When the monkey saw me fall into the water, it tried to help me quickly, but it was too late and I pushed it into the pool.

When we stood up from the pool, the monkey waved his hands repeatedly: "Phone! Get the phone out first!"

"I'm taking it!"

Although I said that, I deliberately waved my hands underwater. When I pulled the clothes up, they were full of water, and the phones inside were all blacked out.

The monkey picked up a phone, looked at it, and then gestured at me speechlessly: "You're only twenty years old, how come you act like a seventy or eighty-year-old grandpa? You've taken all the phones in the group! If we get lost, we'll be stuck in the mountains like wild men!"

"How dare you say that to me? If you hadn't insisted on handing me the phone by the water, would things have ended this way?"

I had deliberately destroyed the communication equipment that allowed me to contact the outside world, and now that I had succeeded, I waved my hand and said, "Forget it, the phone is broken, but Jiang Man has another one! Besides, we still have our handheld terminals and everything else, so we won't lose them!"

Lin Que then stripped off her clothes and jumped into the water: "My lord, my elder brother is right. If the phone is broken, it's broken. Anyway, apart from my elder brother and Sister Man, no one else in the team has any external business. They only have the phone to prevent everyone from getting separated. Since the phone is gone, as long as we try not to separate, it won't have any impact."

"..."

After I destroyed everyone's communication devices in this way, only Jiang Man's phone remained in the group.

After a short rest, everyone continued their journey under my leadership.

Around 2 PM, Monkey glanced at the terminal in his hand: "Young Master Duan, we are now more than 25 kilometers away from where we camped yesterday, but there is still no sign of any villages around! Could we have been tricked again?"

I explained, "It's a bit early to draw conclusions! The maximum error of the handheld satellite positioning terminal is five kilometers. Let's continue walking forward for a while. If we still can't see anything after five kilometers, we can make other plans."

The monkey manipulated the Beidou navigation screen, swiping forward to set a coordinate point five kilometers away, and began to lead the way while walking ahead.

We hadn't gone far into the jungle when Jiang Man suddenly stopped: "Duan Shenxing, have you noticed anything strange about this jungle around us?"

You mean plants, right?

Hearing Jiang Man's question, I nodded in agreement: "This place is indeed quite strange. I've never even seen many of the plants here before! They look like they've been grafted!"

"Young Master Duan, our handheld devices have lost signal!"

The monkey then gestured to the terminal in its hand, saying, "Everything was fine just now, but suddenly the connection was lost!"

"Did it lose a star, or are they all gone?"

The satellite navigation we use needs to connect to satellites to receive a signal. To achieve accuracy, it needs to connect to at least five satellites to function properly.

The monkey pointed at the screen: "It's all gone! It's like the machine stopped working as soon as we got here!"

"We're only five kilometers from our destination, so it shouldn't be a problem."

Seeing that the satellite signal had failed, I took out the compass I had prepared beforehand from my pocket: "The plants here have become very strange, and now the satellite signal is gone too. This is clearly a defensive measure, which just proves that we've found the right place!"

As I was saying this, my face turned gloomy.

Seeing my expression, Jiang Man stood beside me and glanced at the compass in my hand: "There's nothing unusual about this, but why does your expression seem a little strange?"

"This isn't just a normal situation; it's a major problem."

I pointed to the compass needle in the center of the compass and said, "We've been heading southwest the whole time, but look at this compass needle, it's pointing in the direction behind us, which means there's something wrong with the magnetic field here!"

"The satellite phone signal is also gone."

Jiang Man took out her phone and looked at it, a look of disbelief on her face: "But we just lost our satellite signal! Ping'an Village is just a small village hidden in the woods, how could they possibly have the ability to change the magnetic field of such a small area?"

I shook my head and said, "It may not be a small area. Perhaps starting from here, a large area ahead is problematic."

The monkey put away his terminal, gripped his machete, and said fiercely, "Who cares about the problems! We're only five kilometers away from our target now. We'll find out what the problems are up ahead by going to check! If there really are problems, we'll be back in an hour at most!"

"The monkey is right. We'll only know what's going on here once we see it! I think this might be a protective measure by Ping'an Village. Since this is a secluded mountain village, there must be some ancient taboos or something. Everyone should be careful."

Without making a sound, I released the safety on the pistol in my pocket, then dragged the compass into the woods.

This kind of magnetic field disorder often occurs in various large tombs. In order to confuse tomb robbers, the designers of the tombs often place things like magnets in the tomb to change the direction of the compass.

However, we know the direction now, so I just need to use the compass in the opposite direction.

This method has a term called "inverted needle".

The forest in front of us is very dense, and the further we go in, the more strange and unusual plants we see.

In the end, we could only squeeze forward through the bushes, with visibility less than two meters, and all we could see were large patches of leaves.

Since there were no obvious landmarks, the compass in my hand became the only thing I could trust.

After we had walked a distance, the monkey waved its hand and stopped, saying, "Young Master Duan, I really can't walk anymore, let's rest!"

Not only the monkeys, but even the most resilient and hardy Manjing was panting heavily: "Brother, we've been walking on flat ground the whole way, without climbing any mountains or anything, but why do I feel so tired walking these five kilometers?"

"You feel tired not because of the terrain, but because we've walked far more than five kilometers!"

Jiang Man gestured to her watch: "We've been in the jungle for almost three hours now, which means we've already walked more than twenty kilometers!"

We were all stunned when we heard this.

I was so focused on getting there that I didn't realize we'd been walking in the woods for so long.

The monkey looked at a broad-leaved purple tree nearby and frowned, saying, "Young Master Duan, I think there's something wrong with these plants. Otherwise, we wouldn't react so slowly or act so excitedly elsewhere!"