Daomu Biji: Restart

In a daze, I was lifted up and helped to a temporary camp someone had set up nearby. Once I was settled on a patch of grass, someone came up to disinfect me.

I saw a lot of people sleeping or making phone calls, and even some locals had come.

I was completely dumbfounded as I sat there on the grass, not daring to close my eyes. I was afraid that if I did, I’d open them again and find that it had all just been a dream.

I didn't doze off, either. Although I had only slept for a short period of time and the exhaustion kept surging up, I couldn’t sleep. Poker-Face and Xiao Hua were missing. I couldn’t be in a daze right now.

After a while, I looked at my watch and found that I had been sitting there for half an hour. The smell of food was what finally brought me back to reality. It seemed that someone had contacted the villagers nearby and had them bring food over.

When I took a few of the proffered naan, I saw the villagers' outfits and realized that I might have arrived in Xinjiang.⁽¹⁾ Looking into the distance, I found that we were in a river valley with bare mountains on both sides. The sunshine was truly amazing.

This kind of intense sunlight probably couldn’t be seen in plain river valleys but more in alpine river valleys. In other words, we were probably at a very high altitude. The mountains on both sides didn’t look all that high and actually seemed closer to hilltops than mountain peaks.

In the distance, I could see towering snow-capped mountains that went on as far as the eye could see. They were supposedly far away, but they didn’t feel all that far. In fact, it almost seemed like you could reach them in just a few hours if you rode a horse. I had seen a lot of mountains in my day, so I could tell right away that some were divine. The magnificence of the snow-capped mountains in the distance, as well as those endless peaks as far as the eye could see, all revealed a huge mystery.

"What mountain is this?" I asked a man beside me as I chewed my naan.

He also looked at the mountains and said faintly, "This is the Kunlun Mountain range, fool."

I looked at him in surprise, but he just continued to look in that direction, "We’re now in the Kunlun Mountains, so that’s why the snow-capped mountains don't look so huge."

I nodded. It was just as I had expected. I didn’t know who this jerk was, but I had more important things to do right now.

After eating a few bites of my naan, I began to clap my hands in order to find the temporary person in charge here. Xiao Hua’s enterprise was big, but he had the perfect management system. A guy soon came out, but he was still on the phone. Once I finally got him to put the phone down, he sighed and rubbed his face. He was obviously very tired. He looked at me and nodded before asking, "Little Master Three?"

"Call me something else. Hearing that makes me want to vomit," I said to him. After hearing Jin Xingsan call me that over and over again, hearing it now made me feel nauseous. I didn’t want to hear it again for the next several days.

He nodded, "Boss Wu."

This person was very delicate and pretty with very gender-neutral features. I initially felt that he was a girl, but his outfit was completely masculine. Not wanting to delve into this matter right now, I asked him, "What should I do now? Did Xiao Hua set up a backup plan before?"

"The original plan was to build a command post at the spot where we came up,” he said. “But this is the local people’s sky burial ground. There are a group of Tibetan villages forty kilometers away, with the nearest village belonging to the Keriya people. We can't camp here directly, but we can probably set up over there—" he pointed to a spot in the river valley that was about one kilometer downstream. “There’s a flat slope over there where we can set up camp. The cost has already been discussed. The second team will arrive soon with supplies. We have to use horses to transport the core supplies, so it will take them three days to arrive, but the people and their personal equipment will arrive here at midnight. A helicopter is coming in from Kashgar."

"A helicopter?" I murmured.

"Well, it should belong to Master Hua’s friends from various civilian rescue teams."

"Never mind, it’s none of my business if he bought it himself. I’m not envious," I said. "What happened to the second team?"

"In the original plan, other than the core group, each staff member would only make one trip. Master Hua believed that there would be hidden dangers when walking in the dark for a long time, so whenever there was an opportunity, he would come up and replace the team members. He expected to come up about five or six times, so six teams were prepared."

This familiar sense of thoughtfulness felt nice.

Usually, in stories, thoughtful people acted like housekeepers. And if you ever fought in a battle, you would know that such thoughtful and meticulous people were like father figures.

This temporary commander was named Wen Binghui. I still wasn’t very clear on whether he was a man or a woman, but he was very capable and responsible. I had a ton of questions to ask him, but he said that he needed to coordinate everything first and that I should ask his colleagues instead.

I felt like a useless extra.

Wen Binghui asked me to go to the biggest tent to find Director Tie, and when I did, I saw Fatty sleeping inside. After reaching the surface, he was so tired that he left me alone.

The people in Xiao Hua's team were completely different from those in my previous team. Director Tie was a middle-aged man who didn’t look like an insider at first glance. He was short, lean, and had an unkempt beard. People in the industry normally introduced themselves when meeting others, but the people here were very secretive about their origins. Director Tie took out some tobacco leaves and rolled them into a cigarette while saying to me, "I won't go down again."

Of course you can, I said to myself before starting to ask him for the details of what happened before I showed up. When Director Tie explained it in great detail, I found that many of my previous speculations had been correct. For example, they had killed a total of six Jin Xingsans, but people in their team ended up dying every time. Also, there was something wrong with Black Glasses. His team was further ahead than theirs, but they didn’t know what the specific problem was because Xiao Hua was the one who had been in contact with Black Glasses the whole time.

Basically, those Jin Xingsan things used mental torture as a hunting method. They wouldn’t let the creatures on the cliff sleep, but they didn’t kill their prey immediately either. They just kept wearing down their prey's mental state the whole time. After their prey had a mental breakdown, they’d either eat it or parasitize it.

But humans were different from ordinary animals. In the dark, people were particularly prone to collapse when they lacked sleep for a long time. And if you were on a cliff, it was particularly easy to jump off once you had a mental breakdown. So, based on their hunting method, their prey would commit suicide due to mental torture.

After we arrived, everyone was hoping that I could find a way to break this endless loop. But when Jin Xingsan “spoke”, everyone heard something completely different from what I had heard. Then, they saw me talking incoherently and knew that I didn't notice anything wrong. In the end, that Shigou Diao member took the risk and sent me a message.

I asked him what Xiao Hua's plan was if I hadn't showed up.

After all, Xiao Hua and Poker-Face obviously wouldn’t do something on the spur of the moment. Xiao Hua must’ve had his own plan which he implemented even though my arrival made things very difficult for him.

Thinking of this, I became very concerned about one thing in particular. When Xiao Hua was talking with me, he didn't mention that Jin Xingsan was a bee man at all. I had always thought that he was afraid of Jin Xingsan hearing him, but now I was basically certain that Jin Xingsan couldn’t understand people's words. That meant that Xiao Hua could’ve just told me by using some ambiguous words.

Why didn't he mention it at all?

Director Tie asked me if I wanted to smoke but I shook my head and continued thinking carefully. I felt that this point was very important to figuring out their whereabouts.

My theory was that he was guarding against another person who could understand what he was saying.

That person was in the team, at least close enough to us to hear what we were talking about. And that person didn’t want me to know about the bee man.

As a result, Xiao Hua couldn’t say anything.

I narrowed my eyes. Generally, things that happened naturally wouldn’t be too complicated, so I didn’t believe that the person keeping Xiao Hua in check was in the team. After all, with Jin Xingsan there, why would they still be plotting internal strife? Were they too idle?

So, this meant that it had to be someone outside the team. But the whole area had been covered in darkness and no one could move in the dark.

Ah, my fingers trembled. Director Tie handed me a cigarette again but I shook my head.

It's not that there’s no one. In fact, there’s actually one person who can.

Black Glasses.

So many things had happened last night, was he really nearby? Did he have something in his hand to control Xiao Hua and keep him from telling me the truth?

That must’ve been why Poker-Face also disappeared. In order to get Black Glasses in this kind of environment, Poker-Face had to take action. Otherwise, it would be absolutely impossible.

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TN Notes:

(1) Here’s a map to give you a super general idea of how far they’ve gone (I didn’t know where in the grassland they were so I just started at Mandula Town, which was mentioned in Part 3 Chapter 6):

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We have 12 chapters to go (about 60 pages in my word document). I will try to do a chapter a day, but these have been longer compared to normal so it's obviously taking me a bit since I'm still doing OT at work. Just know that we should hopefully be done in the next two weeks. If Yvette doesn't get around to it by that point, I will start on Notes in Rain Village Part 2