Wang Ren gave Wei Heng a deep look and did not entangle with them any further, as Old Ghost’s condition was not looking too good.
Seeing that they were no longer looking for trouble, Wei Heng turned around to check on Zhou Youlan.
Zhou Youlan wore a blank expression, clearly still struck dumb with shock from everything that had just happened.
Water droplets clung to the strands of Wei Heng’s high ponytail, rolling down one by one to land on the back of his hand. Zhou Youlan lowered his gaze, watching the water droplet dissolve into his skin’s texture before finally sliding down and merging into the water below.
The ripples sent out by the water droplets shook ceaselessly, mirroring the frantic beating of his heart at that moment.
Even though he held prejudices against Wei Heng, he had to admit that when Wei Heng blocked the danger for him just now, he was genuinely shaken to his core.
During the previous confrontation with Old Ghost, the danger hadn’t directly faced him, and it wasn’t his neck pressed against by a blade. He had never experienced the kind of malice and peril one never encounters in ordinary life.
Yet this time, the sharp tip of the knife was something he experienced firsthand, coming within a hair’s breadth of slicing across his skin.
If not for Wei Heng, he wasn’t entirely certain he could have dodged it.
Seeing that Zhou Youlan remained unresponsive, Wei Heng furrowed his brow slightly. “What is it?”
Could it be that he had frightened this young master just now?
However, the laws of this era were strict and clear. The Zhou family’s young master had been pampered in luxury since childhood and lacked worldly experience, so he had probably never witnessed such a scene.
Zhou Youlan raised his eyes and met Wei Heng’s brow, which was lowered in vexation. He suddenly panicked, his gaze darting away to avoid direct eye contact, only for it to inadvertently land on Wei Heng’s fair and soft earlobes.
The tender flesh carried a faint, alluring pink tint, inexplicably reminding him of a honey peach in June, covered in a delicate layer of fuzz, crystalline and pink within, exuding an inviting fragrance and a sweet taste.
Actually, no matter how much effort men put into skincare, it was hard to maintain such smooth and delicate skin. At the very least, he had never seen another man whose skin was as translucent as warm jade.
Only Wei Heng possessed skin as flawless as condensed jade, strikingly beautiful.
Zhou Youlan thought that Wei Heng, looking like porcelain and jade, appeared frail enough to shatter at the slightest touch, yet he was precisely the sharpest and most aggressive of them all. Snapping a man’s fingers was as easy as breaking a tree branch, and choking someone’s neck was something he did as casually as play.
“Are you hurt?” Wei Heng asked again.
Why did Zhou Youlan keep staring at him in a daze?
Big Mac was also quite anxious. “Brother, are you alright?”
Sudden clarity returning to him, Zhou Youlan hurried to turn around, putting his back to Wei Heng and causing the water around his legs to splash noisily. “Um, cough, I’m fine.”
Zhou Youlan’s reaction was rather strange. Figuring he must have been frightened and finding no obvious injuries on him, Wei Heng didn’t press further.
Everyone climbed out of the water, but the atmosphere was much quieter than before, with no one daring to speak loudly.
Niu Xixi in particular, usually the most boisterous of them all who could scream at a caterpillar and break out into an impromptu laser dance upon encountering a snake, and who had just been complaining tearfully and aggrievedly about being bullied by Li Xiaohuan, didn’t even dare to cry now.
Yet anyone who had witnessed that scene felt a lingering terror in their hearts, because Old Ghost had genuinely looked like he was about to choke to death under Wei Heng’s grip.
He was truly on the verge of dying.
It was their first time witnessing up close the genuine physiological reactions of a person being strangled. The veins on his neck and forehead bulged violently, his eyes popped wider than usual, and the deep indentation carved by the grass string compressed his skin tightly to cut off his airway. Air went out but refused to come in, and his face was suffused with a near-death flush.
At that moment, they felt a sliver of pity for Old Ghost, but fear far outweighed it.
How could Wei Heng remain so calm?
No matter how frantically Old Ghost struggled, Wei Heng remained completely unmoved, without even a trace of a ferocious or terrified expression on his face. To him, it seemed killing a person was as simple as eating and drinking, leaving him as cold and indifferent as a demon straight out of hell.
Wei Heng sat down to the side, pulled out a new woven rattan bowstring, and restrung the bow.
After all the tossing and turning, Big Mac was completely exhausted. He slumped to the ground. “Brother, what Wei Heng did just now…”
“Do you think he was sent by the family?”
Even if Wei Heng truly liked Zhou Youlan, it was impossible for him to recklessly throw himself into the frontlines at every turn, right?
Big Mac continued, “Given that scene just now, everyone was so terrified that not a single person dared to step up. How come Wei Heng was so brave? Could it purely be because he likes you? If so, Wei Heng really is the ultimate pure-love warrior.”
“Besides, Wei Heng obviously has decent combat skills,” Big Mac pondered aloud. “Yet I’ve never seen him around the estate. There haven’t been any new hires recently, and even if there were, they would have to pass through my dad’s hands. If they went through him, I definitely would have seen them.”
Zhou Youlan sat in silence, lost in thought.
Zhang Tongtong crept over to sit beside Wei Heng, stealing a few covert glances loaded with unmasked admiration and nervousness.
Noticing the frequent glances directed his way, Wei Heng spoke first. “Is something the matter?”
His tone remained cool and detached, exactly as before.
Zhang Tongtong chuckled awkwardly. “Nothing, nothing at all.”
He hitched his hips forward to close the distance between them. “Brother Wei, did you study martial arts?”
The moves Wei Heng used to handle Old Ghost didn’t look random at all. Watching from the side, they had the smooth yet powerful fluidity of choreography in an action movie.
He had once acted in a short historical drama and filmed a few martial arts scenes. The moves taught by the action director were meant to look flashy without any real destructive power, completely unlike Wei Heng’s style. Wei Heng’s movements carried genuine, solid physical force, effortlessly subduing a guy in two swift maneuvers.
Wei Heng did not give a direct answer. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason, just think you’re insanely cool and know how to do everything.” Zhang Tongtong’s eyes shone brightly as he looked at him. “Those guys like Old Ghost are way too arrogant and always start trouble. They definitely needed a warning and a lesson.”
Even though Wei Heng’s execution was far more ruthless than they could have imagined.
Wei Heng offered no reply. Once the bowstring was secured, he went back to trimming and smoothing out the branch to make it easier to handle.
“Brother Wei, walking all this way, we haven’t even seen a snake or a wild boar, let alone a rabbit. What a shame. We made a bow and arrow, but there’s nothing to use it on.”
An idea suddenly sparked in Zhang Tongtong’s mind. “Hey, why don’t we eat tree roots instead? If we boil them into soup, it probably won’t taste too bad.”
Ruan Mengmeng pulled a wry face. “What? I refuse.”
“Well, what else can we do? The fish are gone now, and we can’t even spot a tiny shrimp. We’re going to starve another night.”
Wei Heng quickly finished strapping the bow and arrow to his back. “Wild game in the forest favors dense, dry wooded areas, and their habitats are never too far from a water source.”
He had observed the local terrain upon arriving here. “The woods a bit further ahead gradually thin out, but the shrubbery is very dense. The probability of wildlife appearing there is much higher.”
Naturally, they wouldn’t encounter any large beasts.
“Huh?” Zhang Tongtong’s eyes lit up at the words. “Will there be wild chickens, rabbits, or anything like that?”
Wei Heng answered, “Perhaps.”
A wave of excitement washed over Zhang Tongtong. Just as he was about to drag Wei Heng along to search, Zhou Youlan cut him off. “It’s getting dark soon. It’s not safe to go into the woods. You’re not allowed to go.”
Zhang Tongtong’s smile froze on his face as he turned away in disappointment.
“We might as well go back into the water and fish around. Who knows, we might catch some fish or shrimp,” Zhou Youlan suggested instead.
“Right!” Ruan Mengmeng stood up. “There’s no way there’s only a single fish in this entire river. Maybe we can catch some more.”
A shred of hope rekindled among the others. Trying their luck in the water beat waiting around helplessly.
Ruan Mengmeng brushed her bangs away from her forehead, staring at the river surface with a resolute gaze. “I’m going to battle this river to the death today. I refuse to believe there’s only one fish in it. I am definitely drinking fish soup tonight.”
Borrowing knives from Zhou Youlan, Ruan Mengmeng and the others chopped off tree branches, sharpened one end to use as makeshift spear-fishing sticks, and stepped right back into the water.
The others followed suit, whittling down their own sticks and wading in one after another. The river, which had barely settled, was churned up into turbulence once more.
Wei Heng stayed out of the water, walking toward the riverbank to gather a pile of thin twigs with the intention of making a fish trap.
Sharing the same idea, Zhou Youlan set out to do the same.
Big Mac, however, was less than optimistic. “By the time you guys finish weaving that thing, it’ll be pitch black.”
Besides, they didn’t even have bait, and crafting such a contraption looked entirely too troublesome.
“Stop whining and come help,” Zhou Youlan tossed a bundle of branches at him. “Strip off the leaves and keep the stalks.”
Working with high efficiency, Wei Heng first bent slightly pliable twigs to shape large, medium, and small loops, then cut other slightly stiffer branches to uniform lengths to weave the cage frame.
One end of the fish trap was narrow while the other was much wider. He used the short cut branches to weave a funnel-shaped opening resembling a bowl mouth, leaving a fist-sized gap at the bottom before inverting and securing it tightly to the wide opening of the trap. This way, once fish and shrimp wriggled through the funnel for bait, escaping would be nearly impossible.
Zhou Youlan was also familiar with this fishing technique, though using plastic bottles was actually much simpler.
One could simply cut off the bottle neck and invert it into the body of the bottle, placing bait at the bottom. As long as there were fish in the river, virtually any could be caught.
However, plastic bottles could only catch small fish, rendering anything larger than the bottle opening inaccessible. Their hand-woven fish traps could hold a larger quantity and offered a much higher chance of securing larger fish.
Yet with the fish trap taking shape, finding bait posed a fresh dilemma.
As the traps neared completion, Zhou Youlan dispatched Big Mac to rummage through the dead wood and decaying branches along the riverbank or beneath trees to unearth earthworms or fruit tree larvae.
Zhang Tongtong and the others had already groped quite a distance upstream. Carrying his finished fish trap, Wei Heng headed downstream as well. The dense water plants down there offered a significantly higher probability of catching fish than the upper reaches.
Zhou Youlan’s trap remained unfinished. Catching sight of Wei Heng heading downstream, he hurriedly gathered his incomplete trap and followed along, weaving as he walked.
Glancing at Wei Heng’s handiwork, Zhou Youlan noted how neatly and densely it was woven. Although the trap measured only half an arm’s length, it looked remarkably sturdy.
In contrast, while his intentions were good, his finished product was full of flaws. The branches kept snapping easily, and weaving them together tightly proved far more difficult than anticipated. A slight miscalculation in force would break the wood.
By the time he finally managed to piece it together, the twigs holding the structure looked loose and sparse, threatening to cause the entire trap to collapse and fall apart at any moment.
He had to hand it to Wei Heng. The guy was genuinely formidable.
Yet where on earth had Wei Heng picked up all these skills?
With his hands aching from digging through the water to no avail, Zhang Tongtong looked at the arriving Wei Heng and felt like crying tears of despair. “Brother Wei, will I actually get to eat fish tonight?”
Standing on the riverbank while pondering how to source bait, Wei Heng caught the faint sound of an unusual disturbance echoing from the shrubbery.