SES Chapter 146 Part 1

Chapter 146

Yan Hongsha shot up as if she’d been stung by a scorpion—heart pounding, limbs jerking, she spun around and bolted. Her plastic raincoat crackled loudly as she ran, knees and elbows flailing, until her brain finally caught up with her body and realized she’d already sprinted a good hundred meters away.

She cursed herself under her breath.
What the hell are you running for? You’ve been through worse!

She wasn’t wrong. The sea, the mountains, old clams, wild men—what hadn’t she seen before?

She forced herself to stop and turn back.

The shopkeeper had told her not to cross the mountain because the heavy rain had triggered smaller showers, and the slopes could easily collapse or trigger a mudslide. Maybe… that man had stubbornly insisted on taking the trail anyway—and unlike her, hadn’t been so lucky. Maybe he’d gotten buried alive.

The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed. When she’d pushed down on that hand earlier, it had been ice-cold—but there’d still been something soft underneath the skin, a faint trace of warmth.

Maybe he was buried just recently… maybe he’s still alive.

The thought made her scalp prickle. Standing there in the middle of the slope, she hesitated—too far from the village to call for help, too far from the shop to fetch anyone. Either way, she’d lose time.

She made up her mind and stumbled back toward the spot.

In that short while, the rain had washed the exposed hand even cleaner—pale as porcelain, the long, slender fingers still distinct. Definitely not the hands of someone who did hard farm work.

Yan Hongsha didn’t dare touch it directly. She used the hem of her raincoat to wrap around her wrist and tugged gently—then immediately let go.

The body was buried deeper, she realized—the hand was out here, but the rest of him was pinned under a pile of rocks and mud. The stones looked loose, uneven, with small gaps between them.

Her heart pounded. She rolled up her sleeves, trembling, and began lifting the stones one by one, careful to move slowly, afraid that any sudden shift would collapse the whole pile and crush whoever was underneath.

She didn’t know how long it took. The sky dimmed into night. She clenched a small flashlight between her teeth as she worked, piling the stones to the side until they looked like a makeshift grave mound.

Finally, she cleared the last stone and angled the flashlight down.

Another hand.

It was bent upward, covering a face. The person’s upper body was still buried, only both hands and part of the face visible—the right hand protectively shielding it.

A cold wave of fear washed over her.
She knew that face.

The muddy water pooled around the man’s head was tinged with blood. Yan Hongsha wiped her own face with a shaking hand, leaving streaks of dirt across her cheeks.

She forced herself to reach out and lift the hand covering her face.

And then—everything went blank. Her mind buzzed, and tears burst out before she knew it. She slapped his cheek frantically.
“Yi Wan San! Are you dead? You can’t be dead!”

With the rocks gone, he was covered only in wet soil. Sobbing, she clawed the mud off his chest and bent down, pressing her ear to his chest, then her hand beneath his nose.

But the rain, her panic—she couldn’t tell if he was breathing. Her mind went white. Desperate, she rubbed his chest hard, pressed her hands together and pushed down over his heart, slapped his face again and again while crying so hard she couldn’t breathe.

Then—
A faint groan.

She froze. Had she imagined it?

Rain streamed down his face. The cold wind bit through her soaked clothes. She shivered and quickly half-lifted, half-dragged him against a rock, then stripped off her raincoat and draped it over him.

She wasn’t stupid. Cao Yanhua and the others had vanished one by one after entering the village. Seeing Yi Wan San like this only deepened her dread of the Cao family’s village—and even that little convenience store now seemed sinister.

Get him to safety first. Somewhere dry. Somewhere safe.

The best place was Luo Ren’s car.

She found a fallen branch and poked around to make sure no one else was buried nearby. Then she tried to carry Yi Wan San. But he was unconscious, his arms dangling, much taller than her—his feet dragged along the ground as soon as she hoisted him.

Thinking fast, she remembered the rope in her tactical pack. She tied them together—his torso against her back, their waists lashed with a loop, his arms bound around her shoulders. She hooked her pack straps around her neck, gritted her teeth, and lifted.

He was so damn heavy. Dead weight, literally.

Bent nearly double, she trudged forward through the sucking mud. Each step sank to her ankles. Yi Wan San kept sliding down, and every few paces she had to hitch him back up by the hips.

His head hung beside hers, the smell of blood thick in the rain.

Yan Hongsha kept talking to him, her voice shaking, her face wet with rain and tears.

“What happened to you?”

“Where’s Fatty Cao? Where’s Mu Dai?”

“Yi Wan San, you can’t die, okay? You can’t die.”

She kept repeating the same words until they blurred together with her sobs. She hated this feeling—lost, alone, not knowing if anyone was alive or dead. If she’d known things would end up like this, she wouldn’t have stayed behind in Kunming to argue about debts. She would’ve come with Luo Ren—at least then they’d live or die together.

The rain grew heavier, drumming against her plastic coat. Her legs trembled with exhaustion. She stopped for breath, panting hard—then suddenly felt a faint warmth brush her cheek.

It took her a second to realize—it was his breath.

Her heart leapt. She licked the rainwater from her lips and felt strength flood back into her limbs.

Head down, she trudged on. When she passed the little shop, the lights were all off.

How late was it?

At last, she reached the Hummer, fumbled for the keys, opened the door, and hauled Yi Wan San into the passenger seat. Then she checked the time.

Past nine p.m.

No time to rest. She pulled a blanket from the back, stripped off his soaked jacket, wiped him dry, and wrapped him tight. Then she soaked a wad of gauze with bottled water and gently cleaned the mud and blood from his face.

There was a gash on the back of his head—it looked like a rock had hit him. Blood stuck to her hands when she touched it. She had no idea how to bandage it properly, but she had to try.

So she unrolled a bandage and wrapped it around his head again and again until only his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were left uncovered.

It looked ridiculous—like an Egyptian mummy. The absurd sight made her snort halfway through a laugh—then she almost started crying again.

She took out her phone, holding it high and low, trying to find a signal. The weak flicker of reception came and went, enough to make her want to scream.

Leaning against the driver’s seat, eyelids heavy as lead, she nodded off before she knew it.

Through the haze of sleep, she thought she heard Yi Wan San curse.
“Damn it!”

She jerked awake. He was sitting up—barely, but awake.

Her eyes welled up. “You’re alive!”

Wrapped in layers of bandages, his eyes looked smaller, his voice muffled and strange.

“Barely,” he rasped. “I fought like hell not to die, and when I woke up, I nearly scared myself to death.”

“Got any water?”

She unscrewed a bottle and handed it to him. He took a few small sips, glanced around, confused.
“What are you doing here? Where’s Luo Ren?”

He tried to lean back, but the back of his head hit the seat and pain shot through him. He grimaced and tilted sideways instead.

Yan Hongsha quickly told him everything that had happened over the past two days.

When he heard that Luo Ren had also gone missing, Yi Wan San’s expression changed—but under the layers of gauze, she couldn’t see it.

He interrupted her. “You have to find Luo Ren. Tell him—there’s something wrong with Qingshan. The fifth cursed slip… it might be on him.”