93: Chapter 93 Don't believe me? You think I'm bluffing?

Liu Gang was enlightened by Wang Qiang's words.

That was right; what the hell was the use of a woman?

At a critical moment like this when everyone was starving to death, even a celestial maiden would have to fill her stomach first before she had the strength to get things done.

Exchanging water for meat, this deal was a guaranteed profit.

No matter how harsh Lin Fan's words sounded, the fact was that he took the initiative to come down the cliff to propose terms.

Liu Gang swallowed the saliva produced by his dry mouth, just preparing to gracefully accept the trade.

"Wait a minute."

Chen Jian spoke up and interrupted him.

He bypassed Wang Qiang, walked over to Liu Gang, and cast his gaze past Liu Gang's arm, landing on Lin Fan's calm face.

Chen Jian knew this set of negotiation tactics all too well.

In order to lower the woman's value, Lin Fan deliberately spoke so ruthlessly, making people think she was truly a useless tool that could be discarded at any time, thereby driving down the bargaining chips for her ransom.

"Lin Fan." Chen Jian raised his voice, his throat cracking slightly, "Do you take everyone else for fools?"

Lin Fan stood in place without moving, and Chen Jian continued, "You think it's a loss to trade for her, you don't want her, and you think she's a troublesome tool. Fine, no problem."

He extended his finger, pointing at Song Ya, whose neck was being choked by Liu Gang on the ground, "You don't care for her, but we do. With Song Ya's build, she weighs at least eighty or ninety jin. Leaving aside the bones and uneatable offal, there's at least thirty or forty jin of clean meat."

The wind on the beach blew past.

Wang Qiang was frozen on the spot, and Liu Gang's hand stopped in mid-air.

"Forty or fifty jin of high protein." There was no trace of a joke in Chen Jian's tone, "Sliced up and roasted, it's enough to sustain the dozen or so brothers of ours down here for several days. Our group indeed doesn't dare enter the forest to fight monsters—those things are deadly—but killing a woman is no harder than killing a chicken."

As soon as these words were spoken, even the sound of the waves crashing against the reefs appeared extremely grating.

Eating people.

Chen Jian didn't explicitly say those two words, but the stench of blood between the lines had already pierced the nerves of everyone present.

Su Qingxue stood a few meters away, her stomach churning violently as a wave of nausea rushed straight to her throat.

Eat their own kind? These people's brains were not normal.

Even wild beasts wouldn't eat their own kind when starved to the extreme, yet Chen Jian, a higher-educated engineer, was actually plotting in broad daylight how to carve up the meat of a living person.

She bent down and retched, turning her head away, not daring to look at Chen Jian a single glance more.

It was too disgusting.

Several male employees looked at each other in dismay, exchanging glances without making a sound.

Being driven crazy by hunger was one thing, but actually taking a knife to cut the flesh of a living person made everyone shudder.

Chen Jian swept his gaze across the group of male employees: "Stop putting on airs of being civilized people here. When you are so starved you can't even stand steady and have gnawed clean every grass root on the island, you'll know how precious these dozens of jin of meat are. If you don't eat it, plenty of people will."

Facing Chen Jian's frantic clamoring, Lin Fan stood in place the entire time, not even changing his expression.

"Eat people?" Lin Fan said coldly, "Do you have the teeth for that? Who can't talk tough?"

Hearing Lin Fan's lukewarm taunt, Chen Jian's facial features twisted up.

"Don't believe it? Think I'm bluffing you?" Chen Jian nodded, lifting his foot to take a step forward.

Pinned in the sand, Song Ya, although shivering all over, had an exceptionally clear mind at this moment.

She saw it clearly: these people were simply not human; they were monsters crawled out from hell.

If Lin Fan really brought supplies to trade for her, these monsters who had tasted sweetness would definitely not let it rest; they would suck dry all of Lin Fan's survival supplies like leeches.

"Lin Fan!" Song Ya yelled at the top of her lungs, "Don't mind me! Don't worry about me!"

She wriggled her body, struggling with all her might in the opposite direction of Chen Jian, "They are just a bunch of inhumane beasts! Don't fall for their trick! They won't let me go even if they take the things! Just go!"

"Stinking bitch, where is it your turn to howl here!"

Chen Jian's face turned livid as he raised his right leg.

That sturdy hard-soled shoe aimed directly at Song Ya's flat abdomen and kicked down solidly.

"Bang."

A teeth-aching dull thud.

Song Ya couldn't even let out a miserable scream; all sounds were forcibly cut off in her throat.

Her body instantly curled into an extreme arc.

Her eyeballs protruded, her mouth opened wide, gasping heavily for air while saliva dripped from the corner of her mouth onto the sand.

But this wasn't over yet.

Since Chen Jian had already spoken those words out loud, it was impossible for him to just put on a show.

To force Lin Fan to submit, he had to go all out with lethal force.

He stepped forward in a few strides, grabbed Song Ya's scattered hair with both hands, dragged her upper body up forcibly, and delivered a fierce kick straight to her chest with his right foot.

Once.

Song Ya's body crashed heavily against the reef behind.

Twice.

Thrice.

"Acting so high and mighty! Acting so damn chaste!" Chen Jian panted heavily, his eyes red, his shoe soles landing on Song Ya's body one after another, "Really think I wouldn't dare kill someone? Today I'll finish you off right in front of his face, and let's see who dares say a single word of dissent!"

Fresh blood gushed out from Song Ya's nasal cavity and mouth, dyeing a large patch of sand beneath her a dark brown.

Song Ya's vision began to blur, and the surrounding curses of Chen Jian, the retching of Su Qingxue, and the sound of the waves all turned into a buzzing noise.

Through eyes gummed up by sweat and blood, she stared fixedly at the tall man in the distance.

Lin Fan had been standing there all along, neither speaking nor moving.

Song Ya looked at him, her tears mixed with blood flowing into the sand, yet the corners of her mouth twitched with extreme effort.

She didn't blame him.

In a place without rules like this, not saving her was a rational choice.

As long as he could survive, it would be fine.

At this moment, time seemed to be drawn out extremely long.

In Song Ya's mind, those consciousnesses about to be extinguished due to extreme pain suddenly unearthed an old scene from over a decade ago.

That was deep winter.

Behind the dilapidated tube-shaped apartment building in the urban village, an icy dead-end alley.

At fifteen years old, with two braids, she was cornered by a few punks.

They tore her school uniform and snatched the money in her pockets.

She cried and shouted for help.

An adult passing by the alley entrance glanced at her, lowered their head, and walked away quickly.

No one cared; everyone felt that avoiding trouble was better than courting it.

Just when she was in despair, someone rushed into the alley entrance.

A boy wearing a single-layered jacket washed to a pale white.

The boy shouted nothing, tightly gripping half a red brick covered in frozen mud in his hand, and charged straight into those four punks.

That was a completely suicidal fighting style.

The boy was pinned in the snow by several punks and kicked mercilessly, his nose bleeding and the corners of his eyes split.

But he simply refused to let go, stubbornly finding an opportunity to smash a brick squarely onto the bridge of the ringleader punk's nose.

The sound of the nasal bone breaking, mixed with the punk's pig-like screams, completely scared that group of people away.

The boy climbed up from the snowdrift and threw the snatched schoolbag at her feet.

Wiping the blood on his face with a tattered sleeve, without saying a single redundant word, he turned around and walked away, leaving only a straight-backed figure.

Many years later, Song Ya's academic performance was very good, yet she chose Shengtang precisely because the boy who saved her was in this company.

On her first day reporting to the company, she saw a busy young man in the lobby.

The young man was tall and no longer looked like he did back then.

But the moment he hoisted a cardboard box and turned around, that back profile completely overlapped with the back profile of the one who saved her on that heavy snowy day when she was fifteen.

She didn't go to identify him.

Even when sexually harassed by Wang Qiang, even after suffering all kinds of grievances, she didn't resign.

As for the thing called life, it was already owed back in that snowfield more than a decade ago.

Dying here now happened to return it to him, and they would be even with each other.