What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 12

1

Li Cu and the others got out of the car and looked at Ghost City⁽¹⁾ in front of them.

Yang Hao leaned against the car, pulled out his e-cigarette, and took a puff. His e-cigarette was the kind that emitted a particularly large amount of smoke, which filled the air.

Li Cu walked forward and saw the wrecked car in front of him. It was pressed up against an inverted chisel plow⁽²⁾, which was one of many that had been placed on the ground to prevent poaching and protect the surrounding geography.

Any vehicles that came here could only travel on a fixed route but this family obviously didn’t take the usual path so their tires ended up getting punctured by the chisel plow’s blades.

There were more than a dozen teams that patrolled here, along with underground surveillance equipment, so even though it seemed like there wasn’t anyone in the wilderness, they could still use the technology to clearly monitor everything.

But half an hour after hearing the family leave the car and walk forward, the technician suddenly lost all signals.

Li Cu, who was wearing a skull-patterned bandanna and a long-sleeved cooling shirt with angel wings on it, walked up to the side of the car and looked inside.

It was a family car driven by a couple with a child.

The car was a rental but the inside was very nice. He could see some plush toys inside, which must have been acquired at the amusement park in the city.

Everyone else got out of their vehicles one right after another. The family had been missing for twenty-four hours, and the surveillance equipment around the area had not been able to detect any traces of them.

“There’s only one possibility,” Su Wan said to them from inside the car. “They were pulled into the sky by something.”

“Have you ever been caught and lifted into the air by any birds?” Li Cu asked him. The three of them were stumped by the difficult situation.

“There’s a high probability they’re dead,” Yang Hao said to them at this time. “People don’t move when they die so they won’t be detected on any surveillance equipment.”

“It’s only been twenty-four hours. It would be hard for them to die considering they have food, water, and it’s not that hot here.”

“One of them could have killed the other two and then committed suicide,” Yang Hao said. “The biggest indicator is the car. The driver—likely the man—could have deliberately caused the car to crash here. You might as well have someone check to see if there were any problems in their family.”

“Do people with family problems usually drive to a place like this together?” Li Cu asked.

“My parents would take me to the U.S. when they were fighting,” Su Wan chimed in. “They probably thought that going to a place like this would ease the tension and make things better.”

“If the woman didn’t like places like this, then it was more of the man’s wishful thinking,” Yang Hao said. “The man probably said something like, ‘I drove you all the way here so what are you still dissatisfied with? I’ve done enough. Why are you still dissatisfied?’ Then the woman probably said, ‘I know. I appreciate you trying to solve this problem but you obviously don’t know what I really want.’ At this point, the man didn’t understand at all and said, ‘Huh? We came here to Ghost City. Didn’t you want to travel?’”

Li Cu and Su Wan both looked at Yang Hao, wondering what he had gone through.

Yang Hao continued, “If a person doesn’t realize that what he thinks is a good idea is actually insensitive or torturous to others, then the more he wants to solve a problem, the more he’ll screw it up. In the end, the man probably took a spare shovel out of the trunk to kill his wife and child but the wife escaped and ran away with the child. He chased them for a few miles, caught up to them, hit them with the shovel, and killed them both.”

“Why isn’t the wife the killer?”

“Well, the odds are too low. First of all, it’s very difficult for mothers to kill their own children unless they’re suffering from a mental illness. Second, if she wanted to kill her husband, then she’d have to do it in one blow while they were still in the car. Otherwise, she maybe not be able to kill him once he starts to run away. If you’re trying to kill someone in Ghost City, then you have to know that it’s better to kill them with one hit. Otherwise, things will become very troublesome. But now all three people are likely dead and it’s not because of the collision. So, my conclusion is that the man is the culprit.”

There was silence in the car.

Of course, Li Cu didn’t believe Yang Hao’s theory. Although it was possible, it wasn’t the case here.

The woman had put a lot of stuffed toys in the car. Regardless of what she had been thinking, most people who set up this kind of space were usually looking forward to the journey. Of course, he also had to admit that he didn’t know how to read people.

Wu Xie’s face suddenly flashed through his mind, making him frown for just a moment.

“They asked us to come here because something strange must have happened,” Li Cu said. “If it was a simple murder, they wouldn’t have come to us.”

The three of them looked at the rescue team standing off to the side, waiting for them to start issuing orders. One man walked over to Su Wan and asked, “Leader, what should we do now? Based on the data, they left in this direction.”

“Let’s go and take a look,” Su Wan said.

He looked in the car again and then asked Li Cu, “Under what circumstances would you leave the car and hike into the Gobi Desert in this environment? Isn’t this choice a bit risky and not in line with modern people’s cautious nature?”

“The three of them left together, indicating that they thought it was dangerous to stay in the car.” As Li Cu said this, a gust of wind blew past and kicked up a bunch of sand.

2

Wang Meng was still squatting on the ground. It took a long time for the pain to subside but when it finally did, the soothing relief left him with no strength at all. As a result, he continued to squat there, feeling no other emotions.

This was his superpower. It enabled him to sit between the bike and the Xiali with a blank mind.

If some pervert was secretly watching his every move from the darkness, then they would realize that the reality in front of them was different from how murders were normally depicted.

Because your prey would probably just sit still for eight hours.

In the end, a loud honk suddenly came from the nearby Xiali.

It startled Wang Meng so much that he leaped to his feet in fright.

The Xiali’s car horn kept going off, the sound deafening in this quiet environment.

Wang Meng walked over to it. Since his emotions had just erupted, he wasn’t afraid of death nor did he feel any fear in his heart.

He walked over, opened the car door, and saw that the key was turned to the first position so that only the car’s electrical system was on (generally, turning the key did one of three things: powered the vehicle off, turned on the vehicle’s electrical system, or started the ignition). He turned the key and shut the car’s power off.

The sound of the horn immediately stopped.

He pulled the car key out, threw it into the darkness in the distance, and moved to sit down again.

But at this time, the car’s headlights suddenly came on.

The lights were so bright that they illuminated a large area across the way.

Wang Meng looked over there and saw that the ground was covered in gray plastic squares that were about one meter squared. They were densely packed together and covered an area the size of about two basketball courts.

It was kind of like a huge gray chocolate bar, but it was divided into countless smaller pieces.

Wang Meng looked at it and couldn’t help but feel that it was very familiar.

Then, it suddenly hit him.

This was a giant Minesweeper field, the kind that you would see on a Windows computer. It was made of plastic and spread evenly on the ground.

What was going on? Was this an art exhibit or some kind of an escape room?

<What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 11><Table of Contents><What Are They Doing 2022 Chapter 13>

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TN Notes:

(1) Ghost City (sometimes called Ghost Town) is a collection of yardang land forms in the middle of the Jung’gar Desert of China’s north western region of Xinjiang (basically a part of the Gobi Desert). It’s called Ghost City because the wind sounds like howling ghosts as it moves through the large rocks and kicks up sand and dust that blocks out the sky. Info here and a bunch of pics here.

(2) A chisel plow is a popular farming tool used for deep tillage. Its main purpose is to loosen and aerate your soil. It has plowing blades widely spaced apart on a frame that’s usually pulled behind a tractor. Could look something like this:

In this context, it’s inverted so the blades are facing up.