Chapter 174

I told Liu Sang that the sound of the wind blowing through the snakeskins was definitely different from how it blew through the animal skins. Although it was almost unnoticeable, his ears were so good that he should be able to hear the sound of snakeskins or animal skins in the distance.

Liu Sang looked at me like I was an idiot, but I merely looked back at him and said, “This is the only way.”

He sighed, “I can’t hear it. I can only gather information that comes from the sounds I hear. When there’s no sound, I’m just like you.”

“Try harder.” I patted him. “The world is most afraid of those who are serious.” (1) Then I started shaking the nearby branches so that the animal skins sounded like they were blowing in the wind. “Come on, listen carefully.”

Liu Sang rolled his eyes at me. I kept shaking the skins every which way, but he completely ignored me.

When I finally stopped, he said to me, “Can you be more serious? I already told you that I can’t hear it. There’s no wind here. I could try it if there was wind.”

I looked at his expression and realized that he really couldn’t hear it. I sighed and looked at Kan Jian, who took out a mud ball from his pocket and knocked it against the tree until it broke into fragments. He then shot them directly at the animal skins.

These mud fragments hit the animal skins with a very dull sound before rolling down.

“You just need to remember this sound,” I said as I patted him.

Our group of four set out and started walking through the tree canopies. Kan Jian thought the paraglider might still be useful, so he packed it away. Liu Sang sighed again. He obviously still didn’t agree with my methods.

There were two things to pay attention to when walking through the canopies: one was the thickness of the branches, while the other one was the degree of entanglement between the branches. The branches here were very densely packed together, so we had to climb over them one by one. It was slow going, but at least it wasn’t difficult.

There were a large number of camphor, banyan, fairy (2), and cypress trees here. We walked for about a kilometer, and I realized that my reasoning was correct because I could see traces of fixed wires in some of the places where the tree branches were connected.

But these traces didn’t just lead in one direction. Sometimes there were three or four paths in a tree that led in different directions. Kan Jian took a few steps on each path and shot those mud fragments all over the sky. Liu Sang looked pained as he listened, but he didn’t have a better way.

After a while, Liu Sang stopped in a big tree and said that he had heard a strange noise in one of the directions Kan Jian had just shot in. Kan Jian made a few more shots to help determine the direction and then we went over. As we approached, we saw the third royal poinciana.

There were snakeskins on this royal poinciana, so I cautiously went down. With just a single glance, I realized that it was same situation as that first royal poinciana.

I shoveled away the fallen leaves on the ground and revealed the hidden tiles. Sure enough, there was a room below.

I touched the back of my head as Liu Sang looked at me with a complicated expression on his face. Three things. I only needed to calculate three things correctly before people who looked down on me would change their view of me. (3)

The trees with snakeskins hanging on them were refuges.

We removed the tiles again and revealed a hole. As the flashlight shone down into the darkness, it swept past many sealed boxes. We marked this spot on our GPS and then moved on.

At dusk, we came to the fourth royal poinciana. At this time, we were already deep in the hinterland of the forest. There were a lot of fish skins and bones hanging from this royal poinciana. When we got to the tree and looked up ahead, we saw an exquisitely amazing sight.

This tree’s location marked the starting point where the valley floor sank down like a staircase for dozens of meters.

There was a cliff just two meters away from the tree, and under the cliff was even more dense forest that was full of miasma.

It was a valley within a valley.

No wonder someone wanted to paraglide down.

<Chapter 173><Table of Contents><Chapter 175>

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TN Notes:

(1) It’s apparently the first part of a quote from Mao Zedong’s 1957 speech to students at Moscow University. According to baidu, the full quote is something like: “the world is afraid of those who are serious, and the Communist Party is the most serious.”

(2) I think fairy trees (仙女树) are hawthorn or ash trees. Or they might be part of the mint family? Science is not my forte lol.

(3) Wu Xie’s over here like:

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So, episode-wise, this is the best I can do: Episode 15 18:43-21:00. Instead of them finding it themselves, sexy man spills the beans to Wu Xie. Our chapters-long adventure was reduced to like 3 minutes in the drama…