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Old Liu’s body gleamed with a pale, grayish, waxy sheen in the sunlight.
He lay stark naked on the sand, that spine-chilling smile still on his face.
Little Wang’s death looked even worse.
No one knew when he had rolled off the reef, but the back of his head had struck squarely against a sharp rock corner, and blood had pooled in a large dark patch.
His eyes were half-open, looking at the sky but not really at the sky, looking at people but not really at people.
Lily from public relations curled up in the farthest corner.
Her hands clutched her knees tightly, her whole body curled into a ball. That was the last warming action her body had instinctively made in the final minutes of her life.
And two more bodies were stacked together, arms and legs intertwined, so tangled it was impossible to tell who was pressing on whom.
The living stood beside the bodies.
No one spoke.
Waves slapped against the beach, one after another.
“Ahhhhh~”
Xiao Zhou from administration broke down first, her throat squeezing out a sharp, off-key scream. Her legs gave way, and she collapsed straight onto the sand.
“Five people are dead… five people! We’re going to die too! We’re all going to die in this godforsaken place!”
That voice was like a fuse.
In an instant, it ignited everyone.
“Help! Who will save us!”
“I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die in a ghost place like this!”
“Ms. Su! Didn’t you say rescue would arrive by midnight last night? Where are the people? Where’s the plane?!”
A male employee, his face covered in gray-black grime, rushed up to Su Qingxue, his eyes completely bloodshot, the veins in his neck bulging out one by one, spit spraying directly into her face.
“You lied to us! You’ve been lying to us from start to finish! What bullshit rescue! A fart would have more substance than your promise!”
Su Qingxue stepped back half a step.
She stared at the twisted face in front of her, completely unrecognizable.
What was this person called? From the tech department? Logistics?
She actually couldn’t remember.
Back at the company, a person like this didn’t even have the right to enter her office.
But now, this person, whose name wasn’t even worth her remembering, was pointing at her nose and cursing at her in a way she hadn’t heard in more than twenty years of living.
“Everyone, calm down!” Su Qingxue instinctively raised her voice.
A whole night of poisonous smoke, sea wind, and dehydration had ruined most of her throat.
No one listened.
The crowd completely exploded.
Someone else knelt beside Old Liu’s body, pushing over and over at the body that wouldn’t move at all, repeating just one sentence. “Old Liu, get up, don’t sleep anymore. The sun is out…”
Wang Qiang leaned behind a large reef, saying nothing.
His head hung down, both hands in his pockets, his shoulders trembling constantly.
Not from cold.
From fear.
Last night, he had used Old Liu as a human wind shield. It wasn’t as if no one present had seen it.
Now that the man was dead, what if someone dug up the old account… what if someone pinned that life on his head…
He would go to jail when he got back.
He quickly scanned the area.
Everyone was going crazy. No one was paying attention.
Zhang Tao stood at the edge of the crowd.
His expression was very flat.
That flatness wasn’t calmness. It was complete numbness.
He looked at Old Liu’s smiling dead face, and only one thought remained in his mind: if they still couldn’t go back today.
Old Liu’s coat.
The gray windbreaker Old Liu had frantically stripped off last night had been blown two meters away, crumpled into a ball on the sand.
Zhang Tao slowly moved over.
He hooked the corner of the coat with his toe and nudged it bit by bit to his feet.
He bent down, picked it up, and shook off the sand.
He put it on himself.
Dead person’s or living person’s, it didn’t matter. Warm was warm.
From start to finish, no one noticed him.
Chen Jian pushed up his salt-stained glasses.
He squatted beside the three bodies and examined them one by one.
His wife, Wang Lan, stood behind him, clutching his shirt hem tightly, not a trace of color in her face.
“How did they die?” Wang Lan asked.
“Old Liu died of paradoxical undressing.” Chen Jian stood up. “When body temperature drops below thirty degrees, the part of the brain that regulates temperature basically fries, and the whole brain thinks it’s on fire, so he frantically stripped his clothes off.”
“Little Wang convulsed in the night and fell, hitting the back of his head on a sharp stone. Bad luck.”
“Lily died from hypothermia, dehydration, and carbon monoxide poisoning — a triple blow. She was the weakest, so she was the first who couldn’t hold on.”
He glanced at the pile of bonfire ashes, and the corner of his mouth twitched hard.
That fire had indeed saved most people’s lives.
But the cost was that, when there was no wind, the carbon monoxide smoldering out of those wet, rotten logs above was concentrated enough to send the weakest few directly to their deaths.
Su Qingxue held onto the reef and took three deep breaths in a row.
She couldn’t panic. She absolutely couldn’t let the scene completely collapse at this moment.
Once this group’s trust in her crumbled, she would be nothing.
No bodyguards, no assistants, no lawyers.
The only thing on her body still worth anything was this mouth of hers.
At the company, she had handled countless crisis PR cases.
A public opinion scandal exploding, a stock price crashing, an executive running off with the money — which time hadn’t she turned the situation around at the most critical moment with a single press conference?
It was the same now.
She needed a story.
A story that would make this group, standing on the edge of collapse, choose to believe her again.
It didn’t need to be true.
It just needed to sound true.
Su Qingxue let go of the reef and walked step by step into the middle of the crowd.
“All of you, be quiet!”
That shout squeezed the last bit of moisture out of her throat.
Her throat felt as if it had been sliced by a blade, hurting so much her vision blurred.
But it worked.
The shouting and crying stopped for two seconds.
More than a dozen bloodshot pairs of eyes turned toward her in unison.
Su Qingxue stood up straight.
The one-piece swimsuit on her body was so dirty you couldn’t tell it had once been white, and her long hair was tangled into dead knots plastered to her shoulders.
But the way she stood there was exactly the same as on the fifty-eighth floor of Sheng Tang Group’s boardroom.
Back straight, chin slightly raised, hands folded in front of her.
The things honed from years of struggling in the capital markets were carved into her bones. They couldn’t be burned away.
“Something happened last night. Old Liu and the others… are gone.”
She paused for a second.
Her gaze swept over everyone present.
“I promise you, in my capacity as CEO of Sheng Tang Group, that as long as we can go back alive, Old Liu, Little Wang, Lily, and the other two colleagues — Sheng Tang Group will take full responsibility for each of their families.”
“Compensation: one million per person. Children’s education, parents’ retirement, mortgages and car loans — all covered by the company. Not a single cent less.”
“The living will get the same.”
Su Qingxue looked around the circle, slowing her pace.
“Everyone present, as long as you hold on with me until the moment rescue arrives, when we return to Jiangcheng, each person will receive two hundred thousand yuan in cash compensation, plus a lifetime position guarantee at Sheng Tang Group.”
“The injured will have all medical expenses fully covered by the company. Those with psychological trauma will be assigned the best specialists for long-term rehabilitation.”
“These are not empty promises. After we return, in black and white, witnessed by lawyers, signed into contracts one by one.”