A clever cave rescue: Thermal Vision shows its power

The instant the stone flew out, Ye Mo leaped from the rocky ledge. Before landing, he twisted into a roll, lowered his body with the momentum, and slid like a broken log into the shadows on the cave's left side.

Sure enough, the noise drew the two guards away. Guns at the ready, they moved off to check the distance. Their backs glowed red in the thermal image, their footsteps crisscrossing, their attention completely diverted.

"Now!" Ye Mo barked quietly.

Tony had only removed half the vent's iron grille. Half his body was stuck inside, and he moved sluggishly. Ye Mo grabbed his wrist and hauled him out. Tony grunted as the old wound on his shoulder struck the rock. His temperature shot up, turning him into a suddenly blazing mass of charcoal in the thermal view.

"Keep quiet." Ye Mo dragged him into a corner. "Want everyone on this mountain to hear you?"

Tony glared at him, panting. "Who the hell are you? A graduate of some spy training camp? Or military intelligence's latest human experimentation project?"

"The system says you shouldn't be asking that right now." Ye Mo looked up and scanned the depths of the passage. "The next patrol comes in three minutes. We have to get into the fissure before then."

"What fissure?" Tony tried to press him.

Ye Mo ignored him and lay on the ground, pressing his palm against it. Coolness seeped into his palm, along with an extremely faint current of air brushing between his fingers. In the thermal image, he saw airborne particles drifting slowly from a narrow passage to the right, as though drawn by an outside force.

"There." He pointed at a crack almost completely blocked by rubble. "There's a draft. That means it leads outside."

Tony frowned. "Not even a cat could squeeze through there."

"You're not much bigger than a cat." As he spoke, Ye Mo took off his hoodie and shoved it at Tony. "Wrap your head in it. Don't let the heat from your breath drift out."

"Wait, I haven't-"

"If you want to live, shut up and do it."

Ye Mo crawled in first. Rocks scraped his shoulders, and several tears soon appeared in his work pants. He paid no attention to the pain, inching forward while scanning ahead with Thermal Vision. The passage had numerous branches. Some looked passable but actually ended in dead ends. He relied on vibrations transmitted through the ground to judge his direction-the routes with a constant draft had colder rock layers and weaker heat signatures.

Tony followed, moving more and more slowly. His legs began to tremble, his breathing grew heavy, and in the thermal image, his whole body resembled a cooling lump of cast iron.

"Hang in there." Ye Mo glanced back at him. "Another two hundred meters."

"You know..." Tony gritted his teeth. "Wouldn't a normal person say something encouraging right now? Like 'almost there' or 'hang on'?"

"I told you, the system won't let me waste words."

"The system again?" Tony sneered. "Do you really have an AI in your head giving you orders? Or are you just a lunatic who happened to guess a few things right?"

Ye Mo did not answer. Suddenly, he raised a hand to signal a halt, crawled forward a few steps, and pressed his ear close to the rock wall.

About fifty meters ahead came a faint but continuous metallic scraping, as though some mechanical device was operating.

He narrowed his eyes and activated Thermal Vision. In the image, a thin wire stretched across the ground where three passages met, its ends connected to metal boxes buried in cracks in the rock. The wire itself gave off no heat, but the disturbance of the surrounding dust created a faint temperature difference, appearing as a broken dotted line in the image.

A tripwire alarm.

And there was more than one.

"Don't move," Ye Mo warned softly. "There are traps ahead. Infrared surveillance might be scanning too."

Tony swallowed. "So are you planning to go around? Wait for their shift change? Or charge straight through and gamble?"

"None of those." Ye Mo pulled a piece of metal from his pocket, scrap he had swiped from the cave's pile of tools earlier. "I'm going to make them divert their own attention."

He bent the metal into an arc and adjusted its angle toward the lingering warmth of a distant fire. Firelight struck the smooth surface, reflecting a swaying, human-shaped silhouette that fell precisely onto a false route.

Within ten seconds, footsteps came from the guard post ahead. Two guards approached that direction with guns in hand, one shining a flashlight over the ground.

"Nobody here," one said.

"There was definitely a shadow just now." The other frowned. "This damn place is creepy."

They hesitated a moment before finally deciding to split up and check.

Ye Mo immediately rose. "Go! Hurry!"

He supported Tony and hurried along the route he had judged safe. Every step landed at the boundary between shadows and cold zones, avoiding every possible detection blind spot. Three hundred meters later, a partially concealed mining chamber formed by a collapse appeared ahead. Rubble blocked most of its entrance, and there were no living heat sources inside.

By the time they squeezed in, Tony was nearly out of strength. He sat against the wall, his chest heaving violently, his forehead covered in cold sweat.

"You..." He stared at Ye Mo. "How did you do that? Those distractions, the route, the traps... You couldn't have done all that on luck."

Ye Mo crouched at the entrance, continuing to watch outside with Thermal Vision. Their pursuers' footsteps gradually faded. They were safe for now.

"The system prompted me," he said.

"That again." Tony panted. "Can't you tell me something real? Like which laboratory you escaped from? A mutant? Someone with superpowers? Or a fourth-generation AI vessel secretly registered by Stark Industries?"

"I'm not an AI." Ye Mo turned to look at him. "And I'm not from your world."

"Oh?" Tony raised an eyebrow. "Then where are you from? Mars? Or a parallel universe?"

"More or less." Ye Mo grinned. "I was an ordinary student on Earth. I woke up and found myself in this godforsaken mountain valley in Afghanistan."

Tony froze briefly, then burst out laughing. "Ha! So you're a transmigrator? Listen, buddy, if you're trying to make me lower my guard with some ridiculous story, you've failed. Among the lousy excuses I've heard, this only ranks third, right behind 'my mom called me home for dinner' and 'I really didn't mean to trespass into a restricted military zone.'"

"Believe what you want." Ye Mo took off his jacket and spread it on the ground. "You need rest now. Your wound has a high risk of infection, and your temperature is unstable."

"You know medicine too?" Tony narrowed his eyes.

"The system taught me." Only after saying it did Ye Mo realize he had let it slip, and he hastily added, "Self-taught."

Tony stared at him for several seconds before suddenly asking, "That system you mentioned... is it talking to you right now?"

"Yeah."

"What's it saying?"

"Warning me not to tell you too much."

Tony laughed. "Interesting. Is it afraid I'll study you? Or that once I know the truth, I'll haul you off and slice you up?"

"Either's possible." Ye Mo sat against the wall, closed his eyes, and summoned the Gene Spiral Tower in his mind. Its first floor glimmered faintly, the Thermal Vision icon hovering silently, with a line of small text beneath it: cooldown remaining: 4 minutes 17 seconds.

He still could not activate it again for too long.

"Hey," Tony suddenly said. "If it's really like you said, and you came from another world... why did you save me?"

Ye Mo opened his eyes. "Because you're not dead yet."

"That's it?"

"You're no use dead." Ye Mo shrugged. "I'm still counting on you to get me out of this hellhole and get me some gear while you're at it."

"You're pretty practical." Tony shook his head. "But what if I'm a bad guy? What if I hand you over to the government once we get out?"

"Then you can shout right now." Ye Mo looked straight at him. "There are still five people outside looking for us. Just yell, and they can storm in here within ten minutes."

The mining chamber fell silent.

Tony did not move.

He stared at Ye Mo, his gaze complicated, as though assessing a machine whose parameters he could not read.

"You're not afraid of me?" he asked.

"What's there to be afraid of?" Ye Mo countered. "Can you beat me in a fight? Outrun me? Or pin me to the ground before I make a move?"

Tony fell silent.

He knew the other man was right. From the very start of this escape, control had never been in his hands.

"So..." he began slowly. "You're that kind of protagonist template? Transmigration plus a golden finger plus saving the world? Are you going to tell me next that I'm actually a key figure in your destiny?"

"I don't know anything about destiny." Ye Mo stood, walked to the entrance, and shifted a little rubble aside to look out. "All I know is that you're alive right now, and useful to me. When the day comes that you aren't, I'll leave."

Watching his back, Tony suddenly felt that this person did not seem human.

Too calm, too calculating. Every sentence sounded as though it had undergone precise deductions.

But he really had saved him.

"Hey." Tony asked one final question. "Do you have a name? I can't keep calling you 'System Guy,' can I?"

Ye Mo glanced back at him.

"Ye Mo," he said. "Remember it, but don't go shouting it. If the people outside hear you, we're both done for."

Tony opened his mouth to reply with a joke.

Just then, Ye Mo abruptly raised his hand, his gaze sharpening.

He had seen it.

At a distant bend in the passage, a faint but distinct heat silhouette was moving slowly.