Princesa Mercenaria

Capítulo 5

Drawing energy from who-knows-where, he leaped over the ditch like a rabbit and climbed the vertical ladder to the stands. Enraged, Ye Xiao roared, "You can't escape!"

Xiaozhi turned around and saw him, only a dozen meters away. In her panic, she continued climbing upwards. Ye Xiao caught up, taking three steps at a time. The blood on his elbow gradually congealed, and the excruciating pain was temporarily forgotten. His only thought was to grab the girl!

Seeing Ye Xiao closing in, she began to climb higher and higher, until she reached the top of the stands, where there was nowhere left to escape. Behind her was an iron railing, and there was no "god" to protect her. Xiao Zhi curled up into a ball and surrendered helplessly.

Ye Xiao reached the highest point. Worried that Xiao Zhi would try to escape again, he rushed over like lightning. Unexpectedly, the girl instinctively dodged to the side, while Ye Xiao, blinded by anger, lost control of his steps and rushed over the high iron railing.

He paid no attention to what was happening outside, and by the time his entire body was sent flying, it was too late to turn back!

This is the highest point of the stadium stands, more than 20 meters above the ground. Falling to the ground here would be certain death.

Xiao Zhi let out a terrified scream and lunged back to the iron railing. Ye Xiao, meanwhile, was hanging in mid-air, plummeting rapidly towards the ground twenty meters below, pulled toward hell by the law of universal gravitation.

Free fall...

15:30

The +th one?

Now let's temporarily shift our focus from the stadium to our long-lost home base—the sleeping villa.

The bedroom on the second floor.

Sun Zichu still lingered at the gates of hell, occasionally uttering incoherent sounds: "The City of Sleep... The Kingdom of Rakshasa... The Night of the Great Empty City... Doomsday Judgment... Heavenly Secrets... Must Not... Be Revealed..."

"He's run a high fever again!"

Lin Junru touched his forehead, sat anxiously on the edge of the bed and sighed. Looking at the half-dead man on the bed, her heart ached as if it were being cut by a knife.

“I didn’t expect the fish poison to be so serious.” Yu Ling paced back and forth by the bed. “It’s all my fault. I was so careless. I shouldn’t have cooked that soup so easily.”

Ding Xiang turned back from the window, patted Yu Ling on the shoulder and said, "It's no use saying anything now. We can only wait for Tong Jianguo to come back. Hopefully, he can find the life-saving serum."

The three women gathered around the bed, watching their dying grandson, Chu, wrapped in a blanket and groaning in pain. He couldn't drink anything, had completely lost his mind, and was in even worse shape than before; he might die at any moment from the poison.

Is the final moment approaching?

"What about the others?" Dingding, still frowning, returned to the window and looked at the sky. "Are Ye Xiao and Xiaozhi alive or dead? And why hasn't Elena come back yet? Where has Qiuqiu disappeared to? How are we going to explain this to her deceased parents?"

"It's all my fault!"

Yu Ling lowered her head in anguish.

Ding Xiang continued speaking to himself, "Are we the only ones left? Three women and a dying man."

“No, he won’t die.” Lin Junru interrupted her abruptly, almost to the point of paranoia. “None of you should curse him.”

As she spoke, she hugged Sun Zichu's face again, as if they were a couple who had been in love for a long time. Even she herself felt confused. What were his good qualities that made her so suddenly fall in love with him?

Perhaps, none of this needs a reason. Does it need a reason at all?

"Okay, let's stop arguing, okay? Let's think of a way to save ourselves."

"I wonder how many more hours I have left to live? Will my parents come to Thailand to look for me? They must be crying too if they can't find me!"

Lin Junru suddenly became so pessimistic again, and nervously lowered her head to sob.

“Let’s think back on these past few days—since we entered Nanming City.” Dingding ignored her and leaned against the window, talking to herself, “There have been many strange things since the first day, like that Frenchman we met on the road, and the French tour group’s bus exploding. Why did we have to be the ones to run into it? Then the bus got lost. The driver has driven this road many times, how could he get lost?”

Are you going to talk about me next?

The perceptive Yu Ling immediately noticed, because from the first day she joined the tour group, some people felt that her origins were unknown and her whereabouts were suspicious. This suspicion may not have been eliminated even now, and only Tong Jianguo completely believed in her and protected her.

Dingding shook her head somewhat awkwardly: "I don't know."

“I don’t know why I got dragged into this.” Yu Ling couldn’t control her emotions either. “Although I’m still very young, I’ve been leading tour groups since I was eighteen. I’ve led many of the Chinese tour groups for Chiang Mai Rose Travel Agency. I’ve never had such a weird thing happen before. Why do I always have to be unlucky? Maybe I did something terrible in my past life and I have to atone for it in this life.”

"Don't talk about you anymore, I didn't doubt you." Ding Xiang comforted her calmly, then looked up and carefully recalled the events of a few days ago. "On the first night, a landslide occurred in the middle of the night, severing the only tunnel in and out of the city—why did it have to happen on the very night we entered this ghost town? If it had happened a day earlier, we wouldn't have been able to drive into the tunnel; if it had happened a day later, we could have escaped safely. But it just had to happen on this damned night. It's such a coincidence!"

"Yes, there's no such thing as a coincidence in the world."

Finally, Lin Junru wiped away her tears and chimed in, snapping out of her infatuation and sadness.

"This deserted city was like a trap set for us. Just as we jumped in, someone covered the trap entrance. And how could our tour guide, Xiao Fang, have died tragically on the rooftop the next morning? Was there a murderer among us? Perhaps it was the Frenchman Henri who escaped? But he was seriously injured that night and couldn't move from his bed. How could he have gone up to the rooftop to kill someone?"

"Makes sense? Then who could have done it?" Now it was Lin Junru's turn to rack her brains. She temporarily put aside her grandson Chu's pale face and recalled with a solemn expression, "The second person to die in the tour group was the driver. He was trying to escape when the gas station exploded and he died. But why was he the only one who died? If the gas station had exploded, the people traveling with him would have died too. This doesn't make sense."

Dingding nodded. "That's right. And the next afternoon, when Tong Jianguo and Yang Mou arrived at the TV station, they had already connected to satellite communication and received radio signals from outside. Just as they were about to send a distress signal to the world, thunder suddenly started in the sky and damaged the satellite receiver and TV tower on the roof. Wasn't that obviously preventing us from escaping?"

"Could it be that there really is a divine hand controlling us from the shadows?"

As soon as she finished speaking, Lin Junru's expression froze instantly.

Everyone's eyes were drawn to the bedroom doorway, where a white cat was nimbly crouching on the ground, a fiery red dot on the tip of its tail, as if it wanted to set the house ablaze.

It was that mysterious white cat again, bringing them to this villa and keeping them up all night. Its cold eyes stared at them, as if it could see right through them, showing disdain even for a cat.

Cat's Eye: The Secret to a Sparkling Future.

The Secret of Heaven Season 4 Complete Version Chapter 3: Cai Jun in the Morgue

Same minute, same second.

While Sun Zichu groaned in bed at the base camp, Elena was weeping in a dark secret room.

The television suddenly exploded, and the noise almost scared her to death—in an instant, a ball of sparks flew out, the lights went out, and fragments of the picture tube flew around, some hitting her, but luckily her face wasn't scratched.

The entire secret room was pitch black and filled with a pungent smell of burning, turning into a sealed crematorium, where she was bound and prepared to be burned to ashes.

Tears streamed uncontrollably from her eyes like a faucet, sliding down her cheeks amidst her sobs. Since she couldn't see anything anyway, and no one would hear her cries for help, she would just cry out loud. This release wasn't just of the fear of the moment, but also of all the repression and pain she had felt since entering the world of Heavenly Secrets. It included the inescapable curse of fate that had haunted her for over twenty years, even the memory of her mother, who had suddenly vanished on a snowy night many years ago and never returned…

Although she had reunited with her mother in an ancient castle in the wilderness of Transylvania a year earlier, that mother was a different person—a person cursed with eternal damnation in the Middle Ages, a member of the Dracula family who existed only in legends, and a harbinger of her own future fate—tragedy.

Elena sighed once again in the locked room. Tragedy is about destroying beautiful things for others to see. But was she truly beautiful herself?

Now all that awaits her is time, and time is the cruelest thing in the world, slowly wasting away one's youth and leading one to the grave.

Yes, this is her tomb, her cramped underground palace, her dilapidated coffin.

She began to imagine a terrifying future, spending countless days and nights here, tormented by hunger and rapidly dehydrated by thirst, turning into a living dead who was still breathing. Her organs would gradually wither away, shriveling her up like a mummy, until finally she would open her mouth in agony, becoming a horrifying corpse.

Finally, flies and bedbugs will take over her body, turning her into a pile of bones and dust.

This was her final destination.

Thinking of this, she was no longer afraid, and even her tears stopped flowing. Elena calmly closed her eyes, awaiting the final moment.

Yes, death has arrived.

The iron door to the secret room was suddenly opened, and dim light shone in, accompanied by the sound of light footsteps.

Elena immediately opened her eyes, her pupils momentarily dazzled by the light, and she saw the figure of a man.

She then shouted in a hoarse voice, "Henry! You damned bastard!"

However, when the man walked up to her, she felt something was amiss. Although she still couldn't see his face clearly, his movements and demeanor were very different from Henry's.

Who are you?

The initial tension quickly turned into intense excitement. If it wasn't Henry, then it must be someone who had come to rescue him—either Tong Jianguo or Ye Xiao. In any case, he was saved!

Sure enough, the man untied the ropes binding her.

However, because she had been in the same position for too long, Elena's whole body was numb and she couldn't move for a while.

The man pulled her up and carefully helped her outside. Only then, with the help of the light from the porch, could Elena make out his face.

It was an unremarkable face, belonging to a Chinese man who was probably in his thirties, but I had never seen him before.

He is X

Elena immediately sensed something was wrong, especially when she noticed that the other person was completely black from head to toe, except for their skin color, and was also wearing a pair of large black sunglasses.

This is an empty city with no one around, so how could a stranger suddenly appear?

"Who are you?"

She switched to Chinese and shouted loudly, while the man in black, X, gave a strange smile, still holding her arm tightly, and dragged her to the other side of the corridor.

The morgue is across the corridor.

Elena still doesn't know that she's been locked up in the hospital all along. It's a small room at the very back of the ground floor corridor, opposite the morgue. It used to be used to store medical waste, but Henry had converted it into a secret room. The thick iron door blocked her cries for help, but it couldn't stop the sound of the exploding television from carrying through the corridor to the morgue across the way.

The frozen corpses did not wake up, but they did attract the still-shaken X.

"SHIT! Let me go!"

She struggled desperately at the morgue entrance, her legs, which had just regained strength, kicking wildly against the wall of the opposite corridor. But her hands were held tightly by her arms, and she couldn't break free at all.

Having just been rescued from the secret room, she was soon to be sent to the morgue. Poor Elena screamed at the top of her lungs, but could only pause briefly at the morgue entrance.

"Let her go!"

Suddenly, a man's voice came from behind him.

The morgue has finally returned to peace.

X still held Elena in his hand, calmly turning around. The dim light in the corridor illuminated a tall and imposing figure.

"Tong Jianguo!"

Elena screamed. The fifty-seven-year-old man was expressionless, his eyes coldly fixed on the stranger in front of the morgue, holding a dark, menacing pistol.

The man in black, X, stared coldly at Tong Jianguo, and of course, he also saw the gun pointed at him. This was the second time today that someone had pointed a gun at him.

"Let her go."

Tong Jianguo warned him again, but this time in a calm tone, though it sounded more severe than before.

The standoff lasted for half a minute. Elena dared not struggle any longer, fearing that if the two started fighting, the gun might accidentally go off and cause serious trouble.

X suddenly sneered for a few seconds, then shoved Elena forward.

Before she could even realize what was happening, she had already charged heavily towards Tong Jianguo. There was no way to dodge in the narrow corridor, and she was already in a panic, so both of them ended up falling to the ground.

This was a fatal oversight.

In less than a half second, a pistol appeared in X's right hand.

In less than a half second, a bullet was fired from X's gun.

Gunshots echoed throughout the hospital building.

The bullet pierced the air in the corridor, tore through Tong Jianguo's left upper arm, and burrowed into his taut muscles.

Blood splattered in the morgue.

At the same time, it also splashed onto Elena's face. She only felt a slight heat on her nose before she saw Tong Jianguo painfully clutching his arm.