Snake Spirit flicked his tongue and nodded, his scales catching the faint moonlight. "There's no way Google Maps could mess up this bad. If the town is gone, then yeah, there's no guarantee it's still two hundred kilometers away."
Monkey immediately objected, his voice rising in the stillness of the wilderness. "You mean we have got to walk another fifteen kilometers just to get back to the canal? That's half a day wasted! And we're out of supplies; we need food! Besides, that place is way too dangerous. The scavenging will go on for days, and it's definitely crawling with their people right now.
They just lost more than twenty cargo ships' worth of goods. Imagine what they will do if they find us! The whole canal is filled with their ships, and if we keep following the river, it's even riskier. What if a chopper spots us during patrol? Then what?"
He wasn't wrong. Going back fifteen kilometers was a long trek for a mere possibility. And everyone was already starving, their stomachs growling in the silence.
"If we go back, we're guaranteed to reach Luksa along the original route," Jing Shu said coolly, her gaze steady. "But if we keep walking forward, can you promise we will reach it in two hundred kilometers? What if it takes five hundred and we're trapped in there instead?"
She shifted the weight of her pack and added, "Old Goat ran into the same problem last year. He was already at Wu City but couldn't cross for over a month. You really want to risk that? If the terrain shifted again, we could lose ten days, maybe half a month. That's a way bigger waste of time! And without enough supplies, once we're stuck in those mountains, we will be done for."
Monkey argued back, gesturing toward the horizon. "If we backtrack along the canal, there aren't any towns nearby. The Americans barely have people in that area, and there's no way we can grab supplies or a vehicle.
Going that route means we will be walking the whole time: no people, no resources, no cars, and probably a ton of danger. That's four or five days wasted at least! But if we go this way, we will pass six or seven towns ahead. There's got to be people or vehicles somewhere. It's safer."
Jing Shu narrowed her eyes, looking at the huge mountain looming ahead. With her experience, she could tell this was a massive tectonic shift. That meant they wouldn't only have to climb it but also deal with all sorts of unknown dangers along the jagged slopes.
Back in the fifth year of the apocalypse, during the Great Migration, the shifting crust had reshaped the world. From Wu City to southern China, she had seen how brutal it could get. Without the Tyrant's foresight and decisiveness, half their people wouldn't have made it through the passes.
Even now, as strong as she had become, those towering mountains still cast a long shadow over her. After the third year of the apocalypse, she had learned one hard truth: it was better to backtrack than to take a new path through some freshly risen mountain range. Inside those mountains lurked Darklife creatures and countless other deadly surprises waiting in the cold.
"Then let's split up," Jing Shu said, her tongue dry. She pulled a bottle of mineral water from her pack, the plastic crinkling. She gulped it down before adding, "You guys keep moving forward. I will go back along the canal. That's final."
Monkey snorted, scratching Ah Huang's head as the exhausted dog panted heavily, its tongue lolling out. "Fine, then let's split up."
Tank dropped his heavy pack with a thud that echoed against the rocks. "Hold up. We're a team; no one acts alone. And we're still on a mission. Old Goat already divided us into two squads, so we can't split again. As acting captain, it's my duty to keep everyone safe. Since we have got a disagreement, we will vote."
Ling Ling raised her hand immediately. "I'm with Mirror. She has been dead-on about every danger and situation these past few days."
Xiao Hei was almost crying, his face pale in the moonlight. "I pick Monkey! I don't want to walk four or five more days on foot, damn it!"
Snake Spirit slithered over to Jing Shu's side, his eyes unblinking. "I trust Mirror's instincts."
Everyone looked at Tank. He hesitated, shifting his weight, then sighed. "As captain, I have to think of everyone's safety. Monkey's plan really is safer. I will side with him."
A tie. So what now?
Snake Spirit flicked a coin into the air. It spun wildly, catching the faint light before hitting the ground with a crisp clack. He pressed his palm over it as it stopped spinning. Jing Shu narrowed her eyes, focusing every bit of her power to see, but even with all her focus, she couldn't tell heads from tails through his hand. She would have to pick one.
"Heads," she said calmly.
Monkey shrugged. "Then I'm tails."
Snake Spirit lifted his hand. Light glinted off the metal surface: it was tails.
Jing Shu slung her pack over her shoulder, the straps creaking, and started walking ahead. Xiao Dou flapped her wings frantically to keep up. Monkey grinned, his relief evident. "Let's go, Ah Huang."
The others followed, deciding to keep going forward. The plan was simple: head straight to Luksa, steal a car if they found one, rob anyone in their way, climb whatever mountains blocked them, and never turn back.
Jing Shu clenched her fists. She had messed up. If she had shown her true strength earlier, she could have slapped these idiots flat against a wall until they listened. Then there wouldn't be any stupid coin tosses or leaving it to fate. She would say they were turning back, and they would turn back.
She thought of the Tyrant: firm, absolute, unquestioned. People might call her brutal or undemocratic, but no one would dare argue. Anyone who did, she would just slam them against the wall again. That would at least cut down on a lot of unnecessary risks, and maybe she would finally feel at peace.
For the last time, Jing Shu told herself she was going to change how she handled things from now on.
She gazed up at the massive mountain ahead, the silhouette stretching endlessly into the distance like a jagged wall. "Guess this is fate's way of messing with me again," she muttered.
The group stepped into the mountains. The air temperature dropped by at least five or six degrees, and everyone instinctively pulled their damp clothes tighter against their skin, stomping their feet now and then to fight off the chill. Only Jing Shu, wrapped in her oversized cotton coat, was actually a little warm.
The mountains were bare, scattered with a few blackened, dead trees that looked like skeletal fingers. Even a light cough echoed like a ghost's whisper in the thin air. There were no animals and no birds, just the occasional eerie cry drifting through the still air from somewhere deep in the peaks.
The dirt road turned into slabs of uneven rock. They walked for more than an hour, yet it still didn't feel like they had actually entered the mountain range, even though it loomed right there in front of them, immense and silent.