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The fire in the cave had burned down to embers when Lin Fan opened his eyes.
He did not hurry to get up. Keeping his posture leaning against the rock wall, his right hand instinctively reached to his side.
The knife was still there.
His fingers touched the cold handle, his fingertips rubbing over the rough anti-slip texture, and his heartbeat steadied by half a beat.
But his arms were empty.
Last night, that nation’s first love who had used every skill she had in the firelight, as if she wanted to melt herself into the cracks of his bones, had not left even a single hair behind.
Lin Fan twisted the corner of his mouth.
It was not an accident, and it was not even a disappointment.
Pinch a snake by its vital point, feed it a hot meal, and the moment you let go, it would be strange if she did not slip away.
His gaze shifted.
On the other side of the cave, a small white shape was huddled up.
Song Ya.
Last night, after Liu Feifei had exhausted herself and collapsed on the ground asleep, Lin Fan had gotten up to add firewood.
He had also glanced toward the cave entrance.
Song Ya had been curled up behind a rock outside, her lips frozen to the color of pig liver, her teeth chattering like castanets, her whole body shaking like a sieve, only a breath away from shock.
He had let her in.
Now, Song Ya was hugging her knees with both hands, her chin resting on her kneecaps, her rabbit eyes, red from a sleepless night, fixed on Lin Fan.
Her eye whites were full of bloodshot veins, as if red ink had been dripped into them.
“Awake?”
Lin Fan sat up straight, casually picked up an unburned stick from the ground, and poked at the embers.
With a crack, a few sparks burst out, curling away in a wisp of blue smoke.
The fire had not completely cooled yet.
Song Ya bit her lower lip, her eyes churning with a mess of feelings: three parts fear of him, three parts grievance, and the remaining four parts anger she could not suppress.
“She ran away.”
Song Ya spoke, every word carrying a barb.
“I have eyes.”
Lin Fan did not even raise his head, the stick in his hand continuing to poke at the ashes.
“She slipped away while it was still dark, without making a sound.”
Song Ya’s pace quickened. “Lin Fan, she played you! She was never sincerely following you. She only came for a bite to eat! She came for this fire! Once she had eaten her fill, drunk her fill, and warmed up, she patted her butt and walked away.”
Lin Fan’s hand stopped moving.
He raised his head.
“True feelings?”
He savored those two words and could not help laughing out loud.
It was not a polite laugh.
It was the kind of laugh snorted out through the nose, a laugh of genuine absurdity.
“Song Ya, is your head filled with salt water from the Pacific? In a place like this, you are talking to me about true feelings?”
Song Ya’s face burned from his laughter. Both hands clutched the hem of her shirt, her knuckles turning white.
“What are you laughing at! Am I wrong? Last night… last night she shamelessly fawned over you, got what she wanted, and then turned her face! She isn’t even human!”
Song Ya spoke faster and faster, her voice cracking.
“She also took the bottle of mineral water you left on the rock!”
Lin Fan lazily glanced at the flat rock beside him.
It was empty.
“So what?”
Lin Fan twisted his neck, and his cervical vertebrae made two crisp cracking sounds.
“Don’t you understand yet!”
Song Ya jumped up from the ground in a hurry.
“She went back to find Ms. Su! She will definitely act as if nothing happened and keep playing her pure, innocent big star!”
“When rescue comes and we return to Jiangcheng… Lin Fan, she absolutely will not let you off!”
The more Song Ya spoke, the colder her spine felt.
It was not the wind. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
It was from the months she had interned at Sheng Tang, when she had seen with her own eyes too many ways the people above got rid of others.
Quietly, without a sound, a living person would simply disappear from their workstation.
Even the resignation paperwork was handled by human resources on their behalf.
“She is Liu Feifei! A top star built by capital! Last night… what you did to her, if even one word of it gets out, her image, her endorsements, her dramas will all collapse!”
Song Ya stared with reddened eyes, her voice trembling.
“To shut your mouth, she has ten thousand ways to make it impossible for you to survive in Jiangcheng. She will accuse you of rape! Do you understand?”
Lin Fan listened quietly.
He did not interrupt with a single word.
Only after Song Ya finished did he stand up slowly.
One meter seventy-eight.
The cave ceiling was not high. When he stood straight, his head was only a fist’s distance from the rock above.
This day and night on the desert island had carved something indescribable into him.
It was not as simple as getting a few shades darker from the sun.
His entire presence had changed.
He took a step forward.
Song Ya’s body was more honest than her brain. Before her brain could issue an order, her legs had already automatically stepped back.
Her back hit the cold rock wall.
There was nowhere left to retreat.
“I traded a fingernail-sized scrap of luncheon meat for a whole night of personal service from a top star in domestic entertainment.”
Lin Fan tilted his head.
“Help me work out this deal. Where exactly did I lose?”
Song Ya’s mouth opened, then closed.
Her mind roared. He actually… he actually saw the whole thing like this?
There was no guilt from taking advantage, no head clouded by beauty, not even a trace of smugness about having slept with a big star.
“Accuse me of rape? Which eye of yours saw me holding her head down? She took off her own clothes. She crawled over here herself. She knelt at my feet begging me to touch her.”
“Step back ten thousand paces. Even if this woman really flies back to Jiangcheng and reports me to the police, where is the evidence?”
He pointed toward the cave entrance.
Outside was a rocky slope, farther away was the beach, and at the end of the beach was that insane sea.
“On this broken island where even time runs wrong, who is going to collect evidence? Send a forensic examiner over by kayak? Or have the police ride dolphins to the crime scene?”
Song Ya’s throat moved.
“But…”
“No buts.”
Lin Fan cut her words off dead in her throat.
“She ran back, not because she has confidence, but because she is a coward.”
His voice dropped half a degree.
“She is afraid that if she keeps staying with me, she will only ever be a lifetime exclusive slave girl, without even room to bargain. She has to go back. Back into the crowd, put on her Nine Heavens Goddess shell again, and keep playing her pure image.”
“She thinks that as long as she blends in with Su Qingxue’s group, waits for rescue, and returns to civilized society, she will once again be that high-and-mighty Liu Feifei.”
Lin Fan paused.
“Last night? It never happened. It was all just a nightmare on a desert island.”
As he spoke, he reached out.
Five fingers unceremoniously gripped Song Ya’s chin.
The force was not heavy.
Song Ya was forced to raise her head, her neck stretched into a taut line.
“She ran off. That works out well. Tonight, that vacancy — are you going to fill it?”
Song Ya pushed Lin Fan away, though she did not push him far. She was so hungry right now she could not even strangle a chicken. Both hands quickly crossed protectively over her chest, and her face flushed all the way from her cheeks to the roots of her neck.
“You dream!”
“I won’t… I won’t!”
Song Ya gritted her teeth, her eyes darting everywhere, just not daring to meet Lin Fan’s gaze.
She held out for a long time, her neck stiff as if it had been set in plaster, and finally squeezed out a sentence through her teeth:
“You… you are not clean anymore!”
The instant those words came out, the cave fell silent for a second.
Lin Fan froze. This was a real freeze, not an act.
In this day and night on the desert island, he had been called a beast, called a pervert, and Su Qingxue had pointed at his nose and said he was not fit to be a person. This chapter was copied from NovelPing without permission.
But “not clean anymore” — this was the first time.
The next second, he burst out laughing.
“Not clean?”
Lin Fan laughed so hard he bent over, pointing at Song Ya’s face, black in some places and gray in others.
Then he pointed at her bare feet.
All ten toes were exposed, the soles covered in overlapping scratches, a few cuts still seeping blood, her toenails packed full of mud and sand, as if she had just been dug out of a coal pile.
“Miss Song, do you have some major misunderstanding about your current situation?”
Lin Fan straightened up, the tail end of his laugh still on his face.
“Right now, you can’t even drink a mouthful of water that isn’t salty, you can’t even find a piece of paper to wipe yourself with, and you barely even have a complete pair of pants left to cover yourself with!”
“You are talking to me about being clean?”
Song Ya’s eye sockets reddened at once.
Tears welled up inside them, but stubbornly refused to fall.
It was not that she was not wronged.
It was that she was too wronged, so wronged that even crying felt humiliating.
She held her neck stiff, raising her chin high.
That was her last stubbornness.
“Anyway, I don’t want to.”
“I would rather freeze to death outside than be like her.”
Lin Fan stared at Song Ya for three seconds.
That stare could not quite be called admiration or sizing her up, but it was definitely not the look you gave a dead person.
“You have backbone.”
There was no sarcasm in Lin Fan’s tone. “Since you don’t want to trade that way, then trade this way.”
Lin Fan raised the knife in his hand, then patted his own arm.
“Labor. Use your two hands and two legs, do the work, and trade it for your life.”
He strode toward the cave entrance.
After five or six steps, he did not look back.
“Follow me.”
Song Ya froze where she stood.
The sun had not come out yet. Wind poured in from the cave entrance, sweeping over her body, dressed in only a thin shirt, and the cold drilled into the cracks of her bones like needles.
Song Ya gritted her back teeth and limped after him.
The instant she walked out of the cave, the sea wind blew even harder.
But compared to last night’s blade-like wind that could cut lines into a person’s skin, it was softer, barely downgraded from “lethal” to “half-lethal.”
Lin Fan stood at the edge of the rocky slope halfway up the mountain, looking down toward the beach.
It was too far away.
He could not make out people clearly, only a few black dots moving on the beach.
They moved extremely slowly, like a few half-dead ants.
[Current time: 08:15]
[Ambient temperature: 12 degrees Celsius]
[Beach target group status: Five dead. The remaining survivors have completed a preliminary power reorganization. Su Qingxue controls decision-making power, Wang Qiang acts as the violent enforcement tool. Chen Jian has been forced to accept a technical support role. They are currently split into two routes searching for fresh water and fuel. It is expected that they will still come up empty-handed by noon.]
The golden prompt box floated before his eyes, the writing as clear as if it had been carved in.
Lin Fan narrowed his eyes.
Five dead.
His prediction last night had been a first case of hypothermic shock. He had not expected five to go in one breath.
That woman Su Qingxue did have some skill.
Even with five people dead, she could still pull the rest together again and keep the situation from completely falling apart.
In a company meeting, that would be called crisis leadership.
On this desert island, it was called keeping a cow alive just long enough to keep pulling the millstone.
But that was all it was.
No water, no food, no decent fire.
Her mouth, worth ten billion, could not buy a single thing on this island that would let a person live one more hour.
She would not last long.
“Where are we going?”
Scan note: I checked the English text above for source-script characters. No Chinese-script characters appear in it. Names are rendered in pinyin only, and no source-script terms were preserved.