Chapter 5: The Lost Trail to Tianjin

19TH SEP 2021~ VERALUCTL

If everyone’s speed from before could have been described as ‘sightseeing’, now everyone’s speed was ‘sightseeing while being unable to find a bathroom’. In a flurry, everything was packed up and they followed Lao Ma, running the entire time, trying to get as far away from this cursed place as possible.

But even Yan Guo1 had said that nine out of ten things in your life would be misfortunes.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong- it was the wisest axiom in the world. Before long into their hurried journey, that spine-tingling rustling appeared again. Li San’er panted as he wailed, “Those- those things, those spider demons, is there no end to them? Why are they here again? Don’t tell me that we were camping near a spider cave! Is it because our team is full of men, so they’re forcing us yin energy to balance us out2?”

Mo Yannan’s face had turned into the same shade as a pig’s liver. The moral of this story was that high school cross-country was very important because for someone like him who passed every year on sympathy points, critical moments like these were awfully unseeming.

His legs grew heavier and heavier like he was dragging a giant metal weight behind him, the sand beneath his feet feeling like they were trying to suck his entire body in. Don’t tell me this is quicksand, Mo Yannan thought in a daze. Someone muttered a curse under their breath and he picked him up. “Lao Ma, lead the way, I’ll guard the rear!” An Jie shouted.

People often talked about kites with a broken string but Mo Yannan was now like a kite with a broken throat, hanging half-dead onto An Jie as he panted, constantly in danger of gulping down his last breath. An Jie smiled. “Professor Mo, will you guard with me?”

Mo Yannan had lost his voice.

Shen Jiancheng didn’t even turn his head. Li San’er on the other hand looked back. “Lao An3, Professor Mo, can you two do it?”

“Can or can’t, I’ll be fine,” An Jie responded casually, lifting up the SPAS-12 with a single hand. The Italian-produced machine gun was quite a wild one. He grinned as the man-faced monsters closed in and faced his firepower.

It was the first time in Mo Yannan’s life that he truly understood what gun smoke was. Loud bangs, shrieks, and roars all mingled together. His body was yanked backwards as the monsters approached, occasional scraps of bloody flesh splattering on his face with a foul smell, his nose burning with the pungent odor of rust. Giant scythes flashed everywhere in front of him like a storm of daggers, grey, dead men’s faces in front of his own every few steps.

A weak psyche couldn’t have made it through. Mo Yannan thought that the fact that he was conscious was nothing less than a miracle; it really was true that people had endless potential in them when cornered.

Suddenly, An Jie stopped moving. Mo Yannan heard him say in a light voice, like he was entirely separate from them, “Professor, we’ve been surrounded.” This old man was going to choke on his own saliva.

He stared, wide-eyed, at the monsters that surrounded them and stared them down, the circle they formed around them narrowing with each passing second. Their legs rubbed against each other, reminding Mo Yannan of an untimely line; ‘to sharpen one’s knife for livestock’.”4

Unfortunately, they were the livestock now.

“You… Why did you stop shooting?” Mo Yannan asked weakly.

An Jie shook the big gun in his hand and threw it aside casually. He brushed off his clothes and said a sentence that made Mo Yannan almost faint. “No bullets left.”

“Wh- what- what do we do now?”

An Jie sighed and glanced sideways at Mo Yannan. He wasn’t too troubled; the reason he had continued to drag this burden along wasn’t just because he wanted to help an old man who couldn’t run anymore, but also because he had thought of using him as a distraction. If he really ended up with nowhere left to run, then he would throw him out as a shield and deflect their attention away. It was true that those creatures had intelligence, but it wasn’t high enough to organize a good ambush. He slowly drew a dagger out from his sleeve. It wasn’t very long, but it was extremely sharp; almost as sharp as the scythe-legs of the monsters.

The most important thing now was to comfort this trouble still leaning against him though, in case he would faint later. Dragging him would take even more effort. “I still have this.”

Mo Yannan looked at his confident smile and felt the world darken. He had heard of switching a shotgun for a cannon, but never a cannon for a shotgun.

Maybe stimulated by the cold glint on the dagger, but the leader of the monsters suddenly made a strange shriek, and a mob of dead faces rushed towards them. Mo Yannan felt his vision blur and as if reading from a wuxia novel, a few heads fell onto the ground in an instant. The monsters suddenly seemed to lose focus and began picking and grabbing at the heads in the chaos. 

“It seems I guessed right.” An Jie raised his brows. “Let’s go!”

Mo Yannan was helpless but to raise a hand to protect his head and follow Captain An into a suicide journey of scythes and death, always careful not to touch those strange monster tails. He felt that every cell in his body, if not more, dedicated to sport had been roused up; not even when fleeing from dogs as a child had he been this agile.

Very soon, An Jie’s trick lost its effect. The leader of the pack let out a devil’s shriek and the monsters that had been on top of each other quickly regathered themselves, those without a head also stopping fighting. After a small pause, they found the trail that the two men had left behind and caught up to them once more.

Those with longer legs run faster, something that was an eternal truth; those with more legs also run faster, something that was really an unfortunate eternal truth.

An Jie looked down at the dented dagger in his hands- as expected, one couldn’t trust cheap items from tourist stores. The corners of his mouth turned down in disdain and he threw it off to the side. It seemed there really was no way left to go.

He secretly figured out how to get rid of the burden on his hands, and what escape route to prepare for himself…

At that moment, Mo Yannan suddenly let go of him. An Jie frowned and turned to him, puzzled. The white haired professor carefully straightened his lapel; his glasses and the rest of his attire were covered in dirt, but he looked then like he was still the respected intellectual that spoke eloquently of the past and present on a lectern. 

“Xiao An, let me go and escape yourself. If they choose to eat me, it’ll take some time, so run at the right moment and rendezvous with the others.”

What?

An Jie blinked, uncomprehending.

Mo Yannan smiled a little. “I’m old and I’ll only drag you down if I stay. Just as you said, I shouldn’t have come.” He reached into his pocket and took out the wallet with the photo in it, and put on An Jie a string of green beads. The color of the beads were varied, some deep green, some turquoise, a mixture of dark and light surrounding a yin symbol made of white jade. 

“I bought this bracelet for my kids on my way here. Originally, I thought that there would be another half to this taiji5, but I wasn’t able to find it. But I still want you to take it back…” Halfway through his sentence, he was violently pulled into An Jie’s arms as An Jie threw the both of them away, a monster stepping onto where they were, its sharp legs cutting through An Jie’s sleeve. Luckily, they avoided any cuts.

An Jie pushed the wallet back into Mo Yannan’s pocket and narrowed his eyes to take a good look at the monsters’ formation. “Lao Mo, who do you think I am?” Throughout the entire journey, he had politely referred to him as ‘professor’, but suddenly, his form of address changed. Mo Yannan didn’t know why, but his eyes burned with tears at that ‘Lao Mo’.

An Jie also felt that there was something wrong with him. Mo Yannan was already offering himself up, so he really should have just followed through, yet when he saw the old man trying to keep his hands from trembling to put the string of beads on his wrist, he suddenly made a fool of himself and rolled out from underneath the scythe with him, almost dying as a result. An Jie calmed his thoughts and told himself that it was fine, that it hadn’t been the most opportune moment, that it wouldn’t be too late to throw him out now.

The monsters didn’t give them a chance to catch their breath. The two had yet to stand up before a new round of attacks started, bloody mouths and sharp scythes bombarding them with such fury that even An Jie lost his elegance as he ducked and dived. The head of the monsters seemed to have taken a special interest in Mo Yannan’s face with the shining glass pieces, its eyes staring at him intently the entire time.

Unfortunately the man next to the prey was too slippery and all that they managed to get was some shredded cloth. 

The monster obviously had little patience and roared. The two raised their heads just in time to see the leader’s tail dispersing into shiny sequins, densely flooding towards them. An Jie laughed bitterly. Was this what they called ‘being surrounded by tigers and wolves’?

What could he do? Run!

“Quickly, quickly! You can’t touch those things!” Mo Yannan yelled in horror.

No shit, did I need you6 to tell me that? An Jie cursed silently, but the next sentence from the old professor was, “I see now, that thing wants my head. Just leave me here, they won’t be able to catch up to you that quickly.”

He didn’t think that the old bookworm would be that observant… An Jie paused and chuckled. “Lao Mo, hang on tight and don’t move!”

Mo Yannan suddenly felt empty air beneath his feet: he had been swung up. With a jump, they landed right onto a man-faced monster’s back and it shrieked- An Jie was correct once again: they had no weapons on that large back of theirs. A shocking power lay inside that An Jie’s thin body; even with an extra person, he acted like the leap had been more than easy.

The originally gentle, elegant man showed a ruffian-like, complacent smile.

Mo Yannan felt like he was dreaming, carried by An Jie as he jumped from one monster’s back to another. The monsters became anxious, climbing onto each other, stepping across one another, the blades of their scythes swinging around and the entire situation just generally becoming a huge mess.

A mess that was exactly what An Jie wanted. When Mo Yannan had finally recovered, the two had already mysteriously ducked outside of the ambush circle. It was easy to say, but much more thrilling in experience. One small mistake, one small delay, and they would have ended up as mincemeat beneath those scythes.

Mo Yannan pondered, this brother An Jie, was he actually one of those hidden masters written in books? No wonder he dared to enter the desert by himself; he had the ability to match his courage!

Unfortunately, his companion wasn’t feeling so lighthearted. An Jie didn’t even have time to take a little breath after shaking off the monsters when he felt something wrong beneath him. Faintly, he said, “Lao Mo, look beneath our feet. Doesn’t it look like…”

Mo Yannan suddenly felt his body sinking downwards and widened his eyes. “Quicksand!”

Holy shit, it really was ‘it was the gods that wished to end me, not my mistakes in war’7. An Jie barely even had time to lament this: the quicksand beneath them seemed abnormal, swallowing them at an astonishing pace. Before he could even finish his sentence, the two of them had been swallowed by the yellow sand in the blink of an eye.

Grains poured into his mouth and nose, his lungs aching from being unable to breathe, and his vision was filled with darkness. Still though, there was still a hand that refused to let him go. An Jie wondered why he was able to maintain his consciousness even in this situation, and lamented that his life would end in quicksand next to an old nerd of all people.

There was no regret, nor pain, just a ridiculous sense of relief.

But before he had time to reminisce on his life, the pressure on his chest suddenly eased, followed by large mouthfuls of air gushing into his lungs as he coughed. A voice kept throwing out questions. “How are you? Are you alright? Are you two alive? Still in the land of the living? My dear brother, I thought you both gloriously sacrificed…” The voice was so much of a comedy in and of itself that An Jie almost laughed out loud.

It was Li San’er.

He opened his eyes, the torchlight from his companions blinding his eyes. It was only when he recovered was he able to carefully look around——

No way. “This is… Tianjing City…”

1Yang Guo is the protagonist of the Wuxia series The Return of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong. It’s… very popular.

2Yin energy is associated with females, darkness, the cold, and passivity. Yang energy is associated with males, dryness, light, and action. Yin energy is also used for evil things like ghosts and zombies, as you would know if you’ve read TGCF. (Luci: no ky thank you)

3Lao, directly translated meaning ‘old’. It’s not a descriptor, it’s used as an affectionate prefix, showing their closeness. 

Luci, being the idiot she is, translated it previously as Old, as seen in Old Ma but has now realised how stupid that sounds so from now on it will be Lao  -L

We’ll be fixing it up in previous chapters tomorrow.

4The precise words are taken from the poem ‘Mulan Ci’ (which, as you can probably tell, is the story of Mulan). The meaning of the line is to prepare oneself for something, and be excited about it.

5The yin-yang symbol in its entirety in this context. Objectively, taiji is the state of completion that forms yin and yang; the driving force of everything. It’s translated as ‘Supreme Ultimate’ sometimes, which in my opinion makes no sense, but essentially means the state of everything.

6An Jie uses the polite ‘you’ here, LOL.

7This was (supposedly) spoken by Xiang Yu, a noble during the Chu-Han Contention period of China just before he got killed. Basically, ‘it’s not my problem I lost, god wanted me dead.’