After Li Cu crawled out halfway, he turned to look for someone and saw a movable pulley device standing on the side of a truck. Previously, he had thought it was just some strange cargo, but now he understood its purpose. Although the truck bed had been towed away, it was still exhausting to crawl out of the sand pit by himself, so Li Cu turned to find someone to give him a hand. He thought it was only natural; since the other party had already lifted the front of the truck, it would definitely be necessary to give him a pull.

So he continued to turn around and said to the person nearby, “Give me a hand, brother.”

Unexpectedly, what greeted Li Cu was a blow from the butt of a gun, which struck him right on the forehead. He almost fainted and fell onto the sand, taking a mouthful of it. In a daze, he felt as if someone had dragged him out of the sand pit, and then he sensed that someone was starting to search him.

Li Cu thought to himself that the security these days was terrible; even in the desert, there were highway robbers. In his haze, he suddenly saw the other person’s gun hanging right in front of him. It seemed that the other party was quite confident after hitting him with the gun butt, not expecting him to have any ability to resist. He reached out and grabbed the gun, pulling with both hands, trying to wrest it away.

The other person reacted very quickly, immediately grabbing the strap of the gun, and the two of them began to tug and roll together. The sand pile could not support their weight during such intense movement; they both wanted to stand up to gain some advantage, but as soon as they tried to push themselves up, the sand would sink beneath them, and they would be thrown back down again.

During the struggle, the wound on Li Cu’s back split open again, and sand rolled into the injury, causing him almost unbearable pain. Because of this, his strength erupted fiercely for a short time. Although the other person was much taller than him, he didn’t gain any advantage at all.

As they shouted in anger and pulled at each other, they finally both rolled into the water of the lake. Li Cu pushed the other person away with all his might, and the gun went “splash” as it was thrown somewhere, far from the other person.

Then the man stood up from the lake water, both of them panting heavily. They looked at each other, and under the moonlight, Li Cu noticed that the other person’s skin was very pale; he didn’t seem to be young but rather an old man.

“Who are you?” Li Cu shouted at him. “Why did you attack me? I was just passing by!”

After panting for a while, the other party spoke in a strange language. Li Cu listened carefully and realized that it was a local dialect. If he tried to understand it as Mandarin, he would never comprehend it, but if he guessed based on the pronunciation, he could infer the general meaning.

The stranger seemed to be asking Li Cu as well: “Who are you?”

Li Cu thought to himself, “What does it matter to you who I am? It’s not important who I am; I’m just a victim of circumstance, I was kidnapped here, and they were caught in the sand. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, and you wouldn’t know me anyway.” But then he realized he had just asked that question himself.

For the two men caught in fear, knowing who the other was was the one question they both desperately wanted answered.

“I’m a victim of circumstance,” Li Cu tried to calm himself down. “I’m from Beijing, I got lost here, and I’m trapped. There were originally three of us, but now there’s only one left.”

The person stared blankly as Li Cu finished speaking, then replied in accented Mandarin, “You are a lost soul. How did you end up like this? Did you fall from a plane?”

“I can’t explain it clearly,” Li Cu scratched his head. “I said I came by boat. Do you believe me?”

The man scrutinized Li Cu for a long time without speaking, as if he had caught on to something, before finally saying, “Are you really from outside the desert? Not from inside the sand?”

“Lying to you would be like lying to a puppy.”

“You being a puppy is of no benefit to me.” The man still didn’t dare to approach Li Cu, but he seemed a bit more relaxed. “So let me ask you, what year is it now?” he inquired.

Li Cu gave him a rough idea of the time.

The man was momentarily stunned and said in a dazed tone, “Heavens, it’s almost been twenty years. I’ve been stuck in this godforsaken place for twenty years.”

Li Cu then asked him, “Alright, sir, now it’s your turn to tell me, who exactly are you?”

The man looked around, pointed at the truck, and said with a somewhat vacant expression, “I’m the driver.” As he spoke, he gestured to the surroundings.

Li Cu noticed that the man’s clothes were indeed similar to those of the mummified corpses, only even more tattered, and he was adorned with many things.

“You’re one of the drivers of these trucks?”

A driver? A truck soldier?

The man ignored Li Cu and muttered to himself, “Twenty years, just like that.”

Li Cu asked, “Why haven’t you died?” After he asked, he felt it was a bit impolite.

The man’s expression was somewhat confused as he replied, “Why die? As long as you understand the rules here, you won’t die. It’s not that easy to die.”

Li Cu thought this person seemed a bit crazy, as if his mind had already gone a bit awry. Suddenly, the man seemed to remember something and turned sharply to Li Cu, asking, “How did you get in? By boat?”

Li Cu was just about to explain that they had come here on a moving sea vehicle similar to a bus when the other person turned his head toward a nearby sand dune, as if listening for something. Li Cu wanted to speak, but the man immediately waved his hand at him and said, “Shh, don’t say anything yet.”

Li Cu was startled by him and didn’t dare to speak again. He listened quietly, but he heard nothing, only the occasional sound of sand sliding down the dune from a distance.