19: Chapter 19 Help! Someone, please save us!

Old Liu's corpse cast a grayish-blue waxy sheen under the sunlight.

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He lay stark naked in the sand, his face bearing a smile that made one's neck turn cold.

Xiao Wang's deathly appearance was even uglier.

It was unknown when he had rolled down from the reef, the back of his head striking squarely against a sharp rock corner, leaving a large pool of blood.

His eyes were half-open, looking at the sky yet not like looking at the sky, looking at people yet not like looking at people.

Lili from the Public Relations Department shrank into the furthest corner.

Her hands tightly hugged her knees, and her entire body curled up into a ball—that was the last warming movement her body instinctively made in the final minutes of her life.

There were also two corpses stacked together, their arms and legs intertwined so that it was impossible to tell who was pressing on whom.

The living stood beside the corpses.

No one spoke.

The waves slapped against the beach one after another.

"Ahhhhhh~"

Xiao Zhou from the Administrative Department was the first to break down, a pitch-high, out-of-tune miserable scream squeezed from his throat as his legs went soft, causing him to collapse directly onto the sand.

"Five people are dead... Five people... We are going to die too! Everyone is going to die in this damn place!"

This voice was like a fuse.

Instantly, it ignited everyone.

"Help! Who can save us?!"

"I don't want to die! I don't want to die in a ghost place like this!"

"President Su! Didn't you say rescue would arrive at midnight last night? Where are the people? Where are the planes?!"

A male employee with a face covered in ash and dirt rushed in front of Su Qingxue, his eyes full of bloodshot veins, the blue veins on his neck bulging outward one by one, and his spit directly sprayed all over her face.

"You lied to us! You've been lying to us from start to finish! What kind of bullshit rescue! A fart is louder than those words you said!"

Su Qingxue took half a step back.

She stared at the completely unrecognizable, distorted face in front of her.

What was this person's name again? From the Technical Department? Logistics?

She actually couldn't remember.

Back at the company, this kind of person didn't even have the qualification to enter her office door.

But now, this person who wasn't even worthy of having his name remembered by her was pointing at her nose, shouting and cursing at her in a way she had never heard in the more than twenty years of her life.

"Everyone, calm down!" Su Qingxue instinctively raised her voice.

A whole night of toxic smoke, sea breeze, and dehydration had ruined most of her throat.

No one listened.

The crowd completely exploded.

Someone squatted on the ground hugging their head and wailing dryly, while someone else clung to the reef and looked out at the sea surface.

There was also someone kneeling beside Old Liu's corpse, repeatedly pushing the body that simply wouldn't budge, repeating the same sentence over and over in their mouth, "Old Liu, get up, stop sleeping, the sun is out..."

Wang Qiang leaned behind a large reef, not uttering a single word.

His head drooped, both hands tucked into his pants pockets, and his shoulders kept shaking.

It wasn't the cold.

It was fear.

Last night, the matter of him using Old Liu as a human windbreak wall was witnessed by people present.

Now that the person was dead, what if someone brought up old accounts... What if someone pinned this life on his head...

He would have to go to prison once he went back.

He quickly swept a glance around his surroundings.

Everyone was going crazy; no one had the spare attention.

Zhang Tao stood on the edge of the crowd.

The expression on his face was very flat.

This flatness wasn't calmness; it was complete numbness.

He looked at Old Liu's smiling dead face, and only one thought remained in his mind: if they still couldn't go back today...

Old Liu's jacket.

The gray windbreaker that Old Liu had gone crazy and stripped off last night had been blown two meters away by the wind, crumpled into a ball and thrown on the sand.

Zhang Tao slowly moved over.

His toes hooked the corner of the clothes, bit by bit nudging it to his feet.

He bent down, picked it up, and shook off the sand.

Slipping it onto himself.

Whether it belonged to a dead person or a living person, as long as it was warm, that was enough.

From beginning to end, no one paid attention to him.

Chen Jian pushed his salt-stained glasses up.

He squatted beside the three corpses, checking them one by one.

His wife, Wang Lan, stood behind him, tightly tugging at the corner of his clothes, her face completely devoid of any trace of color.

"How did they die?" Wang Lan asked.

"Old Liu suffered from paradoxical undressing." Chen Jian stood up, "His body temperature dropped below thirty degrees, and the part of his brain controlling temperature was completely fried. His mind kept feeling like he was on fire, so he went crazy and stripped off his clothes."

"Xiao Wang had a convulsion during the night and fell down, striking the back of his head on a sharp rock. Bad luck."

"Xiaoli suffered from hypothermia, dehydration, and carbon monoxide poisoning simultaneously. As the weakest one physically, she was the first who couldn't hold on."

He glanced at the pile of bonfire remnants burned to ashes, the corners of his mouth twitching fiercely.

That fire had indeed saved most people's lives.

But the price was that when there was no wind, the concentration of carbon monoxide generated by those damp and rotten logs was enough to directly send off the weakest few people.

"If we still can't go back today," Chen Jian lowered his voice, speaking only to Wang Lan, "more people will die."

Su Qingxue supported herself against the reef and took three deep breaths in succession.

She couldn't panic; she absolutely couldn't let the situation completely collapse at this moment.

Once these people's trust in her collapsed, she would be nothing.

No bodyguards, no assistants, no lawyers.

The only thing on her body that was still worth a little bit was this mouth.

At the company, she had handled crisis public relations countless times.

Public opinion explosions, stock price collapses, executives running away with funds—when was there ever a time at the most critical juncture that she didn't rely on a press conference to forcibly turn the situation around?

It was the same now.

She needed an explanation.

An explanation that could make this group of people standing on the verge of collapse choose to believe her once again.

It didn't need to be true.

It only needed to sound like the truth.

Su Qingxue let go of the reef and walked step by step to the very middle of the crowd.

"Give me silence, all of you!"

This shout squeezed out the very last bit of moisture in her throat.

Her throat felt as if it had been slashed by a razor blade, hurting so much that her vision blurred.

But it worked.

The roaring and crying briefly stopped for two seconds.

A dozen pairs of bloodshot eyes turned uniformly toward her.

Su Qingxue straightened her body.

The one-piece swimsuit on her body was already so dirty that its original white color couldn't be seen, and her long hair was matted into tangled dead knots glued to her shoulders.

But the posture with which she stood there was exactly the same as at the board of directors meeting on the fifty-eighth floor of the Shengtang Group.

Her waist was straight, her chin slightly lifted, and her hands were folded in front of her.

The things forged through struggling and crawling in the capital market were carved into her bones and could not be burned away.

"Something happened last night. Old Liu and the others... are gone."

She paused for a second.

Her gaze swept across every single person present.

"I promise you in the name of the president of the Shengtang Group that as long as we can return alive, the families of Old Liu, Xiao Wang, Lili, and the other two colleagues—every single one of them—will be taken care of by the Shengtang Group to the very end."

"The bereavement compensation will be one million per person. Children's education, parents' retirement, mortgages, and car loans will all be fully covered by the company. Not a single penny will be missing."

"For those who are still alive, it's the same."

Su Qingxue glanced around and slowed down her pace of speech.

"Every single person present, as long as you hold on with me until the moment rescue arrives and return to Jiangcheng, you will each receive two hundred thousand in cash compensation, plus a lifetime job guarantee from the Shengtang Group."

"For those who are injured, the company will fully bear the medical expenses. For those with psychological trauma, the company will arrange the best specialists for long-term rehabilitation."

"These are not empty checks. After we go back, it will be in black and white, witnessed by lawyers, and signed into the contract line by line."