13: Chapter 13 On this island, there is no midnight.

"Who has chewing gum on them? Or a cigarette case. I need that kind of packaging with a tinfoil lining."

Dead silence surrounded the area.

"I... I have some in my bag." A female colleague usually in charge of administration tremblingly unzipped her deformed bodycon skirt, digging out a pack of chewing gum soaked and softened by seawater.

Chen Jian walked over in a few strides, snatched the wrapper, brutally tore open the outer green packaging, and pinched out the thin layer of silver tinfoil inside.

Over a dozen people all huddled around, even deliberately suppressing their breathing.

No one could understand what madness this usually submissive kept man was up to.

Chen Jian walked behind a huge reef.

This spot happened to block the piercing cold wind blowing from the sea surface.

He half-knelt in the sand, unbuttoned his shirt, and forcefully tore off a long strip of cotton fabric directly from the hem of his relatively dry underwear close to his skin.

He rubbed it vigorously with both hands, rolling the fabric strip into a fluffy, cotton-like ball.

Then he scraped off a bit of dry moss powder from a nearby rock crevice, carefully padding it at the very bottom.

After finishing this, he folded the tinfoil in half.

Lowering his head, he bit and chewed along the edge of the tinfoil bit by bit with his teeth, forcefully biting out an extremely narrow hourglass shape in the middle.

At the narrowest connecting point, the width was less than two millimeters.

Chen Jian pressed one end of the tinfoil tightly against the positive pole of the lithium battery.

He exerted force with his thumb.

The other end was pressed down toward the metal piece of the negative pole extremely slowly and steadily.

The instant they made contact.

"Hiss!"

The short-circuit current instantly pierced through the tinfoil in a fraction of a second.

The narrowest part in the middle with the highest resistance couldn't bear the load, and was directly burned red-hot by the terrifyingly high temperature, followed by the burst of a dazzling bright yellow spark.

The residual paper fibers attached to the back of the tinfoil were ignited on the spot.

Chen Jian was quick-eyed and nimble-handed; he pinched that weak flame and shoved it right into the prepared pile of shirt cotton and moss.

He threw himself onto the ground, cupping his hands into a semi-circular windbreak, puffing out his cheeks, and blowing air into it extremely gently and rhythmically.

"Hoo... hoo..."

A wisp of extremely thin white smoke drifted out swayingly.

Immediately after.

"Whoosh!"

A finger-sized, orange-red flame slowly lit up.

"Fire! It's lit! It's actually lit!"

"Holy shit! Sister Lan, your husband is so fucking awesome!"

The beach, suppressed to the extreme, completely exploded.

Several grown men were so excited they shed tears on the spot, scrambling and rolling desperately to squeeze behind the reef.

Wang Qiang reacted the fastest. Relying on his physical advantage, he shoved the person beside him away with his shoulder and unreasonably monopolized the core position closest to the flame, his hands practically pressing into the fire.

Su Qingxue's nerves, stretched to the snapping point, finally relaxed.

Her legs went weak, and she slowly slid down to a sitting position along the rock wall.

Feeling that faint yet genuine warmth, she looked at Chen Jian.

Knowledge, in this ghost place where even money was useless, had unexpectedly become the only hard currency.

Fire had indeed been started.

But these people were celebrating too early.

There was simply no dry wood that could burn normally to be found on the beach.

The rotten kelp and driftwood that everyone scrambled to gather were all soaked by seawater year-round, covered in thick salt frost and seabed silt.

As soon as these things were thrown into the fire.

"Crackle, crackle!"

The wet wood cracked violently under the heat. Extremely thick, turbid, billowing white smoke swelled out abruptly like sewer toxic gas fermented for ten years.

As the biting sea wind backwashed, this toxic smoke smacked squarely into everyone's faces.

"Cough, cough, cough... Ugh!"

Su Qingxue bore the brunt of it, her tears streaming wildly from being choked. She clamped her hands over her mouth, her slender body twitching violently, coughing so hard that even the last bit of bitter bile in her stomach was about to turn upward.

Liu Feifei had it even worse. Her delicate face was smoked pitch black, and she lay on the sand crying while dry heaving.

The circle of male colleagues around them didn't fare much better; they were all covering their eyes and coughing frantically.

Yet.

Not a single person retreated, not even half a step back.

Retreating meant the extreme cold that could freeze a person straight to their bone marrow.

They could only cry bitterly while coughing their lungs out, desperately leaning closer to that foul-smelling flame.

Pure torture.

Right in the midst of this extremely tragic toxic-gas fumigation, the direction of the airflow changed.

A gentle breeze poured down from the boulder-strewn slope halfway up the mountain.

There was no suffocating smoke and fire in the wind.

There was only the aroma of meat, rich enough to drive a person mad on the spot.

Spam—the heavy industrial crystal of high starch, high fat, and high sodium.

Under the roasting of the open fire, the animal fats completely dissolved, drifting slowly while mingling with the natural fragrance carried by the top-tier fire-starting material, camphor wood.

This scent penetrated the turbid, thick smoke below without any hindrance, aggressively burrowing into everyone's nasal cavities.

"Gurgle, gurgle~"

A series of gastrointestinal churning sounds exploded in Su Qingxue's abdomen.

She tightly clutched her stomach, her cheeks instantly flushing blood-red.

The aloof queen posture she usually held in the company's conference room was stripped down to not even leaving her underwear by this primitive physiological reaction at this moment.

Hunger.

A fear even more destructive than the cold began to backfire on them.

The campfire dispelled some of the chill, getting this group of people's body metabolism running again.

From the cruise ship accident at noon until now, after a dozen hours of high-intensity physical exhaustion, they hadn't eaten anything.

Their empty, deflated stomachs began frantically secreting gastric acid, the stomach walls rubbing and corroding each other, triggering waves of dizzying, spasmodic pain.

"Meat... He's eating meat..."

Zhang Tao collapsed on the outer periphery farthest from the fire.

His eyes stared straight, gazing blankly at the halfway point of the mountain without any focus.

Turbid saliva stretched into long threads down his cracked corners of the mouth, dripping into the torn shirt on his chest, yet he remained completely oblivious.

"Give me a bite... Just licking the tin box holding the meat is fine too..." Zhang Tao neuroticly scratched the sand on the ground with his fingernails, muttering incoherently.

Inside the inner circle of the campfire.

Wang Qiang couldn't keep his eyes open from the thick smoke, his entire face showing an expression of extreme, hideous distortion.

He felt a sharp-edged rock fragment beneath his buttocks.

His five fingers gripped the edge of the stone tightly, the veins on the back of his hand bulging one by one.

But immediately after, he thought of the terrifying strength when Lin Fan kicked him flying, as well as the chilling tactical straight knife pressed against his neck, pouring cold water over all the impulses in his brain.

Fight a knife with a stone? Fight a madman who could kick a person's ribs apart with a single kick?

Wang Qiang's fingers loosened, and the stone dropped onto the sand.

He couldn't beat him, and he simply couldn't afford to provoke him.

The extremely distorted sense of hunger had nowhere to vent. Wang Qiang stiffly turned his neck, his gaze sweeping across several colleagues around him.

Finally, it glued itself tightly to Li Bin's exposed, slightly fatty arm not far away.

If a person is truly starved to the extreme, they can eat anything.

"Don't panic... Nobody panic..." Su Qingxue bit her lip, forcing herself to maintain a tiny shred of sanity with the pain.

"Twelve o'clock... I said rescue will definitely arrive at twelve o'clock... As long as we get on the helicopter, when we go back, I'll book Michelin restaurants all over the Bund... Eat whatever you want..."

To prove her words, Su Qingxue raised her wrist, looking with extreme difficulty at the waterproof Patek Philippe.

That was her only spiritual pillar.

Yet.

The moment her gaze touched the dial, Su Qingxue stiffened all over.

On the dial.

That slender second hand wasn't ticking clockwise at all.

It had gone crazy.

It spun frantically over half a circle to the left, then abruptly retreated a few notches to the right.

The hour and minute hands were even more completely messed up, fighting with each other.

The terrifying geomagnetic anomaly in this sea area could instantly destroy even the most precise mechanical watch.

"What time is it..." Su Qingxue's voice completely changed tone, "Wang Qiang! What time is it now!"

Wang Qiang froze for a moment, quickly rolling up his sleeve to look at the Rolex.

"President Su... The watch is broken! The hands are floating around randomly!"

Liu Feifei let out a piercing scream: "My Cartier stopped moving too! The hour hand is running backwards!"

"Mine too! Everything is messed up!"

Panic.

An ultimate despair overriding hunger and cold instantly detonated this group of people's psychological defenses.

In a civilized society, time was the foundation of order.

And now, order had collapsed.

They had no idea how long they had endured this pitch-black night.

Was it eight in the evening? Or two in the morning?

That illusory twelve o'clock supporting everyone to stay alive completely devolved into a blank check without even a scale.

Time was infinitely stretched.

Thick smoke, the piercing cold wind, the churning and agonizing pain in their stomachs. Every second was being magnified to be as long as a year.

Beside this pile of broken fire that could only emit foul-smelling, thick smoke, this group of people who used to be at the top of the social pyramid completely degraded into livestock waiting to be slaughtered.

...

Halfway up the mountain, the Karst Cave.

The firelight was bright, without a trace of suffocating black smoke.

The burning of the camphor wood released an extremely comfortable thermal radiation, baking the entire cave dry and warm.

Lin Fan finished chewing the last piece of Spam stained with charred brown grease.

On his retina, the golden prompt box of the omniscient vision refreshed, taking in the extremely tragic farce on the beach below.

[Target group status below updated.]

[Su Qingxue (President of Shengtang Group): Severe hunger, mild carbon monoxide poisoning. Psychological defense line collapse progress at 85%. Experiencing deep claustrophobia brought by the loss of time scales.]

[Wang Qiang (Sales Director): Sanity value plummeting. Suppressing extreme binge-eating desires. The target has developed an extremely dangerous predatory impulse toward his own kind.]

[Chen Jian (Structural Engineer): Gained temporary right to speak through technology. Extremely calm. Evaluating the surplus value of everyone, paying special attention to severely dehydrated females. Ready to engineer a betrayal at any time.]

With a twist of his wrist, Lin Fan accurately thrust the straight knife back into its scabbard.

He stood up, walked to the cave entrance, and said, "Twelve o'clock?"

Lin Fan curled the corners of his mouth, letting out a sneer.

"On this island, there is no twelve o'clock, only the survival of the fittest."