Chapter 21 He’s Gone

At that moment, I felt as if I were a rescue team member. After saving someone from the rubble, I had to give them first aid immediately.

As it turned out, Jin Wantang’s neck was fine. The wound was bleeding, but fortunately, his artery hadn’t been nicked.

We cut his clothes off and saw that his ribs were dented on both sides and there were black bruises under his skin. His lungs must have been bleeding, which was why he had been coughing and spitting up blood. He eventually lost consciousness, so I had to keep slapping him to stay awake as I tried to ask him about his breathing. If he was suffering from lung contusions and bleeding, then I needed to fix his ribs. But if his lungs had collapsed, then we could only leave him lying here without moving him. But no matter how many times I asked, he was unable to answer me.

Poker-Face came over and used both hands to feel Jin Wantang’s ribs one by one. There were probably a large number of fractured ribs on both sides, which meant that the thing stuck in his lungs wasn’t the end of a broken rib but a section of his fractured ribs. Poker-Face glanced at me and then used a standard rope to tie one of the severed Zhang family members’ hands against Jin Wantang’s chest to act as a brace.

This was something we couldn’t deal with, so we could only do the best we could to maintain the status quo and hope that the internal bleeding wasn’t too serious.

I turned to look at the darkness in the distance. The cold firework over there had been extinguished once it was completely out of sight, so that guy was probably either looking at us from the darkness or had run away directly.

As I flicked my cigarette butt into the darkness, it emitted a small spark. But at this time, I was shocked to find that the spark had actually hit something. I quickly took out my flashlight and turned it on, only to see that young man from before. He was crouched down about six or seven meters in front of me and holding a knife in his hand.

This guy was actually using the cover of darkness to move right towards us, which showed that he was definitely a ruthless character.

“Sneak attack!” I immediately shouted.

As Fatty and I dropped down and raised our guns to defend ourselves, we saw that the young man no longer bothered hiding and just rushed over directly. He threw the knife in his hand straight at Jin Wantang, aiming to kill.

That knife throw had been done without an ounce of hesitation, indicating that it was a skill that had been learned since childhood. But Fatty fired his gun at almost the exact same time that the knife flew out. He was holding a submachine gun, so the kid dodged to the side, rolled into a nearby gap, and disappeared. As a result, Fatty’s bullets all missed their target.

In the ensuing rain of fire, the knife went straight towards Jin Wantang. Poker-Face pulled Jin Wantang about half a palm’s distance to the side so that he just barely avoided the blade. The knife hit the stone in a shower of sparks and then bounced into the nearby gap.

“Brother!” Fatty shouted, “Is there some kind of misunderstanding here?”

Seeing that there was no movement in the gap, Fatty pulled a glow stick out, but I immediately stopped him. We couldn’t abuse our lighting resources any more. At this time, however, a face suddenly appeared in the stone gap behind Fatty and smiled at me. Then, he stretched out a hand and grabbed the pin on one of the tactical detonators hanging from Fatty’s body. After quickly grabbing three more, he immediately pulled the pins.

Fatty was shocked when the detonator fuses suddenly started smoking, and shouted, “Fuck, he’s in a crack in the rock!” At the same time, he tried to unhook the belt that the detonators were hanging on, but he wasn’t wearing the belt like normal so he couldn’t figure it out.

The leads on these detonators were all short, so when we usually used them, we had to calculate the time before connecting them to a longer lead. These short ones would explode in less than six or seven seconds.

Fatty and I looked at each other.

I knew that he was about to run away, so I rushed over, held him down, and pulled the three detonators from his belt. I held two of them in my mouth so that I could suck out the ignition while I pulled the fuse out of the last one.

The fuse burned out directly in my hand, but I didn’t feel the burning sensation through my cold sweat.

Fatty and I immediately moved away from the gap. All of these gaps seemed to be connected, and the kid was able to move around inside of them.

I spit out a mouthful of gunpowder-coated saliva and said to Fatty, “In the future, put the detonators upside down.” Fatty nodded, his eyes a little red as he stared at the gap and aimed at it with his gun. He was obviously very angry.

“He’s gone,” Poker-Face said. Sure enough, we heard someone gasping for breath in the darkness outside. Then, the young man seemed to start playing the morin khuur⁽¹⁾ in the dark, the sounds becoming more and more distant.

I slowly relaxed, but felt a lingering fear in my heart. If I hadn’t flicked my cigarette butt just now, the consequences would’ve been unimaginable.

Whoever this man was, his mobility was amazing.

About half an hour later, a star-like dot of light appeared in the darkness far away from us. When I looked up, I saw that young man standing on a tall black stone hundreds of meters away. There was a sun-wheel behind him made of woven branches that was covered in ribbons, just like a Buddha statue. He was carrying a lamp and had a morin khuur on his back.

The knife had also returned to him. I used the binoculars to look at his expression and found that he didn’t seem to regret his failure. Instead, he seemed extremely composed, as if everything was going according to his plan.

But the most frightening thing was what I saw behind him. There was a huge outline, which seemed to be a huge stone building. But the light was very weak, so I couldn’t see it clearly.

At this time, Jin Wantang let out a moan and finally woke up.

<Chapter 20><Table of Contents><Chapter 22>

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TN Notes:

(1) It’s a traditional Mongolian bowed stringed instrument also known as the horsehead fiddle. It looks like that one picture I posted a lot of chapters ago.

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Sorry, 3 chapters is the only “spree” I can do today. I have to go out and be social on my precious day off. Ugh.