“How did you get here?” Jiang Ye’s brow furrowed tightly.
“Because you came here,” Jin Feize said with a smile. “Did you forget? We’re a couple. Couples should be inseparable.”
“I’m asking how you knew I was here.” Jiang Ye quietly felt through his pockets and collar, checking whether this bastard had planted some tracking device on him.
“Was that hard to guess? Shen Duo disappeared, the Public Security Bureau sealed your mother’s file, and no one can help you find Mom, so you could only go into battle yourself. Poor little tadpole, did you find your mother?”
“How did you contact Jijival?”
Jin Feize blinked and smiled. “Among Mojiang Village’s old hunters, Jijival is the most famous. He wasn’t hard to ask about. Little Ye, if you’d told me earlier that you wanted to go to Taisui Village, why would you need to go around asking by yourself and make it so troublesome? You even changed SIM cards just to hide from me. What was the point? Wherever you go, I can find you.”
Bai Nianci came over and asked curiously, “You two know each other?”
Jin Feize entered the stilt house and greeted him with a smile. “We’re cou—”
Jiang Ye reacted swiftly. Before he could spew nonsense, he covered Jin Feize’s mouth and said calmly, “Classmates. We’re classmates.”
“You should rest.” The old hunter walked into the house, sat by the fire pit, and lit an old pipe. “We enter the mountains first thing tomorrow morning. We’ll be walking for the whole day. Sleep well tonight. Tomorrow morning, as soon as the sun rises, I leave. I won’t wait if you’re late.”
His cloudy yet sharp eyes looked toward Jiang Ye. “That boy there. Are you also going to Taisui Village?”
Jiang Ye nodded. “Sorry to trouble you.”
Through the dim yellow lamplight, the old man studied Jiang Ye’s face. His clear, handsome eyes and brows were sharply black and white, giving him a distant, indifferent air. The boy’s features tugged at threads of the old man’s memory, slowly awakening something that had been dormant in his mind for a long time.
After looking at him for quite a while, he said, “Why do I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere?”
“Seen him?” Bai Nianci said. “Sir, this is his first time here. When would you have seen him?”
Jijival pondered for a long while, then asked Jiang Ye, “Did you have a relative who went to Taisui Village? I think I saw someone who looked a lot like you.”
“Yes,” Jiang Ye said. “Were you the guide for them too?”
“It was me.” The old hunter’s expression turned reminiscent. “That was more than ten years ago. Since you had a relative go there, you should know what kind of place Taisui Village is. More than ten years ago, there were still people living there. After your relative went, everyone there died. After that, I never saw anyone who went there come back out.”
“Do you know what she encountered inside?”
“How would I know? I’ve never spent the night in Taisui Village. I only take people to a place two hundred meters from Taisui Village. You walk the rest of the road yourselves.” The old hunter said, “Ever since I was little, my father taught me that place was evil. When I was a child, I followed my father to Taisui Village to deliver goods. The people living there were all strange, every single one of them. Every day, they worshipped things no one could see. My father said that once a person spent the first night there, they could never come out again. At least, I’ve never seen anyone from Taisui Village leave Taisui Village. Did that relative of yours not come back?”
Jiang Ye realized that his mother might have been the first person in decades to walk out of Taisui Village.
Although now she had gone back again, and there had been no news from her ever since.
The old hunter took a puff from his pipe and gave a cruel verdict. “If you go, not one of you will escape.”
Once those words came out, Huo Ang and Yilale exchanged a glance. Bai Nianci’s expression was grave; no one knew what he was thinking. Jin Feize stood outside the corridor teasing the sparrow in its cage, as if he had not heard the people inside talking at all.
Jiang Ye lowered his head and unconsciously rubbed his knuckles. When ordinary people heard something this absurd, they would either be frightened or skeptical. Yet not a single person present reacted that way. Sure enough, Bai Nianci and those two mercenaries all had some understanding of Taisui Village’s strangeness.
He could not help wondering exactly what his mother had discussed in her paper that had caused it to be officially blocked. Perhaps only the people at the institute knew the answer to that question.
“What about the original residents there?” Huo Ang cut in. “Didn’t you just say people used to live there?”
“They’re all dead. The village has been abandoned for years.” The old hunter blew out a ring of smoke.
Yilale still wanted to ask something, but the old hunter said he was going to sleep. He arranged rooms for everyone on the third floor. One room cost seven hundred yuan. When Jiang Ye went in and looked, the room was small and dilapidated, and there were mold spots on the bedsheets. There were only two empty rooms in total, and they were not soundproof. Even knowing the old hunter was fleecing them, everyone had no choice but to make do.
Jiang Ye wanted to share a room with Bai Nianci. Bai Nianci took off his glasses and wiped them, smiling. “Oh, Little Ye, look at your classmate. He obviously wants to share a room with you.”
Jiang Ye turned his head and met Jin Feize’s resentful gaze.
Jiang Ye: “…”
“Did you two have a fight? You’re classmates. You should get along. No matter how big the conflict was before, look, didn’t he come all this way to find you?” Bai Nianci patted his shoulder. “I’ll squeeze in with your Uncle Huo and Uncle Yilale. We just happen to need to discuss tomorrow’s arrangements. You kids hurry up and sleep.”
Jiang Ye pressed his lips together and glanced at Jin Feize. No matter how unwilling he was, he could only share a room with him.
The old hunter held out his hand to them. “Pay first, then stay. Since we have some fate between us, I’ll make it a little cheaper. Six hundred and fifty. This old man doesn’t know how to use Alipay. Give me cash.”
Jin Feize said, “I’ll pay.”
He took out the money. The old hunter wet his finger with saliva and counted the bills. The amount was exact, not a single yuan short, and his attitude immediately improved quite a bit.
Without a word, Jiang Ye logged into Alipay and transferred the money to Jin Feize. He absolutely refused to stay in a room paid for by Jin Feize.
“I’m kindly advising you, don’t risk your lives.” The old hunter spoke with heartfelt earnestness. “Young people nowadays like excitement. The more dangerous a place is, the more they want to go there. At your age, you two should be studying properly.”
Jiang Ye asked, “Grandpa, my mother came here again last month. You should have met, right? Did she say anything to you?”
“Your mother?”
“The relative who looked a lot like me. She actually isn’t my relative. She’s my mother.”
“No, no.” The old hunter hurriedly shook his head. “You’re mistaken. The person I’m talking about was a man.”
“A man?” Jiang Ye frowned. “What was his name?”
“He was called…” The old hunter was stumped. “Aiya, it’s been too long. I can’t remember.”
“Jiang Ran?” Jin Feize suddenly said.
The old hunter shook his head. “I don’t know whether that was his name. I’d already forgotten the man completely. I only suddenly remembered when I saw this boy.”
Jiang Ye clenched his fists. His thoughts rose and fell like a tide.
Could that man who looked so much like him have been Jiang Ran?
If Jijival had seen “Jiang Ran,” that meant “Jiang Ran” really did exist, and was not a hallucination his mother had produced because of anxiety disorder. Capital University could not find the name “Jiang Ran” perhaps because the identity that man had given his mother was fake.
Jiang Ye thought carefully and arrived at a hypothesis. Perhaps there had been a group of people led by Jiang Ran, who had impersonated the military and teachers from the Special Biology Research Institute of Capital University, deceived his mother, and taken her deep into the jungle. At the time, his mother had been a famous rising star in academia. It was very possible they wanted to rely on his mother’s learning to complete some task. Perhaps there was some mystery in Taisui Village that could only be solved with his mother’s help.
But why would that person look like him?
An extremely absurd guess arose in Jiang Ye’s heart.
Could Jiang Ran be his biological father?
“Do you have a photo?” Jiang Ye asked again.
The old hunter said no.
Jiang Ye pressed him with a few more questions, but the old hunter answered all of them by shaking his head. After all, he was old, and many details could no longer be remembered. He only remembered that Jiang Ran had come with many people.
That also confirmed Jiang Ye’s guess: that team had impersonated the military and entered Taisui Village.
Of course, there was another possible line of speculation. Perhaps they really had been some platoon from Unit 608, but the organization had erased their names and designations, causing them to vanish from the files from then on. Jiang Ran had lost his legal identity and become a ghost wandering outside the system.
The old hunter left. Jiang Ye had just entered the room when Jin Feize pressed him against the wooden plank wall.
Jiang Ye knew he was going to go insane. He had prepared for it long ago. He took a folding knife he had picked up from a street stall out of his pants pocket and said coldly, “You’d better not go crazy.”
Jin Feize’s smile was vile. Yet he ignored it completely, pressing his waist straight against the sharp blade as he leaned in toward Jiang Ye. The blade cut through his jacket. If Jiang Ye had not pulled back quickly, the folding knife would have stabbed into his kidney.
This lunatic!
Jiang Ye’s expression was cold and severe, and his heart went chilly.
“Not stabbing me?” Jin Feize laughed beside Jiang Ye’s ear. “I knew it. You’re softhearted. You can’t bear to make me bleed.”