Inside the cave halfway up the mountain, firelight danced.
Orange-yellow flames drove away the damp cold air and baked the rock walls dry and warm.
Lin Fan sat cross-legged beside the fire, drew his tactical straight knife, and sliced a piece of luncheon meat down the middle.
He pierced it with a sharpened stick and held it over the fire, turning it slowly.
Under the high heat, oil quickly seeped out of the luncheon meat’s surface, and the sizzling crackle echoed through the silent cave.
-brown crispy crust gradually formed, and the rich smell of meat, mixed with the distinctive scent of burning camphor, drifted straight out on the cool night wind.
Song Ya, wrapped in her torn white shirt, clutched the hem tightly with both hands, her eyes fixed on the roasting meat over the fire, her throat bobbing uncontrollably.
After drinking half a bottle of water, her temperature and dehydration had greatly improved.
But the extreme hunger she felt was now being multiplied by that deadly roast-meat smell.
Lin Fan didn’t even look at her. He tore open a wrapper, broke off a small piece of dark chocolate, and tossed it into his mouth.
The bitterness of high-purity cocoa, with its sweet aftertaste, melted on his tongue and quickly turned into calories to fight the island’s cold night.
His gaze passed over the jumping flames, through the sparse vines at the cave entrance, and looked down condescendingly at the beach below, sunk in dead silence.
The omniscient prompt’s golden characters jumped in the darkness.
[Temperature monitoring: Current ambient temperature 14°C. Expected to drop below 10°C within two hours. With a force-4 sea wind, the wind-chill temperature will approach 5°C.]
[Status analysis of the group below: Severe hunger and thirst, mild hypothermia. Their psychological defenses have been precisely shattered by the smell of roast meat and are crumbling.]
Lin Fan sneered.
Tonight’s island welcome feast was something those social elites, used to red wine and steak, were not going to survive.
At the edge of the beach, beneath a few rotten coconut trees, it was pitch black.
Zhang Tao was on all fours, his hands frantically groping through rough sand and rotting vegetation.
Wang Qiang had just vomited all over the ground nearby, and the area stank like a biochemical leak.
Survival instinct forced Zhang Tao away from there, and he crawled alone a dozen meters deeper into the trees.
Suddenly, his fingers touched something round, hard, and covered in rough fiber.
Zhang Tao’s movements froze. He clutched it tightly to his chest.
The weight was wrong! The dead coconut from before had been light and hollow, but this one was extremely heavy, and when he shook it, there was a clear sound of water inside.
It was a top-quality coconut!
Zhang Tao’s eyes gleamed, and his heart pounded wildly in his chest.
He picked up a sharp reef fragment from by his foot, clamped the coconut tightly between his legs, aimed at its weak point at the top, and smashed it with all his might.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
His skin was scraped raw by the rough shell, and his hands were cut open at some point, blood mixed with sand smearing across the coconut.
Finally, with a light crack, the coconut shell was smashed open with a coin-sized gap!
A sweet-smelling juice seeped out. Zhang Tao smelled the taste of life itself and impatiently lowered his head, opening his cracked, bleeding lips, desperate to press them to it.
Just as his lips were only two centimeters from the gap, a huge force suddenly struck him from behind!
A leather shoe kicked him hard in the lower back.
Zhang Tao was already physically spent, and the kick sent him flying face-first into a pile of gravel, his mouth full of bloody sand.
Wang Qiang snatched the coconut rolling on the ground.
“Found something good and wanted to eat it all yourself? Do you know Sheng Tang’s rules or not!” Wang Qiang scolded in a low voice.
He held the coconut, his eyes fixed on the gap where liquid was flowing, his throat working with coarse pants.
Thirst. So fucking thirsty.
Wang Qiang no longer cared about any damn hierarchy. He pressed the gap straight to his mouth and sucked hard!
Cool, sweet coconut juice poured violently down his esophagus into his stomach, and his parched body was instantly moisturized. The pleasure that shot straight to the top of his skull made Wang Qiang let out an involuntary, extremely satisfied groan.
He gulped down three huge mouthfuls, drinking a full quarter of the coconut juice in one breath.
Reason returned quickly after the brief relief. Wang Qiang abruptly stopped swallowing and pulled the coconut away from his mouth.
He quickly wiped the juice from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve, and even grabbed a handful of sand and rubbed it on his lips, faking the appearance of still being extremely thirsty.
Zhang Tao climbed up from the ground, his face covered in blood, his eyes fixed on the coconut in Wang Qiang’s hand.
“Brother Qiang… leave me a sip… I risked my life to crack that open… give me one sip…” Zhang Tao’s voice trembled, his knees going soft, about to kneel.
“Shut up!” Wang Qiang kicked Zhang Tao hard in the shin and warned him viciously. “This coconut is mine. It has nothing to do with you! Say one more useless word, and when we get back to the company, I’ll kill you!”
With that, Wang Qiang turned and ran toward the sheltered rock pile where the main group was.
Zhang Tao sat collapsed on the sand, staring fixedly at Wang Qiang’s back.
All he could manage was helpless sobbing.
Beside the rock pile.
Su Qingxue curled up on the sheltered side. Her sand-stained one-piece swimsuit offered no protection at all against the bone-piercing sea wind. She hugged her knees with both arms, her body shaking violently and uncontrollably.
She lowered her head and, by the faint moonlight, glanced at the waterproof Patek Philippe on her wrist.
The second hand on the dial was spinning wildly, as if it had gone mad. This sea area’s bizarre, powerful magnetic field had ruthlessly erased even time, the last ruler of civilization.
She had no idea what time it was at all. She could only cling desperately to the illusory obsession that “rescue will definitely arrive at midnight,” holding on in the cold wind.
The smell of roast meat drifting down from the mountainside was like an invisible awl, churning her stomach upside down, bringing up waves of sour bile.
Beside her, Liu Feifei’s lips had long since turned purple with cold. She didn’t even have the strength to speak coquettishly anymore, gasping like a dying fish with her mouth open.
Hurried footsteps approached.
Wang Qiang rushed into the shadows holding the coconut, his face full of fawning eagerness to claim credit. “Ms. Su! I found it! I found it!”
“I braved the dark and groped around in this broken forest for more than half an hour, my hands are all scraped raw, and I finally found a coconut that isn’t spoiled! I didn’t dare take a single sip myself. I saved it all for you!”
Su Qingxue raised her head, said nothing, and snatched the coconut.
She held it with both hands and pressed her lips tightly against the rough gap.
She swallowed violently.
The sweet juice flowed down her throat, like rain after a long drought.
Su Qingxue drank the remaining coconut juice in one breath until it was completely gone, even tilting her head back to pour the last drop into her mouth.
Liu Feifei, standing to one side, stared wide-eyed, her hands reaching forward uncontrollably. “Ms. Su… give me a little to drink too… please, just one sip…”
“It’s gone.” Su Qingxue set down the empty coconut shell and wiped the remaining juice from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.
With some moisture restored, Su Qingxue’s breathing steadied, and her eyes regained their usual coldness and authority.
She looked at Wang Qiang, half-kneeling before her, with great appreciation. In this godforsaken place, to bring water to his leader without stealing a single sip — this was what a good Sheng Tang employee looked like. In contrast, that knife-wielding madman Lin Fan up there was simply a hopeless bottom-feeder.
“Wang Qiang, you’ve done very well. Sheng Tang never mistreats its meritorious employees.”
Su Qingxue leaned against the rock, her voice regaining some of its usual boardroom certainty. “When the rescue team lands tonight and we return to Jiangcheng, the sales director position will be yours. I’ll personally approve a five-hundred-thousand bonus for you.”
Wang Qiang trembled with excitement and kowtowed fiercely. “Thank you for your guidance, Ms. Su! From now on, my life, Wang Qiang’s life, is yours!”
Zhang Tao limped back to camp, just in time to hear this promise of promotion and reward loud and clear.
Hiding in the darkness, his teeth ground together with a grating sound, and the mad killing intent in his eyes grew even stronger.
Time flowed coldly on with the sound of waves washing ashore.
The night grew deeper, and the sea wind’s strength clearly increased, blowing against the body like blades scraping bone.
The temperature officially dropped below ten degrees!
Su Qingxue’s grand pie in the sky couldn’t resist the physiological limit of hypothermia at all.
Liu Feifei was already frozen into a daze, burrowing into Li Bin’s arms, trying to absorb a pitiful bit of warmth.
Su Qingxue kept rubbing her arms, the clattering sound of her chattering teeth unnervingly clear in the darkness.
She couldn’t help raising her head again.
The fire in the cave halfway up the mountain was still steady.
She could vaguely see Lin Fan’s tall silhouette sitting beside the fire, even leisurely turning the roast meat.
That comfort, that warmth, looked like an utterly unattainable realm in the eyes of the freezing, starving crowd.
Su Qingxue bit down hard on her bleeding lip.
She couldn’t understand how a bottom-rung workhorse earning three thousand yuan a month as an intern could live more comfortably in this environment than she, a CEO worth tens of billions?
An unprecedented sense of frustration and rage completely shredded her last shred of elegance.
“Make a fire…” Su Qingxue’s voice trembled as she suddenly turned to Wang Qiang and Zhang Tao.
“Go make a fire! Wang Qiang, Zhang Tao! Rub wood together, smash stones together, I don’t care — get me a fire right now!”
Wang Qiang, his nose running with cold, looked completely bewildered. “Ms. Su… it’s pitch black, and we can’t even find a dry stick. What are we supposed to make a fire with?”
“I don’t care what method you use!” Su Qingxue pointed at the firelight halfway up the mountain and shouted herself hoarse. “Lin Fan can make fire, why can’t you!”
Her chest heaved violently as she played her ultimate trump card, one that had never failed her in civilized society.
“Whoever can light a fire for me on this beach, when we get back to the company, I will personally reward him with eight hundred thousand yuan in cash! Paid immediately!”