165: Chapter 165 Water is not as precious as life

Wang Lan, who had been sitting on the other side of the campfire, tightened her shoulders slightly.

She raised her head, a trace of nervousness showing on her face, but she quickly suppressed it.

"What is it?"

"Lobelia, Bidens, Plantain."

Lin Fan stared at her, "You recognize them!"

Wang Lan's eyes flickered slightly.

Earlier, to prove her usefulness, she had proactively demonstrated her ability to recognize herbs and find water.

Now, this very ability had turned into a knife held by Lin Fan against her neck.

If she said she didn't recognize them, she would be lying.

If she recognized them, she had to go out and find them.

Wang Lan was silent for half a second.

"I recognize them."

Lin Fan put the red-hot knife tip back into the fire.

"Ten minutes."

Wang Lan looked at him.

Lin Fan's voice had no ripples.

"You and Zhang Tao bring them back within two minutes."

"If you can't bring them back, Zhou Kai's leg is done for……"

Saying this, his gaze slowly swept across Zhang Tao and fell back onto Wang Lan's face.

"By then, the two of you will be buried with him."

Wang Lan did not argue further.

She got up, took the rattan basket, and said in a low voice, "Song Ya, give me a torch."

Song Ya looked at Lin Fan.

Lin Fan nodded.

Song Ya immediately lit another torch and handed it to Wang Lan.

Wang Lan took the torch, turned around to walk out of the cave, and Zhang Tao followed.

After Wang Lan left, Lin Fan continued to squat on the ground.

His thumbs were wedged against the bruised flesh at the edges of the wound, his pads pressing down and giving a heavy squeeze.

"Ugh……"

With this squeeze, more poisonous blood mixed with a bit of mucus spattered out, flowing down his ankle toward his heel.

The venom had already seeped into the superficial capillary network.

The cloth tied tightly around the base of his thigh intercepted the channel of venous return, but the toxin concentration at the primary wound site was still at a lethal level.

The amount that could be expelled by physical compression was far from enough.

"Water." Without lifting his head, Lin Fan continued to squeeze downward.

Beside him, Su Qingxue immediately ran to the supplies area, picked up two bottles of water, then walked quickly back to Lin Fan's side and handed them over.

Lin Fan glanced at them out of the corner of his eye, but his hands didn't reach out to take them.

"Change to mineral water." Lin Fan's voice had no fluctuations, leaving no room for negotiation, "Move a whole case out."

Su Qingxue's hand holding the bottles tightened, her gaze landing on Zhou Kai's wound.

That patch of flesh had been cut open, exposing the blood and flesh.

No matter how clear the stream water on the Deserted Island looked, it was a mixture of microorganisms, sediment, insect eggs, and even animal feces.

Flushing it directly into an open wound was equivalent to stuffing bacteria into the flesh.

Without waiting for the venom to take effect, infection and sepsis could take a person away.

Su Qingxue's face suddenly turned pale.

She belatedly realized that she had made an extremely elementary common-sense mistake.

In the past at Shengtang Group, she only needed to sit in the leather chair of the president's office to approve documents, and all execution details were perfected and filled by a massive and professional team.

She didn't need to know that wound cleaning required a sterile environment.

Now, with a living human life laid out before her, the habitual mindset she had formed from long residing in a high position almost became a knife that killed.

"It was my oversight." Su Qingxue did not waste words defending herself, set the broken plastic bottles aside, and directly turned to walk toward the darkest corner deep inside the stone wall.

She carried out a whole box of unopened mineral water, a full twenty-four bottles.

Tearing open the packaging, she pulled out a bottle, unscrewed the cap, and handed it to Lin Fan's side.

Lin Fan took the bottle, and the water poured directly onto the cross-shaped incision.

The clear column of water struck the rolled-up flesh, washing away the black blood that had just been squeezed out, flowing down Zhou Kai's lower leg into the mud pit below. After one bottle was poured out, black blood was still seeping outward.

"Next bottle." Lin Fan casually threw away the empty bottle.

Su Qingxue immediately handed over the second bottle.

Zhou Kai was in so much pain that his eyeballs rolled wildly, and cold sweat streamed down his chin.

He watched Lin Fan use mineral water bottle after bottle to wash the wound, the water gathering into a puddle in the mud pit on the ground—water that, if it were the weather of the first two months, could make people stab their companions with knives.

"Brother Fan……" Zhou Kai squeezed out broken syllables from his throat, "This water, this water is so precious……"

The survival instinct of the bottom layer fought in his brain.

His leg hurt, his life hung by a thread, but seeing that clear water poured like that into the mud, his heart ached painfully.

Lin Fan's hand squeezing the wound did not stop, and the third bottle of water was poured straight over his head, scattering a newly emerging clump of fishy red.

"Water is not more precious than life." The tone of this sentence was flat.

Song Ya stood two steps away holding a torch.

The flame licked the rattan bark, and the light and shadow flickered on Lin Fan's profile.

She watched this man brutally squeeze the wound, watching the empty plastic bottles piling up on the ground.

A few days ago, he killed people to silence them.

In everyone's eyes, he was an unscrupulous tyrant.

But now, dozens of bottles of life-saving water, he poured them without even blinking an eye.

Song Ya swallowed her dry saliva.

It turned out that peeling away that cold-blooded shell, Lin Fan, who was kind-hearted by nature deep down, was still there.

Only in this ghost place without rules, his mercy had changed to a more extreme and pragmatic way.

Only living people had value, and resources always served those who could breathe.

"The blood is still black." Su Qingxue stared at the incision and reminded him in a low voice.

"The venom is spreading in the subcutaneous tissue, the incision is too shallow." Lin Fan threw away the fourth empty bottle and picked up the fire-burned combat dagger again. "Song Ya, bring the torch closer."

Song Ya hurriedly took half a step forward, her arm straightened.

Lin Fan pinched the knife hilt, and with the knife tip following the previous incision and the blade facing upward, he forcefully pried it open two centimeters toward the thigh.

There was no anesthetic for this.

The muffled sound of flesh being cut open was exceptionally clear in the cave.

Zhou Kai let out a wild roar like a muffled ox, and the wooden stick bitten in his mouth snapped in half with a crisp "crack".

Half of his body bounced upward uncontrollably; if his thigh hadn't been tightly bound by the cloth strips, this cut could have allowed him to directly kick out Lin Fan's front teeth.

"Hold down his shoulders!" Lin Fan shouted loudly.

Su Qingxue pounced directly, kneeling on both knees, her whole body weight pressing on Zhou Kai's left shoulder.

Song Ya held the torch with one hand, and firmly pressed down on Zhou Kai's right shoulder with the other.

"Liu Feifei, come over and continue pouring water." Lin Fan said with a cold face, his fingers probing into the edges of the widened wound, pulling them outward, and the water rushed in fiercely, forcibly forcing out the deep poisonous blood.

...

Outside the cave, the dark night was like ink.

The sea breeze surged up along the steep slope, blowing the tree crowns to rustle.

Zhang Tao held a torch wrapped with vines, following unsteadily behind Wang Lan with deep and shallow steps.

The decaying leaves on the slope were extremely thick, feeling soft and mushy when stepped on.

Zhang Tao walked very slowly, occasionally stopping to kick the rotten branches on the ground with his toe. "I say, can we walk a bit slower?"

Wang Lan ignored him, lowering her head to rummage through the roots of several thick banyan trees.

Zhang Tao hurried over in a few steps, lowering his voice, the red swelling on his face looking somewhat comical under the firelight. "When Zhou Kai's leg is completely ruined and the poison reaches his heart, we'll go back then. By that time, even immortals coming won't be of any use."

Wang Lan stopped her movements, straightened up, and looked at him. The night wind messed up her hair, and her eyes revealed undisguised contempt.

This man was not only stupid, but stupid without any sense of the big picture.

"Or why don't we just not go back at all?" Wang Lan retorted.