Falling into the Cretaceous

My temples are throbbing.

Shen Ye felt all the blood rushing to his head, making him dizzy and extremely uncomfortable.

His nostrils were filled with the smell of burnt plastic. He coughed twice and found himself hanging upside down in his seat, the seatbelt tightening around his waist. The nose of the plane was wedged between trees, causing the fuselage to tilt 30 degrees in the air. The cabin lights flickered, exposed wiring hissed and sparked, and sunlight streamed in through the cabin opening.

The cabin was in a mess, with many passengers whose fate was unknown hanging precariously from their seats. Painful wails echoed throughout the cabin.

Shen Ye fumbled to unbuckle his seatbelt and fell onto the aisle. His right hand hit something soft, and when he looked down, he saw half of his bloody arm with a Rolex on his wrist.

vomit!

Shen Ye felt a churning in his stomach and vomited up all the airplane food he had eaten for lunch.

His brain was still buzzing.

The intense dizziness is slowly subsiding, but what follows is waves of pain throughout my body, as if all my bones are falling apart.

He became certain of one thing through the pain: he had survived the plane crash!

"I didn't die... I didn't die! Ahhh... I survived... I really survived! Thank God!"

Shen Ye collapsed to the ground and wept bitterly.

The feeling of surviving the ordeal gave him goosebumps all over his body. He cried out unconsciously, releasing the emotions that had been weighing on him by the mountain of death before the plane crash.

"Save me...please...sob sob..."

Shen Ye, recovering from his excitement, looked in the direction of the sound and saw a woman trapped by a deformed, protruding overhead luggage rack at the point where the cabin had broken open. Terrified, she was trying to pull her foot out. She was sobbing, tears mixed with mascara streaming down her cheeks, forming two black streaks.

"Don't move it. Pulling it forcefully will cause further injury. Find something to pry up the luggage rack."

Shen Ye stood up and shouted to the struggling woman. He shook his head and looked around, trying to find something to pry it open.

"Help me... I don't want to die here... I'm only twenty-three... I just signed with a modeling agency in New York... Waaah..."

The woman was so terrified that she was breathing very rapidly and speaking haltingly, like a patient suffering from oxygen deprivation.

"Miss, you'll be alright. Take a deep breath and calm down. I'll go outside and find someone else to rescue you!"

Shen Ye was about to walk out when he said that.

The woman grabbed Shen Ye, like a drowning person grabbing a rescuer.

"Don't go...please don't go...sob...I'm scared...please don't go."

Her trembling hands gripped Shen Ye's clothes tightly; enveloped in fear, she was completely unaware that this would affect the rescue.

Just as Shen Ye was at a loss for what to do.

A woman in a flight attendant uniform hurriedly squeezed past him from behind, holding a metal rod that she had apparently removed from somewhere.

"Sir, you're awake. Are you injured?"

The flight attendant asked with concern; clearly, she had woken up quite early and had already begun rescue efforts in the surrounding area.

"I'm fine! Give me the pole, let's get this lady out of here first!"

Shen Ye shook his head and took the metal rod, wedged it into the gap between the luggage rack and the seat, and then pressed his whole body against the rod.

"Get up!"

Shen Ye exerted force, and the veins on his forehead bulged.

He was relieved that he hadn't broken any bones, but he had quite a few bruises and his muscles ached when he exerted himself.

"Crunch!"

Finally, the metal emitted a screeching sound as it deformed, and the luggage rack was pried open.

"Pull her up!"

Shen Ye shouted.

The flight attendant quickly grabbed the woman under her armpits and dragged her out. When her leg came out, the bloody calf was truly terrifying. The woman only glanced at it before her screams echoed throughout the wrecked cabin.

"Ah! My calf...it's broken...it's over...I can't be a model anymore...waaaaaah..."

The flight attendant herself was still wet with tears, but she quickly and patiently comforted the female model.

"Don't worry, miss, the rescue will arrive soon, and the doctor will heal your foot then."

White bone fragments were faintly visible at the wound on the woman's calf. Shen Ye had explained the treatment of fractures in the wild countless times in front of the camera, but this was the first time he had actually faced bone fragments. Stomach acid rose to his throat, but he swallowed it back down.

He realized this wasn't a TV show shoot, and he didn't need to force himself...

"Ah K, he's in first class. He said he's going to film the sea of ​​clouds outside the window for vlog footage!"

Shen Ye suddenly turned around, crawled through the overturned seats, and walked towards the nose of the plane. He ignored the model, leaving the flight attendant to drag her out little by little.

The nose of the plane was completely destroyed. Several pine trees as thick as a leg were embedded in the cabin. All the people in front were crushed to death, some were killed by branches or shrapnel, and the aisle was covered with sticky blood.

"Ak!"

Shen Ye spotted him. A-K's lower body was pinned down by the back of the seat in front of him, and his broken arm was hanging down.

"Brother Ye, I can't feel my legs."

When A-K saw Shen Ye, a hint of joy flashed in his eyes, and he said in a weak voice.

Shen Ye reached out to touch Ah K's leg, his hand feeling warm and wet, and then he touched a metal plate on Ah K's leg.

"It's nothing, my leg is just numb!"

As Shen Ye spoke, he pulled his hand out and glanced at it; he felt blood on his palm.

The blood was dark red, indicating it was venous blood, not arterial blood, which was a silver lining in a bad situation.

He has three episodes dedicated to wilderness first aid, each garnering over a million views. The comments section is flooded with praise for his professionalism. However, only he and his team know that he's actually a half-baked theorist.

"Brother Ye, I'm so sleepy, I really want to take a nap."

"Hold on, I'll get you out!"

Shen Ye pushed hard against the seat back that was pressing down on Ah K, but it didn't budge.

He tried to recline A-K's seat back, but the mechanism was broken. Shen Ye pounded on it with his hands, and with a crack, A-K's seat back folded back.

A-K also fell sideways and landed on top of Shen Ye.

"K, you need to lose weight!"

As Shen Ye turned A-K's body over, his expression froze when his gaze fell on A-K's abdomen.

He turned to look at the chair back that had been pressing against Ah K's chest. A tree branch as thick as a leg had pierced through the back, and bits of flesh hung from the bloody broken end of the branch.

Ah K also saw a fist-sized bloody hole in his abdomen. He gasped for breath, and because the hole had been blocked by the wood, the blood was now gushing out all at once.

"K, press your wound, I'll go look for it. There should be a first-aid kit on the wreckage. You'll be fine. Don't forget, I'm a survival expert."

Shen Ye's ten fingers were trembling uncontrollably. He pressed both hands together on Ah K's abdominal wound, and blood oozed out from between his fingers, warm and sticky.

"Brother Ye".

"explain."

"This episode is going to get tons of views..."

"You absolutely have to share this! Didn't you want to buy a Ducati? I'll buy it for you when we get back!"

"Zhang Xue's motorcycle is pretty good too..."

"I'll buy you anything you like!"

Tears streamed down Shen Ye's face. He had never imagined the scene of losing a loved one at his age, and he was at a loss.

"Brother Ye... thank you... thank you for helping me start a business and for taking me out of the mountains... When you go back... remember to tell Ah Zhen that I love her..."

"I'm afraid A-Qiang will hit me. Would it be better if you went back and told her yourself?"

"..."

Ah K closed his eyes, his breathing becoming shallow. Shen Ye dared not let go; he knelt on the sloping floor, his knees digging into broken glass. The screams, cries, and curses around him surged in and receded like a tide. Outside, someone shouted "Fire!", someone shouted "Run!", and someone was calling out to God in English.

"Ak!"

Shen Ye shouted loudly, but Ah K did not respond. He was dead.

Shen Ye grabbed his legs and dragged him out of the cabin.

Shen Ye then discovered that the plane had crashed in a valley. The three pieces of wreckage, like a stranded blue whale, lay overturned in the green forest. The middle section of the wing was broken off, and the four engines were on fire.

That area was a rocky valley with a fairly open view. A large number of people came out of the cabin and stood on the rocks covered with moss and lichen. The corpses that had been dragged out were also lying haphazardly.

Beyond this open area lies a primeval broad-leaved forest.

The warm sunlight outside the cabin shone on Ah K's pale face and wounds.

Shen Ye was completely stunned.

His mind went blank. He had never faced death before, and for the first time, his soul was struck by this silent death.

Ah K's body lay there quietly, unresponsive no matter how they called him, like a prop they usually used for set design.

"Hey——!"

A sharp sound, like the cry of an eagle, came from the sky.

Shen Ye did not look up.

But when people around looked up and stopped to watch, the originally noisy scene became much quieter, as if they had seen something new and interesting.

"Mom! Is that a pterosaur?!"

A blond little boy from Europe or America shouted loudly.

Shen Ye was stunned for a moment.

He recognized the voice; the foreigner had spoken to him in Chinese when he boarded the plane because he was a big fan of Shen Ye.

Shen Ye didn't take the pterosaur nonsense seriously, nor was he in the mood to look at the sky. His mind was blank, a chaotic mess, like a lump of stirred paste.

A black ant crawled onto Ah K's wound and sucked his blood. Although Shen Ye didn't have real survival experience, his knowledge base was still very rich.

He recognized the ant at a glance; it was none of the ants he knew.

It had white stripes on its body and was two or three times larger than an ordinary ant!

Before he could take a closer look, a sound five or six times louder than a tiger's roar came from the forest, which was truly awe-inspiring.

Everyone fell silent instantly.

It was so quiet that the only sound was the crackling of a section of the fuselage burning.

"Oh my god... what was that sound?" a blonde woman asked, covering her mouth in fear.

"Nobody knows... This place feels very strange..."

"There's no cell phone signal here!"

"Mine doesn't work either. My phone has satellite communication capabilities, but that's not working either."

People around were talking about it.

Stimulated by the strange noise, Shen Ye snapped out of his grief and looked around at the surrounding forest once more. Most of the trees were tall coniferous gymnosperms, but unusually tall ferns and shrubs grew at their bases.

This doesn't resemble modern vegetation at all.

The strangest thing is that their plane was flying from Beijing to New York, taking the Arctic Great Circle route, and the places they passed through didn't have any forests like that at all, only ice and snow!

Moreover, it had only been six hours since takeoff, so theoretically it should have been over the Bering Strait.

But where is this?

Shen Ye's mind was buzzing. He was thinking, there shouldn't be such a forest island along the way, right?

At this point, even more ants came to bite Ah K's corpse; they were all quite large.

Besides ants, there were also buzzing flies!

These flies look like horseflies.

It looks quite large. These things are very bloodthirsty; they'll fly over as soon as they smell blood.