Chapter Seven: The Final Gamble (3)
Zhousheng Xing’s face was somewhat grave, yet he was smiling. “Indeed, rules need to be established. Pointing a gun at a guest is not a rule of the Zhousheng family. Young Boss Cheng has already shown mercy.” He waved his hand, signaling for someone to deal with the butler. “And I’m sorry about what happened last night. I never expected there to be an outsider at my side who would threaten Young Boss Cheng’s safety.”
“That’s only normal,” Cheng Muyang said. The wound on the back of his hand was strikingly visible. Just now, he had used that injured hand to throw a punch, to the point that the entire back of his hand had begun to swell and redden. “Even I can’t guarantee that every person around me is absolutely loyal.”
The table had been overturned, and with yet another unpleasant incident, Cheng Muyang soon took his leave.
Nan Bei hesitated, glancing at the little boy in Zhousheng Chen’s arms. Zhousheng Chen seemed to guess what she was thinking and smiled kindly, putting her at ease. She quickly lifted the white gauze curtain, but did not see Cheng Muyang.
Thinking of everything that had just happened, her heart suddenly began pounding violently in her chest.
This ship was simply too dangerous.
At any moment, something could happen.
Would tonight’s gambling game really go as smoothly as they hoped?
She rested in her room for several hours. Around seven o’clock, someone suddenly brought over an extremely sumptuous dinner. To accommodate the tastes of the three families, the Zhou Sheng family had specifically brought chefs who could prepare all kinds of dishes. In the more than twenty days since they had set out, she had never once eaten anything cooked with mint.
People from the Yunnan-Guizhou region all had a fondness for mint.
Spicy and cooling, with a clean, delicate flavor.
She picked up a small piece of grilled fish with her chopsticks. Because of the mint, the greasiness seemed to disappear. She suddenly thought of how Cheng Muyang always carried that same cool, refreshing scent. Even in the mornings, she could see him eating mint leaves.
It was precisely these tiny details that always made her feel he was not far from her.
She was eating somewhat absentmindedly when someone lightly knocked on the door. She walked over and opened it. It was Shen Jiaming.
“What are you eating?” Shen Jiaming watched her slowly swallow what was in her mouth and could not help laughing. “Slow down, don’t choke.”
She swallowed the fish completely. “Mint grilled fish. Come, eat with me.”
Shen Jiaming was not at all shy about it. He walked over, picked up her chopsticks, and began eating the other dishes. “I don’t like mint. You know that.”
Nan Bei thought about it. “I guess you really don’t.”
“Are you going to watch tonight’s gambling game?” Shen Jiaming asked casually as he ate.
“I’m not going,” Nan Bei refused outright. “I’m afraid I’ll get nervous. I always feel that anything could happen on this ship. If possible, I’d rather sleep straight through until we reach our destination. It would be more peaceful.”
Shen Jiaming casually picked up the remote and turned on the satellite television. Leaning back against the sofa, he began watching the evening news seriously. The news anchor was wearing a pale pink suit, with a practiced smile, and her English was very fluent.
“Next is a special bulletin.” After a brief advertisement, the female anchor had already picked up a stack of papers and said in an even tone, “At five this morning, the Philippine ‘Freedom Armed Forces’ launched attacks on government military positions in three cities and towns, including Maguindanao Province. The local government forces immediately retaliated, and the exchange of fire continued for several hours. The government has now dispatched the 1st Mechanized Brigade to join the fighting…”
She listened attentively, but Shen Jiaming had already switched to another channel.
“Why did you stop listening?” Nan Bei asked, puzzled.
Shen Jiaming kept switching through channels from different countries as he told her, “It’s Filipinos fighting Filipinos, fighting among themselves. It has nothing to do with us. Our cruise ship should be in Thai waters by now. The Zhousheng family has already made all the arrangements. What happens in the Philippines won’t affect us.”
She finished every last bit of the grilled fish, then hugged her mint lemon tea and chatted idly with Shen Jiaming. The room had floor-to-ceiling windows in a semicircle, half overlooking the sea. The two of them sat not far apart, watching the distant horizon and the clouds.
“A storm is coming,” she murmured.
Shen Jiaming did not hear her clearly. He was just about to ask what she had said when the telephone suddenly rang. He walked over and picked it up. After listening for two seconds, he put it down. “The people downstairs said we’ve entered the area of a severe typhoon.”
Nan Bei gave a quiet “Mm.” “The storm is fine, as long as we don’t enter waters with submerged reefs.”
She stood up and walked to the window, looking out at the nearby sea.
Sunset came late at sea.
The color of the water could still be seen.
She was staring somewhat absently when she noticed another strange detail. According to what Shen Jiaming had said, they should already be nearing Thai waters. So how could there be a Kuroshio Current? This nearly black seawater should only be encountered when passing through places such as the Philippines. It should not have appeared here.
The Philippines… Taiwan.
Almost subconsciously, Nan Bei mapped out a topographical chart in her mind.
The Bashi Channel?
“I remember that by evening, we had already left the Bashi Channel?”
Shen Jiaming glanced at the watch on his wrist. “More or less. At this time, we should already be far away from it.”
But right now, this cruise ship was clearly in the Bashi Channel.
She did not immediately tell Shen Jiaming. She was only wondering whether the hosts had lied, deliberately keeping them in international waters for one more night, or whether someone else was manipulating the route.
“You should go to the casino.” She turned around and leaned against the glass, reminding Shen Jiaming.
“More or less. I should get ready.” Shen Jiaming rose from the sofa, then suddenly asked her curiously, “You really don’t care whether we win or lose?”
Nan Bei neither agreed nor disagreed. She looked at him. “None of that matters. What matters is that everyone can return safely.”
Shen Jiaming soon left.
Night quietly descended. The room was very dark. She wanted to turn on the light, and her hand had already pressed against the switch, when she realized that her vision was beginning to blur, her pupils slowly dilating involuntarily. She held her hand out in front of herself and moved it farther away, finding it difficult to focus on the tip of her middle finger. It happened silently, without the slightest pain.
Her movements gradually came to a stop.
In Southeast Asia, this kind of interrogation technique was commonly used. Adrenaline was used to dilate the pupils, followed by hallucinations and intracranial hematoma.
The maximum dilation of the pupils was 9 mm. She had seen it happen once in person, and even then, she had only been a bystander.
The dizziness caused by her dilated pupils forced her to stand with her back against the wall.
There was not a sound. Everything in the room was utterly silent. Her hand felt along the wall. She stood there for about ten minutes, finally able to adjust to the dizziness, but by then, her eyes could no longer see anything.
The skin of her palm was pressed tightly against the wall.
She forced herself to concentrate, trying to determine what had suddenly happened.
Perhaps it was the food, perhaps a drug, perhaps simply some silent, imperceptible poisonous gas. There were too many possibilities, and too many reasons. Anyone on this ship might have had a reason to do this. It was like so many places in this world, where you could be walking down the street and at any moment be struck by someone who suddenly rushed out, killed with a single shot.
Sometimes, the person being hated does not even know what they did wrong.
Let alone when she was Nan Bei, Nan Huai’s only younger sister.
She thought in some confusion, trying to find something suspicious among all the possibilities running through her mind. The ship’s route had quietly changed, and even Shen Jiaming did not know. Did someone want to remain in international waters? What were they trying to do in the safest possible place?
The woman who had died last night had also fought to the death in the end to keep the ship in international waters.
And now, this sudden poisoning.
Nan Bei kept testing the functions of her body.
So far, apart from her dilated pupils, there had been no other reaction.
For some reason, she suddenly thought of Cheng Muyang. Ever since Qiandao Lake, his life had constantly been under threat. Although he had concealed it very well, so well that she had thought he was only here to indulge in romance with her.
Yet that night, she had suddenly woken up to find a gunfight taking place before her eyes.
And again, she and Shen Jiaming had suddenly decided to leave through the stairwell, only to encounter that bloody scene. If she had slept until dawn that night, or if she had not seen the bodies in the stairwell, perhaps she would have known nothing at all. Just by chance, it had already happened twice.
What about all the things she had not seen?
When his name appeared among her suspicions, Nan Bei suddenly felt that her heartbeat was becoming unsteady.
If the dilation of her pupils was only meant to impede her movements, then could the reason be that someone wanted to completely threaten Cheng Muyang’s life, and did not want her to interfere?
As she thought, she had already taken off her slippers.
She stood barefoot on the floor.
Then, fumbling in the darkness, she changed into a close-fitting short-sleeved shirt and cotton pants. All of this took more than five minutes under conditions in which she could not see. She needed to make it easier for herself to move. Her hand closed around the doorknob, while reason kept warning her that if she opened this door, the danger waiting outside would be impossible to predict.
What she should do now, more than anything, was find Shen Jiaming and have him come to her room.
But she was worried about Cheng Muyang, worried that something might happen to him while she was blind. Even if she could not find him, she might have a chance of seeing Xiao Feng or Oman, or someone else.
She opened the door and asked into the corridor, neither loudly nor softly, “Is anyone there?”
No one answered, and there was no sound of footsteps.
At this hour, everyone should have gone to the casino. But there should have been someone responsible for the security of this floor. Yet there was not a single person in sight. Still, that was just as well. It made it convenient for her to walk there barefoot.
Nan Bei’s room was on one side of the corridor, while Cheng Muyang’s was at the far end on the other side.
With one hand against the wall, she walked toward the end of the corridor as quickly as she could.
Her fingertips slid along the wall. The first door, then the wall, the second door… until her hand touched his door. She finally stopped and gently knocked. There was no sound.
Had he gone to the casino?
She gently knocked again.
In the silence, she distinctly felt the door beneath her hand open.
“Cheng Muyang?” she called his name, her hand already quietly clenching into a fist.
If it was not Cheng Muyang, then this was the biggest possible trouble.
There was no answer.
She tensed every part of her body, ready to strike back at any moment, when she was suddenly pulled into the room.
“It’s me.” Cheng Muyang’s voice was brief and urgent. She felt herself being lifted entirely into his arms and swiftly carried away.
A tremendous shattering sound suddenly tore through the entire room.
Amid the howling of the wind as it rushed into the room, she was suddenly gagged, her body going weightless as he held her tightly in his arms, plummeting rapidly from high above.
The instant they hit the water, there was a sudden explosion beside her ears, but under the enormous force of the water below, the sound gradually faded into the distance.
Only sinking, sinking without end.
She could not see, but she knew they had jumped into the sea. Cheng Muyang’s hand was clamped tightly over her mouth and nose, but she had not been prepared beforehand. The oxygen in her lungs was already gone, and waves of pain began to spread through her chest. Fortunately, he soon carried her back to the surface. As he released his hand, he gripped her around the waist and lifted her upper body completely out of the water.
In the torrential rain, Nan Bei gasped for breath.
Her lips and tongue had been soaked in seawater, leaving them raw and astringent. The heavy saltiness and bitterness made her want to retch.
“I know you can’t see right now,” Cheng Muyang said. “I’m going to take you swimming for 1,000 meters. It’s a severe typhoon right now. Once we reach shore, I’ll tell you what happened from beginning to end.” His voice was weakened by the typhoon and the waves, drifting into her ears in broken fragments.
She had no unnecessary words to spare. She only said one word.
“Okay.”
He did not need to tell her. The moment the two of them entered the water, she understood how dangerous things were now.
Why did he know she could not see?
Why had he suddenly jumped overboard?
And why had there been the sound of an explosion?
The storm clouds she had seen at dinner were still vividly etched in her mind.
Trying to swim through a severe typhoon was practically gambling with their lives.
All these questions could only be pressed down for the moment. Getting out of this dangerous stretch of sea was the first thing they had to do.
Cheng Muyang quickly adjusted his position, reaching his arm around from behind her back to her chest and, using the standard method for rescuing someone, carrying her as he swam toward the island. A dozen-meter-high wave surged toward them from not far away, carrying a thick, briny stench.
Nan Bei tried hard to adjust her breathing, but she continued choking on seawater. She could not see the way ahead. To avoid becoming a burden, she could only rely on him to move forward.
Cheng Muyang held his watch up before his eyes, constantly checking their direction and coordinates.
The Batanes Islands lay to the southeast.
The Kuroshio Current in this stretch of sea already had a powerful flow. Now, with the storm, the water was swirling with even greater force, making it impossible to see even a meter ahead. The wind, waves, and rain also blurred his vision, and every breath was labored and agonizing.
He symbolically covered Nan Bei’s mouth.
Signaling for her to hold her breath.
Then he began holding his own breath as he swam. In the typhoon and monstrous waves, the survival abilities of the two of them were perhaps not even greater than those of a thumb-sized fish. The hand Cheng Muyang used to paddle through the water kept bleeding, the redness dispersing into the seawater in an instant.
Originally, he had had time to use a tool to smash through the glass. But Nan Bei’s sudden appearance had cost him the crucial ten seconds. In his desperation, he could only use his fist to drive the steel blade he carried for self-defense into the glass, causing the bulletproof glass to shatter instantly. And for that, he had paid a terrible price.
The highly saline water of the Kuroshio Current had left his right hand completely numb. Judging from the amount of blood pouring out, he knew the injury was severe and that he had to get ashore for treatment. With a wall of waves closing in before his eyes, he cast aside all distracting thoughts and swam forward through the increasingly enormous waves, unable to see anything more than five meters ahead.
The 1,000-meter swim they had to make together was draining every ounce of his strength.
A ten-meter wall of water suddenly rose up, its howling roar drowning out everything.
In an instant, he saw the reef. He suddenly pulled Nan Bei into his arms and held her tightly. The two of them were lifted by the wall of water and hurled violently toward the reef.
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