We hadn’t noticed the several rows of footprints at all until the muffled voice of the oil bottle pointed it out. When we leaned over to look at the footprints, it was indeed as he said, which made us even more vigilant. Panzi immediately raised his short gun and aimed at Anning’s corpse.

We took a few steps back, while the oil bottle on the other side shone the mining lamp on the corpse and signaled for me to wake up Fatty immediately.

Having just gone through a life-and-death struggle and then encountering Anning’s sudden death, my nerves were already at their limit. Just when things had calmed down for a few minutes, they tensed up again, making me feel quite frustrated. However, I wasn’t scared; instead, I stepped back to Fatty’s side, first feeling around for his dagger, and then I slapped him a few times.

But Fatty was in such a deep sleep that even after several slaps, he only slightly furrowed his brows but didn’t wake up. When I hit him, I felt his face was all sweaty.

I began to feel something was off. How could someone sleep like this? Was he sick? However, when I touched Fatty’s forehead, I didn’t feel any fever. I thought, could he be dreaming? Just as I was about to pinch him hard, I suddenly noticed that there were also small muddy footprints right next to where Fatty was lying. Moreover, there were even more of them and they were more chaotic than those around Anning.

I thought this was bad, so I quickly stood up and stepped back, calling out to Panzi.

“What’s wrong?” Panzi turned back, and I pointed to the muddy footprints for him to see. “There are some here too!”

While Panzi kept his gun trained on Anning’s corpse, he stepped back to my side. When he looked down, he cursed under his breath and moved his gun to the side. The oil bottle also turned back and saw it, stepping back as well.

The three of us looked at the corpse and then at Fatty. I thought to myself that this situation had become complicated. The corpse was manageable, but I didn’t have much time to think. Panzi glanced at the oil bottle, and the two made a gesture, clearly exchanging some opinions. Panzi raised his gun and stepped back to the edge of the rocks beneath his feet, distancing himself from the corpse and Fatty, allowing him to monitor both directions simultaneously. The oil bottle handed me the lamp to shine on Fatty while taking the dagger from my hand and crouching in a very strained posture as he approached Fatty.

It was a half-squatting position, with his feet bent and his body leaning forward, but not completely squatting down, allowing him to maintain maximum agility in case of an emergency. He got close to Fatty, turned his head away from me, and made a gesture for me to move the light to shine on the footprints near Fatty.

The atmosphere was really grim, and I cursed inwardly, wondering when this kind of situation would come to an end. I moved the light over, and in that instant, suddenly two or three unidentified objects shot out from under Fatty’s shoulder at high speed, darting past the range of the light.

The speed was too fast; in the blink of an eye, my vision blurred. But my hand reflexively moved in the direction those things had dashed out. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch anything in the light, only hearing a series of sounds as something jumped into the swamp. At the same time, there was also a sudden commotion near Anning’s corpse, with a similar series of sounds of something entering the water, almost like a lot of frogs being startled along the edge of a field.

The “Muffled Oil Bottle” reacted astonishingly, but clearly, he was at a loss for how to deal with such speed. He quickly turned around and gave up before he even took a single step to chase. He waved his hand for me to go over and shine the light into the water.

I rushed over, lifted the miner’s lamp, and shone it into the water. Immediately, I saw ripples and several water trails swiftly disappearing, sinking into the marsh.

“What is it? A water rat?” I asked, as that was my first instinct. Back in the 1990s, when urban construction wasn’t as developed, I had seen quite a few of those rats.

But the Muffled Oil Bottle shook his head, his expression dark: “It’s a snake! That kind of cockscomb snake.”

I gasped, looking at the series of marks left on the ground, suddenly realizing that I was right; those were indeed snake-like tracks. No wonder they looked a bit like footprints but weren’t. An ominous thought surged in my mind; it is said that this type of snake is extremely vengeful and acts in a bizarre manner, and now it had indeed come knocking.

At that moment, I noticed that the Fatty was still unconscious, and my heart sank. I thought, could it be that the Fatty had already been bitten?

I immediately went over to check on the Fatty. Not knowing if all the snakes had left, I cautiously approached and pushed him a little. To my surprise, he woke up immediately and sat up straight, his face pale but still somewhat dazed. He looked at us and then at the sky, a bit confused. After a while, he finally said, “What the hell are you guys doing? Fatty here sells his skills, not his body; looking at me is useless.”

Seeing him like this, he should be fine, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Still, I wasn’t reassured, so I had the Fatty turn around and checked him; he indeed hadn’t been bitten. The Fatty, seeing me ask him to take off his clothes, felt even more confused and asked me what was going on. I explained the earlier events to him.

The Fatty was skeptical, but we didn’t have time to explain further, so we got up and walked over to An Ning’s body. I shone the light around the nearby marsh, which was completely black, and I couldn’t see anything. The stones around the body were covered in the marks left by those snakes.

“This is really bizarre; could it be that these snakes opened the sleeping bag?” Panzi muttered to himself softly while tapping the body with his gun to see if any snakes were still inside.

No snakes emerged, but I felt extremely uneasy, a nightmarish panic spreading in my heart. While we were sleeping, several cockscomb snakes had crawled out of the marsh, slithered beneath the Fatty and An Ning, and somehow managed to open An Ning’s sleeping bag. This was truly strange; what did they want? Looking at the pitch-black marsh, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something ominous was bound to happen.

Everyone else felt the same way. The Muffled Oil Bottle crouched down to check An Ning’s body and found nothing unusual. He gestured for us to turn on our miner’s lamps; he wanted to take a closer look at the situation underwater.

We followed the Muffled Oil Bottle’s instructions, and the Fatty came over to help. We turned on the miner’s lamps in four directions and started scanning the water. Just as we had barely started, suddenly the Fatty behind us exclaimed in shock.

We thought the snake had appeared again and immediately turned around, following his light to see that about twenty meters away in the marsh, there was actually a human figure, seemingly crawling out from the mud of the marsh.

The light from a miner’s lamp couldn’t illuminate clearly, so all the lights quickly gathered around. We saw a person covered in mud, standing in waist-deep water, staring at us like a water ghost.
“Damn it, what is that?” the fat man shouted.
After taking a closer look, the muffled oil bottle exclaimed, “Oh my God, it’s Chen Wenjin!” Saying this, he rushed into the swamp and waded towards the person.