Chapter 241: Snake Marsh Ghost City (Part 1)

Two minutes later, A Ning stopped breathing and died in my arms. Her delicate, elusive face beneath the messy short hair was frozen in a look of shock. We gathered around her until she breathed her last, then fell still, and it felt as if time itself had stopped.

Suddenly I felt as if everything had ceased. My heart ached with sorrow, yet I couldn't cry; my chest felt blocked by something.

It had all happened too fast.

Though the journey had been fraught with danger and I had expected someone might get hurt, I never imagined this woman would die—and so easily, so suddenly. There was no warning; it just happened. The person who had been speaking moments ago was dead in an instant. Truly dead, with no chance for us to save her.

At first I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I thought I was dreaming. How could this woman die? She was so tough, so beautiful, so cunning—fragile on the outside but with a heart as hard as iron. Though I didn't like her, I truly admired her. If anyone here had to die, it should have been me, the weakest of all.

But she really was dead, right in front of me—so easily, so plainly, so carelessly she had died.

In that moment I felt as if I had been knocked back to square one. Time and again we had faced danger, and all of us had made it through. Even in Qinling, when I went alone, I barely managed to return alive. I had come to believe that after all this, people like us had become formidable, with enough experience that even if we ran into danger, we could handle most of it as long as we stuck together. If we were to die, it should be in the most perilous part of some ancient tomb. But now A Ning had died so easily—from a snake. Suddenly I realized: No. Humans are fragile creatures. Whether it's Poker-face, Panzi, or me, in a place like this, death comes just the same. No matter how skilled or experienced you are, it doesn't matter.

This is the law of reality, not a scene from a novel or a movie. When you encounter something like this, you die. Even Poker-face, if he had been standing by the waterfall just now, would surely have died!

I looked up at the dense jungle ahead and felt an overwhelming sense of fear and despair. In that instant I wanted nothing more than to turn and run, to abandon everything and flee this place.

Then the sky finally brightened. Sunlight streamed down from one side of the canyon, illuminating everything. Ahead, steam rose from the waterfall; the spray, caught in the sunlight, formed a white mist that hung over the lush rainforest.

The beautiful scenery remained, but the beautiful woman was gone.

Panzi was someone who saw through life and death. Though he too wore a look of regret, he was much calmer than we were. Heavily wounded and unable to say much, he told us, "This was an accident. Sudden as it was, we have to accept it. We don't know if there are more of those snakes around. We shouldn't stay here long. Let's move on and find a cleaner place to figure things out."

I remembered how Poker-face had killed that crested snake, and I felt a pang of bitterness. I turned to look at the snake's body floating on the water, but it was gone. They say such snakes will take revenge on anything that kills one of their own, never stopping until the enemy is dead—eerily relentless. Staying here was indeed dangerous. The thought of A Ning's fate made me want to leave even more.

For a moment I couldn't bear to leave A Ning's body behind, so I lifted her onto my back. Fatty helped support Panzi, and none of us dared go back into the jungle. We moved along the edge of the canyon, wading through the water.

No one could talk anymore. Fatty couldn't even sing his mountain songs. I didn't even know why we kept moving forward. My mind was a blank.

Stumbling along, we walked for over ten minutes in a daze, but we couldn't find a dry spot to rest. The sun climbed higher, and the coolness from last night's rain vanished all at once. Everyone had reached their limit—too tired after a night of running, fighting, climbing trees, death, and escape. Even an iron man would have had no strength left. To make matters worse, as the temperature rose, the humidity became unbearable. Fatty hated that the most, gasping for breath until finally Panzi ended up supporting him instead.

Just as I was thinking of suggesting we stop and rest right there, the canyon ahead began to slope downward. The rainwater rushing along the ground became a swift stream, flowing downhill. We carefully followed it, and when we reached the bottom of the slope, we saw the canyon's exit open up before us.

Beyond, the trees grew sparse, giving way to a wide black swamp some two hundred meters across. Then the vegetation gradually thickened again into a waterlogged rainforest, filled with low but extremely lush aquatic trees, their roots tangled and intertwined, deep and impenetrable.