Chapter 37 Strange Situation

With the three of us dragging Jin Wantang’s body behind us, we approached the hanging corpse. This corpse was also severely dehydrated and light, but I felt a little calmer when I didn’t see any pink on it. It did have Xiao Hua’s company logo on its clothes, however.

When I climbed up next to the body, I saw that it was a withered female corpse hanging there with a rope around her neck. She appeared to be Mongolian, so she was probably a local guide.

Fatty, seeing that I was silent, also remained silent. He probably didn’t want to hear the bad news. “It’s a stranger. A woman,” I said. “She was in Xiao Hua’s team.”

I climbed up so that they could come up and see for themselves. The safety anchor here was occupied by the corpse, so I found a gap and made a temporary movable anchor.

Fatty quickly passed the corpse and said, “This was a suicide.”

The probability was high, because if it was an accident, the rope would have been around her waist instead of her neck.

There was a question lingering in my heart: What happened? But I no longer had the energy to ask. The three of us were silent for a while as Poker-Face searched the body. He ended up finding a notebook, a cell phone, a flashlight, ammunition, and a pack of high-calorie hardtack. Then, he used his knife to cut the rope off of the corpse.

When the body fell, he buckled his own carabiner on the anchor the corpse had just been occupying.

“Signal flare.” When he said this, he threw the flare he had found on the body to Fatty.

“Don’t you want to save it?” Fatty asked.

Poker-Face looked up. He must have seen something, and I only hoped that we could see it too.

Fatty set the flare off and illuminated the area above us. We could see that there were a lot of anchors on the cave wall above, but there were six or seven bodies hanging from the ones further ahead.

There was a particularly ominous feeling in my heart as I realized that these bodies looked the same as the one we saw just now—they had all hanged themselves.

Why did they commit suicide while climbing?

What was going to happen next?

But a moment later, I saw a strange situation. The signal flare kept going up and then slowly fell back down. I looked down and saw the flare kept falling and falling until it eventually disappeared into the darkness.

“Mr. Naïve, have we really climbed that high?” Fatty asked.

I picked up a glow stick and threw it down. I had a general idea of how high we had climbed, so we should have definitely been able to see the glow stick land on the ground. But the glow stick also fell completely into the darkness and then disappeared without a trace.

I looked up again and saw that that inch of sunshine was still out of reach. It was like we weren’t any closer to it at all.

“Something’s wrong,” I said faintly and looked at Poker-Face.

“Check all the bodies first,” he said to me. I nodded.

We continued climbing up and quickly checked all the hanging bodies. They were all members of Xiao Hua’s team, but I didn’t see Black Glasses or Xiao Hua among them.

Every time I looked at a face, my poor heart felt like it was gutted.

Fatty emptied their pockets while chanting some prayers and it wasn’t long before we saw a hanging tent bed beside the topmost body.

The bed was very professional and sturdy, so I climbed onto it. There were also a lot of hanging chairs beside the bed so that I could rest for a bit.

The three of us looked for comfortable positions. I felt a terrible pain in my back when I sat down, but Fatty found a chair and fell asleep immediately.

The journey up here had been exhausting.

Poker-Face came over to me and handed me the notebook.

I took it, turned on the light that came with the tent, and glanced at the huge black nothingness in front of me. As I began reading the notes, Poker-Face lay down and began to doze. The atmosphere was very silent.

In fact, there was more than one notebook since Xiao Hua’s team were all well trained and everyone carried a notebook with them. But this girl’s notes were a little more detailed.

When I opened it and flipped to the first page, I saw a sketch of Xiao Hua, along with some words written in the margins: The boss is really good-looking.

The second page was a sketch of Black Glasses, along with the words: The second boss is also good-looking.

I smiled bitterly. They were all lovely people, but all of them had died after encountering a desperate situation in this God-forsaken place. This business was so cruel.

It took me an hour to read through this notebook, which recorded in detail everything Xiao Hua’s team had experienced. After reading it, I had a somewhat confused understanding of the whole thing.

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