Chapter Ninety-Two: From now on, you will be my most trusted partner.

As soon as she descended, Jiang Huan pulled out her unmistakable oversized flashlight, flooding the passage ahead with blinding light. Even the blackest void was turned to full daylight beneath it.

The passage ahead was only wide enough for one person to edge sideways along the wall. After entering, it split into three directions.

Jiang Huan had only taken a few steps when she heard movement behind her. Turning around in such a cramped place was difficult, but the other person spoke first.

“It’s me.”

Xie Congzhou. He had come down as well.

“I hadn’t even finished speaking, and you already jumped.”

His words made Jiang Huan feel a little awkward.

Things had been happening one after another lately, and she had not had any channel through which to gather the so-called gold and silver.

“Fourteen meters ahead. The end of the first bend is an underground river. The end of the second bend is the gold mine you want. At the end of the third bend, there are many living things. My advice is not to go there.”

Jiang Huan was inwardly cursing to the heavens.

When he said there was gold below, she could still tell herself that perhaps he had been judging from the moisture of the plants and soil, or some other plausible clue. But now that he had spoken with such certainty, he was clearly admitting that whatever was mysterious about him could not be explained from a scientific angle.

If she could choose, she would rather have heard only the part about there being a lot of gold.

If you do not know what to say, then keep still and let things be; that was a philosophy Jiang Huan had learned through two years of struggle in the livestreaming world.

She applied it to life again just then.

But no trick could withstand a single sincere sentence.

Sincerity was always the ultimate weapon, no matter the situation.

Seeing that Jiang Huan did not answer, Xie Congzhou added, “I know you’re different from everyone else. You have your secrets, things you can’t tell others. So do I. By choosing to be honest with you, I’m showing my sincerity. I truly want to cooperate with you, to protect the people around us and survive in this apocalypse.”

He no longer wanted to see his own kind dying all around him.

Jiang Huan could feel the sincerity in his words, but what was behind that urgency, and the faint ache hidden within it?

Hadn’t he already led the people he cared about out of a dead end and brought them here?

Before Jiang Huan could state her position to Xie Congzhou, they had already reached the first fork.

According to his guidance, the end of this first turn was the underground river. She hesitated for a few seconds, then decided to go take a look first.

She had walked less than thirty meters when a thick dampness hit her. After turning the corner, the space suddenly opened before her.

The change startled an exclamation out of Jiang Huan.

It was no wonder. The scene before her was like some immortal’s hidden realm: stones carved with intricate patterns, and down more than a dozen steps, the water level rose from shallow to deep.

The height was more than two meters, so the space did not feel cramped, and the moisture stretched far, far into the distance.

She tossed a few pebbles into the water, estimating that an area about one meter in from the lowest step was a reasonably safe depth.

Xie Congzhou had really guessed right, no, not guessed. He had truly been right: there really was an underground river here.

She endured the urge to start fishing on the spot and finally interrupted herself. “It would be great if there were fish.”

“There are, but they probably aren’t the kind you normally see,” Xie Congzhou said. “If you’re not in a rush, you can stay here and fish for a while.”

“I am in a rush.”

Jiang Huan did not hide her need and longing for gold as she said it.

So Xie Congzhou led her to the second fork.

Jiang Huan quickened her pace, driven by urgency. After about sixty meters, a pit less than one meter sixty in height appeared ahead. She checked it, threw in a few things, and seeing no movement, she crawled inside. After squeezing in a few meters, another cavity opened before her, where a person could stand upright.

Its size was about that of a village basketball court, and Jiang Huan felt from the moment she entered that breathing was not as easy here as it had been outside.

Xie Congzhou came in as well. He was too tall, and his shoulders too broad, so after squeezing through he looked somewhat disheveled.

Jiang Huan saw the dirt on his shoulders and the mud stuck in his hair, and for some reason she almost wanted to laugh.

This man possessed mysterious powers, an intimidating appearance and physique, and spoke the most sincere words. No one knew what kind of environment could have shaped someone like him. He was unlike any man she had ever seen before.

Noticing her gaze, Xie Congzhou thought she was asking where the gold was. “It’s all here.”

Only after a moment did Jiang Huan react.

She immediately reached for the wall beside her. Earlier, the moment she entered, she had felt how uneven and pockmarked it was. Right then, she brushed away a slightly raised yellow clump of earth and, using a bit of force, pried it out. A nugget of gold larger than an adult’s palm landed in her hand.

Xie Congzhou also got to work, clearing gold nuggets from other spots.

Jiang Huan stared at his back and quickly exchanged the nugget.

Five hundred points.

She turned to look at the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The corners of her mouth lifted, and her smile kept growing.

“Hahaha, hahahaha, hahahahahaha!”

She had just been worrying that she might have to live off the savings she had stockpiled before the apocalypse, and now heaven had sent her such a surprise.

Could it be that Xie Congzhou was another blessing from the heavens, another cheat code sent just for her?

Jiang Huan laughed as she dug for gold. If that expression had appeared before the apocalypse, Qing Mountain Psychiatric Hospital would have already received a call and driven over to take her away.

But this was not before the apocalypse, and she was not sick. She was just laughing a little madly.

The two of them dug in silence. Every so often, Jiang Huan would toss in a gold nugget to exchange it, then watch her points climb to a thousand, break ten thousand, and effortlessly reach the hundred-thousand tier.

Just as she was wondering whether she might break a million today, Xie Congzhou poured cold water on the idea. “You can’t just keep digging in one place, and the soil you clear out here has to be properly dealt with too. Otherwise, if the place collapses, not only is it hard to say whether the underground river will ever see daylight again, we might not even be able to get out.”

Jiang Huan stopped her dog-like wall-digging at once.

Gold or life. Life came first, without question.

Looking again, she saw that Xie Congzhou alone had dug out thirty or forty nuggets, piled on the ground in a very impressive heap. And the places he had worked on were smooth and level, as if merely pressed flat, entirely different from Jiang Huan’s battle-scarred, wall-shattering “masterpiece.”

Jiang Huan gave an embarrassed laugh, and the two of them worked together to take as many of the nuggets on the ground as they could carry. The few they could not take out were left by the wall to be collected next time.

After all, she had already discovered and claimed the places above, and now that the below-ground section had been found too, it naturally belonged to her as well.

Before going back up, Jiang Huan asked one more time, “The things in that third cave won’t come out, will they?”

Xie Congzhou sensed it for a moment. “No, as long as no one deliberately goes over there.”

After answering, he was tugged again. Turning his face toward her, he raised his brows slightly, as if asking what this time meant.

“Wrap those things up for me. And as for the secret of that entrance, please keep it for me.”

“Fine, as you wish. But about the cooperation we discussed before…”

Jiang Huan smiled. “From now on, you’re my partner. The most trusted kind.”

She had meant to bump shoulders with him, the sort of gesture two good buddies might use, but because she was clutching gold and unwilling to let go, she ended up bumping him with her face instead. The angle was so strange it almost looked as though she were leaning in against him.

The people gathered around the entrance saw the whole thing clearly.

What on earth had happened down there to make Jiang Huan act so meek and clingy?