Flash and Gone

Setting out on the road again, Bai Yang found that they all looked entirely unconcerned, treating their previous encounter as a routine everyday occurrence.

Is it because they're thick-skinned, or because they frequently run into situations like this in the jungle?

Bai Yang was destined never to get an answer to this question.

The group changed direction and pushed forward. Even using his backside to think, anyone knew that heading along the path the giant ape had taken was pure suicide, while following the direction it had come from probably wouldn't yield any prey either.

With the saying that when the Beast King prowled, all beasts lay low, the giant ape might not have been a lion or a tiger, but its sheer bulk made its terrifying nature obvious. Consequently, over the next stretch of their journey, the group encountered practically no animals at all.

Insects didn't count.

Along the way, the girl who had stayed glued to Bai Yang's side like a shadow spoke very little and possessed the highest level of vigilance. At the slightest sign of trouble, she would shield Bai Yang behind her in an instant. She rivaled the most professional bodyguard, forever standing on the very front line of danger, and countless times she had yanked Bai Yang back from the edge of unknown perils—she was simply a saint!

Regarding the matter of being protected by a girl, Bai Yang's inner thoughts were... let's talk about something else instead.

There was a doubt buried deep in Bai Yang's heart for a long time that he could find no answer to, which was that this girl seemed overly loyal to him. He had never given her anything, so why would she be so wholeheartedly devoted to him?

He could only attribute this to an unfamiliarity with local customs, leaving him without an answer.

The largest of the group, Number One Barbarian, was a rather interesting fellow. He could always sniff out various kinds of food in the jungle, his nose sharper than a dog's. Whether it was strange fruits hidden among the thickets or plant roots buried in the soil, he always managed to unearth something edible. Anyway, the entire journey was just him eating one thing after another.

Bai Yang found it completely incomprehensible that the guy hadn't been poisoned to death yet. He figured there must be some scientifically explainable cause-and-effect relationship between the fellow growing to such a massive size and his nonstop eating, eating, and eating.

For the sake of his own little life, even though Number One repeatedly held up strange things and wanted to share them with Bai Yang, gesturing wildly to indicate that they were truly edible and tasted great, Bai Yang still respectfully declined.

Thanks for the kind offer, but I still don't want to die.

Number Three Barbarian was probably beyond redemption on the path of courting death.

Bai Yang felt that if he were to describe it using the phrase "a single laugh makes you ten years younger," he would probably have to regress by a full hundred past lives!

This guy's curiosity had broken through the heavens. Whenever he came across a crevice or a tree hollow, the fellow would poke at it with his door-sized heavy saber, stirring up no end of laughable and absurd situations.

Case in point, he still had a head full of bumps like Shakyamuni right on his forehead, which he'd gotten from poking a tree hollow and provoking a swarm of bees that stung him.

Yet what made the fellow interesting wasn't just his heavy curiosity, but rather his inability to learn a lesson. The Nth time he poked at a stone crevice, he dragged out a centipede over a meter long, and even though he was almost bitten, he still found it endlessly entertaining.

Come to think of it, precisely because of his heaven-reaching curiosity and incorrigible personality, he made the best pathfinder. After all, he could spot any danger in the first instance, couldn't he?

As for Number Two, well, the fellow was basically like an invisibility cloak, hiding in the tree canopy and barely showing his face. Regarding this jungle-concealment method that was practically an art of evasion, Bai Yang figured that if he were to fight so-called special forces soldiers in the jungles over on Earth, the guy could probably wipe out a whole squad by himself.

This was a rare jungle survival experience, and they ultimately concluded the trip by hunting a brown bear.

The process of hunting the brown bear was heart-pounding, yet Bai Yang hadn't felt half a cent's worth of danger—it was utterly boring!

The fellow was standing fifty meters away from the battlefield, and on top of that, he had a girl with terrifying martial prowess guarding him. If he could still feel the tension and thrill of a hunt under those circumstances, it would be a miracle.

To put it simply, they discovered a brown bear that stood nearly three meters tall when upright. Then Number Three, deep in his second-year adolescent delusions, threw down his big blade and charged over, jabbering away as he tried to match strength with the bear. He ended up discovering that his physical strength apparently couldn't match the opponent's, so he resorted to his unique ultimate technique—the one Bai Yang had witnessed before, where he jumped onto the creature's back and shook off every attempt to throw him.

Then Number One walked over and whacked the brown bear right on the nose with a club, beating the creature so hard that snot and tears streamed down its face as it howled miserably. Finally, the battle ended when an arrow shot by Number Two—from some unknown hiding spot in the trees—pierced straight through the brown bear's right eye.

In reality, hunting was often just that simple and brutal; the process of finding the prey took up most of the time. Bai Yang felt that if they were back on Earth, the actual final kill would be compressed infinitely, finished off with a single gunshot.

The big brute Number One acted as a beasts-of-burden coolie, carrying the brown bear back all by himself without his legs even trembling once.

There was simply no matching that strength. Bai Yang guessed that if Number One went to work on a construction site, plenty of migrant workers would probably lose their jobs!

The journey back was much easier than the trip out. Although the jungle exploration had lasted only a few short hours, a feeling of having lived through another lifetime welled up in Bai Yang's heart.

Even if someone puts a blade to my neck in the future, I will never enter the jungle again!

Standing at the village entrance, Bai Yang told himself this in his heart. So what if there was a blade at his neck? He could run away...

Time slipped away quietly amidst all kinds of boredom, exasperation, tangled thoughts, and numbness. Ten whole days had passed in the blink of an eye since his last trip into the jungle!

The ten days here referred to local time. If calculated by the nearly fifty hours in a local day, more than twenty days had already passed over on Earth!

According to scientific research, half a month was enough to completely alter a lifestyle. If you don't believe it, try it yourself: raise a dog, and every time you feed it, bang on its food bowl. I guarantee that half a month later, whenever you bang on it, it will come running over wagging its tail and acting all cute within a minute.

Therefore, ten days later, apart from some deficiencies in language, Bai Yang was already indistinguishable from the villagers here.

During this period, Bai Yang had spent almost all his time mingling with the local villagers, deliberately observing and studying their living habits and language. By now, he was able to carry on simple conversations with them.

To what extent could he manage these simple conversations? Let me give you an analogy.

It was equivalent to a foreigner over on Earth using phrases like "Hullo yo, I eat yo cold, good belly-belly..."—roughly that level of communication.

Even so, the greater part of his communication with the villagers still had to rely on hand gestures.

The more he understood the living habits of the villagers here, the more Bai Yang came to appreciate the hardship of their lives. Jungles, treehouses—everything was actually not as pleasant and comfortable as it looked.

The villagers went out hunting every day, and casualties occurred from time to time. To survive normally, they had to venture into the jungle to hunt, and venturing into the jungle to hunt meant inevitably facing all kinds of perils!

It was a vicious cycle...

In these ten days here, Bai Yang had witnessed with his own eyes three disabled people, six heavily injured people, and two who entered the jungle and never returned.

Life was a miracle, extremely tenacious, always managing to find the correct way to survive in all sorts of harsh environments. At the same time, life was also incomparably fragile; with the slightest slip, a vibrant life would be gone just like that.

(Seeking recommendation votes and collection support)