141: Chapter 141 The more you charge, the more effective it becomes.

Song Ya patted the crushed leaves off her trouser legs, squatted down beside a clump of low bushes to rummage through them, but found nothing.

She plucked a few leaves, brought them close to her nose to sniff, and an astringent smell surged straight to her head, making her utterly afraid to put them in her mouth.

As soon as Lin Fan and the other three men left, the edge of the woods instantly became quiet.

The four women dispersed, each minding her own business.

Liu Feifei was the most decisive.

She directly found a flat, large rock and plopped down on it. From the moment she sat down, this person had no intention of getting up again.

With a blade of grass clenched between her teeth, she squinted at the sky and swung her legs back and forth out of boredom, perfectly interpreting the two words "lying flat".

"They really treat me like a coolie. Whoever wants to stay in this lousy place can stay, and whoever wants to search can search."

She muttered to herself while rubbing her chafed, red heels.

Su Qingxue didn't make a sound.

She leaned against the trunk of a large tree, her right hand casually and unassumingly covering her knee.

Her complexion didn't look good, but she stubbornly refused to spit out a single word.

On the other side.

"Don't pick blindly."

Wang Lan's voice drifted over from behind, unhurried and leisurely, carrying the quiet confidence of someone who had been through it.

"Some grasses will ruin your skin the moment your hand touches them."

Song Ya turned her head.

Wang Lan was squatting beside a patch of low ferns, her fingers brushing aside the fallen leaves covering them to reveal a few clusters of plants growing flat against the ground underneath.

"Do you recognize this kind?"

Wang Lan pointed at one of the clusters, which had long, narrow leaves with fine serrations along the edges.

Song Ya walked over, took a look, and honestly shook her head.

"Wild kudzu."

Wang Lan pulled one out forcefully, banged it twice against a nearby rock to shake the mud off the roots.

"The roots are edible and full of starch. They taste a bit astringent when chewed, but they can fill your stomach. In this ghost place, anything that can fill your stomach is your lifeline."

Song Ya took it, examined it back and forth, and her eyes lit up: "How do you know this?"

"I used to gather them in the mountains with my dad."

Wang Lan replied casually, her hands not stopping as she pulled out a few more roots in succession.

Song Ya didn't think much of it at all.

She just felt that Wang Lan knew a lot and was amazing, so she quickly squatted down and joined in pulling them up.

The two walked a dozen steps south along the edge of the woods.

Wang Lan stopped in front of a clump of low bushes and poked at them with a branch.

"See that?"

She pointed to those plants whose leaves grew in groups of three with branching stems.

"This one, don't touch it."

"If the juice gets on your hands, it directly blisters, itching and hurting, and if you scratch it open, it will get infected."

Song Ya jerked her hand back with a whoosh and took half a step back.

Wang Lan turned her head again and jerked her chin in another direction.

"Stay away from that cluster of round-leaved ones over there too."

Song Ya looked over in the direction she indicated; that cluster of plants had rounded leaves, bright green color, and looked no different from mint.

"Can't that be eaten?"

"Eaten?"

Wang Lan let out a scoff.

"If you really eat it, it will make you have diarrhea until you're dehydrated. What is the concept of dehydration on this lousy island? It's tantamount to a death sentence."

Song Ya shivered, nodded repeatedly like an obedient student, and committed all of this to memory.

Wang Lan felt an indescribable sense of comfort in her heart.

She was so easy to manipulate.

When it came to scheming against people's hearts, she was even more practiced at it than keeping accounts.

Walking forward a few more steps.

Wang Lan stopped beside a fallen rotten log.

At the root of the rotten log grew a patch of low bushes.

The leaves were thick, with a layer of fine fuzz covering the surface.

Before anyone even got close, a pungent, spicy smell surged up.

"What is this called again?" Song Ya leaned over curiously.

Wang Lan didn't rush to answer.

She plucked a leaf, pinched it between her fingertips, and slowly rubbed it.

Green juice seeped out from the veins, staining half of her fingertip pad.

"This is good stuff."

She handed the crushed leaves under Song Ya's nose.

"Sniff it."

Song Ya leaned in and took a breath.

The next second, she was choked so badly that tears almost burst out, and she blinked rapidly several times.

"This is way too pungent!"

"The more pungent it is, the more effective it is."

Wang Lan casually wiped the juice on her hands against her trouser legs.

"This kind of grass is pounded and applied to wounds to dispel stasis and stop bleeding. Back in the village, whenever someone bumped or bruised themselves and couldn't find medicine, they relied entirely on this to cope."

As she spoke, she neatly plucked several more leaves and stuffed them into her trouser pocket.

"Prepare more. On this island, it's either bumping or bruising every day, and there's no telling when it will come in handy."

Song Ya thought about it and felt it made sense.

She also picked a small handful, rolled them up carefully, and tucked them cautiously into her pocket.

The two strolled around the vicinity once more.

They sporadically dug up some wild kudzu roots and plucked a few handfuls of edible young fern shoots.

The quantity wasn't much, but at least it could make do for a meal.

When the two of them walked back to the original spot carrying the things.

Liu Feifei was still sitting on that rock.

And swinging her legs out of sheer boredom.

Su Qingxue hadn't budged either.

She was still leaning against that tree trunk.

Her right leg was stretched out straight, motionless.

Beneath her trouser leg, her knee position was swollen like a steamed bun.

Scraped skin was only a surface matter.

The real problem was beneath the skin.

Just now, when Liu Feifei was startled forward by Wang Lan's shout, Su Qingxue's center of gravity completely collapsed, and she narrowly managed to grab a vine so she wouldn't roll down the cliff.

But at that instant, her knee slammed solidly against the rough rock surface.

At that time, her adrenaline was surging, and she couldn't care about anything else.

Now that the adrenaline had receded, that wave of pain surged upward like the tide in successive waves.

The kind that pierced straight to the heart.

Su Qingxue tried to bend her right leg.

She couldn't bend it.

It wasn't a bone issue; the moment she moved, the swollen flesh and skin pulled apart along with it, hurting so much that her vision kept going black in flashes.

She clenched her teeth, stared at the rotting leaves under her feet, and refused to utter a single word.

Wang Lan looked at Su Qingxue. That incident at the cliff, although it didn't send Su Qingxue directly down, the force of that collision was definitely not light.

Wang Lan grew up tumbling around in the countryside; she knew all too well how much impact a kneecap would take from falling in a place without any leverage points.

Su Qingxue must be in so much pain right now that she couldn't even walk.

This was also why Wang Lan deliberately chose this exact moment to take Song Ya to recognize that grass used for dispersing stasis and stopping bleeding.

The timing was just right.

"President Su! What's wrong with your leg?"

Song Ya put down what was in her hands, ran over in two or three steps, and squatted down in front of Su Qingxue.

Su Qingxue instinctively pulled her trouser leg down a bit, wanting to hide her knee.

"It's nothing."

"How can this be called nothing!"

Song Ya didn't listen to her, reaching out to gently press on the bulging area.

With just that touch.

Su Qingxue abruptly shrank back by half an inch.

"Hiss..."

A gasp of cold air was sucked in between her teeth, the tendons on her neck all tensed up, and sweat "swished" out from her forehead.

"Don't press."

Her voice was pressed very low, so low it was trembling.

Song Ya was startled, quickly withdrawing her hand, her brows tightly knitted.

She saw it clearly.

Beneath the trouser leg, the entire knee was swollen into a lump, a large patch of shocking bluish-purple underneath the skin.

The blood stasis was already spreading around.

In this kind of weather, it was humid, stuffy, and hot.

If the blood stasis couldn't disperse, let alone walking by then, on this lousy island where even anti-inflammatory drugs didn't exist, whether they could keep their lives was up in the air.

"No, this needs to be dealt with immediately."

Song Ya stood up abruptly, her voice changing out of anxiety.

"I'll go find something to apply to it for you."

Su Qingxue looked at her with knitted brows, her lips pale and devoid of color.

"Find what? In this barren mountain wilderness, what can you find?"

Song Ya's hand subconsciously felt toward her trouser pocket.

Inside it were a few leaves.