“Where is Xiao Lan?” Su Qiao grabbed Li Zhuang by the collar and demanded harshly.
“She’s at home! Let go, why are you grabbing me?” Li Zhuang answered as he struggled hard to break free.
“Come back with me!” Su Qiao didn’t waste words. She seized one of his arms and forcefully dragged him forward with her.
Within minutes, the two of them arrived at the home of Su Qiao’s paternal aunt, Su Sanmei.
“Where’s Xiao Lan?” Su Qiao looked around, but couldn’t find her sister anywhere.
She turned to look at Li Zhuang, only to see that he too wore an expression of utter shock.
Before Su Qiao could ask again, Li Zhuang pointed at a large tree in the courtyard and shouted, “When I went out, I tied Xiao Lan to the tree! How is she gone?!”
Su Qiao’s mind buzzed loudly, as if it had exploded on the spot.
She rushed over to the tree and saw a hemp rope still tied around it.
The rope was about as thick as a finger, one end fastened to the trunk and the other hanging down to the ground. The dangling end bore fresh marks where it had clearly been cut by a sharp blade.
Su Qiao’s body began to tremble uncontrollably. She yanked the rope off the tree, held it up in front of Li Zhuang, and asked in a shaking voice, “Is this how your family usually goes out, by tying Xiao Lan to a tree?”
“Yeah! My mom said if we go out, we should tie Xiao Lan to the tree so she can’t run far.”
Li Zhuang didn’t think there was anything wrong with what he’d done, answering with complete self-assurance.
“I used to tie her there whenever I went out too. Who knew she’d run off today? Sis, don’t blame me, she must’ve sneaked off somewhere to play!”
“Bullshit!” Su Qiao exploded in rage.
“Xiao Lan is only three years old! You think she could cut a hemp rope by herself and go out to play? Cut it with what?!”
Su Qiao was so furious she was on the verge of losing all reason, her body shaking as violent thoughts surged through her.
She had never known that when no one was home, her three-year-old sister was tied to a tree at her aunt’s house.
She clenched the hemp rope tightly, the coarse fibers biting painfully into her skin.
But Su Qiao knew this was not the time to argue.
She lifted her head, forcibly suppressing the fury in her eyes, and issued calm instructions, “Li Zhuang, go to the fields right now and find the village secretary. Tell him Xiao Lan was taken by traffickers, and ask him to bring people to help search.”
“Taken by traffickers? Impossible!”
Although her cousin looked terrifying at the moment, Li Zhuang knew that if this really got reported to the village secretary, his parents would definitely beat him half to death when they got back.
So he still argued stubbornly and shouted back, “She must’ve gone out to play! When have there ever been traffickers in our village?”
“Go now! Say I told you to, say the traffickers just ran off and there’s still time to catch them. Go, now! If Xiao Lan isn’t found, I’ll skin you alive!”
The anger Su Qiao had been forcing down finally erupted.
Gripping the hemp rope, she lashed out at Li Zhuang without caring whether she hit his face or his backside, raining blows down on him.
“Sis, stop hitting me! I’ll go—I’ll go right now!”
No matter how sturdy Li Zhuang was, he was still only a twelve-year-old boy.
He never imagined that his usually gentle cousin could be this frightening when she lost control.
After being beaten like that, he was truly scared. As soon as he spoke, he started crying, clutching his throbbing arm, and took off at a dead run toward the fields.
Once he was gone, Su Qiao turned and went into her aunt’s kitchen, grabbed a knife, and then headed without hesitation toward the barren hill behind her aunt’s house.
Su Qiao had spent a full twenty years thinking about how her sister had disappeared.
From the villagers’ scattered remarks, she knew that people had been sent to search back then.
Led by the village secretary, they had combed both the main road at the eastern end of the village and the small paths to the west, but in the end found nothing.
Later, when news came from a neighboring village about child traffickers abducting children, they finally confirmed that Xiao Lan had also been taken.
Her younger sister’s disappearance became a lifelong knot in Su Qiao’s heart.
No matter how busy she was, whenever she had a quiet moment, she would think about it. After pondering it for so many years, she came to believe the problem lay in two possible areas.
One was that they truly discovered it too late and failed to catch up with the traffickers, but she felt this possibility was relatively small.
That was because her aunt’s home was at the easternmost edge of the village, and just beyond it were the village fields.
At that time of day, everyone would have been working in the fields. If a stranger had passed through there with Xiao Lan, people would certainly have noticed.
Going west along the small paths was even less likely, because that would have meant passing through the entire village.
By that reasoning, the second possibility was much more likely.
That was that the traffickers first stole her sister and hid her on the long-abandoned hill behind the village, then waited until it was late and there were fewer people around before secretly taking her away.
That barren hill was right behind her aunt’s house. It was called a hill, but in truth it was little more than a dirt mound now, with hardly any trees left.
Because one kind of stone found on the mountain was well suited for making bricks, several brick kilns had been opened near Xiaojin Village, and the hillside had been dug full of pits. The paths were especially hard to walk, and if you weren’t careful, you could easily fall into one of the holes. On top of that, there was nothing edible growing on the mountain, so aside from kiln workers coming in the mornings to haul stone, villagers generally didn’t go up there.
Su Qiao felt it was more likely that the trafficker had hidden her little sister on the mountain than already taken her away.
Worried about her sister, she couldn’t wait for the villagers to gather and search together. And having studied self-defense for so many years, she believed that with some advance caution, she was capable of protecting herself.
Knife in hand, Su Qiao stepped out of the courtyard and turned toward the direction of the back mountain.
But after only two steps, she felt her wrist go numb. Before she could even react, the knife slipped from her control and ended up in someone else’s hand.
Startled, Su Qiao quickly turned around and saw Xiao Qifeng looking at her with a complicated expression.
Why had he followed her?
Before Su Qiao could ask, Xiao Qifeng lifted the knife and gave it a little shake at her. “What are you planning to do?”
“Find my sister. She was taken by traffickers. Give it back!” As she spoke, Su Qiao reached out to snatch the knife.
Xiao Qifeng raised it higher and asked disapprovingly, “You’re planning to risk your life with this? And how do you know your sister was taken?”
When he had followed her to this spot, he had just seen her lashing a hemp rope wildly at a boy of about ten.
Although he didn’t know what had happened, from the scene it clearly looked like an older sister disciplining a younger relative, and as an outsider it really wasn’t appropriate for him to step in.
So Xiao Qifeng had stood at some distance and watched for a while, until the boy ran out of the house crying.
Once the boy left, he was about to go over and explain why he had followed her, but before he could get close, he saw her stride angrily out of the courtyard with a kitchen knife in hand.
In his twenty-four years of life, Xiao Qifeng had never seen such a fierce girl.
She was completely different from the Su Qiao he had in mind.
The corner of his mouth twitched despite himself, and he hurried forward to snatch the knife from her hand.
“There are cases in the county. I heard people talking about it at school before, several children have gone missing around here. I came back this time because I wanted to check on Xiao Lan first. Who would’ve thought I was still too late!”
Su Qiao had no patience to argue with him. She urgently reached out again to grab for the knife. “Give it back to me, now!”
Hearing this, Xiao Qifeng understood at once, no wonder she had been so frantic all morning.
But he had no intention of returning the knife to her.
He put it into the military satchel slung over his shoulder and then asked, “Where are you going? The back mountain?”
Seeing him act like this, how could Su Qiao not understand what he meant?
She hesitated for a moment, then didn’t refuse the goodwill. After all, compared with a battle-hardened soldier, her little bit of skill really wasn’t worth mentioning.
“Mm, the back mountain. I think…”
As she followed Xiao Qifeng forward, Su Qiao explained her analysis.
After hearing it, Xiao Qifeng shot her a surprised glance.
He clearly didn’t expect that, with her sister missing, she could still remain this calm, let alone come up with such a well-reasoned analysis in so short a time.
He lifted his head, narrowed his eyes, and looked toward the mountain, then said in a low voice, “I’ll go up first and take a look. Follow behind me slowly.”
Without waiting for her reply, he quickened his pace.
Watching the man who almost instantly pulled away from her, Su Qiao couldn’t quite describe how she felt.
With that inexplicable engagement now hanging over her head, to be honest, she didn’t want to have too much to do with him.
Yet at this moment, looking at his resolute back, she inexplicably felt reassured.
“Soldiers really are the people’s backbone,” she murmured under her breath, then quickened her steps.
The back mountain wasn’t tall, but because of unregulated mining, it was riddled with pits of varying depths. There were also chunks of rock left behind after blasting for stone, many of them hanging precariously and threatening to fall, making the place quite dangerous.
Although her spirit was high, Su Qiao had clearly forgotten that her current body was malnourished and couldn’t compare with her later self.
What’s more, she had injured her knee when she jumped down from the wall earlier. Standing still was manageable, but once she walked, the wound rubbed repeatedly against her trousers, sending up a burning pain.
Even so, she clenched her teeth and pushed on, keeping a distance of two or three meters behind Xiao Qifeng.
Along the way, Xiao Qifeng turned to look at her several times, but in the end didn’t say anything.
Just as Su Qiao felt she could barely catch her breath, her chest so tight it felt like it was about to burst and she was on the verge of giving up, Xiao Qifeng suddenly stopped.
“What is it?” she hurried up, panting.
“Shh.” Xiao Qifeng made a gesture for silence, then, before Su Qiao could even react, strode quickly toward a pit not far to their right.
Su Qiao’s heart began pounding wildly. She rushed after him and asked in an excited whisper, “Is someone down there? Is it a little girl, about three years old?”
Xiao Qifeng didn’t turn around. He crouched down and peered into the pit, then replied, “I can’t see clearly, but there is definitely someone down there.”
Su Qiao said no more. She lay down beside him and shouted toward the bottom of the pit, “Xiao Lan! Xiao Lan, is that you down there?!”
Very soon, faint sobbing from a small child drifted up from below.
Tears instantly welled up in Su Qiao’s eyes.
She sniffed hard and shouted down into the pit, “Xiao Lan, don’t be scared. Big sister is coming down to save you!”
After that, she glanced around the pit, stood up, and walked to a rock at the edge that looked fairly solid, gripping it as she prepared to climb down.
“What are you doing?” Xiao Qifeng quickly grabbed one of her arms and asked in shock.
“Going to save my sister!” Su Qiao forcefully shook his hand off, then shot the man an annoyed glare. “Don’t get in the way!”
“With me here, do you need to go down at all?!” Xiao Qifeng could hardly believe what he was seeing.
This girl was treating him as if he were completely invisible!
He was irritated too and, without bothering to argue with her, grabbed her arm again and pulled her aside.
Seeing Su Qiao about to erupt, Xiao Qifeng pointed at himself, stared straight into her eyes, and said slowly, word by word, “Me. A soldier of the People’s Liberation Army. Protecting the people’s safety is my duty. That safety includes her, and it includes you.”
With that, he ignored her, bent down to test the same rock Su Qiao had looked at earlier, and then deftly climbed down into the pit.
Su Qiao didn’t expect him to act like this.
She had agreed to let him come along because she was worried about running into child traffickers in the mountains. One or two wouldn’t be a problem, but if they ran into a group, she wasn’t confident she could handle it.
And now it was just a matter of climbing into a pit to rescue her sister. Su Qiao believed she could handle that entirely on her own, without anyone’s help.
In the past twenty years, what hadn’t she been through? What hadn’t she faced? She had long been used to shouldering everything by herself.
So Xiao Qifeng’s actions made her feel rather unaccustomed to this, but at the same time, she couldn’t help feeling a surge of gratitude.
Soldiers of the people, serving the people, this comrade truly was a good soldier, she thought to herself.