I was stunned by the scene before me, and before I could react, the fat guy next to me rushed over with a gun, shouting, “Bullets! Bullets!!”

I pulled out a gun, but he immediately snatched it away, wedging it under his arm while holding a torch in one hand and loading bullets with the other. He jumped into the bushes and chased after whatever it was.

After running a few steps and seeing that I wasn’t moving, he cursed loudly, “Keep up! If you stay here, how am I supposed to find you later?”

I cursed back, slapped myself, tightened my backpack, and quickly followed him.

Crashing through the bushes was incredibly difficult; I gritted my teeth and pushed through the thorns, following the glow of the fat guy’s torch, and soon my clothes were completely torn. After chasing for several dozen meters, I saw the treetops ahead shaking violently, clearly indicating that whatever we were after had climbed a tree. The noise was enormous; it was evident that this thing was massive.

The fat guy reached the base of the tree, and we saw deep scratches on the trunk, with the leaves in the treetops shaking as they moved toward another tree.

We weren’t monkeys, so there was no way we could chase it up the tree, but standing at the base, we couldn’t keep up. The fat guy gasped for breath, took a few more steps, and had no choice but to lift his gun, aiming in the direction of the shaking leaves.

I immediately shouted at him, “Watch out! Don’t hit Panzi!”

The fat guy gritted his teeth and said, “We’re dead anyway! Let’s take a gamble!” With that, he fired a shot.

The gunshot was deafening. The fat guy was a good shot, but under these circumstances, there was no target to aim at, and I had no idea if he hit anything. The treetops continued to shake in the distance; whatever it was moved faster in the trees than on the ground and was quickly getting away.

“Damn it! This freaking rifle has too small of a caliber!” the fat guy cursed, gritting his teeth as he ran a few more steps and fired off four more shots, emptying his magazine.

I clearly saw the bullets’ fiery trails disappearing into the darkness, but it was all in vain. By the time the fat guy finished reloading, that thing had already vanished from our sight, and it was impossible to catch up.

“What do we do? What do we do?” I shouted in panic.

The fat guy was also anxiously pacing around, but after a moment, he noticed something. He shone the torch up to the tree, and we saw that the trunk was covered in blood.

He hurried a few steps and shone the light on another tree, finding the same thing.

“We’ve got a lead!” he shouted, immediately handing me the torch. “Damn it, this time it’s in trouble. We’ll follow the blood trail and find its lair. Even if we can’t save Panzi, we’ll make it pay with its life.”

This might be our only hope of rescuing Panzi. I thought for a moment and nodded without hesitation.

The fat guy asked me for all the bullets. Panzi’s bullets were stored in a cigarette case, and I didn’t have many left. After all the shooting, I took them all out and found that there were less than one and a half boxes left. The fat guy cursed again, “Next time, if I find another Lama, I won’t come back unless I have something with a caliber above 5.54!”

“Alright, next time I’ll get you a rocket launcher. Stop whining and let’s chase!”

The fat guy poured out five bullets, putting three into his chest pocket and two in his mouth. He shook his head and said, “Let’s go!”

I led the way with the torch to scout the trees while he covered me with the gun, and we followed the blood trail into the depths of the darkness.

The bloodstains continued along the way; there were none on the tree trunk, but there were plenty on the shrubs and ferns below. The more I looked, the more uneasy I felt. This blood must belong to Panzi. With so much blood, it was possible that an artery had been hit. If that were the case, even a deity couldn’t save him.

But alive or dead, we needed to see the person or the body; nothing is ever “absolute.”

We chased for about five or six hundred meters, and the sounds from the treetops ahead had already faded away. We couldn’t afford to care about directions, getting lost, or the strange sounds we had heard earlier. All we knew was that there were bloodstains, and we had to follow them.

The bloodstains were intermittent and increasingly faint, and my heart grew more anxious. I didn’t know if the bleeding had stopped or if it had all been drained away.

The fat guy was cautiously watching the treetops while quickly moving forward, yelling, “You son of a bitch, if you have the guts, come back and take me along with you! Let’s see if your teeth are tougher than my skin!”

I hurried to stop him, “What the hell are you doing?”

The fat guy replied, “Wild animals like to eat when they feel absolutely safe. If it hears me yelling, it will be alert and won’t attack Panzi so quickly.”

I said, “Alert my ass! Don’t attract other things!”

He said, “Haven’t you seen Animal Planet? Such a large predator has its own territory, and there won’t be too many large beasts in that range. It would be best if we could lure it over; we’d have less wasted effort.”

I still felt it was very inappropriate, but the fat guy continued on his own path, yelling as he ran, “You son of a bitch, the one you’re carrying has AIDS, and if you eat it, you’ll—” Before he could finish, he suddenly tripped over something and fell to the ground.

I helped him up and shone the torch down, only to see Panzi’s backpack on the ground, covered in blood.

The fat guy immediately became alert. I wanted to speak, but he made a quiet gesture to me, signaling me to raise the torch and look at the treetops. Just as I straightened up, I saw a massive shadow silently descend from the tree behind him.