The next morning, Renard woke in the biting cold wind, feeling sore all over, as if he'd been beaten up in his sleep.
The other three had already packed their things and were ready to leave. It looked like they would have left him behind if he hadn't gotten up on his own.
Luckily, he didn't have much to pack. After a hurried cleanup, he quickly caught up with the others.
Though the blizzard had passed some time ago, the snow in the forest still showed no sign of melting. Some of it had even frozen into solid blocks of ice.
Renard struggled along, repeatedly blowing warm breath onto his hands in an attempt to heat them.
But that little bit of warmth did no good. It only made his hands feel even stiffer.
Since all four of them were martial artists, they moved through the forest at a decent pace, reaching the foot of Palm Mountain by noon.
Palm Mountain was an unremarkable peak among dozens of others, but it still stood three or four hundred meters high and stretched for more than ten miles.
Finding a well-hidden Shadow Tiger in such a vast forest was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, Miss Heidi had already come up with a plan.
Two hours later, Renard found himself alone in a ravine, looking more miserable than if he'd eaten a fly. Miss Heidi's brilliant plan had been to split up and search.
If Miss Heidi hadn't looked so serious, he would have thought she was joking. But she was clearly in earnest, and the four of them had gone their separate ways.
Renard even began to suspect that they were going to kill him to keep him quiet because he knew Miss Heidi's secret—that she wanted to