Artifact Report

Chapter 340 Mai Minghe - Everything went smoothly, really
As if it had been planned for a long time, the bluish-white morning mist seeped into the world from the horizon, floating on the sea; even those on the same boat, shrouded in the mist, could only be seen as vague and incomplete outlines.

"...Is it some kind of drifting trash?" the sea reed finally whispered.

The group held their breath and waited for a while, but there was no more impact sound from the bottom of the boat; they swept the outside of the boat with flashlights and fishing rods, but nothing floated up in the dark seawater.

“I didn’t see any trash,” Amy said in a low voice.

"May drift—"

Hai Luwei had barely begun speaking when there was another loud thud from the bottom of the boat—all three of them jolted and instinctively froze.

It doesn't look like trash; it feels like a very heavy object.

It's been several minutes and it hasn't drifted away... Why is it still under the boat?
If it was that guy named Evan... if he could hold onto the bottom of the boat, why didn't he swim out a little to call for help?

Whatever it is, just sitting there waiting is not a good idea.

“You all stay on the boat,” Mak Ming-ho stood up and began to take off his coat. “I’ll go down and check on things.”

The sea reeds gasped.

He had been leaning on the gunwale, seemingly trying to pierce the seawater with his eyes, sometimes squinting and sometimes widening them; now he relaxed, his drooping face filled with hesitation: "Um... well, I'm more sensitive to the cold... so I won't do it for you. Or, you could ask Amy."

Amy, who had been generously given a treat, didn't mind. She stood up abruptly and was about to start taking off her clothes when Mai Minghe quickly pressed her back down and lied, "It's alright! I used to love winter swimming when I was young."

All of them were hunters, and they had all experienced things far more painful and agonizing than being submerged in cold water. Upon hearing this, Amy nodded and added, "I'll keep an eye on you from the boat. Just in case, do you have a weapon?"

Mai Minghe had no weapons.

She came to rescue people; who would have thought that rescuing people would require weapons?
She stripped down to just a T-shirt and shorts, shivering from the cold, and circled the boat before finally pulling a stainless steel fork from the leftover salad bowl from the previous night, clutching it in her hand like a woman who had downgraded her spending habits.

Amy's thin lips pressed together, as if many words were churning in her chest, but in the end, they only came to say: "...Be careful."

Upon entering the water, it felt as if thousands of ice needles were piercing my internal organs, and even my soul rapidly froze and collapsed, turning into a small piece of cold, hard stone.

Mai Minghe realized that this kind of pain could not be cried out; the moment she entered the water, she could even feel the hairs on her heart bulging.

Fortunately, once the fear of having a heart attack subsided, she was able to open her eyes, swing her legs, and spin around in the seawater—the sky was still not bright enough, the sea was filled with ambiguous, sticky clumps of darkness, and the area below the boat was even more pitch black.

What to do? Swim into that darkness?

But the next moment, a strong light shone down from the sea; the light was immersed in the water, rippling and spreading out—as if someone had scraped off the top layer of oil paint, revealing another layer of paint underneath the hull.

It was a grayish-white, slender shadow, pieced together by two dark, forked branches.

For a brief few seconds, Mak Ming-ho was certain that it was a creature that had just been born from the ship and the sea—there was even an umbilical cord connecting the ship and the shadow.

She swam slowly towards it, and the blurry shadow gradually transformed into a recognizable outline.

It was a lean man, shirtless, wearing only black trousers. He floated in the water, back down, face up, head half-hidden and half-leaning, bobbing gently beneath the boat, as if watching the people inside through the hull—but because of the umbilical cord, he was never swept away by the sea.

It must be Ivan, right? There can't be anyone else but him.

Has he fallen into a coma? What is that umbilical cord?
Mai Minghe held his breath and swam closer, then swam out of the flashlight's beam. With great difficulty, he could vaguely make out in the dim light that it was a belt—by some miraculous coincidence, the belt buckle was open, and it had slipped out quite a bit, but was caught on his pants at the end; and the belt buckle was caught in the footboard used for getting on and off the boat.

When did it get stuck there? How did it get stuck there? Did the nest foresee this coincidence and send her to rescue people?

Mai Minghe pulled off Ivan's belt, which floated up like a water snake. She had originally intended to pull the belt off the boat completely, but as soon as one end of the belt came loose, it was immediately pushed away by the waves. She reached out and grabbed it several times, but couldn't catch it.

Never mind, the most important thing now is people.

Mai Minghe grabbed Evan's arm and with a little force, he immediately felt his shoulder joint slip outwards—his body barely moved, but his arm suddenly grew longer, as if only his arm was following Mai Minghe.

She endured a chill run down her spine, released his arm, wrapped her arms around his waist, and slowly swam away.

Underwater, she could feel and smell nothing; most likely, she was pulling a corpse up to the surface—the only certainty was that Evan was at least not swollen, rotting, or inflated.

"Really him?"

Hailuwei and Aimeili worked together to finally pull the two onto the boat. Evan, like a dead fish, fell to the floor with a thud, his head slumped to one side.

Amy quickly squatted down and placed her hand on his carotid artery; after a few seconds, she placed it on his chest.

Soaked to the bone and chilled by the cold wind, Mai Minghe nearly fainted. Trembling, he burrowed between a towel and a blanket, his voice trembling as he finally managed to utter, "Is he... still alive?"

"She's still alive, but her heartbeat is very weak," Amy said. "I don't know if she was already unconscious before falling into the water. She's so badly injured, yet she didn't drown... She's really tough."

She frowned, looking at Ivan's injuries. "Who did he offend? He's really ruthless."

“Evil, villain, I don’t know…” Mai Minghe said.

The flesh and blood hole on Evan's shoulder had been soaked in seawater and turned white and swollen, with no trace of blood left, resembling a huge, soft, bloated, upside-down jellyfish hat.

This is just one of the injuries he has sustained.

“Our first aid kit isn’t enough to handle such a serious injury… To be honest, I don’t know if we should be performing first aid on a drowning person,” Amy said, frowning. “Could there be hypothermia as well?”

"It seems like we need to pat his back to get the water out of his lungs?" Hai Luwei's face scrunched up. "But in this state, if we pat him twice, he'll either die or die."

“He still has a faint heartbeat, so his condition isn’t at its worst yet. But how to handle it is definitely beyond my capabilities.” Amy reached out a hand to Evan, hesitated for a moment, then withdrew it, as if she had made up her mind: “We should get him to the hospital immediately.”

The problem is that Evan's condition is definitely not suitable for being sent to a proper hospital.

There wasn't a single injury on his body that could be explained as an accident; it was obvious at a glance that he had been violently tortured. The three men had just taken him to the hospital when the police were about to arrest and take him away.

“Oh, right,” Mai Minghe remembered, looking up at the sea reeds. “What was the doctor’s name again at that clinic you took me to last time—”

“Dr. Nate,” Hailuwei nodded, “it’s only been less than two weeks since I last visited, his clinic should still be open. Let’s get ashore first, put him in my car, and I’ll call to see if he’s there.”

Overall, everything seemed to go quite smoothly: the person they had been searching for all night ended up bumping into the boat by sheer coincidence; and no one stopped them on their way back to shore and into the car.

Dr. Nate lived upstairs from the clinic. Although he was woken up early in the morning, he grumbled and agreed to the job over the phone for the sake of the money. Before hanging up, he complained, "After a while, I won't have to be bothered by you hunters anymore."

"Are you really moving to the Bahamas?" Sea Reed asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Nate’s voice lightened a bit, “the plane tickets are all booked, we’re leaving on the 20th, and we’re going there to spend Christmas.”

(End of this chapter)