139: Chapter 139 The Zhuang family takes turns sitting

[Warning: The second tsunami will arrive within 72 hours. Expected intensity: Level One.]

Lin Fan was standing on the hillside slope. He accidentally stepped on a loose piece of gravel, causing his body to lurch forward, but he quickly steadied his footing.

What was the concept of a Level One?

What about the first one? The system had never given a rating for that.

That tsunami directly capsized a ten-thousand-ton luxury cruise ship, killing hundreds of people, and those who survived were flung into this ghost of a Deserted Island.

What level would that one count as?

The system did not answer.

It never answered follow-up questions. This piece of junk only spat out information; whether you could understand it or make use of it had nothing to do with it.

His retina returned to normal.

Seventy-two hours, three days.

Lin Fan squatted down. The first question: Would the tsunami hit the Karst Cave location?

The shelter was halfway up the mountain, with an estimated elevation of fifty to sixty meters.

Although he had seen the wave height of the first tsunami while on the cruise ship, he hadn't measured it.

Judging later from the palm trees on the beach that had been washed crooked and the cruise ship debris wedged into the rock crevices, the highest wave crest had rushed up to around thirty meters.

If the intensity of a Level One tsunami was lower than the first, the water wouldn't be able to climb up at all.

This was good news.

But good news was often followed by bad news.

Where had he been before the first tsunami?

He was on the cruise ship. When the tsunami came, the cruise ship flipped, people were swept into the sea, and when he woke up, he was on the beach of this Deserted Island.

The memory of that middle segment was broken. It wasn't amnesia; there was simply no memory to speak of.

With a close and open of his eyes, he cut directly from the cruise ship to the Deserted Island.

Could this be teleportation?

Lin Fan didn't like using words from science fiction novels like that, but he couldn't find a more suitable one.

If the first tsunami was the entrance, what about the second?

There were two possibilities.

The first: an exit.

The tsunami would come again and "teleport" them back from this Deserted Island.

Would an ocean vortex appear, and if they jumped into it, would they go directly from this place to somewhere else?

Then they would return to normal waters, back to a world with a maritime bureau, signals, and rescue ships.

If it was this kind, they would be able to leave in three days.

Su Qingxue would return to her Shengtang Group, Song Ya would return home, Liu Feifei would return to her set, and he, Lin Fan, would return to his rental apartment.

If they could really go back, would Su Qingxue silence him and kill him?

Without even thinking about it, the answer was definitely yes.

But this kind of cheesy plot that could only happen in TV dramas probably wouldn't happen.

Then there was another possibility: the tsunami wasn't an exit, but a second wave of drops.

Just like the first time, it would sweep a batch of people in from the outside.

New survivors, new variables.

If it was the second scenario, the problem would be huge.

What kind of people would arrive?

How many?

What would they bring? Would they have weapons?

How was their physical fitness?

Would it be a bunch of scared white-collar workers, or a group of veterans?

Everything was an unknown.

Right now, there were seven people on the island, and the status quo had stabilized for over a month.

He was the absolute core, Su Qingxue was the person by his side, Song Ya managed logistics, Zhou Kai was the muscle, Liu Feifei was an accessory, and Zhang Tao and Wang Lan were the laborers.

Everyone's position was nailed down; no one dared to flip the script.

But if a new batch of people came, the situation would be different.

The more people there were, the more variables there would be.

Where there were people, there were schemes; where there were schemes, there was rebellion.

The supplies in his hands were enough for seven people to eat, so they would definitely be coveted by others.

The authority that Lin Fan had spent over a month establishing on this island was worth nothing in the eyes of the newcomers.

Why should they listen to you? Who the hell were you?

When the two factions collided then, the best-case scenario was that he absorbed them, and the worst-case scenario was that a character even more ruthless than him emerged from their ranks.

Lin Fan wasn't afraid of people more ruthless than him, but he feared uncertainty.

"Damn it." He cursed, turning around and walking back.

He wouldn't check the traps anymore. In seventy-two hours, there were things more important than checking traps.

When he walked back to the entrance of the Karst Cave, Su Qingxue was still sitting on that flat rock.

A branch was laid beside her feet, and a bunch of horizontal lines were drawn on the ground—she was indeed counting the days.

"What day is it?" Lin Fan asked.

"The fifty-seventh day." Su Qingxue did not raise her head.

Fifty-seven days.

Two months.

He glanced into the Karst Cave. There wasn't much water left inside, but as for food, relying on hunting and finding food at the edge of the forest, those modern supplies hadn't been touched much.

Regardless of whether it was the second wave of tsunamis or other new variables, as long as an external force broke the existing balance, the Karst Cave possessed a favorable terrain and would definitely be absolutely safe.

But if a new batch of people was washed ashore and they blocked the path down the mountain, these seven people definitely wouldn't be able to last long relying on the leftover smoked meat and supplies in the cave.

Rather than sitting passively and taking a beating, it was better to sweep back everything edible right now.

Only with food in hand did one have the chips to negotiate rules with the unknown.

"Pack your things." Lin Fan raised his eyes and swept them across the group. "Everyone, into the mountain."

Zhang Tao glanced at the sun outside. "Brother Fan, with the sun like this right now, if we go out, we'll probably be baked into jerky."

"Not going?" Lin Fan was extremely irritable, and Zhang Tao happened to walk right into the line of fire. "Zhang Tao, is it because I've given you too many good expressions lately that it's made you arrogant?"

Lin Fan's dagger pierced the mat beneath Zhang Tao, brushing right against his thigh. "Or is it that you haven't seen blood in too long and want to bleed a little?"

Zhang Tao instantly cowered. During this period, Lin Fan truly hadn't made things difficult for them; in the morning he took them hunting and searching for starch-rich food, and during the peak of the daytime heat they would rest.

In the afternoon when the sun set, they would go pick up firewood.

Life had been too stable, causing Zhang Tao to forget that Lin Fan had poisoned over a dozen people to death in a single night.

"B-Brother Fan, I... I was wrong..."

Lin Fan ignored him, pulled out his dagger, and grabbed his crossbow. The seventy-hour countdown in his mind ticked down steadily.

"Su Qingxue and Song Ya, you two go as well."

Following Lin Fan's order, the group marched out of the Karst Cave in a mighty procession and plunged into the mountain forest.

Humidity rushed into their faces.

Wang Lan walked at the very back of the group.

Her gaze passed over the shoulders of the people in front, locking fiercely onto Su Qingxue's back.

The swelling from those two slaps had long since subsided, but the sense of humiliation had long since carved itself into her bone marrow.

When Wang Lan was a financial supervisor at Shengtang Group, she learned a most basic principle.

Accounts could not become dead accounts; whenever there was an opportunity, they had to be settled.

For over a month, Su Qingxue had cowered inside Lin Fan's partition, eating ready-made meals, drinking clean water, and not even touching heavy labor.

Lin Fan raised her like a canary, and no one could touch a single hair on her head.

Now, the opportunity had delivered itself to her doorstep.

The terrain of this mountain forest was complex, infested with poisonous bugs, with cliffs and hidden trenches as numerous as cattle hairs.

If someone died here, you wouldn't even hear a peep.

Afterwards, as long as they unified their narrative and said she missed her footing, they wouldn't even need to fabricate a second set of excuses.

Getting rid of Su Qingxue wasn't just for revenge.

Wang Lan saw things very clearly: Lin Fan had the resolve, a blade, and held water and food in his hands, but he lacked a brain by his side to calculate the grand total for him.

Liu Feifei was a fool with no bottom line, Song Ya did nothing but nod or shake her head, and Zhang Tao was a cowardly piece of trash who bullied the soft and feared the hard.

Among this group of people, only she, Wang Lan, understood how to weigh pros and cons and control the board.

As long as Su Qingxue—this ornament who occupied a position without doing any work—died.

The position of the second-in-command by Lin Fan's side would open up.

She, Wang Lan, would be able to logically step into that position. Once she completely controlled logistics and these people's weaknesses, whose surname this island would bear in the future was really hard to say.

In the company, she couldn't grind her way to the position of president.

On this Deserted Island where morality didn't even exist, who stipulated that the one who calculated the accounts couldn't become the dealer?