stones, behind which was a small cliff. The stream formed by rainwater flowed down from the cliff and rushed directly onto my face.

It was very cold and my hands and feet were almost numb, but it wasn’t the first time for me to wake up in such a state. I knew everything would be better in a few minutes, but I also couldn’t lay there and do nothing. I tried hard to move my hands and feet and felt my body slowly start to respond. Then, I tried to move several more times and finally managed to stand up.

It was already bright and fog was everywhere.

Where am I?

I got up and tried to rub my body to speed up the blood flow. As I slowly warmed up and my mind became clear, I immediately noticed that something was off—the vegetation here wasn’t the same as the vegetation I saw before I was knocked unconscious.

Shit, that bastard. My heart was alight with abuse, but I didn’t have the strength to shout out my grievances.

“Unfortunately, you’re not as important as you think you are. On the way to the underworld, try and guess who I am!” I immediately remembered his last words and wondered what they meant.

If he was someone I didn’t know at all, then he wouldn’t have said such a thing. Did I really know him?

My mind was in turmoil and I suddenly realized that I should have cut his mask off with a knife the first time instead of trying to rip it off.

I couldn’t remember who told me that it wasn’t foolproof to use a human skin mask to change into another person. First of all, the person you wanted to change your face to had to be somewhat similar to you. I was related by blood to Uncle Three—or Xie Lianhuan—and my face shape was basically similar, so it was possible to do. If it wasn’t similar, it would be impossible to change your face shape to match the person you wanted to copy.

I couldn’t figure out who he really was, and the pain and cold I felt all over also made it hard to think deeply. Judging from the man’s skill, he wasn’t particularly strong, but he was at least better than me.

I looked around. I had to be in a mountain stream that had dried up for a long time since the ground was full of fist-sized pebbles and weeds were growing among them. Since the mountain climate was humid, all the stones were covered in a thick layer of moss and the small stream of water flowing down the cliff seeped under them. I could hear the sound of the water but couldn’t see it.

I looked around at the trees—the trunks were thick and covered in moss. The humidity in this place was completely different from the place where I had been knocked out.

Had I been taken far away?

I still had a headache and felt dizzy for a while, but my body was much better than before thanks to all kinds of blows I had received during this period. It was always good to receive blows as long as it didn’t destroy or kill you. I found a relatively large stone and sat down, feeling kind of afraid to touch my face.

In fact, it wasn’t my face I wanted to touch, but my mask. I knew the man meant to kill me, but Fatty was nearby, so the guy couldn’t make much noise. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have woken up. But even if I didn’t die, the injuries on my face would be beyond my control.

My mood was very strange and I didn’t know whether I wanted this mask to be ruined or not. In short, there were conflicting ideas. The only advantage of this mask was that it brought a lot of people here, but after that, it seemed to bring me all kinds of trouble.

When I touched my forehead with my hand, I knew it was severe—I felt extreme pain coming from the place where I had been struck. My face inside the mask must have been completely bruised, but the surface of the mask wasn’t damaged at all.

It didn’t seem so easy to escape from such a life. Whoever made the mask must have fully considered any possibilities.

The mask covered my face, so I couldn’t check the wound, but it didn’t seem all that serious to me. I didn’t see a stream and I couldn’t look in a mirror, so I had to forget about it and figure out where I was.

I walked all the way along the cliff until I got to an area where it gradually dropped in height. I discovered a place where I could use my strength to climb up and found that it was a very steep slope. Strangely, there were a few trees on the slope and only some small shrubs. This was a debris flow slope, which might have been caused by a landslide in recent years.

I must have rolled down this slope. I moved my hands and feet, surprised that my body hadn’t fallen apart after rolling down something like this. But after moving around a little, I found that I felt a very uncomfortable pain all over my body.

It was different from ordinary bruises, so I knew it had to be the pain of injured bones. It was just that my body hadn’t fully recovered and I was still cold. After a while, all kinds of injuries would surface and I might not even be able to walk.

I leaned against a tree and looked at the surrounding environment. I could imagine what kind of scene it was last night. The place where I had stayed yesterday must’ve been above this slope. After that bastard knocked me out, he must have pushed me down and I rolled over the small cliff. I didn’t know whether he wanted to kill me, but he obviously didn’t want Fatty to find me again.

There wasn’t such a steep slope in the area where Fatty and I had questioned him yesterday, so he must have dragged me along for quite some time. There was probably a slim chance I would find Fatty when I went back.

I lifted my leg and started to walk towards the slope, stopping and resting often. It took me more than an hour before the plants began to look familiar, but I was still a long way from the top. I couldn’t walk anymore, but after looking down, I saw that I hadn’t walked very far at all. The slope was too steep and really hard to walk on.

The last section was close to a ninety-degree angle and I had to practically climb on my hands and knees. Fortunately, this section was only a few meters. After I reached the top, I found that there was a gentle slope where the trees grew tall and the vines coiled and tangled with shrubs, leaving little room to walk.

The sun was getting stronger and stronger as I leaned against a tree and basked in its light. I felt that all the pain was infinitely magnified and became unbearable in some places. Moreover, my whole body had lost most of its strength after walking for such a long time.

Please don’t break any bones, I chanted to myself. A fracture was tantamount to death in this kind of place, but a few broken ribs would probably be ok.

When I thought about it, I suddenly wanted to laugh. I recalled my various experiences over the past few years and realized that this wasn’t the first time I had encountered such a mess. Now that I was in this kind of situation again, my sense of calm was far greater than my panic. I felt like a fly, beaten by the flyswatter countless times but still not dead. In the end, I suddenly realized that my question wasn’t “why didn’t I die”, but why was I beaten like this and stayed trapped under the flyswatter?

But I at least knew that I didn’t want to be killed here. God beat me to death so many times, so he certainly wouldn’t let me end it here, I thought to myself

After a light nap, I clenched my teeth and stood up again. I knelt on the ground to look for any traces of our passage through the bushes and searched bit by bit until the evening sun set. By that point, I seemed to have returned to the place where Fatty had interrogated the boy before.

We came here at night, so there wasn’t any special geographical feature that I could remember and now I didn’t have any impressions at all. Of course, Fatty was nowhere to be found.

I didn’t stop but continued to try and recall the way back in hopes of finding the place where the foreigners had camped. There would be bonfire remnants and garbage there, so if I find those things, I could determine the location of other places.

I didn’t know where I went wrong this time, but I didn’t find anything at all. No matter how carefully I looked for signs of broken shrubs, or how hard I tried to remember the location, there was absolutely nothing.

<Chapter 29> <Table of Contents><Chapter 31>

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Updated 2/14/2021