[Damaged satellite phone: Motherboard severely corroded, battery short-circuited. No signal was successfully sent before it hit the water. Current rescue probability: 0%.]
A 0% chance of rescue.
Lin Fan felt as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over his head. The chill exploded through him, and even standing under a blazing sun on a beach pushing forty degrees, he couldn’t stop himself from shivering.
The noise around him — the shouting, the waves, the women’s cries — seemed to be sucked away in an instant, as if the air itself had been turned into a vacuum.
All he could hear was a sharp ringing in his ears.
He stiffly lifted his head, his gaze traveling past the crowd toward the primeval jungle in the distance, dead silent and strangely ominous. Wherever he looked, golden text jumped into view again.
[Current location: Latitude X, Longitude Y (edge of the Devil’s Triangle region).]
[Environmental analysis: Strong magnetic interference. Radio silence. The nearest major shipping lane is 600 nautical miles off course.]
[Rescue probability: 0.0001%. The nearest human to this place is an astronaut in space.]
One in ten thousand.
Lin Fan stood there, wooden, his eyeballs dry and aching.
Was this it?
What he’d wanted was to live here with these women for a month — and then be picked up and taken home.
Now, it looked like he might just die here.
No rescue. No signal. On an island that might not even be on the map, how long could a group of soft, modern people survive? Three days? Five?
He stood there stunned for a full five minutes.
It wasn’t until an unfamiliar seabird screeched overhead, a blob of droppings nearly landing on the tip of his nose, that Lin Fan snapped back to himself.
Instinctively, he glanced at Su Qingxue not far away.
The icy CEO was directing everyone, her face pale but her eyes still steady and certain.
She genuinely believed the signal had gone out.
She genuinely believed that tonight a helicopter would come roaring down out of the sky and carry them back to a civilized world of air conditioning, red wine, and Simmons mattresses.
Should he tell them the truth?
Lin Fan moved his cracked lips, but in the next second, the thought was ruthlessly snuffed out.
Absolutely not.
The only reason order hadn’t collapsed yet was that everyone still believed there was law, and rescue. Once that veil was torn away, once they knew this was a place beyond the law, despair would instantly breed the purest kind of evil.
If it came down to fighting over the last mouthful of water, Lin Fan didn’t dare imagine what these polished elites were capable of.
If everyone knew they were never going home, then on this island, murder wouldn’t land you in prison.
Lin Fan took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. Since there was no going back, he had to survive.
And in this godforsaken place, his only advantage was the “omniscient prompt” in front of his eyes.
His vision refocused, and the chaotic beach instantly transformed into something else entirely in his eyes.
Except for him, almost everyone was frantically “collecting supplies.”
A sales manager who usually bossed him around was now on his hands and knees in a pile of rotting seaweed, clutching a seawater-swollen Hermès Birkin bag. He ignored the mud and stench clinging to it, his face lit up with the joy of someone who’d just struck gold.
Not far from him, two elite men in high-end shirts were wrestling each other.
Over an overturned metal case.
The case had spilled open, and more than a dozen luxury watches lay scattered on the sand, glittering temptingly in the sunlight.
“We’re rich! This time we’re really fucking rich!”
One of the men slipped a diamond-encrusted Rolex onto his wrist, his face flushed with excitement, the veins in his neck bulging. “This one alone is worth hundreds of thousands! Sell it back home, and at worst I can still drive away in a Mercedes.”
“Bullshit! I saw it first!” The other man lunged at him, ready to bite.
Human greed was magnified to infinity in that moment.
In their minds, survival wasn’t even a question. They’d be home tonight. And since they were going home, whatever you grabbed was yours!
Who, at a time like this, would bother picking up worthless luncheon meat and bottled water?
Only Lin Fan.
He looked at the troop of not-quite-evolved monkeys, pulled his gaze away, and turned toward an unremarkable pile of wreckage.
[Damaged shipping container: Shell severely deformed, but pressed into the lower right corner are 12 undamaged cans of luncheon meat, seals intact.]
[Scattered plastic crate: Mixed in beneath women’s underwear and torn cloth, it conceals a full case of 500 ml bottled water — 24 bottles in total.]
Without a moment’s hesitation, Lin Fan nimbly pushed aside the broken plank pressing down on top. The moment his fingertips touched the cold plastic of a water bottle, he felt more grounded than he would have holding a bar of gold.
He took off his soaked vest, wrapped the luncheon meat tightly inside it, tied it into a firm knot, then heaved up the case of water, ready to find a shady spot to hide it all.
Not far away, Zhao Na had just slipped a huge diamond ring onto her finger. She turned, saw what Lin Fan was doing, and rolled her eyes in open contempt. “Treating a pile of junk like treasure. Some people really are hopeless.”
“Well, well. Isn’t this our star waiter, Lin?”
A mocking voice followed right behind it.
Lin Fan stopped and turned his head.
Wang Qiang was swaggering toward him with two male subordinates in tow. The two men were draped in designer bags, watches, and even several gold necklaces scavenged from every corner of the beach, like a pair of walking display racks.
And in Wang Qiang’s hand was a bottle of red wine, still sealed.
Romanée-Conti.
The finale item from the ship’s auction, rumored to have a starting price equal to a sports car.
Wang Qiang looked at the bottled water and luncheon meat in Lin Fan’s arms and laughed so hard he nearly doubled over, tears almost flying.
“Lin Fan, is your brain full of paste? Or did you drink so much seawater you haven’t drained it all yet?”
He pointed at Lin Fan. “Ms. Su already said the rescue team is coming tonight! The helicopter arrives, and we go home! What are you picking up this garbage for? Planning to take it home and open a corner shop for your poor old mother?”
The colleague beside him, wearing a green-bezeled Rolex he’d just snatched, sneered along with him, shaking his wrist so the gold caught the light and dazzled the eye.
“Exactly, Lin Fan. Look at the watches your brother’s got here. Sure, we suffered on this trip, but once we sell these back home, we’ll be millionaires! And you? You’re picking up cans? Were you a starving ghost in your last life?”
“Don’t say that,” the other colleague chimed in sarcastically. “The man’s a waiter, after all. Occupational habit. He’s probably saving that water so he can keep serving us on the plane, hoping we’ll tip him a little something. Ha ha ha ha!”
The harsh laughter echoed across the empty beach.
Lin Fan watched the celebrating clowns without expression.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t get angry.
Now that he knew the chance of rescue was only 0.0001%, their mockery sounded to him like the ravings of the dying.
He glanced at the priceless bottle of red wine in Wang Qiang’s hand, then at the gold watch on his colleague’s wrist.
Golden subtitles floated into view again:
[Romanée-Conti (1990): Top-tier red wine. Contains alcohol, which accelerates dehydration. Drinking it with no fresh water available is slow suicide. Best served with a coffin.]
[Gold Rolex: A heavy metal object. You can’t eat it, you can’t drink it. Aside from adding weight and burning calories, it’s completely useless. Might work as a nutcracker, though.]
The corner of Lin Fan’s mouth curved slightly upward.
Laugh.
Go ahead and laugh.
Wait until midnight passes, until the sound of helicopter rotors never comes, until real hunger, thirst, and cold set in. Then we’ll see whether you gnaw on a gold watch to fill your stomach, or drink red wine to quench your thirst.
By then, those priceless treasures in your hands won’t even be worth trading for a single mouthful of my water.
“Done laughing?” Lin Fan said lightly, his voice surprisingly calm. “If you’re done, get out of my way. Good dogs don’t block the road.”
“What did you say?!”
Wang Qiang’s face changed. He hadn’t expected Lin Fan — usually so meek, so easy to push around — to talk back. He was about to explode, his raised hand not yet fallen, when Su Qingxue’s cool voice came from the distance.