I called Fatty over to take a look. He widened his eyes and said, “Huh? They’re heading back. What are they going back for?”
“Is someone chasing them?” I asked. Fatty took out his binoculars, looked through them, and shook his head. “It’s just the two of them. They’re in a hurry, almost running, but there’s nothing behind them.”
“Let me see!” I snatched the binoculars from him and, upon looking, realized something was off. “They’re taking off their clothes.”
“Taking off their clothes? Both of them?” Fatty asked.
The two of them were running while removing their clothes piece by piece. I found it strange, and Fatty was getting more anxious. “Hurry, hurry, let’s see how the old lady’s figure is!”
I pushed him aside, adjusted the focus of the binoculars, wanting to see the ice beneath their feet.
There was nothing unusual on the ice surface, and it was too far away for the binoculars to see what was under the ice. Fatty aimed his gun a few times but shook his head as well. The distance was just too far; the guns we had were already very inaccurate at such a range, let alone for sniping.
We watched them run to the center of the icy lake, now only in their underwear. If they took off any more, it would be a naked run. I was puzzled, yet there was still nothing chasing them from behind. What on earth were these two doing? Did they suddenly get carried away halfway?
“Should we go take a look?” Fatty said. “Could they be going crazy?”
“If we go now, we won’t catch up with them unless they run in our direction,” I replied. “Besides, they’ve stripped down like that, with no burdens, while we’re dressed like woolly mammoths; we wouldn’t even be able to roll after them.”
“But if we don’t go, we’re too far away to see anything.”
“Damn it, what do you want to see?” I scooped up a handful of snow and threw it at his face, then pulled out the walkie-talkie to call over there.
After calling for a long time with no response, we saw the two of them start to dance wildly in the center of the lake, flailing their arms and legs, slapping themselves.
“I get it now,” Fatty said. “This is snow madness.”
“What do you mean?”
“They say if you look at snow too much, you’ll go crazy.”
“I think you’re the one who’s gone crazy.” I said to Fatty, “What kind of joke is that at a time like this? Let’s go, we still need to check it out.”
Fatty and I ran back onto the icy lake. I felt both anxious and troubled, not knowing what had happened to them. If I had been a bit more assertive back then, I wondered if that annoying girl would have listened to me. If something really happened to them now, I didn’t know what my feelings would be—whether I would feel schadenfreude or guilt.
We ran like mad, luckily those two kept flailing in the center of the lake and didn’t run off elsewhere.
It took us a full half hour to reach them, during which we slipped countless times, and by the time we got there, I was almost out of breath.
At that moment, Zhang Haixing was only wearing a bra and panties, while Feng was nearly completely naked. The two of them were exhausted, lying on the ice, still desperately making slapping motions. Fatty took off his clothes to cover Zhang Haixing, and I covered Feng with my clothes, then helped the two of them up. I heard Zhang Haixing repeatedly saying in Cantonese, “It’s on fire, it’s on fire!”
I saw her skin had turned blue from the cold, but there were no signs of burns. Feng was speaking something in German, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“Where’s the fire?” the fat guy asked. “Is it actually burning, or is it just smoldering? I think the latter seems more likely.”

I ignored him and glanced into Zhang Haixing’s eyes, realizing she was starting to hallucinate. As the ruler of the Hallucination Victims’ Alliance, I knew that at this stage, she might not be able to hear my voice, because when hallucinations occur, the mind is definitely not clear. One cannot use reason to resist hallucinations.

I looked in the direction they were running from and said to the fat guy, “It seems like they’ve been affected. Use the binoculars to check what’s on the other side of the lake.”

The fat guy looked through the binoculars and shook his head. “Nothing. I can’t see anything. I need to go over and take a look.”

I said no way. Two people could handle two people, but if the fat guy got affected too, how would I catch him? Plus, if he had to take off his clothes, that mound of flesh would be slippery; I wouldn’t be able to hold him down.

We first dragged Zhang Haixing and Feng to the shore, further away from the lake. I thought to myself: great, all this walking today has been for nothing. We set up a tent and injected both of them with sedatives and antidotes, not knowing if it would work.

Both of them were already exhausted, and after some fussing around, they fell into a deep sleep. The fat guy was also tired and said to me, “So far, all my predictions have been correct. If this big pile of shit is over two meters tall, I’m really going to have to cut him in half to carry him back. Oh man, I’m exhausted. This foreigner must weigh at least 180 pounds, all muscle. Next time, I’ll carry the old lady, and you can take care of the foreigner.”

Zhang Haixing’s body was not like an ordinary girl’s. Although she was thin, the muscle definition on her body was very pronounced, and carrying her was not as pleasant as I had imagined.

I lit a cigarette. Smoking at high altitudes is more harmful to the lungs, but I couldn’t care less; I needed some nicotine to calm down. I said to the fat guy, “Next time, we need to be more forceful. Otherwise, we’ll always be paying for these idiots’ mistakes. If they die, it’s all over for them, but what do we do?”

The fat guy placed his gun on his knee, glanced outside the tent, and said, “That old lady’s temper, just think about it. The notes from the kid say there’s something by the lake, and it’ll be even more troublesome once it gets dark. It’s still early; let’s see if we can wake them up. We must get into the canyon on the other side of the lake today.”

I looked at the two of them. I knew the effects of the sedatives; I felt that they definitely wouldn’t wake up anytime soon. But the fat guy was right, so I said, “It’s impossible to rely on them to walk on their own; we need to make a sled and drag them over.”

The ground was covered in snow, and beneath the snow were black stones, leaving us with no materials to make a sled. The fat guy said, “We need to make use of that deer. I saw on an exploration show that you can make a sled from animal bones.”

The fat guy was running low on energy, and the altitude sickness was hitting him hard. I told him to stay with the two of them and went back to the lake, to the frozen corpse of the deer.

I looked around to make sure that the huge shadow wasn’t nearby, then started using a small hammer to repeatedly strike the surface of the lake, trying to dig the dead deer out.

I struck the millennia-old glacier on Changbai Mountain. The ice here was much easier to handle, and soon I shattered a large section of the ice on the lake’s surface, revealing the ribcage of a deer beneath. I continued to pry out seven or eight bones with an ice pick, and when the body finally emerged from the ice, I suddenly realized that this was not a deer.

I cleared some more ice and stepped back a few paces, unable to help but gasp in surprise. I discovered that the corpse beneath the ice was a creature I had never seen before. It appeared to be an animal, but I noticed countless coin-sized scales on its body. The part of it that was exposed above the ice seemed to be just a small portion of its entire body.

I took a deep drag of my cigarette and called over Fatty to take a look. Fatty was completely unwilling to move, but with no choice, he huffed over. When he saw the area I had dug out, he was also stunned.

“What is this? Have you seen anything like it before?”

Fatty squatted down and walked around the creature, then said, “Dude, this is a bunch of big leopards.”