Chapter 21: The Vanished Corpse

  "What's wrong?" I also ran to the lake shore with tension, watching him look at the lake surface with binoculars. To me, the lake surface was still as calm as before, and it looked beautiful under the moonlight. But I also knew that I was near-sighted, although the degree of my glasses was not high, and I didn't even wear them in this situation, so I couldn't see clearly what happened on the other side of the lake.

  Su Haicheng put down the binoculars in his hand: "Maybe I didn't see clearly just now."

  "What's wrong? Saw... a dead body?" I still can't forget those dead bodies.

  "No, it's a whirlpool. Right in the center of the lake."

  I took the binoculars from his hand. Actually, I wasn't very good at using this thing, and always felt like my eyes couldn't focus on both sides. And after using the binoculars, I had a feeling of being disoriented. As I held the binoculars and was still looking in the direction of the lake center, I was stunned by a scene that caught my eye. "Over there... someone!" I exclaimed.

  By the lake, which is still quite far from us, it seems like someone is standing at the edge of the woods. I don't see very clearly, and I'm not sure if it's a tree or something else. After all, our only source of light now is the moonlight. Tonight's moonlight isn't particularly bright either.

  My voice also made Su Haicheng tense up, he took away the binoculars and looked in the direction I was pointing. After adjusting the binoculars, he said: "Take your things and go take a look."

  Although it's already warm here, I didn't have any objections when he suggested going over to take a look. If there are people on the other side, there are two possibilities. One is that they're locals, and we can talk to them, maybe get some leads. After all, the locals must know more about the legend than we do. Since there's even a signal tower here, it's definitely a place where nearby villagers come to gather.

  There's also the possibility that it was the boss and his people. It's possible that it was the boss himself, who is searching for Sakura Yuki to the point of near madness. It's not impossible that he ran over in the middle of the night.

  With our backpacks on, the two of us headed in that direction. Walking on the sandy ground by the lake, although not strenuous, we still felt like we had been walking for a very long time before we finally arrived at that place. We did see someone! But he wasn't standing at the edge of the woods as we saw through the binoculars, but rather lying on the ground.

  The man was wearing a camouflage uniform with a red cross on his sleeve, and he was lying face down in the sand. There were only sand grains on his face, without any other injuries. My thought at that time was that this person had followed these soldiers into the forest, but when something happened, he got separated from them and didn't stay together with them. He wandered alone in the woods, got lost, and walked to here before fainting. At least when we saw him just now, he was standing upright.

  Su Haicheng quickly helped him up and turned him over, saying: "Hey, are you from the medical team? Hey, did you faint? Water."

  I hastily handed over the mineral water in my bag.

  He brought the water to the man's lips, but his movements froze. He slowly put down the water and also let go of the man. I asked anxiously: "What's wrong? Maybe he's just hungry, tired, and fainted. Give him some water to drink, maybe he'll wake up."

  "He's dead!" Su Haicheng said softly. He carefully placed the body down and began to search through his clothes.

  "I exclaimed in surprise: "Impossible! Just now I saw him standing. He must have just died. Quick, do CPR, maybe he can be revived!"

  As I spoke, he had already rummaged through the soldier's breast pocket and pulled out his ID. He looked at the badge on the ID and said, "He is from the medical team that we came in with."

  "How is this possible? Didn't they all die? And you guys burned them, but...this one clearly hasn't been burned. Maybe he got separated from his team and got lost in the woods, and only came out now." As I said these things, my body had already unconsciously retreated two steps. Dead people, in my lifetime, except for when my grandfather died, I haven't gotten close to any dead person. Of course, Su Haicheng doesn't count. When I'm with him, if I don't deliberately think about it, I completely forget that he's a dead person.

  Su Haicheng's face had already sunk, and he was still searching for something else on him. "From the time, he has been in this village for more than two months." He flipped through his palm, carefully examining it with a flashlight: "There is not a single wound on his body that should have appeared from surviving in the wild. In the absence of supplies, a person, in such a forest for more than two months, without even hurting their hands, is basically an impossible thing. And there's cell phone signal here! Walking in one direction, even if it's difficult, walking for three or four days will definitely find a place with people."

  "How did he... die? No, wait, I saw him standing just now. And he was standing at the edge of the woods, at first I even suspected that I had misseen it, and thought he was just a tree branch that looked like a person." As I said these words, my heart rate had already accelerated. Because I realized a very strange doubt point. "He... was over there earlier, on the edge of the woods."

  But now he's fallen down, about ten or twenty meters away from the woods and about two meters away from the lake. In other words, after we saw him, he was still moving towards the lake.

  "He's just died? Must be!" I said firmly. But then how to explain that he had some time these two months?

  Su Haicheng stood up, washed his hands with the mineral water bottle, and said: "Don't think about these things for now. Let's just wait here tonight and talk about it after Ah Tian and the others arrive tomorrow."

  I looked at the dead man and took two steps back, then nodded. Su Haicheng re-lit the bonfire. The two of us sat around the bonfire, but didn't say a word. Our hearts were heavy, not knowing what to say.

  Today I walked a long way, and now I've finally settled down. I wrapped my arms around my knees, put my head on them and closed my eyes. As I was dozing off to sleep, I seemed to hear Su Haicheng muttering to himself: "You're here, so where are my comrades?"

  I don't know when I fell asleep. I woke up because the person I was leaning against suddenly stood up, causing me to fall over. The sandy ground wasn't painful, but I still held my head in confusion. When I fell asleep, wasn't I leaning against myself? How did I end up leaning on Su Haicheng's body?

  And he's now running on the sandy ground, looking flustered and glancing around as if searching for something. I followed him to take a look around, and in the next second, I also jumped up.

  Where's the body?! The body is gone! The body has actually disappeared!

  "He...he...left on his own?" The phrase the boss said appeared in my mind "Even the dead have returned." Where did that dead person go?

  Su Haicheng looked anxious, constantly squatting down to check the marks on the ground. In fact, there were no marks on the ground at all, and I even suspected that we had seen a ghost last night, or that both of us had hallucinations at the same time.

  Just as I was panicking in my heart, Su Haicheng suddenly fell to the ground, motionless.

  "Ah! Su Haicheng!" I rushed over and helped him up. "Hey, hey, Su Haicheng, you're suffocating." He was already dead anyway. "You, you, you open your eyes? Su Haicheng?"

  But he didn't react at all. With his eyes closed, it was as if he had fallen asleep. Or perhaps even dead.

  I hastily pulled out my phone and dialed Kakashi's number. As soon as the call connected, tears began to fall from my eyes. "Kakashi, please hurry over! Suhai Cheng suddenly fainted."

  "Hello, hello, we're almost there. Emergency rescue, artificial respiration... Hmm, forget it, he's a dead man anyway. Wait for us, we'll be right there."

  He hung up the phone and I was still holding Su Haicheng, crying helplessly. I simply couldn't remember how to do CPR, and did he even need oxygen when he didn't have a pulse?