The Road Home

Chapter 38

The extremely fortunate part was that the geography of this particular location was very kind to them.

The flat ground did not go on for very long before it transformed to steep, mountainous terrain that very easily brought on fatigue once you started climbing it. Ordinary people would not be able to travel too far into it.

These last several months, in the periods that the combat engineers were demining the area, Lu Yanchen would come to this site now and again, and so he had a greater degree of familiarity with this place than Qin Mingyu. The direction he gave Qin Mingyu to search was one that was more or less swept clean already and could be considered relatively safer. The trek down his own route, though, also went smoothly and no danger signals arose.

Twenty-odd minutes later, they spotted those six young people behind a stone stele at the foot of the mountainous terrain.

The beams from the several flashlights in Lu Yanchen's group all shone over there. One girl's tears began falling first. "We wanted to climb up and walk along on the mountain to search for mobile reception and call the police, but we fell back down." Right after she said this, four young girls began talking all at once, describing how when they came in there was still light in the sky, but later, when it became dark, everyone grew scared. On top of that, they had no mobile reception, so they could do nothing but have the three boys climb upwards to try to find a signal.

But one fell and ended up dragging another down as well. When the remaining one climbed back down, he, too, seemed as if his soul had flown away and scattered from fright. With the men injured, these girls dared even less to go searching in these murky mountain woods for a way out. They therefore simply sat in one place, reasoning that someone would eventually come to rescue them.

Lu Yanchen felt the bones of that injured young man's leg. It was broken. The other man's condition was not bad; he could walk.

"You're already considered pretty lucky." Pulling back his hand and shutting off his flashlight, Lu Yanchen remarked, "If you really had run into a landmine, it wouldn't be as simple as just a broken bone."

The man gave a sharp inhale of pain, not uttering anything.

Lu Yanchen removed all the equipment he had been wearing and tossed it onto the stone stele. Turning so that his back faced the injured young man and crouching, he ordered, "Get on."

The young man was more burly and muscular than even Lu Yanchen and so was quite doubtful. However, with no other options, he could only lean his weight forward onto Lu Yanchen's back.

Straightening back up, Lu Yanchen ensured that this person with the most serious injuries was secure on his back, and then he gave instructions to the police officers: Each one of them would take one civilian, and they would exactly re-trace their steps back along the same route they came. Not even one unnecessary extra step was to be taken. When they came in, they had relied on the assistance of equipment; leaving now, they were relying purely on the markers he had left behind and his memory.

Moonlight broke through the gaps in the branches and leaves and spilled onto the path.

Lu Yanchen turned off his flashlight. Those several police officers did so as well so as to not affect Lu Yanchen's vision. With natural light, it was not a difficult task for him to pick out markers and find the way back. Ten minutes passed, but his breathing had not even grown heavier. On his back, that grown man, who this entire time had stayed mute, now shamefacedly asked in a small voice, "Comrade, are you doing okay?" Before he spoke, he had deliberated for a long time. He did not know how he should address Lu Yanchen, so in the end he had done what they do on television and cheesily addressed him as "comrade."