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After a satisfying meal, everyone lounged around, content.
“Actually… when we retire in the future, living in a small house by the lake wouldn’t be so bad,” Mei Shengyao began to daydream about the future: “Have a few acres of farmland, eat the rice we grow, the fish we raise.”
Xie Lianyun, squinting, added: “And a pond of crayfish.”
“Right, must have crayfish.”
Huo Ren remained pragmatic: “We’ll need a whole team of farmers to help with the work then.”
Mainly, their household would be responsible for eating.
“Sounds good… Huo Huo can take care of the accounts then…”
Listening to their aimless banter, Huo Ren kept an eye on everyone’s state.
While the others seemed relatively cheerful, Bo Jue sat alone in a corner, lips pursed, silent.
Huo Ren straightened up slightly, like a lead wolf sensing something amiss.
What’s wrong?
After observing for a while, he realized something. Bo Jue had been wearing a high ponytail and a baseball cap all day, a departure from his usual loose, long hair.
Could it be… they hadn’t properly bathed in two or three days?
The physical activity had been intense these past days, and even after changing their clothes twice, the smell of sweat lingered. Xie Lianyun even suggested throwing them all away and buying new ones once they returned to the city.
“Um,” Huo Ren tentatively spoke up: “Since we’re free this afternoon, why not… boil some water for a bath?”
Chi Ji quickly nodded in agreement, while Xie Lianyun was still processing: “Bathing six people… that’s a lot of water. Won’t we risk being discovered?”
“I… kind of want to bathe,” Huo Ren explained: “Sweated too much before, it smells weird.”
Mei Shengyao’s eyes sparkled, opening his oversized backpack and pulling out a folding plastic ring like magic: “Look! At! This!!!”
Everyone squinted, trying to figure out what it was: “What’s this?”
“A foldable portable bathtub!!”
Bo Jue showed a baffled expression: “How many things did you secretly buy…”
Deciding quickly, Huo Ren and Long Jia dug another stove. Two smokeless stoves and a solar battery heated water simultaneously, with a simple screen set up for privacy, allowing each person to enjoy a scrub in the open air.
Xie Lianyun, returning with several buckets of water, was still hesitant: “Let me be clear… if we get caught, the crew could end up filming hot idols passionately streaking—our careers in the entertainment industry would be over.”
Huo Ren paused, imagining the scenario.
A circle of police charging neurotically: “Don’t move! You’re surrounded!”
Long Jia stands up nonchalantly from the bathtub, dripping wet: “Wait, let me dry off.”
Female reporters, covering their eyes, snap away: “Sss… too thrilling…”
He quickly shook his head, dismissing the bizarre imagery.
“So, when bathing, uh, try to be quick.”
Fortunately, the water heated up fast, and the bathtub didn’t require much water.
The clear, clean mountain air, with pear orchards and streams nearby and mountains and misty clouds in the distance, made bathing a delight.
Bo Jue, feeling he used too much water and time, didn’t want to burden the team and waited until the end.
“This tub is indeed good,” Xie Lianyun remarked, rubbing his refreshed wet hair: “Just that it’s hard to pick up soap if it falls in.”
Bo Jue quietly undressed behind the screen and sighed in relief stepping into the water.
Huo Ren called from behind the screen: “Jue-ge, need help?”
Bo Jue paused, then softly replied: “Should be fine…”
“Your hair is too long, the back part is hard to wash,” Huo Ren said patiently: “I’ll help you scrub it quickly—Long Jia and the others are keeping watch, it’s fine.”
Bo Jue quickly agreed, gratefully: “I’m glad you mentioned bathing. I almost couldn’t make it today… you have no idea how bad I’ve smelled these past few days.”
“How could that be.” Huo Ren, holding a towel, smiled as he entered: “Jue-ge always smells the best, like daffodils.”
After drying and applying essential oil to smooth the long hair, they hadn’t heard from their teammates for over ten minutes.
Chi Ji suddenly called out from a distance, his voice carrying: “The bell rang!”
“You guys go check it out, I’ll finish drying Jue-ge’s hair and join you.”
“Okay—”
Huo Ren finished drying Bo Jue’s waist-length hair and even applied and combed through some essential oil, spending about ten minutes without any noise from the others.
No gunshots were heard either.
Bo Jue felt something was off and whispered, “Could they have already been captured?”
“That doesn’t seem likely,” Huo Ren, making sure his clothes were properly worn, then lifted the curtain to check outside: “Eh? Where did everyone go?”
Chi Ji hurried back from a distance, waving at them: “You guys, come over here.”
Following him, they were petrified at the sight, standing in a line next to three stone statues.
Indeed, deer had come.
Not one, not three, but a procession of them.
When Xie Lianyun and the others arrived, only five or six were sniffing around for the salt.
Before they could even prepare their rifles, seven or eight more emerged, voraciously devouring the roadside daisies with their tongues.
Soon, a large family of over a dozen deer gathered, all sniffing around like salt detectors, extending their tongues to lick clean every grain of salt and droplet of salty water.
The deer, with their dark brown fur, the stags crowned with long antlers like tree branches, and several does leading their fawns to lick the rocks, presented a pastoral scene.
Bo Jue slapped his forehead: “Xie Lianyun, what were you thinking with all that salt? Are we waiting for them to eat us now?”
Xie Lianyun, scratching his head in confusion, hadn’t anticipated his salt-spreading would attract so many top-tier beasts: “Are there that many animals around here? There aren’t wolves, are there??”
“It shouldn’t be,” Huo Ren, having memorized the local forestry guide, replied: “There are wolf packs in Luanfu Mountain, but this area is an old hunting ground, the deer population is cultivated.”
“So… what do we do now?”
They watched the procession of deer from behind the bushes, with two cameramen climbing nearby trees to capture the scene.
Xie Lianyun initially hoped to hunt a deer for their evening meal but hadn’t expected to inadvertently summon an entire herd, risking being trampled.
He felt overwhelmed, a rare feeling of defeat settling in.
He couldn’t win a fight against Long Jia, let alone these towering stags.
“Maybe… we should just give up on eating meat.”
Imagining the antlers charging, the news the next day might headline a popular idol impaled by a deer, which sounded utterly humiliating.
Chi Ji worriedly suggested: “They’ll probably leave after licking the salt… but if they’re still here by night, hiding from the drones might become impossible.”
Huo Ren cautiously stepped out from behind their cover, taking a step forward.
Several stags immediately raised their heads to look at him, nearly two meters tall with their antlers, showing no fear.
Their large black eyes with unusually long lashes stared at him, as if asking, ‘What do you want, kid?’
Huo Ren didn’t expect to be intimidated by herbivores, silently retreating back to the safety of his teammates’ embrace.
“Let’s… head back to camp,” he suggested quietly. “They seem formidable; best not to provoke them.”
The deer, like a bridge of deep brown, meticulously licked every stone nearby before departing.
That afternoon, they settled for catching a couple of fish to grill, as their traps remained empty of rabbits, releasing a skunk they caught due to its stench.
Huo Ren let his teammates handle the fishing while he stayed near the extinguished proximity light, watching what the cameramen were doing.
One cameraman, dressed in black, almost blended into the tree, with his presence barely noticeable except for his camera.
Huo Ren looked up, suddenly realizing something was amiss.
A snake—was it a snake?! A thick one at that!
The snake, nearly one and a half meters long, blended into the vines on the tree, almost indistinguishable at a glance.
Its dark brown stripes made it resemble tree bark, with only the shimmer of its scales in the shadows giving it away.
Just as Huo Ren was about to warn him for safety, the cameraman turned, saw the snake, and with a swift motion, struck its head with a dagger.
The snake was instantly pinned to the trunk, its tail thrashing twice before going limp, dead.
Indeed… a professional in action.
Huo Ren breathed a sigh of relief for him and continued to look up.
The cameraman, unfazed, kept his right hand holding the camera, continuing to shoot the distant view of the forest.
“Uncle,” he tentatively called out: “Uncle, is that snake poisonous?”
Hearing the question from below, the cameraman removed his earphones, which were blasting death metal, to look down: “No poison, it’s just a common fig snake. They usually don’t bite people.”
He wouldn’t have intervened if he hadn’t been concerned the snake might harm them; normally, he wouldn’t bother them while passing through the woods.
Huo Ren responded with a long, “Oh,” his gaze falling on the snake’s over one-and-a-half-meter-long body, then asked, “Uncle, could you give that snake to us, if that’s okay?”
The cameraman looked at him quizzically: “You want it for a pet?”
“Not really, was thinking of making a soup out of it… looks like it has a lot of meat…”