Chapter 71 Snake Marsh Ghost City (Part 1)

Two minutes later, A Ning stopped breathing and died in my arms. The expression on her incomprehensibly beautiful face, framed by the strands of her disheveled hair, was one of surprise. We stayed by her side until she breathed her last breath, and when she finally went still, time seemed to freeze.

I suddenly felt as if everything had stopped. I was so overcome with grief that I wanted to cry, but the tears never came—it was like something in my chest was blocking them.

It all happened so fast.

There were so many dangers along the way that I knew something would happen to someone, but I never thought that this woman would die, especially so easily and suddenly like that. The whole thing had happened without any warning—one second she was talking to us and the next she was dead. And she died in such a way that we didn’t even get the chance to save her.

At first, I didn’t believe what I was seeing and merely thought that I was dreaming. After all, how could this woman die? She was tough, gorgeous, and cunning, with a weak appearance that hid a heart of steel. Although I didn’t like her, I sincerely admired her. If anyone had to die, then it should have been me—I was the weakest one in the group after all.

But she did die, and right in front of my eyes too. She was really dead, gone so easily just like that.

I suddenly felt like I had been knocked back to my old self. Although things were always dangerous, we somehow managed to make it through in the end. Even when I went to Qinling Mountain alone, I still survived, if barely. I once thought that after experiencing all these things, people like us would have become more powerful and skilled, and as long as we were together, we could handle whatever danger we encountered. And even if one of us did die, it would have been in the most dangerous place in an ancient tomb. But A Ning had died so easily from a single snake bite… I suddenly realized that I was wrong—humans were inherently fragile creatures. Whether it was Poker-Face, Pan Zi, or me, in a place like this, death was still death. It didn’t matter how good your skills were or how much experience you had, it was all useless in the end.

This was the law of reality, not the plot of some novel or movie. If any of us encountered this kind of thing, we would definitely die, even Poker-Face. If he had been the one standing by the waterfall just now, he would have also died!

I looked up at the dense jungle in front of me and suddenly felt a wave of fear and despair hit me. At that moment, I just wanted to run away, ignore everything, and escape from this place.

By this time, dawn had finally broke. The sun shone down from one side of the canyon, flooding our surroundings with light. Water vapor hovered over the streams in front of us as the spray from the waterfall glittered in the morning light, forming a white mist over the dense rainforest.

The beautiful scenery remained, but the beautiful woman was gone.

Pan Zi was a man who had seen a lot of death during his lifetime, so although he also had a look of sorrow on his face at this time, he was a lot calmer than the rest of us. His injuries made it difficult to speak, so he kept it brief as he gently reminded us that this was an accident. Although it happened so suddenly, we had no other choice but to accept it. There was no telling if there were any more of those snakes in the area, so we couldn’t stay here long. We needed to leave here and find a cleaner place where we could think things over.

Suddenly remembering that Poker-Face had just killed the snake, I felt even more upset. I turned to look at its corpse floating in the water, only to find that it was gone. People said that this kind of snake would take its revenge on those who killed its own kind and relentlessly hunt the perpetrator down until they breathed their breath, so I knew that it was indeed dangerous to stay here. Thinking of A Ning’s tragic fate, I knew that we couldn’t stay any longer.

But I couldn’t bear to leave her body here, so I put her on my back. Fatty moved to help Pan Zi, and then we set off again, wading along the edge of the canyon since we didn’t dare go into the jungle again.

No one was in the mood to talk, and Fatty didn’t sing his folk songs. I didn’t even know why I was still moving forward. My mind was blank.

Putting one foot in front of the other, we walked in a daze for more than ten minutes but couldn’t find a dry place to rest. The sun was getting higher and higher, dissipating the coolness of last night’s heavy rain. Everyone had finally reached their limit and were starting to flag. After a night of running around, climbing trees, fighting, escaping, and death, even an iron man wouldn’t have any strength left. But what was even worse was how the humidity increased as the temperature rose. Fatty was having a particularly hard time, breathing so heavily that Pan Zi ended up having to help him walk.

Just as I was wondering if I should speak up and suggest that we take a break, the canyon in front of us suddenly started to slope downward, and the stream of rainwater on the ground picked up speed and flowed down it. We carefully waded down the stream to the bottom of the slope, where we saw the canyon’s exit.

The trees were a lot sparser here, and we could see a black swamp that was about two hundred meters long. The vegetation was much denser towards the back, giving way to a large aquatic rainforest. The trees weren’t tall, but their canopies were extremely lush. That, coupled with the way their roots and branches were entangled together, made the forest seem immeasurably deep.

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