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墨書 Inktalez
I was not far from Old Qiao, but the tangled branches in between made it difficult to navigate. The thickest branches were only as wide as my arm, while the thinnest were even skinnier than chopsticks, flailing wildly in the wind. They were quite dangerous, yet lacked the strength to support my weight; at sixty-five kilograms, I figured I would break them with just one step.
Old Qiao was also assessing the situation below and shouted, "Damn it, this isn't going to work. You coming down is too risky. Instead, you should—"
Hearing this made my heart race. I didn’t care about anything else; I glared at him and said, "No 'shouldn't' or 'don't'! This isn't the time for personal heroics. No matter how risky it is, I can't leave you behind. Just wait; I'm coming down now!"
Old Qiao seemed momentarily stunned. "You misunderstood! I meant… don’t come down; I’ll come up!"
I abruptly halted, my gaze fixed on the swirling white mist below that occasionally revealed a small van beneath it. Suddenly, my vision blurred, and my legs began to tremble uncontrollably as my heart raced. Just moments ago, I had acted recklessly without thinking; now, I was drenched in cold sweat, overwhelmed by a wave of dread. My mind felt out of control: "With your skills… how are you going to get up? Wait… are you pretending to be weak?"
At that moment, a safety rope was suddenly tossed up from below. Old Qiao's voice emerged through the howling storm: "...With this old body of mine, who knows how much longer I can last... I’ve been feeling weak for a while... Tie the rope around your waist and climb up the main trunk first. I'll follow behind... If something goes wrong, you can still save me."
Though I didn’t catch everything he said, I understood that Old Qiao wanted to tie us together with the rope so that if one of us encountered trouble, the other could help in time. As expected, he didn’t want to be a burden.
Just then, my junior brother shouted from above, "Damn it! Are you two done yet? I'm about to lose it!"
He was right; given the current situation, we couldn’t afford to hesitate any longer. Steeling myself, I tightened my grip on the safety rope and shouted downwards, "Alright! I'll go up first; you stay close and pull the rope if anything happens!"
Old Qiao’s response was drowned out by a rumble of thunder. Almost simultaneously, my junior brother cursed loudly. I looked up and realized something was wrong—his branch had snapped with a loud crack from the thunder's shock. In an instant, he flipped upside down in mid-air, hanging headfirst among the chaotic branches. The broken half of the tree trunk came crashing down; if I hadn’t dodged in time, it would have struck me directly on the head. Old Qiao also stumbled as branches fell around him from the impact.
Heart racing with fear, I yelled at my junior brother, "Can’t you be more careful? What are you doing hanging upside down? Get back up!"
“Damn it! Do you think I want this? I’m stuck!” My junior brother twisted awkwardly a few times, as if he really was caught.
I shook my leg and took a half step back, changing my angle to look up. Just then, I noticed something green and hand-like wrapped around his leg, but the visibility was too poor to tell if it was a branch or something else.
At that moment, I didn’t pay much attention, thinking my junior brother was just being his usual troublesome self. I shouted, “Stop making excuses! If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. If you can’t pull it out, don’t blame the latrine for being hard! Do you want me to come help you?”
He let out a grunt, clearly falling for it. With a sudden flip like a carp, he tried to roll upward but then cried out, “Wait a minute! Why do I feel like… this thing is biting me! Damn it, it’s gnawing at me and starting to suck my blood!”
Just then, another thunderous sound crashed down like an earthquake, striking the van below. In an instant, the van exploded with a deafening roar, a massive tongue of fire shooting up several meters high. The heat wave surged toward us. It all happened so fast that there was no time to dodge; I instinctively gasped as I was thrown upward, countless branches slicing across me like blades. The searing heat felt like lava erupting, nearly making me vomit blood. My ears rang incessantly, filled with the smell of charred flesh and blood in my nostrils. My mind went completely blank; I had no awareness of anything…
Goodness, I don’t even know how to describe what I felt at that moment. Looking back now, I’m drenched in sweat. Surviving that explosion was nothing short of a miracle—of course, a large part of it was sheer luck.
Because almost simultaneously, the torrential rain began to cool and humidify the air, preventing us from being truly cooked alive.
But in that moment of hot and cold colliding, no one expected that the wreckage of the van would explode again. The entire metal frame turned into a giant fireball that flew upward. I vaguely heard my junior brother shout, “Get back! Old Qiao, move!” At the same time, I finally completed several aerial somersaults and landed with a thud on a tree branch as thick as my thigh. Good grief! The impact nearly knocked the wind out of me; my throat felt raw as I coughed up blood.
Before I could catch my breath, something suddenly tightened around my waist and lifted me off the ground. In an instant, I was spinning around, feeling dizzy and nauseous—truly sickening.
I struggled to open my eyes and saw my junior brother using Ze Zhang to hook the rope around my waist. He looked exhausted too; the other end of the rope was still attached to Old Qiao. A split second later, a massive fireball shot past Old Qiao’s backside. I watched in horror; if Old Qiao had sunk just one centimeter lower—no, even one millimeter—he would have been sent flying with that fireball.
Old Qiao let out a deep breath and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with a weak smile. “Thanks to you this time… otherwise, Old Qiao would have been off to the moon.”
My junior brother puffed up with pride and boasted shamelessly, “Of course! You don’t see who I am! I can vanish without a trace or sneak away unnoticed. Back in Luoyang…”
As soon as I heard him, I knew he was going to go on forever, so I quickly interrupted, "Alright, alright, I get it! Can you please put the person down first? My stomach... it's about to burst from your grip!"
"Hehe, Senior Brother, I know you're afraid I'll steal your spotlight!" my junior brother said with a laugh as he slowly loosened his hold. "But I'm a generous man and won't hold it against you. What was that saying? Gold will always shine; just wait to count your money! Ouch... damn it, it's biting again!"
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