Sure enough, not long after, she had Jiang Xiaohui, Xu Qiuyan, and Ying Gou brought over.
Seeing me, Jiang Xiaohui lowered his head. I understood at once. After that opening had appeared, Jiang Xiaohui must have insisted on going down to take a look. Once he did that, Xu Qiuyan and the others had no choice but to follow him down.
It was just that they had not been as lucky as us. They had been captured outright.
"Xiaobai, this isn't Xiaohui's fault. I was curious at the time too, so I agreed to come down and take a look first. We had originally planned to leave Ying Gou behind to tell you, but we didn't expect him to insist on coming down with us. We were captured as soon as we came down. We had wanted to resist, but Ying Gou told us to abandon that idea. He said resisting under those circumstances would be unwise, so we should wait and see."
Afraid that I would blame Jiang Xiaobai, Xu Qiuyan explained at length.
I said, "I'm not blaming him. It's just that we had agreed that, whether we found anything or not, we had to return to our meeting place first. No one was allowed to come down on their own. If it hadn't been for him, you wouldn't have been dragged into this and become prisoners."
Yan Rou objected. "They aren't prisoners. I've treated them with every courtesy here and haven't done anything out of line. I told you that your friends are my friends. Ask them yourself—I've treated them well, afraid of slighting them in any way."
Xu Qiuyan nodded slightly. "You really didn't make things difficult for us."
Jiang Xiaohui asked, "Is Goudan'er in your hands too?"
"Goudan'er?" Yan Rou clearly did not know that