Three hours later, it was already late at night. Li Ke heard footsteps approaching, and there must have been quite a few people. Before she could get up, the robbers made their move.
"Get up, get up, hurry up, our team is here, get ready to go," the robber urged.
Li Ke and the others were also forced to stand up with guns pointed at them. This time, they were tied together in groups of three on a rope, and they no longer had to carry their backpacks.
Then the other party covered all of their heads with black cloths, and from then on, Li Ke and the others could only continue their journey under the guidance of the robbers.
After listening to the footsteps for a while, Li Ke deduced that the number of robbers who had come to join them was not many; there must have been more than a hundred more.
They turned left and right, climbed up and down slopes, until Li Ke lost her sense of direction. It wasn't until she kept bumping into earthen walls as she walked down the steps that she could roughly tell they had probably entered a tunnel.
Niu Dazhuang and the others were forced to stay where they were until the next morning, when all the bandits on the mountain slowly disappeared.
After seeing the robbers disappear in all directions, the officer and the remaining men waited for a while to make sure there was no further movement before waking up the sleeping men and preparing to leave.
Niu Dazhuang ran up the hill and began to look around. All those people had left. Now he had no weapons or food. There were traces left by the other party in all directions, making it impossible to determine the direction Li Jia had been taken away.
When the officer saw Niu Dazhuang walk back looking somewhat lost, he patted him on the shoulder and said, "Try to think positively. We'll find clues and rescue them as soon as possible. Don't be too anxious."
Niu Dazhuang rolled his eyes at him and retorted, "That's our base commander! If your commander were captured by the enemy, wouldn't you be worried?"
Officer: Another one who doesn't appreciate kindness; he shouldn't have said anything.
The rescued hostages, exhausted and hungry, breathed a sigh of relief when they heard from the team that the kidnappers had retreated.
The soldiers took out the food from the thirty backpacks, but there wasn't even enough for each person to have a bite. They could only give a little bit of food to the starving ones first, and then they helped each other walk back the way they came.
Many of the hostages were finally able to vent their emotions. Niu Dazhuang heard words like "drinking blood," "eating people," and "sharing food" in the angry and fearful voices of those people, and he couldn't help but clench his fists.
Once he had obtained weapons and food supplies, he broke away from the group and went to find Li Jia.
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