Chapter 40: White Mist in the Woods 5
Zhou Huanchang sat on the ground for a long while before he finally spoke. “Yesterday afternoon, I arranged for the owner of Xian Man Seafood to deliver goods to the store. After he left, I went back to the third floor for a nap.”
Things at the club had been busy lately, and he was tired. He had originally set an alarm for 3 a.m. but didn’t wake up until it finally roused him at four. Just as Zhong Mu had guessed, Zhou Huanchang did want to be the first to release a review of the new bike and seize the trending topic. So, after changing his clothes, he took his outdoor filming equipment and prepared to head straight for Comb Road while the mountain was still quiet.
Zhuang Ningyu asked, “You didn’t know about the appearance of the Qingquan Mountain rules zone?”
“I didn’t know at the time. I was in a bit of a hurry since I woke up late and didn’t have time to check my phone. I only noticed the news push notification when I got to the shop entrance,” Zhou Huanchang explained. “I was originally going to go back to the shop, report it according to procedure, and wait for you all to escort me down the mountain. But before I could even turn off the engine, a cloud of white mist appeared out of nowhere in front of me.”
With no time to think, Zhou Huanchang twisted the throttle and sped off in the direction of going down the mountain, but the white mist quickly caught up to him. The world, swallowed by it, was like a sea made of air—breathable, yet boundless. It seemed unobstructed, yet he couldn’t find a single right path. The end of his vision repeated: white mist—mountain scenery—white mist—mountain scenery. The countless similar repetitions could easily wear down any psychological defense. As he continued to ride, Zhou Huanchang’s vision went dark, his whole body trembled, and his mind grew hazy, until he finally crashed into another motorcycle at the edge of the mist.
Zhuang Ningyu said, “So you crashed me into here.”
Zhou Huanchang paused for a moment, then argued without much confidence, “Aren’t you from the Order Maintenance Department?”
Zhuang Ningyu patiently explained, “I used to be, but not anymore. I’ve already resigned.”
Zhou Huanchang wasn’t keen on taking responsibility, so he changed the subject. “Then where are the people from the Order Maintenance Department?”
They were in the mountains, but they had most likely missed another chance to enter the rules zone. Zhuang Ningyu tried to contact Ye Jiaoyue, but the call signal was intermittent, and messages just showed “sending.” However, Yi Ke’s call came through quickly, probably because they were both currently in the same rules zone.
“How are you?” Yi Ke asked anxiously.
“I’m fine. I’m with Mr. Zhou, the owner of the motorcycle club,” Zhuang Ningyu said in a calm tone. “I was just about to go down the mountain, but before I could react, I was cluelessly crashed into here.” Now tell me, he thought, who could have guarded against that?
Zhou Huanchang, standing to the side, was speechless.
Yi Ke was filled with helplessness. He leaned against a tree, his head buzzing with a headache, deeply regretting not sending a driver to block the exit of the wedding banquet. But what was done was done, and regrets were useless. The priority was to meet up as soon as possible. The other’s coordinates had already appeared on his screen, not far from him. So he said, “Stay put, I’ll come find you.”
“I’d better come find you. My legs are fine, but He Yu has trouble walking,” Zhuang Ningyu said, gesturing for Zhou Huanchang to lift the other motorcycle that had fallen to the ground. “My communication signal hasn’t fully recovered yet. Use this time to report to Captain Ye for me.”
Yi Ke hung up. He Yu, sitting under the tree, looked up and asked cautiously, “Did your colleague come in?”
Yi Ke said, “Two people. A former colleague who’s on leave, and the owner of a local motorcycle club in Jin City.”
He Yu, with a hint of anticipation, continued to ask, “Men or women?”
Yi Ke replied, “Men.”
He Yu was speechless.
Although she didn’t get a female companion, at least there were two more people in the group, so He Yu looked somewhat relieved. After giving a brief report to Ye Jiaoyue, Yi Ke added, “Don’t worry, I will definitely take good care of Captain Zhuang.”
Hearing the words “Captain Zhuang,” He Yu’s eyes visibly lit up. After Yi Ke finished his report, he kindly and proactively informed this suspected fangirl, “Yes, it’s the Captain Zhuang you’re thinking of.”
He Yu didn’t expect her slight expression to be caught, and her face turned red with embarrassment. She explained, “…I just think Captain Zhuang is really handsome. Of course, Teacher Yi, you are also very handsome!”
She couldn’t quite change her form of address, rarely calling him Xiao Yi, mostly mixing “Teacher Yi” and “Brother Yi,” probably a habit from her internship. Yi Ke didn’t correct her again. On the map, Zhuang Ningyu’s coordinate point was moving at a moderate pace, as he and Zhou Huanchang were pushing their motorcycles through the forest. Although it was a bit clumsy and inconvenient, the Order Maintenance Department’s vehicles had all undergone energy modifications, and Zhou Huanchang’s motorcycle also had an enlarged fuel tank. Both vehicles had excellent endurance. In this kind of outdoor rules zone, having a good means of transport often added a lot of convenience and couldn’t be easily abandoned.
Zhou Huanchang had never entered a rules zone before. He followed behind Zhuang Ningyu, walking with deep and shallow steps. After a while, he couldn’t help but ask tentatively, “Captain Zhuang, why do you think the rules zone was chasing me?”
“Two possibilities,” Zhuang Ningyu replied. “First, it chases anyone it sees. Second, it was specifically targeting you. Mr. Zhou, have you had any ‘stories’ on this mountain?”
Zhou Huanchang was stunned by the question. After a moment, he answered hesitantly, “There are indeed some stories. I grew up near Qingquan Mountain, and after getting into this line of work, my connection with this place became even closer. I come into the mountains every few days. But it shouldn’t be to the point of having a rules zone chase after me, right?”
Seeing his vague answer, Zhuang Ningyu asked directly, “Have you ever hit anyone while riding?”
Zhou Huanchang’s body tensed, and he quickly denied it. “No, no, Captain Zhuang, absolutely not. It’s true that some riders have had accidents of that kind on Qingquan Mountain, but it has nothing to do with me or my club. On the contrary, we often assist in related incidents. You can check if you don’t believe me.”
The information Zhuang Ningyu had read earlier did indeed match Zhou Huanchang’s account, so he smiled. “It’s alright, Mr. Zhou. I was just asking casually. You don’t need to be nervous.”
After passing through the woods, the road finally became flat enough to ride instead of walk. The two of them mounted their motorcycles, and the engines roared to life one after another in the mountains. For Zhou Huanchang, this sound was like conversing with an old friend, instantly relaxing his tense mood. He leaned forward slightly, engaged the clutch, shifted gears, and accelerated. The vehicle started smoothly, and the mountain wind whistled past his ears. His blood began to boil in the cold, damp white mist. He even forgot where he was and began to fully immerse himself in the feeling of the motorcycle beneath him—the minimal wind resistance, the captivating roar of the engine tearing through the air under excellent power, a perfect symbiosis of electronics and mechanics. His breathing quickened, and his eyes saw nothing but the unobstructed road ahead.
Go!
“Beep beep beep!” Just as Zhou Huanchang was about to accelerate further, a series of sharp, piercing honks suddenly sounded beside him! He snapped back to his senses. Years of driving experience and muscle memory allowed him to brake safely by the side of the road in the shortest possible time, even in his dazed state. Zhuang Ningyu followed closely, skidding to a neat stop beside him, and reached out to activate his protective gear.
The mental contamination index steadily dropped from over a hundred to zero. Zhou Huanchang’s heart pounded wildly, feeling the lingering fear of a close call. “…Captain Zhuang.”
“It’s alright,” Zhuang Ningyu said, patting him reassuringly. “Get off and walk for a bit. We’re almost there.”
The two parked their bikes in the woods. Zhou Huanchang’s back was still drenched in a cold sweat. He only fully sobered up after splashing his face with cold stream water a couple of times. He no longer dared to take the rules zone lightly and stuck close to Zhuang Ningyu, transforming from a club boss to a newly hatched quail in seconds.
The sun, filtered through the double layers of white mist and tree canopies, cast only a thin halo of light when it reached them. The environment was slightly gloomy, as if it were about to become haunted. So, every few steps, Zhou Huanchang would glance uneasily at his protective wristband. Finally, Zhuang Ningyu couldn’t stand it anymore and said, “The source of the mental contamination this time should be related to the motorcycles. As long as you don’t get on, there’s no danger.”
Zhou Huanchang asked with lingering fear, “So I entered the rules zone because of the motorcycle?”
“It’s possible,” Zhuang Ningyu replied, “but we can’t be one hundred percent sure yet.”
The two climbed a low slope. Zhuang Ningyu rechecked the coordinates and direction, while Zhou Huanchang stood beside him, waiting. It was terrifyingly quiet all around; even the sound of the wind seemed to have stopped. Thus, every tiny sound was magnified several times: the rolling of gravel, the touch of dry leaves on the ground, the low chirping of insects, and a faint, almost inaudible “vroom”! Zhou Huanchang was all too familiar with this sound—it was the trembling roar of an exhaust pipe torn apart by ultra-high RPMs!
“Is someone drag racing nearby?”
Before his words faded, Zhuang Ningyu had already rushed down the low slope! Zhou Huanchang had seen Evolved individuals before; his club had many members who worked for the Order Maintenance Department, but he was still shocked by the other’s feline-like agility and reaction. A sudden gust of wind rose, and the engine noise swirling in it grew clearer and clearer. Mixed with this sound was the high-pitched screaming of a man and a woman—
“Ahhhhhhh!”
With a “boom,” a motorcycle shot out of the woods, as if to freeze in a pose against the light! A man and a woman were on it. The man was fully equipped with gear, but the woman was only wearing a crooked helmet. In this weather, her clothing was unusually thin, and her two legs, exposed from her windbreaker, were frozen white and bloodless. At that speed, combined with those safety measures, Zhou Huanchang could tell just by a distant glance that the woman was definitely going to be in serious trouble.
“Help!” the woman was still shouting and cursing. “Li Hao, are you crazy? Stop the bike!”
To avoid mental contamination during the rescue, Zhuang Ningyu didn’t ride his bike. Relying only on his own two feet, he ran through the woods at a powerful speed nearly equal to that of the motorcycle. After running parallel for a few hundred meters, he found the right moment to throw his protective device at the man, shouting loudly, “Slow down!”
The man, finally coming to his senses, answered frantically, but his driving experience was clearly inferior to Zhou Huanchang’s. A novice’s emergency brake sent him and the bike flying!
Zhuang Ningyu caught the woman in mid-air, rolling with her as they hit the ground. The momentary impact caused his vision to black out briefly. When his sight returned, he was being lifted into the arms of Yi Ke, who had rushed over.
“Cough, cough cough!” The man struggled to climb out of the stream, draping himself over a rock and desperately spitting out the water he had inhaled. His motorcycle spun several times in the forest of dead leaves, leaving a trail of sparks and flashes before crashing into an old tree root and finally coming to a stop.
Zhuang Ningyu waved his hand, panting. “I’m fine.”
Yi Ke grunted in acknowledgment, placed him on a flat rock, and quickly stripped off his ice-cold, stream-soaked jacket. He felt the clothes underneath; thankfully, they weren’t very wet. He then took off his own coat and wrapped Zhuang Ningyu in it entirely, asking, “How are your legs?”
“My legs are fine too.”
Yi Ke didn’t believe him and pulled up his pant legs to check. Zhuang Ningyu didn’t resist this show of concern, but looking at his blood-streaked face, he frowned and asked, “Are you hurt?”
“I got scratched by a branch when I was running over. It’s nothing.” Seeing that the old injury on his knee was indeed fine and not swollen again from the high-speed run, Yi Ke finally relaxed a little. He turned his attention to the trembling young man and woman.
Zhou Huanchang and He Yu also arrived from different directions at that moment. Seeing another woman in this environment, the woman clung to her as if she were a lifeline and began to sob with lingering fear. Zhou Huanchang went to help the man up. Because he was wearing full protective gear and had fallen into the water, the man wasn’t seriously injured, just extremely cold and frightened. When he opened his mouth, his teeth chattered so much he couldn’t form a complete sentence.
Yi Ke quickly started a fire in the woods. The three action packs all contained cold-weather gear. He Yu also boiled a large pot of hot water. Slowly, the two of them finally recovered.
The man’s name was Li Hao, in his early twenties, a minor second-generation rich kid. With his decent looks and love for fitness, he had a bit of popularity online. His interest had recently shifted from watches to vehicles. The motorcycle was also a new purchase. He wanted to take his girlfriend into the mountains for some excitement, but he hadn’t expected to wander into a rules zone.
“Qingquan Mountain was sealed off yesterday,” Zhuang Ningyu asked. “How did you get in?”
“We came into the mountain yesterday afternoon, before anything happened.”
“What time?”
“Around five or six, I think. After entering the mountain, Feifei and I went straight to the villa we had booked. That area is in a mountain depression, and the signal is really bad. My phone had no service, and there was no internet in the house.”
If it were a regular gathering of friends, having no signal might cause anxiety. But the two were a couple in their honeymoon phase, and they had come to the mountain specifically to have fun. No signal and no one to bother them was even better.
Li Hao continued, “Checkout time was around two this afternoon. We were planning to take a ride on the mountain road, take some pictures, and then head back to the city. But as soon as we reached an area with a signal, Feifei received a dozen messages about a rules zone appearing on Qingquan Mountain. So we decided to hurry down, but… I don’t even know what happened. When I came to, I was already here.”
His girlfriend’s name was Chu Feifei. The rules education she had received in school was clearly more comprehensive than that of Li Hao, the slacker. So, after sensing that the environment was mentally contaminated, she quickly activated her protective device. Her thinking was not overly disturbed, and her chain of memory was more complete than Li Hao’s. She recalled uncertainly, “The white mist seemed to be intentionally chasing us.”
It seemed their experience was more or less the same as Zhou Huanchang’s before them; they were “swallowed” by a white mist that appeared abruptly on the mountain road. Zhuang Ningyu quickly reviewed all the known scenarios in his mind. Zhou Huanchang, Li Hao, Chu Feifei, plus himself and Yi Ke—the commonality among the five of them was that they were all riding a rather impressive-looking motorcycle when they entered the rules zone.
But what about He Yu? She clearly couldn’t be categorized this way. She only rode a small electric scooter to and from work, and this time she had come up the mountain in a car. She had no connection to motorcycles whatsoever.
Yi Ke guessed his train of thought and quickly typed a line on his phone, holding it in front of Zhuang Ningyu—He Yu might have been brought in by me.
Zhuang Ningyu shook his head, not entirely agreeing with this view. Although, based on Yi Ke’s previous work report—”I saw He Yu’s figure first, mistook her for being suicidal, and rushed down to help, only for the rules zone to start moving with me”—it was indeed possible that she was purely implicated. But the problem was that He Yu had already been lost in the white mist for a long time before she met Yi Ke. If she was implicated, how could that period of time be explained?
Yi Ke took back his phone, also a little unsure.
The sky gradually darkened.
Chu Feifei and Li Hao clung to each other, for warmth and courage, fully utilizing the advantages of being a couple in this environment. He Yu, wearing Zhou Huanchang’s thick coat, was in charge of distributing all the food. Yi Ke chose a can of fish, opened it, heated it over the fire, and then wrapped the bottom with a towel to make sure it was no longer hot before handing it to Zhuang Ningyu, whispering a reminder, “Be careful eating.”
Chu Feifei, who had just burned herself, exclaimed, “Look at him!”
Li Hao felt wronged. “He has experience. I’ve never eaten this stuff before.”
“Captain Zhuang,” Zhou Huanchang asked, chewing on a soda cracker, “if the rules don’t appear, what should we do?”
“The rules won’t ‘never appear’; they will only appear later or sooner,” Zhuang Ningyu said, glancing at the four motorcycles parked in the clearing in the woods. Although they had all been scratched and bumped, the battle damage only made these muscle bikes look more wild and “manly.” They didn’t seem to match the pale little monster in the blue and white dress that had previously appeared in the rules zone at all. He hadn’t yet figured out the connection between the two.
Yi Ke suddenly said, “Eat a few more bites.”
Zhuang Ningyu, who was about to put down the unappetizing can in his hand, was speechless.
Time passed, minute by minute, and night slowly soaked the entire Qingquan Mountain. After nightfall, the temperature dropped sharply. Fortunately, the firelight diluted the moonlight, casting a patch of red, dancing, warm shadows among the trees.
The three sleeping bags were distributed to the two women and Li Hao, who seemed least tolerant of the cold. Zhou Huanchang leaned against a nearby tree and rested with his eyes closed. Although he wasn’t an Evolved individual, his physical fitness was very good, and spending a few nights sleeping in the wild wasn’t a big problem for him.
Zhuang Ningyu kept watch by the fire alone, sitting on a somewhat comical, soft pile of dry grass—in this regard, Yi Ke was very much like an elegant primitive man with a certain pursuit of quality of life. No matter how harsh the conditions, he could always manage to gather something comfortable from the outside for his “wife.”
Of course, the “wife” status was still very one-sided for now, limited to taking small advantages in communication software. After washing up by the stream, Yi Ke came back and helped Zhuang Ningyu pack away the toothbrush and cup he had just used. Then he stood by the fire, boiling water for a long time.
Captain Zhuang, who was engrossed in his work and suddenly had a wet, hot towel draped over his face, protested, “…I’ll do it myself!”
But Yi Ke didn’t agree.
