177: Chapter 177 This is the way to leave this island

The third wave was fiercer than the previous two.

The sound of the waves crashing against the mountain was no longer a dull thud; it sounded as if the entire rock face was being ripped up by the roots.

The cave walls shook violently, and fine stone powder fell rustling from overhead.

Liu Feifei cowered behind the stone pillar, hugging her head tightly with both hands, unable to even cry out loud.

This wave lasted for nearly half a minute.

When the water receded, the mist pouring into the cave entrance didn't disperse; the air was filled with a salty, fishy stench mixed with the astringency of silt.

Lin Fan stood up and walked to the cave entrance.

The beach below had lost its original outline.

Those reefs were scattered in disarray, and a few trees on the seaside were uprooted, collapsing into the mud with their crowns facing the mountain.

There was no one.

The sea surface was empty; apart from churning muddy water and floating debris, there was nothing.

Lin Fan retreated and sat down.

A few minutes later, the fourth wave came.

The interval was a few minutes shorter than the last one.

When the rumble came up from the seabed, the cave walls hummed along, and a fragment of limestone fell right next to where Zhou Kai was lying, almost hitting his face.

After this wave receded, Lin Fan stood up again.

He walked to the cave entrance and looked down.

Still no one.

The seawater receded even further, far enough to see the uneven gullies on the seabed.

Several large fish were stranded in a mud pit, their tails flapping incessantly.

Lin Fan watched for a moment and turned back.

Liu Feifei lay on the ground, her voice muffled: "Does this sea deliberately want our lives?"

No one paid attention to her.

The fifth wave, the sixth wave.

Time became blurred; there were no clocks or mobile phones in the cave, and the daylight from beginning to end was that oppressive leaden gray.

The intervals between each wave were sometimes long and sometimes short, completely irregular.

Liu Feifei had stopped crying; human fear had a threshold, and once that point was exceeded, only numbness remained.

Her whole body was cowering beneath the stone pillar, her eyes half-closed.

Song Ya sat next to Su Qingxue, the two of them leaning against the cave wall.

Su Qingxue had recovered somewhat from her previous state of shock, but she was still listless, with little expression on her face.

Zhou Kai's fever had not yet subsided, and his breathing was heavy enough for the entire cave to hear.

After every wave ended, Lin Fan would stand up and walk to the cave entrance to take a look.

Every time, the area below was empty.

No ships, no people, no rescue.

After the tenth wave, Lin Fan squatted at the cave entrance, staring at the repeatedly ravaged coastline.

The ebb tide current was fierce.

When the seawater was pulled back, sand, stones, broken wood, everything was dragged toward the sea by that force at an absurdly fast speed.

Lin Fan looked at the ebb tide current, a thought turning in his mind.

If a person jumped in and followed this ebb tide force outward, theoretically they could be carried to the open sea.

This is the way to leave this island.

The only way.

But this method was equivalent to suicide.

The pulling force of the ebb tide was at least several tons; going down there was no different from throwing a branch into a blender.

Even if one wasn't swept to the seabed by the undercurrent, when the next wave came, that wall of water tens of meters high would smash a person into meat paste.

He could probably go back, but whether he could find an intact corpse after going back was another question.

The eleventh wave.

The sound of this wave was somewhat different from before.

The rumbling grew weaker, the noise of the waves hitting the mountain was much smaller, and the mist didn't pour very deep into the cave.

It didn't recede as far as the previous ones.

The muddy water on the sea surface was slowly settling, transitioning in color from yellowish-brown to grayish-blue.

Lin Fan stared at the boundary line between the sea and the sky; that line no longer rose, obediently crouching where it should be.

A line of text popped up on his retina.

[Notice: The tsunami has ended.]

Lin Fan took two quick steps forward, leaning his upper body out of the cave entrance.

The scene below was completely a different world from before.

The entire coast had been turned upside down.

The beach was piled in disarray with things brought by the tsunami: broken wooden boards, deformed metal frames, large chunks of styrofoam, and tangled cables.

There were also ships.

It was a large hull wreckage of a cruise ship; the white shell paint was mottled and scraped, jammed between two reefs, with one half sticking up into the air and the other half buried in the silt.

The numbers and markings on the wreckage were blurred by seawater, but the shape and specifications clearly looked like the port/starboard side of a large passenger liner.

More important than these, there were people on the beach.

More than one.

Lin Fan scanned quickly, probably dozens of them.

Their postures varied; some were lying face down, some sprawled on their backs, and some huddled next to the hull fragments.

Three of them were obviously gone; their body angles were wrong, with limbs bent in directions living people couldn't manage.

Another's head was caught between two metal plates; from above, the face couldn't be seen, only a large dark pool.

The remaining few were too far away to tell if they were dead or alive.

But the chest cavity of one body was moving. The amplitude was very small and required staring to notice, but it was indeed moving.

Alive.

Lin Fan retreated into the cave and picked up the bundle of nylon rope and hemp rope picked up from the beach.

"Lin Fan?" Song Ya saw him taking the rope. "Has the tsunami stopped?"

"It stopped."

"There are people below."

Liu Feifei crawled out from behind the stone pillar, her hair messy like a bird's nest and her face covered in dust. "People? What people? A rescue team?"

"I don't know, washed over by the waves."

Lin Fan hung the crossbow on his back, slung the rope over his shoulder, and pushed the dagger to confirm it wasn't loose.

"I'm going down. You guys wait until I call before coming out."

Song Ya nodded.

Liu Feifei opened her mouth, wanting to ask something, but held it back.

She had already learned one thing: no one needed to nag before Lin Fan left.

Lin Fan walked down along the slope.

The slope had been half-destroyed by the seawater, and the footprints originally stepped out were all gone. Broken stones and wet mud were mixed together, slipping downward with every step.

Lin Fan half-squatted to control his center of gravity, grabbing the protruding ridges of the rock wall with his hands, moving down section by section.

When he reached the bottom, his boots sank into ankle-deep mud.

The smell in the air was very complex: the salty fishiness of seawater, rotting seaweed, and an indescribable chemical smell, possibly diesel or some solvent leaking from the ship.

Lin Fan went to the nearest body first.

Male, around thirty years old, wearing a torn white uniform shirt with a copper name tag pinned to his chest, the handwriting obscured by mud and unreadable.

His neck was tilted, his cervical vertebrae were broken, and he was presumably dead through and through. Skip.

The second body, female, with half her body pinned under a piece of shipboard.

Lin Fan squatted down to take a look; her pupils were dilated, she was not breathing, and she was also dead.

The third.

Male, lying face down in the mud, with an orange life jacket draped over his back, but the buckle unbuckled.

Lin Fan turned his body over; there was airflow in his nostrils. Alive.