Chapter 40
"Is the jump between topics so big?" Shaoxing Yang also interrupted curiously.
"You're overthinking it. How could it be such an outrageous reason?" Chen Yunliang's eyes wandered. "Lu Shiyu, have you read too many novels? How could that kind of plot be true?"
Lu Shiyu sat up straight. “If there wasn’t some reason that was extremely against your will, you wouldn’t have cut off ties with your family directly, right?”
Chen Yunliang exhaled. "I remember saying before that I was the passive party in breaking off relations with my family, and it was only because I insisted on joining the exploration team. It's that simple."
"real?"
"Really, not a single lie."
Chen Yunliang's eyes were sincere, so Lu Shiyu dispelled his doubts.
"I didn't expect that a rich person would actually cut off ties for such a reason."
"That's normal. Rich people are all mentally ill." Chen Yunliang could understand Lu Shiyu's speechlessness very well.
Shaoxing Yang, who didn't hear any gossip, shrank back silently and leaned against Yan Hong.
"Hey, do you think Chen Yunliang is really hiding something from us?"
Yan Hong leaned on her backpack and said, "Who knows? Since joining the team, when has he ever taken the initiative to talk about his family affairs?"
Shaoxing Yang squeezed closer to Yan Hong and said, "Is there really some hidden secret? It's just that it's shameful so we never tell it."
Yan Hong was a little annoyed by Shao Xingyang's squeezing and slapped him: "Get away from me! Can you force me to speak even if I don't want to?"
Shao Xingyang shrank back aggrievedly: "I'm just curious..."
"Oh," Yan Hong sighed, "Who would have thought that a young master from a wealthy family would give up his comfortable life and come to the exploration team to beg for food with us? Rich people really are crazy."
If Yan Hong was just an ordinary person living in the base, she would definitely be a member of the anti-rich brigade.
She hates people who have conditions far superior to those of ordinary people but complain without reason, and she also hates people who squander resources. She hates people who have no ability and can only sit in high positions by relying on connections. In her eyes, incompetent rich people are just termites in the base, gnawing on the fruits of other people's labor but doing nothing, and occasionally bullying others by taking advantage of their power.
But after joining the exploration team, she no longer had the time to hate the rich. She just enjoyed every day she could live. She didn't care if the rich people didn't show off in front of her. Of course, if they showed off in front of her, she would beat them up without hesitation. Anyway, the captain would get her out in the end.
Because she lost her parents, she was raised by the officials of the base. The shortage of resources was natural. Sometimes they would do everything they could to fight for an extra piece of bread. In Yanhong's worldview, fighting and competing were necessary, so when she first heard that children from rich families had no worries about food and clothing since birth and had whatever they wanted, she didn't understand.
Why can they have whatever they want?
Because they are rich people.
Yanhong's worldview was shocked. She had watched everyone struggling for a living every day since she was a child, just to avoid starving to death next month. Suddenly, she found out that someone could reap the benefits without them. Naturally, Yanhong began to dislike them, especially the children from rich families, who spoke in a particularly unpleasant way.
Chen Yunliang is an exception. He is an outlier among the rich children. For some unknown reason, he insisted on signing up for the exploration team.
At first, Yan Hong thought that the other party was just like those people, who wanted to get through the back door easily by being rich. At that time, Yan Hong was still laughing at him in her heart for making a wrong calculation. The training and assessment of the exploration team were abusive to everyone regardless of their background. Even if his family was rich, he would still be beaten. But later, Yan Hong found that Chen Yunliang had no intention of using connections at all. He was training and assessing honestly from beginning to end, and finally became a formal member of the exploration team like them.
I thought it ended here, and that Chen Yunliang would go home and use his status as a formal member of the exploration team as a stepping stone, or as a decoration on the wall of achievements. But he actually joined the exploration team and completed the field missions again and again.
Yan Hong was increasingly unable to understand why anyone would choose to live such a life of living on the edge of a knife, but she gradually realized that Chen Yunliang was different from the parasites in the base, and slowly accepted Chen Yunliang. She would usually forget the fact that he was also a child from a wealthy family, and they would gather together to curse the maggots in the base.
As the conversation went on, it inevitably turned to the topic of cursing the al-Qaeda and the privileged class. Lu Shiyu was shocked to listen to a group of official members of the al-Qaeda organization saying things that could not be broadcast. Every time he heard a terrible remark, he silently wondered in his heart, is this something he can listen to?
The next day came in the blink of an eye.
The group packed their luggage neatly and skillfully, like workers on an assembly line.
The few of them continued walking down the river. Halfway there, they suddenly came across a fork in the river. The river was divided into two, and both sides looked similar.
Tang Zeyu compared the map. At this point, the map was no longer very useful. It only gave a general idea of the terrain. He still had to rely on his intuition as to which way to go.
"Go right."
Strangely, the further we walked, the denser the trees became, as if we were back in the forest.
The group walked along the river and in the afternoon, they finally reached the end of the river, where there was a pool of water and a cliff beside it.
"Why a pond?" Yan Hong crossed her arms and asked doubtfully, "Shouldn't we follow the river out of the woods?"
"Yeah, I remember that too. We should be able to see the sea next." Chen Yunliang looked at Tang Zeyu beside him and asked, "Captain, did we go the wrong way?"
Tang Zeyu held the map and his eyes moved quickly across the map.
"Maybe, should, perhaps, probably, we took the wrong path."
Everyone looked at each other, not expecting Tang Zeyu to make such a mistake in details.
"Although it's not a long way, it's a wasted trip today." Shaoxing Yang put his hands behind his head.
Tang Zeyu felt like hundreds of ants were crawling all over his body at this moment. He was so embarrassed that he wanted to burrow into the ground. He was obviously the leader of the team, but he made a mistake in such a place. It was totally inappropriate. Although he still looked calm on the surface, the shame caused by his dereliction of duty almost overwhelmed Tang Zeyu's mind.
"Look, there seems to be something in the water."
Several people were instantly attracted by Lu Shiyu's voice. Lu Shiyu was standing by the pool, pointing at a creature swimming in the water.
After a few people came closer to see it clearly, their expressions were all wonderful.
A group of creatures with bodies shaped like water drops, which look like both fish and tadpoles, are swimming freely in the pond. Part of their body is like that of fish, and they have thin fins on both sides that are similar to mosquito wings. It is not known whether they have any practical function. Their heads are round like tadpoles, as if their entire heads are swollen, with two protruding eyeballs on both sides of their heads, which seem like they will fall out at any time.
The strangest thing is not its shape, but the pattern on its body.
The few of them had eaten fish with strange patterns before, but what they encountered this time was not only strange, it was simply not something that would appear in reality.
Those patterns are just like the patterns on brain flower, with bumps and grooves, and the outer skin is laser-coated. When light shines on it, it reflects colorful light all over. Various colors such as red, yellow, blue and purple appear on it, and it looks like it is glowing. It does not look like a natural product at all, but more like a man-made handicraft, specially for people with ugliness fetish.
"Disgusting, what kind of fish is this?"
"It's recorded in the book that this isn't a fish," Lu Shiyu recalled. "It's actually the juvenile form of some animal. It just looks a bit like a fish when it's young."
The pond was almost entirely filled with these strange creatures that weren't even fish. Lu Shiyu poked some with a stick and said, "The juveniles of these creatures are completely defenseless and very easy to catch."
"Wait, what do you mean easy to catch?" Yan Hong immediately realized something was wrong: "You don't want to eat this!"
Lu Shiyu blinked, and Yan Hong, with a ferocious expression, wanted to go up to Lu Shiyu and have a good chat, but was immediately stopped by Chen Yunliang and Shaoxing Yang.
"Yan Hong! Calm down! We've eaten everything along the way, so this isn't much of a problem!"
"Yeah! Maybe this just looks weird but actually tastes good!"
"Yeah! You said you didn't want to eat it before, but in the end you ate it with relish!"
"Hey, stop hitting people!!!"
Tang Zeyu had just recovered from the embarrassment of having been led the wrong way when Lu Shiyu carefully approached behind him.
"Help me block it off! Yan Hong seems angry again," Lu Shiyu sighed. "Didn't you say you're not picky about food? Why do you always get so excited when you see the ingredients?"
Tang Zeyu: “…”
How to answer this?
"Maybe it's because I eat too few carbohydrates, which makes me irritable."
"So that's how it is!" Lu Shiyu clapped his hands. "Why didn't you tell me earlier? I'll cook some noodles for her today, and she won't be angry anymore!"
Tang Zeyu: “…”
Forget it, Yanhong will get used to it sooner or later.
After the three-person fight, Yan Hong had almost vented her emotions. She squatted by the river in anger, staring at those fish that looked a bit disgusting.
"I will never eat this! Absolutely!"
"Hmm," Chen Yunliang rubbed his lower abdomen where Yan Hong had elbowed him. "Do you really care so much about the original appearance of the ingredients?"
Yan Hong turned around and glared at him fiercely: "If you don't care, why don't you eat rat meat!"
Chen Yunliang pushed his glasses up. “In fact, the ordinary food we eat doesn’t look very good before it’s processed.”
"Nonsense! You haven't even been to a greenhouse, how do you know what the food looks like before it's processed?"
"Who says you have to go there to find out?" Chen Yunliang said, "Don't you really like the vanilla ice cream cake from the dessert shop near my house?"
"So what? Don't I know how cakes and ice cream are made?" Yan Hong curled her lips, completely unprepared for what Chen Yunliang said next.
"Cake and ice cream are certainly fine," Chen Yunliang said with a malicious smile, "but did you know that otter secretions are your favorite vanilla flavor?"
As if she remembered something, Yan Hong's expression froze instantly.
"This much should be enough."
When Tang Zeyu was helping Lu Yu, he caught a lot of these fish-like creatures from the water. These creatures hardly resisted and could be caught without much effort.
On the way, Yu and the others filled basins with water and carried them towards the camp. As soon as they stood up, they saw Yan Hong staring silently at the void, and Chen Yunliang beside her was still laughing behind her back.
"What happened to Yanhong?"
"Nothing," Chen Yunliang leaned over and whispered, "I was just joking with Yan Hong."
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