I called the fat guy over to take a look. He widened his eyes and said, “Huh? They’re going back. What are they going back for?”
“Is someone chasing them?” I replied. The fat guy took out his binoculars, looked for a moment, and shook his head. “Just the two of them, they’re in a hurry, almost running, but there’s nothing behind them.”
“Let me see!” I said. After looking through the binoculars, I realized something was off. “They’re taking off their clothes.”
“Taking off their clothes? Both of them?” the fat guy asked.
The two of them were running while taking off their clothes piece by piece. I found it strange, and the fat guy became even more anxious. “Hurry up, let’s see what the old lady’s figure looks like.”
I pushed him aside, adjusted the focus of the binoculars, and tried to look at the ice beneath their feet.
There was nothing unusual on the ice surface; it was too far away, and the binoculars couldn’t show what was happening beneath the ice. The fat guy aimed his gun a few times but also shook his head. It was really too far; the accuracy of our guns at that distance was already very poor, not to mention for sniping.
I watched them run to the center of the ice lake, already down to their underwear. If they took off any more, it would be a naked run. I was puzzled, yet I didn’t see anything chasing them from behind. What on earth were these two doing? Did they suddenly get excited halfway?
“Should we go take a look?” the fat guy said. “They can’t be crazy, can they?”
“We won’t be able to catch up if we go now, unless they run in our direction,” I replied. “And look at how they are; they’ve got no burdens on them. 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, while pulling out the walkie-talkie to call over there.
After calling for a long time with no response, I saw the two people in the center of the lake start to dance wildly, flailing their arms and legs, slapping themselves.
“I get it now,” the fat guy said. “This is snow madness.”
“What do you mean?”
“They say looking at snow too much can drive you mad.”
“I think you’re the one who’s gone mad,” I said to the fat guy. “What kind of jokes are you making at a time like this? Let’s go, we still need to check it out.”
The fat guy and I ran into the ice lake again. I felt both frustrated and anxious, not knowing what had happened to them. If I had been a bit more forceful at that time, I wondered if that annoying girl would have listened to me. If something really happened to them now, I wouldn’t know how to feel—whether to gloat or feel guilty.
We ran madly, luckily the two guys kept flailing in the center of the lake and didn’t move anywhere else.
It took us a full half hour to reach them, during which we slipped countless times, and by the time we arrived, I was almost dead from nearly falling.
At that time, Zhang Haixing was only wearing a bra and panties, while Feng was almost completely naked. The two of them were exhausted, lying on the ice, still desperately trying to slap at themselves. The fat guy took off his clothes to cover Zhang Haixing, and I covered Feng with my clothes, then helped them up, only to hear Zhang Haixing repeatedly saying in Cantonese, “It’s burning, it’s burning.”
I saw her skin was already frostbitten and turning blue, but there were no signs of burns. Feng was saying something in German, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

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

I ignored him and looked into Zhang Haixiong’s eyes, realizing she was starting to hallucinate. As a victim of hallucinations myself, I knew that at this stage, Zhang Haixiong might not be able to hear me because when hallucinations occur, one’s mind is definitely not clear. People cannot use rationality to resist hallucinations.

I looked in the direction they were running from and said to the fat guy, “It seems like they’ve fallen for it. 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 take a look.”

I said no way; two people could manage two people, but if the fat guy also fell for it, how would I catch him? Plus, if he had to take off his clothes, that chunk of flesh would be slippery, and I wouldn’t be able to hold him down.

We first dragged Zhang Haixiong and Feng to a bank farther away from the lake. I thought to myself: Well, this long trek today was for nothing. We set up a tent, injected them with sedatives and antidotes, though I had no idea 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 that big turd of a guy is over two meters tall, I really would have to cut him in half to carry him back. Oh man, I’m exhausted. That foreigner must weigh at least 180 pounds, all muscle. Next time, I’ll carry the old lady while you deal with the foreign guy.”

Zhang Haixiong’s body was also not like that of an ordinary girl; although she was thin, her muscle definition was very pronounced, and carrying her wasn’t 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 tougher; otherwise, we keep paying for these idiots’ mistakes. If they die, that’s the end of it. What do we do?”

The fat guy placed his gun on his knee, glanced outside the tent, and said, “With that old lady’s temper, just think about it. The notes from the little brother said 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 area across the lake today.”

I looked at the two of them; I knew the effects of the sedative, and I felt that they definitely wouldn’t wake up anytime soon. But the fat guy was right, so I said, “We can’t rely on them to walk by themselves; we need to make a sled and drag them all the way over.”

The area was covered in snow, and beneath the snow were black stones, so there wasn’t much material 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 sleds from animal bones.”

The fat guy was exhausted, and his altitude sickness was severe, so I had him stay with the two of them while I went back to the lake to the corpse of the deer that was frozen in the ice.

I looked around to confirm that the huge shadow was not nearby and began to hammer away at the lake surface with a small hammer, trying to dig the dead deer out.

On Changbai Mountain, I struck the ancient glacier, and the ice here was much easier to work with. Soon, I smashed a large area of the ice on the lake’s surface, revealing the ribs of a deer underneath. I continued to pry out seven or eight bones with my ice pick, and when the body finally emerged from the ice, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t a deer.

I cleared some more ice and took a few steps back, unable to suppress a gasp. I discovered that the corpse beneath the ice was of a creature I had never seen before. It looked somewhat like 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 section of its entire body.

I took a deep puff of my cigarette and called over the fat guy to come and take a look. He was completely reluctant to move, but with no choice, he huffed over. When he saw the area I had excavated, he was also stunned.

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

The fat guy squatted down and circled around the creature, then said, “Come on, this is a bunch of big leopards.”