Chapter 90: A Logic Loop Missing A Piece
Lin Yan poked his head out and saw two people on the deck smirking at him. He glanced at the lifebuoy on the Forbidden Woman that was gradually being wrapped by black hair, and a thought gradually emerged in his mind: Could it be that these two wanted to use the lifebuoy to pull me up, but it ended up snaring the Forbidden Woman instead?
It had to be said, he nailed the truth.
He watched the Forbidden Woman struggling in place, desperately trying to wrap the lifebuoy with black hair, but it only wrapped tighter and tighter, even pulling the rope connecting the lifebuoy to the boat taut. Was this crisis resolved? At least the Forbidden Woman couldn’t lunge at them now, right?
Lin Yan scratched his head in confusion, hesitated about whether to pull the Forbidden Woman onto the boat too, but remembering that Zhang Qiling hadn’t told him to bring her along, he grabbed the rope of another lifebuoy and climbed aboard without looking back. During this, Fatty and Wu Xie tried to pull him up to give him a hand, but the two were so weak now that they nearly got pulled down by him instead, so they let him climb up on his own.
After Lin Yan climbed up and retrieved the lifebuoy, he looked at Fatty, then at Wu Xie, and finally fixed his gaze on Fatty: “That lifebuoy was thrown by you?” Fatty was stunned: “Why not guess that young comrade?” Lin Yan shook his head: “He can’t even lift his hands now, where would he get the strength to throw a lifebuoy? Besides,” he looked Wu Xie up and down and said slowly, “Even if he weren’t injured, he might not be able to throw the lifebuoy that far, right?”
Wu Xie had black lines all over his face from hearing this. What, he was still an adult man after all—throwing something weighing seven or eight jin five or six meters wasn’t impossible, was it? Lin Yan was definitely slandering him!
“Forget it, I’m not talking to you guys.” Lin Yan yawned. After two days of such thrilling excitement, he was sleepy. If not for still having things to ask Zhang Qiling, he could have fallen asleep right there. He walked to the cockpit and looked at Zhang Qiling, who was focused on driving the boat: “Um… Earlier, Fatty snared the Forbidden Woman with the lifebuoy, and now she’s probably drifting along with the boat. Are you going to bring her back with us?”
Zhang Qiling’s hand on the helm trembled violently. A few seconds later, he said indifferently: “Just leave it like this. Whether she makes it to shore with us depends on fate.”
“Alright then.” Lin Yan didn’t say more. Probably no one could stop Zhang Qiling from doing what he wanted, so the Forbidden Woman drifting was fine—as long as she didn’t climb back onto the boat later.
He walked out of the cockpit, not caring where Wu Xie and Fatty were, yawned, and went to the cabin, collapsing headfirst onto the bed.
He slept dreamlessly through the night.
When he woke up, the sky wasn’t bright yet, just a hint of white on the horizon, with stars and the moon still hanging in the pitch-black night sky. Though still sleepy, for some reason he couldn’t fall back asleep, so Lin Yan endured his sore body and got up.
He walked out of the cabin onto the deck and discovered faint silhouettes of a few people. The one sprawled on the ground snoring loudly was definitely Fatty, and the one standing nearby… was it Zhang Qiling or Wu Xie? Why weren’t they back in the cabin?
It was then that he noticed, though the boat was still rocking on the sea waves, it was no longer moving forward.
He approached the standing silhouette but nearly tripped over the person on the ground: “Whoa!” he exclaimed softly. The person sitting underground against the railing pulled his legs back: “You’re awake?” From the hoarse voice, he could tell it was Wu Xie, so the one standing must be Zhang Qiling.
He sat down beside Wu Xie: “Why is he standing there? And why has the boat stopped?”
Wu Xie, afraid of waking Fatty, whispered in his ear: “He was already here when I woke up. I asked him but he didn’t answer—probably thinking about something. But he did tell me about stopping the boat. We’re only a few nautical miles from Yongxing Island; normally we should have arrived by now. But he thought it better for us to rest overnight first before going to the island to restock, so he stopped the boat here.”
Speaking of the boat, Lin Yan suddenly remembered: “Is this boat from A Ning’s company? Where are the people on the boat? And where’s A Ning? She didn’t come out?”
Wu Xie felt a bit dizzy from the barrage of questions. He rubbed his temples and gestured for him to slow down: “Slow down, slow down, let me sort it out… Fatty and I checked this boat thoroughly—it’s definitely the same one we came on. But by the time we got on board, the ship captain and the people from A Ning’s company were all gone. That’s very strange. The stove was still hot when we boarded; they couldn’t have left more than half an hour ago. No other boats in sight for miles around, but they vanished with all their equipment. Do you remember that ghost ship my Third Uncle and the others were on? Just like that—no useful clues at all.”
Lin Yan listened with chills running down his spine. Could living people evaporate from the sea? Were they all dead? He’d heard a story about a ghost ship that was eerily similar, only it was about the Bermuda Triangle—a ship lost signal in the Bermuda Triangle, and a week later, someone found it. No one on board, but traces of people everywhere. Some food half-eaten, even coffee still hot, as if some force made everyone vanish in an instant. Even decades later, no one ever saw the people from that ship again.
Could they have encountered something like the Bermuda Triangle? But this was Xisha? What if everyone had been turned into ghosts by some mysterious force, and they were right around them now? Lin Yan shuddered at the thought, wrapping his clothes tighter. He didn’t know about the real world, but in this world, there might really be such a force—this world even had zombies, so what was science?
At this moment, Zhang Qiling had turned his head back at some point and joined their discussion: “You overlooked one thing.”
“What?” Wu Xie looked up at him abruptly. He’d thought about this problem countless times and made many assumptions, but ended up debunking them all himself.
Zhang Qiling said word by word: “You overlooked the bloody smell on the boat.”
“Bloody smell? What bloody smell? There’s no blood on the boat?” Wu Xie was puzzled. He and Fatty had searched the boat thoroughly—no bloodstains anywhere, or they definitely would have noticed.
Zhang Qiling shook his head slightly: “Bloodstains can be covered, but the bloody smell can’t.”
Hearing this, Wu Xie first looked confused, but then seemed to understand something, his face quickly turning to fear: “You mean someone killed them all, disposed of the corpses, and calmly had a meal here? We brushed past the killer? But there are no boats nearby either?”
Zhang Qiling nodded: “That’s the only explanation. I checked—they probably left when the underwater tomb was destroyed. By the time we got here, the boat had already sailed far away. A small fishing boat could handle wiping out everyone and taking the stuff. We had just come out then, so it was normal not to notice the boat.”
Wu Xie thought for a moment and felt one question’s answer was still missing to close the logic loop: “Then why didn’t they just sail the boat away and leave it spotless here?”
Yeah, if they just wanted to kill and take the stuff, wouldn’t it be easier to take the boat? Why leave the boat behind?
