In that short time, Ji Xun’s mind raced. He made a move that seemed reckless but was perhaps the most necessary one at the moment.
“Hey.” He stood up without a trace of fear, waved to the group, and even stepped aside to give them a clear view of the soil he had disturbed and the remains within.
“What a coincidence. It seems I’ve discovered a little secret of yours.” He held up his phone. “And I accidentally took pictures and videos, preserving the evidence. So, it’s useless even if you dispose of the remains now. Infanticide is a serious crime, even if it’s the biological father who commits it. Take my advice: turn yourselves in early and strive for lenient treatment.”
“Bullshit!”
Someone shouted at him sharply.
The blinding light shone in Ji Xun’s eyes. He squinted, looking at the people behind the light. He saw they were of different heights and builds, with a wide range of ages. But their faces were all carved from the same ferocious mold—ferocious and vicious.
“What the hell do you know? You think we kill our baby girls? What’s wrong with girls? A girl is a girl. You feed her, she grows up, and she’s worth a bride price. Why would we kill them?”
“What’s the point of talking to him? An outsider meddling in other people’s business. Let’s teach him a lesson!”
“Yeah, grab him, tie him up, and delete the stuff on his phone! Without a person to report it, the police won’t take the case!”
Wow, impressive. Level-ten cooperation. Such clever words. Could you be our mole embedded in the enemy’s camp? Ji Xun thought, staring at the person who had spoken last.
A clamor had already risen from the group of villagers. The surrounding atmosphere was like a powder keg, just waiting for a fuse to be lit and explode. Just then, a phone rang.
The spark fell, and the bomb exploded. Someone raised their hand and threw something heavy at him.
Ji Xun looked closely. It was a hoe for tilling the land. The short-handled hoe cut through the air, flying straight towards him. The whistling sound it made was like the shriek of a ghost in the mountains.
Tsk!
Ji Xun gripped his ringing phone, turned, and ran. The terrain was unfamiliar, so he didn’t care about the direction, running wherever it was rugged and dark. At least he was fast enough. With a sudden burst of energy, he immediately left the people behind him by a large margin.
He looked back as he ran, not even silencing the constantly ringing phone, just to see if everyone behind him was still chasing him. These people had come too quickly; he had only managed to take a picture. What good was a picture these days? If these people came to their senses, split up, with some chasing him while the rest immediately dug up the remains and destroyed the evidence, it would all be for nothing.
But luckily, his bluff had worked, and he had bagged the whole group. Ji Xun counted carefully: there were 18 of them in total, and now, not a single one was missing. They were all chasing him, forming a long tail behind him.
He relaxed slightly and answered the phone.
“Is this Brother Ji? This is Gao Fang. Where are you now? Some people are missing from the village…”
He hung up directly and sent the photo of the remains he had just taken to the other party.
A minute or two later, the phone rang again. Gao Fang’s voice was urgent:
“Brother Ji, I saw the photo. Where are you now? Gao Yuan just went around the village again. A lot of the able-bodied men are gone, and some farm sickles and saws are missing too!”
“These people are all with me,” Ji Xun said.
“Brother Ji, listen to me. You’re in great danger right now. Find a place to hide immediately, send us your location, and we’ll come to support you right away—”
“Idiot.”
“…” Only rapid breathing remained on the other end of the line, stunned by the insult.
The shouts of “kill him” from behind were getting closer. Ji Xun narrowly dodged two wooden sticks that flew at him from behind. He had no idea where these people had found so many sticks. He didn’t have the mental energy or time to organize his words, so he could only be as brief and clear as possible:
“I’ll send you my location, but don’t come looking for me. I’ve tricked all the people who came up the mountain into chasing me. I don’t know when they’ll come to their senses and go back to move the remains. So what you need to do is get to the scene as quickly as possible and secure the evidence. I’ll take them for a ride here for a while.”
With that, Ji Xun hung up and sent his location.
In the time it took to say those few sentences, the group of villagers chasing him had already changed. There were fewer people behind him.
Did someone come to their senses and go back?
Ji Xun’s heart leaped into his throat. He had a lapse in concentration and, in the pitch-black darkness, didn’t see a drop-off in front of him. He stepped into empty air and fell from a platform about half a meter high. Luckily, it wasn’t a cliff below, and luckily, the pursuers were still some distance behind him. He fell to the ground with a grunt, rolled a couple of times, then got back up and started running again.
Just then, Ji Xun saw several shadows suddenly appear among the grotesque, twisted trees to his far left. They were the villagers who had been chasing him from behind.
…It wasn’t that someone had come to their senses and turned back.
It was that they had come to their senses, split their forces, and, relying on their familiarity with the terrain and superior numbers, were planning to surround him!
“Fuck!” Gao Fang cursed, looking at the disconnected phone.
He held his head in his hands for two seconds, then quickly composed himself and first reported the situation to the main bureau, requesting immediate backup. After explaining everything, he pressed the gun at his waist and said to Gao Yuan, “I’ll go to the location to secure the evidence. You stay here and watch Zeng Peng.”
“No,” Gao Yuan said calmly. “A dangerous mission like this must have a partner. If we go up one by one and something happens, there’s no one to provide cover. It’s like feeding troops into a battle piecemeal—useless.”
“We can go up together,” Zeng Peng, who was next to them and had heard everything, chimed in impatiently. This was great news for him. If the villagers committed a crime and had to go to the station, he figured no one would have the energy to stop him from moving the grave. “I can be a fighting force in a critical moment!”
“Shut up,” the twins shouted in unison.
“We still have to go up. The situation is urgent. We can’t just wait here,” Gao Fang said. “By the time backup arrives, it will be too late.”
“Let’s go up first, secure the evidence, and then go find Brother Ji together,” Gao Yuan nodded.
After making their decision, they looked at Zeng Peng again.
“I…”
Zeng Peng only had time to say one word before his hands were cuffed. The handcuffs were locked directly onto the iron bar of the van’s window frame.
He tugged at his arm. The metal handcuffs clanked against the window. No matter how sharp the sound, it couldn’t call back the two police officers who had cuffed him, abandoned him, and gone straight up the mountain. He was frantic but helpless.
“Damn it…”
The village ahead was still quiet. A couple of the scattered lights that had been on had gone out. The remaining light was not enough to illuminate the area. The faint, flickering glow was like a soul-luring lamp in a graveyard.
The wind grew colder. He shivered and sat by the van in a daze.
He didn’t know how much time had passed when two bright lights pierced the darkness. A car drove over from a distance and stopped in front of him. The car window rolled down, and Huo Ranyin’s slightly cold face appeared.
“Why are you the only one here? Where are the others?”
There was another half-sentence, hidden in his throat, that he didn’t say.
Where is Ji Xun?
Gasp—
Gasp, gasp, gasp—
He didn’t know when, but the wind and the voices behind him had disappeared. The only sound filling Ji Xun’s ears was his own ragged breathing. His entire trachea had turned into a red-hot tube; any airflow caused a burning, dry itch.
He swallowed with difficulty.
Had he been running for about twenty minutes or half an hour? His long-neglected body was protesting loudly against the high-intensity exercise. He felt a sharp pain in the ligaments of his knees, and his arms and shoulders also hurt—the former from impact, the latter also from impact.
Ji Xun’s thoughts began to wander as he tried to find humor in his misery. Sometimes, the more tense the situation, the more active the mind becomes, making it difficult to concentrate on analyzing the current crisis.
But there wasn’t much to analyze. The situation was already obvious. The people chasing him had split into three groups and were closing in on him from three directions. They were chasing him closely, but not too closely, allowing him to stumble along, hanging on by a thread, running towards the only unwalled direction.
But was that direction truly unwalled?
Besieging on three sides and leaving one open was a very obvious tactic. These people were hunting him like prey, purposefully driving him towards a specific location. It probably wasn’t a cliff up ahead, just a dead end. That would fit the current situation perfectly. Chase him until he has nowhere to run but to jump off a cliff. No one would have to do anything. If someone came to investigate later, they could argue that he had gone up the mountain at night, didn’t see the path clearly, and fell to his death.
Heh, don’t be fooled by the simple and honest faces of the Xi Jia villagers, all dark and swarthy, as if they had spent their entire lives with their faces to the loess and backs to the sky, not knowing a single character. In reality, weren’t they very skilled and practiced in this hunting tactic? They probably made a living off the mountain and were used to hunting.
Ji Xun’s mind started working.
Just then, the sound of a string being released came from behind him. He heard a “whoosh” sound cutting through the air—
Illegal possession of a controlled crossbow, a violation of public security regulations, punishable by… fuck, who gives a damn about that right now!
His focus sharpened instantly. He summoned the remaining strength in his body and dove forward.
The crossbow bolt didn’t hit him. It grazed his body and shot into the darkness ahead, finally hitting a tree trunk. The body of the arrow trembled, emitting a faint buzzing sound.
Ji Xun landed safely on the ground. The phone in his hand suddenly vibrated.
Someone was calling. Who? Gao Fang and Gao Yuan? Had they found the location and secured the evidence?
Ji Xun thought, but there wasn’t enough time for him to look at the phone screen. He struggled to get up. A stick hit his arm hard. His hand trembled, and the vibrating phone fell out, only to be stepped on by someone’s shoe. He didn’t know if it was broken. At the same time, someone else kicked him forcefully, and he fell heavily to the ground again.
Just then, the layer of earth beneath him began to collapse.
…What?
Before the thought could even dissipate from Ji Xun’s mind, he was already falling along with the earth beneath him.
“Bang!”
Ji Xun landed hard. He had fallen completely unprepared and was thoroughly dazed. Fortunately, he had managed to change his position at the last moment, so he didn’t break an arm or a leg. Even so, he felt his vision go black, and half of his body was numb. It took a full minute or two before he could see again.
He was in a deep pit.
The pit was about two meters deep, and its width and length were about the same, maybe also around two meters, just big enough for him to lie down flat. He strained to lift his neck and looked up. At the opening of the pit, he saw a wooden plank hanging in mid-air, swaying downwards.
That wooden plank was…
He continued to look and saw human figures appear at the edge of the pit. The thin moonlight couldn’t illuminate them, only casting a series of gloomy black shadows. They stood scattered, cold and mocking, as if everything was so simple and clear, well within their control.
Ji Xun’s hand touched something.
He brought it to his eyes. It was an old hairpin.
A hairpin.
He looked up again, looked, and looked, and then he understood.
The strangeness of this village, the strangeness of the women here, the excavated remains of the female infant…
This was a trap, and it wasn’t set for him.
It was set for the women who had been trafficked here and tried to escape.
They repeated it time and time again, hunting women like they hunted prey.
