Zhang Shutong froze for an instant before his body reacted. He lunged forward, about to call for the others to tackle the man and seize the gun.
But then, with a muffled thump, the girl's deceptively light kick exploded with incredible force. The man's body was sent flying backward like a kite with a broken string, his feet lifting off the ground—
—Lu Qinglian instantly changed her stance, her raised foot landing firmly. With a twist of her ankle, the sole of her shoe ground against the dirt path with a sound that set teeth on edge as she channeled her entire body into a sudden exertion of force!
Her other leg immediately followed up with a back kick, striking the long gun dead-on.
Thump, thump.
Two kicks in the blink of an eye. The first knocked the man down, the second sent his weapon flying. In the next instant, the man in the cap was sent flying backward, gun and all, and landed hard on the path.
Dust flew. The girl calmly retracted her leg, her robe settling back at her side.
……
The night of December 5th, 2012.
Zhang Shutong and his friends encountered a man with a gun.
The man took his classmates hostage.
And then the man went flying.
Zhang Shutong and his friends were all completely floored. If one were to use a trendy, of-the-era phrase to describe their shock, it would have to be—
My little buddies and I were all gobsmacked.
—Until the man's intermittent groans and curses sounded from the ground.
Only then did they snap back to reality. Qingyi charged forward and delivered a karate chop; Ruoping ran to Lu Qinglian's side, anxiously asking if she was hurt, with Du Kang trailing along.
Zhang Shutong, for his part, went and picked up the rifle. Cradling it in his arms, his heart finally dropped back into his chest.
In just that short span of time, he had broken out in a cold sweat. Now, as the night wind blew, he felt a chill run down his back.
Really, there won't be any more surprises, will there?
The night's events could only be described as a roller coaster: first the cop, then the poacher, and now this gunman, each one more dangerous than the last... He pinched the bridge of his nose and stole a look at Lu Qinglian.
Ruoping was holding her by the shoulders, asking all sorts of questions, her expression a mix of shock and adoration. The other girl would sometimes give a slight nod, sometimes shake her head, the same as always.
It was as if she hadn't just kicked a gun-wielding thug, but a shuttlecock in a schoolyard game.
Thinking back on that kick, Zhang Shutong was still overcome with a sense of unreality.
He had known she was mysterious, but this was ridiculous. Was she really the keeper of the Green Snake Shrine and not, say, the Shaolin Temple?
He had actually practiced some self-defense in high school—you couldn't save the world without some martial arts skills, after all. And while in the end, he was only a little stronger than the average person, he could still size someone up.
The girl's two kicks had been superb in their reaction time, power, and precision. Forget his high school self; even the man he was eight years later couldn't have taken her on with one hand.
Zhang Shutong was better with his head than his fists. He felt that his brain, at least, was something he could control; combat power, on the other hand, wasn't something you could just conjure up on demand.
Now was the time to use his head.
"Shutong, come take a look at this," Qingyi called out from the side.
He went over and saw that his friend had found another one of the woven sacks. Faint rustling sounds, as if from a few chickens, could be heard from within.
Zhang Shutong first felt the outside of the bag. The two boys positioned themselves carefully, and then, fully prepared, they opened the bag and shone the light inside. It was indeed a close relative of the chicken—
—inside lay two large, half-dead birds. Their beautiful yellow plumage was limp and dull. The boys exchanged a look, confirming what they had suspected.
"A yellow ibis?" Qingyi asked hesitantly.
"Looks like it. I've only ever seen the specimen in the museum," Zhang Shutong said, frowning as he pushed aside the birds' crest feathers.
"Aren't these things almost extinct? It's amazing these two found any."
This bird was a species endemic to the island. He couldn't remember its exact protection level, but he knew for a fact that getting caught with one meant several years in prison.
"No wonder that bald guy pulled a knife..."
"The electro-fishing was just a side hustle. Now take a look at this gun." Zhang Shutong lifted the rifle. He had always been more interested in bladed weapons and knew less about firearms than Qingyi.
"An air gun?"
"Yeah, let me see... Whoa, it's a PCP rifle. Pretty sophisticated."
Qingyi took it, studied it for a moment, and almost raised it to his shoulder.
"This thing is seriously powerful... so they really were poachers?"
"Yeah, a couple of poachers. And we just happened to run into them," Zhang Shutong sighed.
"But look, the birds aren't dead. They must have been hunting something else, too."
Of course, that wasn't for them to worry about. They could just hand it over to the police later.
Zhang Shutong continued his analysis.
"So the one Du Kang saw was the guy in the baseball cap. There were two of them from the start. The cap guy went west, and the bald one came later."
Hearing this, Qingyi slapped his thigh.
"I knew it! My bad, my bad. We heard the bald guy on the phone, saying something about students and not being seen. I thought he was talking about seeing Du Kang, but it turns out he wasn't the one who saw him..."
"...It was the guy in the cap, warning his partner," Zhang Shutong finished for him.
"Sigh..." Qingyi was a bit reproachful of himself.
Zhang Shutong clapped him on the shoulder reassuringly, then called Du Kang over to hear his side of the story. The whole picture was starting to come together.
First, there was no "pincer movement."
There had always been two poachers, the one in the cap in the lead and the bald one following behind. It was just that the first guy had later doubled back from the west and happened to run into Ruoping's group.
At that time, the three of them had gone up to the dirt path. Realizing the bald man was burying fish and not people, they had relaxed, and finding the stench below repulsive, had moved a short distance away.
Meanwhile, the man in the cap had come to rendezvous with his partner. When he got there, he didn't see his accomplice, but he did see the three students.
Ruoping had been the closest to him, and by the time she spotted him, the man had already raised his rifle and taken her as a hostage.
Then, the man had forced the three of them down to the water's edge at gunpoint. Ruoping hadn't wanted to give away the other two's location, but they had been chatting loudly enough for anyone who wasn't deaf to hear, so the man had decided to lay an ambush.
The hostage at that point was still Ruoping. But for whatever reason—maybe he saw that Lu Qinglian's long robe made it hard for her to move, or maybe he thought she just looked like an easier target—the man had a brainwave and swapped them, perfectly setting the stage for the thump, thump that followed.
A few minutes later, Zhang Shutong and Qingyi came up, there was a brief standoff, and the man in the cap was KO'd by Lu Qinglian's kick—
At this point in the retelling, Ruoping remembered her phone and picked it up with a pained expression. Luckily, it wasn't broken, it had just come apart. The back covers of phones from this era were mostly detachable, and since they were usually plastic, they were fairly drop-resistant.
—which didn't stop her from landing two solid kicks to the man's groin, a sight that made the boys' blood run cold.
After another call to the police, they all sat on the side of the path, utterly exhausted. Thinking back on the night's ordeal, they were still shaken.
They looked at one another, their eyes shining in the dark. Someone poked someone else, and one of them couldn't help but laugh. Soon, they were all laughing and joking again.
Qingyi was playing with the air rifle. He had only ever seen them in magazines and had never touched a real one. The thought that it would be confiscated in a little while made him feel a bit reluctant to part with it.
Du Kang, who loved to push his luck, took advantage of his distance from Ruoping.
"Did you get so scared you cried earlier? How embarrassing," he teased, sticking his tongue out and making a face.
Ruoping shot to her feet.
"Looks like you're about to cry, too," she said, making a grab for his ear. Du Kang yelped for mercy.
"Don't forget I saved your life in the reeds!"
Ruoping pouted. "That was the frog who saved me. If you're going to thank someone, thank the frog..."
Then someone brought up the idea of writing about tonight's events for the next Chinese exam essay. There were four of them, so they could start with the fishing trip, and each person could write one part, detailing their own experience.
And since Ruoping's writing was always excellent and her essays were often used as examples in other classes, they wouldn't have to worry about it going unnoticed. Pieced together, it would form a complete and absolutely thrilling story.
Besides, after four years, they were finally seniors. They had to get some respect from the underclassmen. It would become a legend they could leave behind after graduation.
At this, the group grew excited and immediately began to divide up the parts.
Why don't they just build a statue of the three of you? Add me to it, and the four of us standing at the school gate would be even more impressive than Gu Qiumian's dad.
Besides, he had a strong objection. The other three had a lot of material: ‘How I Caught a Frog in the Reeds’, ‘How I Cried in Fear in the Reeds’, ‘How I Tied a Tripwire in the Reeds’... A wealth of subject matter.
All he could write was ‘A Treatise on the Lack of iPhone Signal Reception’. But argumentative essays weren't in vogue in junior high, so the plan was doomed from the start.
It was truly cold. Zhang Shutong sneezed and quickly turned his head, only to see red and blue lights flashing in the distance at the end of the road.
Police sirens wailed.
The police had finally arrived.
……
The police vehicle on the island was a pickup truck. An officer stepped out and was just about to ask who had made the report when the group shuffled aside to reveal the two unconscious men, giving the officer a hell of a shock.
They threw their bikes in the truck bed, piled in on top of them, and went to the station to give their statements.
Halfway through, that officer named Xiong returned. He was about to glare at Du Kang when he saw him, but a colleague pulled him aside, and the two spoke in low voices.
When the officer looked up again, he seemed to be holding something back, his face flushing red from the effort. In the end, he simply clapped Du Kang on the shoulder and walked off as if he hadn't seen a thing.
—I mean, Du Kang was buffing his fishing rod right in the man's face, rubbing it with a tissue so vigorously it was about to rip, full of style and panache.
Ruoping was even asking with a grin from the side.
"My, you must be tired from all that rubbing. Want a drink of water? I see a spot here that's not clean yet. Why does it look so dark? Oh, right, the rod was black to begin with. Never mind, just keep wiping..."
It was a prime opportunity for the kids to be smug. But what could he do? They were heroes. Not only did he have to put up with it, but he also had to commend them and send a banner of recognition to their school.
It turned out the two poachers were career criminals. The interrogation revealed that it wasn't just the two birds; they had hit it big this time, killing a whole mess of foxes, badgers, and pangolins. The carcasses were in their vehicle, parked not far from where the kids had been fishing.
As for why they were burying the fish, it was because the bald man had forgotten the dead fish in the car, and they had started to stink from the heat.
This also cleared up another mystery: why they hadn't encountered the poacher during the previous version of this night. It came back to Du Kang; he had run into the man in the cap while fetching the stool, which had made the poacher uneasy and prompted him to go back with his partner for a look.
An "expert" was even called to the station—he was actually a chicken gelder, but the last ferry had already left for the night, so they had to make do.
For a while, it was utter chaos.
Ruoping's mother also came. Du Kang and Qingyi just called home to say they were safe and would be back soon. That's how it was for boys on the island; they were used to running wild, and as long as they didn't stay out all night, their families didn't worry too much.
By the time everything was finally sorted out, it was past nine o'clock, and they were yawning as they left the police station.
The other three's homes were all to the north. This wasn't a coincidence; that was where the residential area was.
Zhang Shutong was the only exception. His home was to the east. Because his parents had been transferred here for work, there had been no need to build a house, so the family of three now lived in the employee dormitory built by Gu Qiumian's father.
But though it was called a dormitory, the conditions were similar to a three-bedroom, two-living-room apartment, a full ninety square meters.
Usually, this is where they would have split up, the three of them heading one way and Zhang Shutong the other, each to their own home. But tonight there was a new variable: what were they going to do about Lu Qinglian?
Zhang Shutong belatedly recalled that Green Snake Mountain was also to the east, meaning they were going the same way. How else would he have known about the shop at the base of the mountain, even if it was a bit further east than his own house?
Ruoping insisted he walk Lu Qinglian home.
"It's late and dangerous; you can't let a girl walk home alone at night."
If the two of us go back together, Zhang Shutong thought, it's more likely she'll be the one protecting me.
But that was just him kidding. There was no reason to hesitate over something so minor, so he nodded in agreement.
Du Kang was smarter this time; he didn't get jealous or insist on tagging along. He just clapped Zhang Shutong on the shoulder and told the two of them to be careful, which made Zhang Shutong think he'd grown up a bit.
After settling things, the group waved goodbye.
Zhang Shutong was so tired his eyelids felt heavy. He didn't care about the old rules of propriety between boys and girls right now; the priority was getting Lu Qinglian home. He was about to pat the back of his bike for her to get on when he remembered he didn't have a seat back there anymore, just the box he'd installed.
No wonder that kid Du Kang was so agreeable...
But the police station wasn't that far from the mountain. The island itself wasn't big—why else would it be called a small island—
It was five kilometers from north to south and about two and a half kilometers from east to west, with a total area of roughly nine square kilometers. The permanent population was around eight thousand. Even so, it was the largest inland island in northern China.
Besides, the police station wasn't at the westernmost tip, so it was a walk of twenty minutes at most from here to the mountain.
So Zhang Shutong pushed his bike, with Lu Qinglian walking alongside him, and the two of them passed through the town center.
The so-called town center was just a small grid of a few main streets with a department store, some restaurants, a phone carrier's shop, and a supermarket. The signs weren't illuminated; the street lamps were the only source of light. The islanders had no nightlife to speak of. As far as the eye could see, the lamps cast a yellow sheen over the asphalt.
One small convenience store was still lit. Zhang Shutong asked Lu Qinglian if she wanted a drink of water, but the girl shook her head, and they continued on.
"Your family must be getting worried, right?" Zhang Shutong had just remembered that she didn't have a phone and hadn't been able to call.
"It's fine. She knows I'm out tonight."
The "she" she was referring to must have been her grandmother. He'd heard from Du Kang at the funeral that Lu Qinglian and her grandmother had depended on each other for all these years.
But where were her parents?
And he remembered Du Kang also saying that her grandmother had passed away before Lu Qinglian herself died. In a few years, the girl would probably be all alone.
But Zhang Shutong didn't want to pry into her family affairs. The words were on the tip of his tongue, but he just said:
"If you ever need anything in the future, you can contact us."
He didn't really need to say it; after tonight, Ruoping and the others probably already saw her as a comrade-in-arms.
It was better to talk about something lighter.
"When did you tell your grandmother?" Zhang Shutong asked casually. "After school?"
"At noon."
Noon?
But you hadn't even come back to school yet then, you were still at the Shrine sweeping snow, right?
Did your grandmother have a premonition that you'd be out late?
It seems she just doesn't want to talk about it.
Zhang Shutong took this as a sign that she didn't want to talk about her family.
Then, another long-standing question came to mind.
"So what exactly were you doing out here tonight?" Zhang Shutong asked, puzzled.
Before the girl could open her mouth, he quickly added:
"And don't tell me you came out here to fight criminals."
"You can understand it that way for now," the girl replied placidly.
Zhang Shutong shrugged and said no more.
If she gave him that answer again, he would... he wasn't sure what, but he was definitely not asking again.
The two walked side-by-side for a while, and another question occurred to Zhang Shutong.
"With skills like yours, why did you even hide in the first place?"
At his question, the girl stopped. She turned to face him, looked him straight in the eye, and said calmly:
"Because of you…”