div]:!mb-0 [&_.prose>div]:!gap-2 [&_img]:max-h-[200px] [&_img]:cursor-pointer">
*:first-child]:mt-0 [&>*:last-child]:mb-0 mb-6 flex flex-col gap-5">
“Who has chewing gum? Or a cigarette pack? The kind of wrapper with a foil lining.”
Dead silence all around.
“I… I have some in my bag.” A female colleague who usually handled administration tremblingly unzipped her deformed tight skirt and dug out a pack of chewing gum softened by seawater.
Chen Jian walked over in a few steps, snatched the gum wrapper, roughly peeled off the green outer packaging, and twisted out the thin silver foil inside.
More than a dozen people all crowded around, deliberately suppressing even their breathing.
No one could understand what this usually meek husband, who lived off his wife, was going crazy about.
Chen Jian walked behind a huge reef.
It just happened to block the bone-piercing cold wind blowing in from the sea.
He half-knelt on the sand, unbuttoned his shirt, and tore a long strip of cotton directly from the relatively dry hem of his undershirt.
He rubbed it vigorously with both hands, working the strip into a fluffy wad of cotton.
Then he scraped a little dry moss powder from a nearby rock crevice and carefully padded it underneath.
After that, he folded the foil in half.
Lowering his head, he bit along the edge of the foil little by little with his teeth, forcibly biting out an extremely narrow “hourglass” shape in the middle.
At the narrowest connection point, the width was less than two millimeters.
Chen Jian pressed one end of the foil firmly against the positive terminal of the lithium battery.
His thumb pressed down hard.
The other end, extremely slowly and steadily, pressed toward the metal plate on the negative terminal.
The instant they touched.
Sizzle!
The short-circuit current pierced through the foil in a fraction of a second.
The narrowest part in the middle, where resistance was greatest, couldn’t take it. It was burned red-hot by the terrifying heat, then burst into a dazzling bright-yellow spark.
The residual paper fibers attached to the back of the foil caught fire on the spot.
Chen Jian, quick-eyed and quick-handed, pinched the weak flame and stuffed it into the prepared pile of shirt cotton and moss.
He threw himself on the ground, cupped his hands into a semicircular wind shield, puffed out his cheeks, and blew into it extremely gently and rhythmically.
Huff… huff…
A wisp of extremely thin white smoke drifted up unsteadily.
Then.
Whoosh!
A finger-sized orange-red flame slowly lit up.
“Fire! It’s lit! It’s really lit!”
“Holy shit! Sister Lan, your husband is amazing!”
The beach, suppressed to its limit, completely exploded.
Several grown men were so excited they burst into tears on the spot, tumbling and crawling toward the back of the reef without a care.
Wang Qiang reacted fastest. Relying on his size advantage, he shouldered someone aside and unreasonably occupied the core position closest to the flame, his hands almost pressed into the fire.
Su Qingxue’s nerves, tense to the point of snapping, finally relaxed.
Her legs went soft, and she slowly slid down along the rock wall to sit.
Feeling that faint but real warmth, she looked at Chen Jian.
Knowledge, in this godforsaken place where even money was useless, had actually become the only hard currency.
The fire was indeed lit.
But these people celebrated too early.
What everyone brought over in a flurry were all rotten kelp and driftwood, soaked in seawater for years, coated in thick salt frost and seabed silt.
As soon as these things were thrown into the fire.
Crackle! Pop!
The wet wood exploded violently under the heat. Extremely thick, turbid, rolling white smoke, like sewer poison gas fermented for ten years, suddenly billowed out.
The cold sea wind blew back in, and that poisonous smoke plastered itself solidly all over everyone’s faces.
Cough, cough, cough… urgh!
Su Qingxue took the brunt of it, choked until tears streamed wildly. She covered her mouth tightly, her thin body convulsing violently, coughing until even the last of the bile in her stomach was about to come up.
Liu Feifei was worse off. Her exquisite face was smoked black, and she lay on the sand, crying and dry-heaving at the same time.
The male colleagues around them were no better, all covering their eyes and coughing frantically.
But.
Not a single person stepped back. Not even half a step.
Stepping back meant extreme cold that could freeze a person to the marrow.
They could only cry bitterly, coughing until their lungs felt shredded, while crowding desperately toward that stinking pile of flames.
Pure suffering.
Just in the midst of this extremely miserable poison-gas roasting, the direction of the airflow changed.
A breeze poured down from the rocky slope halfway up the mountain.
There was no suffocating smoke in the wind.
There was only a meat fragrance so rich it was enough to drive a person insane on the spot.
Luncheon meat — a heavy-industry crystallization of high starch, high fat, and high salt.
Under open-flame roasting, the animal fat completely dissolved, mixed with the distinctive fragrance of the premium camphor kindling, and drifted slowly over.
That smell passed through the filthy thick smoke below without any obstruction, brutally drilling into every person’s nostrils.
Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle~
A series of intestinal rumblings exploded in Su Qingxue’s abdomen.
She clutched her stomach tightly, her cheeks instantly flushing blood-red.
The queenly posture she used to hold in company meeting rooms was, in that moment, stripped bare by this primitive physiological reaction.
Hunger.
A fear more destructive than cold began to backlash.
The fire pile had dispelled some of the cold, allowing the group’s metabolisms to start running again.
From the cruise accident at noon until now, after more than ten hours of high-intensity physical exhaustion, they had eaten nothing.
Their empty stomachs began secreting stomach acid wildly, their stomach walls rubbing and corroding against each other, triggering wave after wave of dizzying, cramping pain.
“Meat… he’s eating meat…”
Zhang Tao lay paralyzed at the farthest outer edge of the fire pile.
His eyes were glazed, staring unfocused at the mountainside.
Cloudy saliva stretched in long threads from the corner of his cracked mouth, dripping into his torn shirt, and he didn’t even notice.
“Give me a bite… just let me lick that tin box with the meat in it…” Zhang Tao neurotically scratched at the sand with his nails, muttering incoherently.
In the inner circle of the fire pile.
Wang Qiang’s eyes were smoked shut, his whole face twisted into extreme ferocity.
He felt a sharp-edged reef fragment beneath his butt.
Five fingers gripped the stone’s edge tightly, the veins on the back of his hand bulging one by one.
But then he thought of the terrifying power with which Lin Fan had kicked him flying, and the cold tactical straight knife pressed against his neck, and all the impulses in his head were doused cold.
Take a stone to fight a knife? To fight that madman who could kick and break a man’s ribs?
Wang Qiang’s fingers loosened, and the stone dropped onto the sand.
He couldn’t beat him. He simply couldn’t afford to provoke him.
With nowhere to vent his extremely twisted hunger, Wang Qiang stiffly turned his neck, his gaze sweeping over the colleagues around him.
If a person was truly starving, they could eat anything.
“Don’t panic… don’t panic…” Su Qingxue bit her broken lip, using the pain to force herself to maintain her last shred of reason.
“Midnight… I said rescue will definitely arrive at midnight… as soon as we’re on the helicopter, I’ll book out an entire Michelin restaurant on the Bund when we get back… eat whatever you want…”
To back up her own words, Su Qingxue raised her wrist and, with great difficulty, looked at the waterproof Patek Philippe.
That was her only spiritual pillar.
But.
The instant her gaze touched the dial, Su Qingxue went completely rigid.
On the dial.
That slender second hand wasn’t ticking clockwise at all.
It had gone mad.
It spun wildly more than half a turn to the left, then suddenly jumped back several ticks to the right.
The hour and minute hands were even more completely scrambled, the pointers fighting each other.
This sea area’s extremely terrifying geomagnetic anomaly could instantly destroy even the most precise mechanical watch.
“What time is it…” Su Qingxue’s voice completely changed pitch. “Wang Qiang! What time is it now!”
Wang Qiang froze, then quickly rolled up his sleeve to look at his Rolex.
“Ms. Su… this watch is broken! The hands are all drifting wildly!”
Liu Feifei let out a piercing scream. “My Cartier has stopped too! The hour hand is turning backward!”
“Mine too! They’re all messed up!”
Panic.
A ultimate despair, overriding hunger and cold, instantly detonated the group’s psychological defenses.
In civilized society, time was the foundation of order.
And now, order had collapsed.
They had no idea at all how long this pitch-black night had been dragging on.
Was it eight in the evening? Or two in the morning?
That illusory midnight that had sustained everyone’s will to live had completely become an empty promise without even a scale to measure it by.
Time stretched infinitely.
Thick smoke, bone-piercing cold wind, stomach-churning pain. Every second was magnified into something as long as a year.
Beside this pile of broken fire that could only emit foul, thick smoke, this group of people who had once stood at the top of society’s pyramid had completely become livestock waiting to be slaughtered.
…
Halfway up the mountain, in the cave.
The fire was bright, without a trace of choking black smoke.
The camphor burned, releasing extremely comfortable radiant heat, baking the entire cave dry and warm.
Lin Fan chewed the last piece of luncheon meat coated in焦-brown fat.
On his retina, the omniscient vision’s golden prompt box refreshed, taking in the entire extremely miserable farce on the beach below.
[Status update for the target group below.]
[Su Qingxue (CEO of Sheng Tang Group): Severe hunger, mild carbon monoxide poisoning. Psychological defense collapse progress: 85%. Experiencing deep panic from losing all sense of time.]
[Wang Qiang (Sales Supervisor): Rationality plummeting. Suppressing an extreme binge-eating desire. Already eyeing his own kind with an extremely dangerous predatory hunger.]
[Chen Jian (Structural Engineer): Using technology to gain temporary authority. Extremely calm. Evaluating everyone’s remaining value, especially paying attention to severely dehydrated women. Ready to betray at any moment.]
Lin Fan turned his wrist and slid the straight knife precisely back into its sheath.
He stood up and walked to the cave entrance. “Midnight?”
Lin Fan curled the corner of his mouth into a sneer.
“On this island, there is no midnight. There is only the survival of the fittest.”