Strong Yet Excessively Cautious

They followed the narrow path deeper into Fang Feng.

Jiang Xueming held up his phone light, leading the way through the gray-white fog.

As they reached the settlement's houses, they could hear the residents breathing from over ten meters away.

—They were already very close.

Jiang Xueming opened the waterproof tarp bundle and pulled out a pile of weapons and armor.

He put on a MOLLE vest, a Kevlar bulletproof vest, a stab-proof vest, and ballistic plates, then picked out a Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol.

He racked the slide and checked the chamber.

He switched off the safety and inserted a magazine.

The whole sequence left Bu Liuxing staring in a daze.

After Xue Ming finished, he started helping A Xing put on armor as well.

A Xing was extremely curious.

"Ming Ge, do you know how to use a gun in combat?"

Xue Ming said, "I've never fired a real gun. I know a little."

A Xing asked again, "Then where did you learn?"

Xue Ming said, "Mostly from CCTV-6. There was a toy model shop next to the subway station, and the owner was a military enthusiast. He often bought braised food on credit, so I asked him for trial cards to a shooting club. I worked part-time at the shooting club's toy model gun range, repairing toys for people. It paid pretty well."

A Xing asked, "Why learn that?"

Xue Ming said, "Just in case."

"Just in case?" Bu Liuxing scratched his head as he helped Jiang Xueming put on the full set of gear. "Was this really necessary?"

"I was always anxious. Especially in a city like Hong Kong." Jiang Xueming told his good friend the truth. "The crisscrossing streets and alleys had complicated terrain, traffic was dense and chaotic, the place was small, the population was large, and the crime rate was high. I had to learn some skills to protect myself. Besides, I had to protect my little sister. If I didn't learn something, I was afraid I'd never sleep peacefully in that tiny room in the walled city."

At that moment, Bu Liuxing remembered something else—

—Just yesterday, when he had been showing off his skills to Jiang Xueming, he had lunged out the window and nearly slammed into the tunnel wall.

At that instant, Xue Ming had reached out and yanked him back.

That immense force had wrenched his neck painfully, and he had fallen into the corridor, unable to get up for a long while.

The near-death experience had been too thrilling at the time, so A Xing had not thought much about it—he was 1.93 meters tall and weighed ninety-two kilograms.

Yet Jiang Xueming, who looked so frail, had pulled A Xing back through the train window with one hand.

"Listen carefully, A Xing." Jiang Xueming pondered for a moment. "This is our first close encounter with these creatures. If they're aliens, then this is a classic Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind. We need to be cautious in everything we do."

He took another pistol from the bundle, did not load it, and tucked it into A Xing's quick-draw holster.

"Mm." A Xing obediently nodded. "I feel like you're really reliable, Ming Ge."

"I don't know whether these creatures will attack us. But to be absolutely safe, I won't treat them as humans. If there's danger, if they try to hug or drag any one of us away, I'll definitely fire. Even if I can't hit them, I still have to try." Jiang Xueming inserted twelve magazines into his gear and tucked a survival whaling knife into his leg sheath.

His gaze was focused and frightening, as if he had entered work mode and was preparing to deal with beef offal.

He emptied the weapon bag and tossed out everything that remained.

"See that? There are three AR-15 automatic rifles here. They should be Mr. David's primary weapons."

"Yeah! Right! I like long guns!" A Xing's eyes went wide as he nodded vigorously.

Xue Ming shook his head. "But we can't use them."

A Xing asked, "Why?"

Xue Ming said, "Because I don't know how."

With that, Jiang Xueming's fingers flew, and he swiftly dismantled all three rifles into parts.

He took apart everything that could be removed by hand, including the stocks, bolt carrier groups, gas systems, charging handles, trigger groups, barrels, and other modular components. He mixed the parts together and stuffed them back into the tarp bundle, then unloaded every round from the rifle magazines one by one.

Jiang Xueming explained, "I don't know whether those residents know how to use firearms. These days, if you train a chimpanzee, it'll learn by imitation and figure out how to fire a gun. Just in case, I took them apart."

"You call this..." Bu Liuxing felt that something was off, then glanced at the weapon bag again. "Knowing a little?"

"Yes, I know a little." Jiang Xueming put on a tactical flashlight and friend-or-foe identification marker, then equipped Bu Liuxing with the same.

He patted Bu Liuxing's shoulder. He was not quite tall enough, so he had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. Then he patted the pistol magazines on his body.

"If you need anything, I'll support you immediately. That includes covering fire and tossing you ammunition magazines."

A Xing pressed on, "Then do you know first aid, Ming Ge?"

"Wait." Jiang Xueming lowered his head to look at his phone.

A Xing asked in confusion, "Wait?"

Xue Ming looked up, calm in his eyes. He closed the memo on his phone and switched to the pedometer and recording functions. "All right. Now I know a little."

Bu Liuxing asked frantically, "So you were looking things up just now!?"

"If you think that isn't reliable enough, I can also learn some funeral services." Jiang Xueming was expressionless.

Bu Liuxing was stunned.

Xue Ming stepped past A Xing's side, one hand on his holster and the other holding a knife over his heart. Half-crouching, he cautiously headed into the settlement.

He told Bu Liuxing, "I don't have much time, A Xing. You don't have to come with me, but even if I'm alone, I have to go in and investigate."

"Who are you looking down on!?" Bu Liuxing pursed his lips and followed. He copied Xue Ming, moving in a crouched step with a knife in hand beside him.

Jiang Xueming kindly reminded him, "Don't hold the knife like that. Don't you have a safety officer? Didn't he teach you how to use a survival knife?"

"I think holding it like this looks cool. Don't people grip daggers like this in games?" Bu Liuxing held the whaling knife horizontally in front of his chest.

"Then stay farther away from me." Jiang Xueming rolled his eyes.

Bu Liuxing asked, "Why?"

Jiang Xueming said, "I'm afraid that if you fall later, your blood will splash on me."

After hearing that, Bu Liuxing immediately changed his grip. He clenched the end of the handle in the web between thumb and forefinger, blade facing outward.

The two crept all the way to the side of a teardrop-shaped building.

The nearest settlement resident was only five or six meters away.

Jiang Xueming said nothing. He slowed his breathing and felt his way forward.

Bu Liuxing did the same, following behind him through the muddy water.

As they drew closer, Xue Ming heard a moan like sleep-talking.

Now and then, several meaningless words came from that resident's mouth. They could not form complete sentences and came from different languages. Even when Chinese occasionally emerged, it was difficult to make out words with complete logic.

—It seemed these residents would not initiate conversation, nor did they appear aggressive.

Xue Ming walked past the resident, always facing his target and never daring to relax his guard. Only after putting three meters between them did he head toward the next teardrop-shaped house.

A Xing followed beside Xue Ming, his heart pounding wildly. He finally believed Xue Ming's words, because the residents looked truly bizarre up close.

Their skin was bloodless, gleaming greasy under the rain. The arteries in their necks showed an eerie dark blue. Their pupils never focused on anything; they merely let their hands hang at their sides and wandered aimlessly.

He did not know where Xue Ming was going, so he could only follow behind Ming Ge, passing one low teardrop-shaped mud house after another.

They explored the settlement's chaotic rocky, moss-covered terrain step by step, gradually gaining a clear view of the entire settlement's landforms and building layout.

Many blind and witless residents wandered the disorderly stone paths. Murky streams ran beside the residential area like blood vessels, providing this habitation with water and food.

In the slightly drier hollows beneath the stone platforms, they could also see luminous moss and strange fungi.

The deeper they went, the stronger the sweetness in the air became.

Unlike the outer area, where the streams converged deeper in the settlement, they became three separate streams.

Beside one of the creeks, Xue Ming and Liuxing saw groups of three or five residents crouching on the bank, their eyes alertly fixed on the water—

—Then came a splash.

Within a few breaths, those scantily clad primitives all plunged into the creek at once.

The water was barely over a meter deep, yet huge sprays rose everywhere.

When the residents returned to shore, they tore at and beat one another, fighting over the fish meat in their hands.

They practically tore at each other's flesh while stuffing white fish meat into their mouths. Their movements were eerily smooth, as if their arms, shoulders, and necks had no bones.

They were also cursing each other in different languages, most of the insults involving "mother," because words insulting someone's mother sounded roughly similar in the native languages of most countries.

Bu Liuxing trembled all over. "Ming Ge. Did you see that?"

Jiang Xueming said, "I saw it. Their blood is blue."

During the tearing and fighting, the two of them saw it clearly—blue blood seemed to flow through those residents' bodies.

Their wounds healed at an astonishing rate. Their heads had been split open and bloodied while fighting for food, but by the time they spat out fish bones, the wounds on their upper bodies were already close to scabbing over. Injuries to their lower bodies healed somewhat more slowly, leaving them limping and staggering as they walked.

A few residents gnawing on fish seemed to hear the two uninvited guests.

From dozens of meters away, they guarded the food in their hands and roared at Jiang Xueming and Bu Liuxing, hurling curses from various countries.

The feeling was profoundly strange—

—It was like

you clearly knew what they were saying and could understand the sentences coming from their mouths.

But obviously, that was not normal behavior a human should have.

These creatures merely opened their mouths mechanically, like parrots mimicking speech, using word syllables as threatening beastly roars.

A strange thought surfaced in Jiang Xueming's mind.

—Did these things really know what they were saying?

Bu Liuxing's knife hand would not stop shaking. His eyes were red and itchy, stinging in the rain. Seeing the sharp teeth between those bizarre residents' lips, he viciously cursed back at them from afar.

"Keep moving. Don't disturb them while they eat." Jiang Xueming continued leading the way forward.

"Ming Ge, you don't understand. I hate it most when people curse my mom! My mom's really good to me!" Bu Liuxing calmed himself, then asked, "Where are we going? You haven't said a word this whole way or given me any warning."

"The BOSS chose to build the new station here because of the groundwater resources. We dreamed of an ocean." Jiang Xueming explained, "Follow this river, find where it flows into the sea, go to the shore, and find the foreign-style building. Find the young lady from the ancient race you've been dreaming about."