Chapter 42 Brother Gan Shan

Thanks to Xiao Hua’s video warning, I immediately hid behind the corpse. In the fire’s flickering light, I saw the bushes shake for a long time before Brother Gan Shan suddenly appeared.

He sniffed east and then west before walking directly around the corpse and wagging his tail at me.

I looked at him, feeling pleasantly surprised. I was glad that Fatty and the others had made it down, but I had no idea how they managed to do so.

I stroked Brother Gan Shan’s fur and looked towards the bushes, waiting for a while, only to find that Fatty, Xiuxiu, and the others didn’t appear.

I felt puzzled and looked at Brother Gan Shan again, only to find that there was a deep scar on his back.

It must have been made with a knife, which meant that he had been attacked by something.

I touched the collar around his neck and found that a note had been tucked into it. I took it out, unfolded it, and saw that it contained a message from Fatty:

“Let him come to you. He’s the smartest and fastest, and the other dogs will follow his scent.”

Brother Gan Shan was wearing something similar to a saddle. It was a piece of equipment large dogs could wear on their backs in order to carry heavy loads. I dug out water, a medical kit, various medicines, and many other things that could be used for lighting.

But most importantly, it held a short gun with ten bullets, two of which were tracer bullets.

The short gun was a modified shotgun—in fact, it was a small-caliber homemade gun that had been altered—which was originally used to shoot gunpowder and iron pellets, but now it had been modified to shoot bullets, which were also specially made.

Fatty knew that I was very good at using this kind of gun.

I opened the medical kit, took out a needle, thread, rubbing alcohol, and anesthetic, and then started sewing up Brother Gan Shan’s wound. He was a very strong dog, and stood there rigidly as he endured the pain.

Later, I discovered that it was because the corpse had been dried by the fire and was emitting a scent that made Brother Gan Shan look at it greedily.

“You can’t eat dirty things,” I said to him. There were some cans in the bag on his back, so I opened one, stuffed an anti-inflammatory drug into it, and fed it to him.

He was so hungry that he gobbled it up in a flash.

I looked at him and did some calculations in my mind. His speed in the crevices was at least ten times that of mine, so Fatty must have put him directly into the crevice and told him to come find me. There was no telling how many crevices he had searched before he finally found me here.

Of course, the most likely scenario was that he reached this forest through a crevice, and then got confused and couldn’t get out. Then I came here as well and ran into him. When I touched his fur, I found that it was covered in soot.

I grabbed his face and asked, “Brother Shan, do you know which crevice you came out of?” He just looked at me innocently.

“Take me there, ok?”

Instead of leading me to the light to meet Fatty like those sensible dogs in American movies, he thought I wanted to play with him and suddenly became excited.⁽¹⁾

He wagged his tail so much that I checked the wound on his back again and thought to myself, someone cut my dog with a knife.

Who was it? Was Qi Yu really down here?

In any case, no matter who it was, I wouldn’t spare them.

I stood up, searched through everything on the corpse’s body, made a torch, and then lit it using the flames from the fire. Since Brother Gan Shan had been trained, I immediately began thinking about what I had on me that smelled of Fatty.

But no, nothing had Fatty’s scent on it. I did, however, have Xiao Hua’s cell phone.

I let Brother Gan Shan sniff the phone. He immediately knew what I wanted to do and started rushing into the woods.

I didn’t know if this was the direction Xiao Hua had gone in when he left—they had either come out of the same passage as me or come in some other way—but in any case, Brother Gan Shan could lead me to their trail.

Since they had gone back, Brother Gan Shan would surely lead me to the right crevice by following their scent.

I followed the dog into the woods. He walked very fast, so I had to move fast just to keep up with him. One person and one dog ran for about twenty minutes before a huge ivory pagoda appeared in front of us. This pagoda was very big and covered in dust.

The trees in front of the pagoda had been cleared away, leaving a flat, open space that had very complicated patterns engraved on it. Lying on these patterns were curled-up skeletons arranged one by one according to some kind of rule. The bones were very old, and the whole area was covered in dust.

I covered my mouth, noticing at the same time that there was a mummy of an ancient alchemist inside the ivory pagoda. Its face appeared to be covered by something that looked like a cloth.

Its body was also covered with things, just like a hedgehog, and it seemed to be stuck in the ancient ivory pagoda. Brother Gan Shan started barking at that thing, which immediately gave me pause. This was his way of expressing that he had found the target, and right now, he was barking at that thing as if it were Xiao Hua.

<Chapter 41><Table of Contents><Chapter 43>

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TN Notes:

(1) Awww lil pupper

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Might be an update tomorrow, might not. We’ll see