Part Two, Chapter Twelve
Knowing it might be cruel, I decided to tell the truth: "I've been afraid of water since I was a child!"
"Lord Ye!" Yin Tianyu cried out in grief and indignation to the heavens, "If you're afraid of water, why did you choose to live in such a place!"
"Why don't you walk by yourself?" I don't know if it was fear or the wind and rain, but I felt colder and colder, and my teeth chattered uncontrollably.
"Idiot, if I could walk alone, I wouldn't have gone in to look for you!" Yin Tianyu said, pulling off his raincoat. I couldn't help but exclaim, "How are you so smart to know that you should wear a raincoat, not an umbrella, in this kind of weather?"
"When has your brain ever been smart except when it comes to money?" Yin Tianyu shook his head sadly.
"I'm warning you, you... Ouch! Help!" Before I could finish my sentence, a wave crashed over me, and I was pulled into the water by a tremendous force. Involuntarily, I flailed my arms wildly in the air, trying to grab something. In my panic, someone grabbed my arm, and although my body was still being pulled into the water, the speed had greatly decreased. But the seawater still quickly reached my throat. My mind went blank, and my limbs froze in fear, unable to move. I felt my body sinking into the water like a piece of raw iron, and the water pressure immediately squeezed in from all directions.
"My life is over!" I sighed in sorrow.
Suddenly, my head popped out of the water again. I took a deep breath and realized that an arm was wrapped around my neck, pulling me along with difficulty in the big waves. Yin Tianyu's voice was beside me saying, "You're doing a good job. Keep going and don't move around. We have to swim further away as soon as possible, or this house will collapse."
Sure enough, just as we swam a little further away, a wave crashed over the cabin, and it shattered like a toy in an instant. "Watch out!" Yin Tianyu shouted in alarm, and the hand that was holding me tightly suddenly loosened. I had no idea that I would sink back into the water with a "plop," swallowing two mouthfuls of seawater before being pulled up by Yin Tianyu's big hand.
"Hey, you're really obedient! You didn't even move!" Yin Tianyu's voice still sounded calm and unhurried, though he was a little out of breath.
"You bastard! If I could move, I'd strangle you first and then kill myself! Try throwing me into the water again!" I said, tears welling up in my eyes again. Strange, I'm crying a lot today.
"No, don't worry, this time I will never let go no matter what." Yin Tianyu said, his breathing becoming heavier and heavier.
Actually, it's more accurate to say we were floating in the water than swimming, because the waves were huge and rapid. Even a skilled swimmer like Cyril Thorpe would have been helpless, let alone someone like me who couldn't swim at all and didn't know how to use the water for leverage.
My head rested against Yin Tianyu's chest, feeling his breathing grow heavier. Although his warm body temperature reassured me somewhat, my last shred of conscience still made me extremely uneasy: "This can't go on. Neither of us can escape. Please let me go. You only need to do one thing for me: remember my bankbook password and give it to my mom. My bankbook is in a hidden compartment of my suitcase, which is at the resort's guest room manager Zhou Rulian's house. But you have to swear to God you absolutely won't embezzle my money! Otherwise, I'll haunt you even in death!"
“I’m not going to swear, because I don’t want to hear your bankbook password at all. You only have two choices: either push me away and drown yourself, taking the password to meet God, or believe that I can live and take you to a safe place and tell your mother the password for your 173,547.6 yuan deposit in the bank.”
My body jerked violently as if electrocuted, and I screamed, "Are you a human or a ghost?! How do you know so much?! Did you peek into my bankbook?!"
"God told me."
Is God also a Taiwanese?
"I don't know either, but don't worry, I've informed God in Mandarin, English, French, Spanish, and Hebrew. Although we will both die someday, it won't be today, nor here."
"Let me make this clear from the start: I didn't beg you to save me. You were the one who held on tightly and wouldn't let go. You were the one who begged me to save you. If everything goes smoothly this time, don't ever act like a savior in front of me again!"
"Good heavens! No wonder that poor kid Gao Fei would hug me and cry his eyes out whenever he heard the word 'Li'. You really are a gifted person. You always look so fresh every time I see you."
"Gao Fei? How do you know Gao Fei?" I was shivering from the cold in the water, my head was getting heavier and heavier, and I really wanted to sleep, but his words piqued my curiosity.
“Gao Fei is my cousin. I found you hiding here in a photo from a press conference a while ago, so I asked him to protect you. But his method was a bit unusual. As a result, you scolded him and he almost committed suicide out of shame and indignation.”
Yin Tianyu's words reminded me of the day I won money playing video games, and I couldn't help but grin. Just then, a mouthful of seawater rushed over, salty and fishy, choking me and making me gasp and cough. Although I felt bad, it cleared my head a bit.
"Ah, is that so? I thought I really had transformed into a night-blooming jasmine." After laughing, the truth still hit me hard. Regardless of whether she's beautiful or not, being light-skinned is an innate trait of every woman.
"Night-blooming jasmine?!" His face was completely obscured by the water, but his laughter sounded malicious. Sure enough, "Where we're from, we call poop 'night-blooming jasmine,' and the old-timers who collected chamber pots were called 'night-blooming jasmine.' You really have ambition. Hey, ah! I've stepped on sand!" Yin Tianyu suddenly shouted excitedly.
I never knew I loved this land beneath my feet so much. As I lay exhausted on the sand, all I wanted to do was kiss every inch of it with tears in my eyes. After finally catching my breath, I got up and saw Yin Tianyu still slumped to one side like a salted fish. He was truly exhausted.
"Hey, are you alright?" I staggered over and knelt down beside him, but I was startled. He was lying motionless on the ground, his face pale, his hair smeared with blood and drooping listlessly on his forehead, looking utterly lifeless.
"What's wrong with you! Are you dead?! Don't scare me!" I exclaimed, then did something incredibly foolish—I grabbed his head and held it to my chest, my hands trembling as I searched for his wound.
"Mmm, so comfortable." Yin Tianyu said with a slight smile, a sudden vitality appearing on his deathly pale face.
Without thinking, I shoved him away: "Scumbag!"
"Ouch!" he cried out, his head hitting the sand hard.
"Serves you right," I cursed him, but when I saw blood gushing from his forehead again, my heart panicked. I felt a pang of regret for hitting him too hard, and I held his head up again: "What do we do now?"
“Do you know the way? We need to get back to the resort as soon as possible. There’s a medical room there, and I have a room there.”
When were you injured? How come I didn't know?
"Sigh, my lifelong reputation is ruined in an instant. For the first time in my life, I, the 'King of Freestyle,' have been so incompetent in the water. When the house collapsed, we didn't swim far enough, and a plank hit me right on the head. Don't tell anyone, or I'll be completely humiliated." Yin Tianyu was extremely frustrated.
"Luckily you can swim, otherwise we would both be done for." I glanced back at the still indignant sea behind me and shuddered with lingering fear. I saw that Yin Tianyu was still bleeding from his head, so I hurriedly tore off a piece of cloth from his clothes and tied it around his head to slow down the bleeding. Then I reached out to help him up.
“I can swim probably because there are people who can’t,” Yin Tianyu said, helping me stand up by the shoulder. “How come you’ve lost so much weight?” He wrinkled his nose in dissatisfaction, as if he had noticed that the pigs his family’s farmhands were raising had reduced their yield.
"They're oppressed by capitalists." Thinking of the messy people at the resort, I was very dissatisfied. Suddenly, I remembered something. "Hey, don't tell me this resort has nothing to do with Hengwei."
"This is a project we invested in in cooperation with the local government. In order to obtain preferential treatment in terms of taxation and loan policies, we, as the investors, kept a low profile and the operation was mainly carried out by the local government's organizational structure."
"You must have come up with this crazy idea, you swindler!" I said with disdain.
"Even though we've just been through thick and thin together, please don't praise me like that, it'll make me feel embarrassed."
"Did I praise you? I was just advising a bald dog to gnaw on bones more and bite people less, lest it be reincarnated as a dog in its next life."
"I really don't regret having such bad luck every time I see you, because you are just too kind, Night-Blooming Jasmine."
Part Two, Chapter Thirteen