Chapter 228: Fourth Brother’s Camp

I only hesitated for a second before rolling out of my sleeping bag. My mind raced as I quickly grabbed the jacket by my pillow and pulled it on.

Where had everyone gone? Out to relieve themselves? I reconsidered and immediately dismissed the thought. There was no damn reason for three men to go out together for that. What, one guy gets woken up by a full bladder and has to drag two others along so they can all pee in unison while discussing the meaning of life?

Outside the tent, the wind on the grasslands howled, occasionally letting out a shrill whistle. It took a lot of courage to stay here all alone. I really couldn’t hold it anymore, so regardless of where those three had gone, I needed to head out and take a leak first.

Using the dim glow of my phone, I fumbled around the tent until I found a hurricane lamp. I switched it on, and the surroundings instantly brightened. With a steady light source at hand, I finally breathed a small sigh of relief. Turning my head, I noticed that the moment the lamp flared to life, swarms of insects from all around the tent began diving toward the light. Tens of thousands of bugs pattered against the fabric like rain. It wasn’t an impressive sight; it was terrifying.

Suppressing my disgust, I held up the lamp and unzipped the tent to step outside. The moment I exited, my heart tightened. The grassland at night was nothing like the romantic vision I had imagined. For at least a kilometer in every direction, everything was swallowed by an endless darkness, save for the small circle of light in my hand. Each step I took onto the soft grass felt like walking into a bottomless abyss that would never end.

I didn’t dare wander too far. I picked a spot nearby to relieve myself, and just as I was pulling up my trousers, the faint light caught the horses tethered to a tree trunk not far away. I only saw three horses. Sensing something was wrong, I immediately lifted the lamp and went over to investigate.

We had brought seven horses in total, one for each person. When we tied them up at dusk, we had kept them all together. Actually, Kuba had said earlier that there was no need to tether them. These horses had been raised by his family since they were foals; they wouldn’t run off even if left loose. Even if they did wander, an old horse knows the way home, and they would eventually find their way back to Zhurige’s house. Still, I had tied them all in one place just to be safe, thinking it would make for a quicker escape if anything went wrong.

But after I circled the area with my lamp, I confirmed there were indeed only three horses left. Even if Lu Ayao, He Yu, and Chen Canghai had taken three, the numbers still didn’t add up.

In this vast grassland, surely no one was out here stealing horses?

The thought flashed through my mind. Once I was certain only three horses remained, I jogged over to the tent shared by Old Qian and the others. I set the lamp on the ground and crouched in front of the entrance.

“Kuba! Old Qian! Lu Qianshan! Wake up, quick! I think our horses have been stolen!”

After I shouted, the surroundings remained deathly silent.

I patted the side of the tent. “Hey! You three, wake up! The horses are gone!”

The only response was the persistent chirping of insects in the stillness.

I started to feel that something was off. Old Qian and Kuba might be heavy sleepers, but Lu Qianshan definitely wasn’t. The alert instinct of the Lu family was absolute top-tier; at the slightest rustle in the wind, they would be on guard. There was no way I could be out here shouting for this long without anyone responding.

I instinctively reached for the tent zipper, but I lost my balance while crouching and pitched forward, tumbling right into the tent. To my surprise, the flap had already been unzipped at some point!

I hastily raised the storm lantern to shine it inside, and what I saw made my blood run cold.

Where was everyone? Aside from clothes and empty sleeping bags, there wasn’t the slightest trace of anyone!

My scalp felt like it was about to burst. I quickly crawled a few steps further in and touched the three sleeping bags to check their temperature. They were ice-cold, and my heart went ice-cold right along with them. That meant they had been gone for a while already.

I quickly recalled a ghost story He Yu had told me before. It was about a group of people traveling together through the grasslands, only for one of them to wake up and find all his companions mysteriously gone. No matter how hard he searched, he couldn’t find them. Facing the boundless darkness alone, the sole survivor began to spiral, eventually believing he had schizophrenia, that those companions were just figments of his imagination and he had actually trekked into the grasslands carrying all the gear by himself.

A wave of dizziness washed over me. Sitting in the tent, I took two deep breaths, trying to calm myself down. After all, this wasn’t the first time I had encountered something like this, and as the saying goes, unfamiliar the first time, familiar the second. I decided not to dwell on it. Crawling out of the tent, I held up my lantern and circled the area a few times, finally confirming they definitely weren’t nearby. They must have spotted something and headed further out.

There were three horses left, which meant the others had likely ridden the rest away. I squatted down to look for hoofprints. Deciding one lantern wasn’t bright enough, I fetched another one from Old Qian and the others’ tent. Bending low, I started searching outward from where the horses had been tied. This area was so remote that people almost never passed through, so I figured that as long as someone had led horses away, those hoofprints wouldn’t have vanished.

This time, I actually managed to spot a trace.

There were several sets of hoofprints on the ground. They merged at first, then split into two groups and scattered. One group’s direction was impossible to make out, while the other circled around the nearby woods and headed up the slope.

I decided to follow the clear tracks up the slope first. However, I knew full well the old saying that staring at a distant mountain will run a horse to death^[1]; climbing a hill this high on foot would surely tire me out completely. So I had no choice but to head back to the three horses, pick Old Qian’s smaller one, and struggle with all my might to climb into the saddle. Riding the horse, I tracked the footprints, adjusting my direction as I went.

Once I crested a ridge, I immediately spotted two tall horses grazing out in the open plain. Looking further ahead, I saw Chen Canghai and He Yu lying prone together, their butts sticking up in the air as they spied on something. Fury surged inside me. I leaped off the horse, sprinted over, and gave each of them a hard slap on the shoulder.

“Could you say something before you head up here? You just left me all alone at camp!” I roared at He Yu.

Seeing me standing, He Yu hurriedly reached out and yanked me down to lie flat, putting out the lantern in my hand at the same time. In an instant, the three of us were lying side by side in a row on the grassland.

“Keep your voice down, for heaven’s sake! Take a look at what we found. It’s a massive secret.” He Yu gestured with his eyes for me to look ahead.

I turned to look. A few hundred meters ahead was a brightly lit campsite. Every tent had a light on inside, sentry posts were set up alongside them, and several armed men were scattered around the perimeter. Even though night had fallen, the lights remained on and the fires were unextinguished. Their equipment was clearly top-notch, far superior to our two flimsy tents that barely blocked the wind.

“Comrade Canghai was the one who spotted this. Do you think it could be your Fourth Brother’s crew?” He Yu asked, shifting positions after lying on one arm until it went numb.

The moment the words left his mouth, I saw an old man in glasses walking out of one of the tents. He Yu and I immediately locked eyes.

“Wu Yili!”

We blurted out the name almost simultaneously. But the person following right behind Wu Yili shocked me even more. It was fucking Tan Qiu!

I hadn’t seen anyone from the Tan Family in a long time. Why were they getting involved in this too? I wondered. It seemed Fourth Brother and his crew had really spared no expense this time. Unless they dredged up something big from the Tomb of King Gune, they weren’t going to let the matter rest.