Chapter Eighty: Island of Terror

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Chapter Eighty: Terror Island

At the sound of the cry, Chen Xiao immediately shoved past the people in front of him and sprinted into the office. The moment he crossed the threshold, he was stunned by the scene before him.

His first reaction was to turn at once, brace one hand against the wall, and retch violently.

One of the room’s windows stood wide open, the evening breeze blowing in ceaselessly and sending the curtains fluttering. Someone had apparently forgotten to shut it.

But the room had already become a nightmare.

Blood. Blood everywhere.

Bright red splashes seemed to have been flung into every corner of the office, on the walls, the window, the curtains, the desk, the chairs, the floor...

At last Chen Xiao saw the manager, the resort manager who had run back to find the map. He had become a corpse.

Or rather, an incomplete corpse.

He lay miserably on the windowsill, his torso bent at an impossible angle. There was no question at all; Chen Xiao immediately judged that his spine had been broken, because apart from gymnasts, dancers, or acrobats, a normal person’s body could not bend backward beyond ninety degrees.

Most horrifying of all, his body was not even remotely intact.

His abdominal cavity had been torn open by something sharp. Fresh organs, liver, spleen, and intestines had been dragged out completely, as if something had been gnawing on them. They had turned into a nauseating heap of mangled flesh.

One of his arms had been torn off at the elbow, yet Chen Xiao could not find the severed limb anywhere in the room.

Even worse was his face. The flesh on both cheeks had been pecked away, leaving a mass of blood and pulp. And his eyes—both eyeballs were gone, leaving behind two huge, bloodstained hollows.

His thighs and chest and abdomen had also lost large sections of muscle tissue, as though they had been devoured by some beast, exposing pale, stark white bone...

Chen Xiao had never seen anything like this.

The only comparable sight he had ever glimpsed had been on television, on a wildlife program, though that scene had been the body of an antelope torn apart and swallowed by a pride of lions.

His first instinct was to rush up and strike the first female employee who had run in on the manager’s back of the neck, knocking her out. Only then did her shrill screams finally stop. Chen Xiao quickly dragged her out, then stood guard at the doorway, blocking the people behind who were trying to squeeze in after hearing the commotion.

He first used his body to block Cabbage’s line of sight, then pulled Ya Ya into his arms and covered the child’s eyes with one hand.

“Get out! All of you get out! No one is to come into this room! Move!”

Chen Xiao did his best to make his voice sound stern. Although he was frightened himself, and had never in his life seen such a bloody scene, his legs were already growing weak; even so, he clenched his teeth and forced himself to hold on, trying to pass his composure on to the others.

“Everyone out! Out!”

Bang.

He kicked the door shut, finally sealing that bloody sight behind it.

Only Xu Ershao remained. After hearing the scream, he had rushed in behind Chen Xiao and seen the scene inside. By then he was already doubled over to one side, clutching the wall and vomiting uncontrollably.

Everything he had eaten that evening—barbecue, champagne, and the rest of the food still in his stomach—came gushing out. But when he looked at the scraps of roasted meat in the bile and thought of the mangled corpse in the office, he only retched harder.

Then Chen Xiao noticed Xiao Qing’s expression.

Her gaze was dim with weakness, and her face had gone white as paper. Clearly, she too had seen the blood-soaked scene inside.

“Quiet. Everyone quiet!”

Facing the panic of the crowd, Chen Xiao first handed the unconscious female server to the others, then gently steadied Ya Ya by the shoulders.

At that moment, everyone was standing in the hall of the luxury villa.

Thirteen people remained in all: Chen Xiao himself, Xu Ershao, Ya Ya, Xiao Qing, Cabbage, and eight of the resort staff. The original eleven staff members, minus the two missing ones and the dead manager.

“We have a problem,” Chen Xiao said without concealment. “Right now I can tell you that communications on the island have been cut off. What we need now is calm. Everyone needs to calm down. There may be some enormous, aggressive beast on this island that we have not discovered yet. I don’t know what it is. Maybe some large bird of prey, or perhaps something like a wild lion, tiger, or wolf...”

“That’s impossible,” someone cried out at once. It was one of the staff members on the island. “The island is only this big. When it was developed, every inch of land was surveyed. There can’t possibly be any large beast here.”

The others also looked doubtful.

“Reality does not care whether you believe it or not,” Chen Xiao said through gritted teeth. “Your manager is dead. His body is in there. If any of you have the guts, go look for yourselves before you question me again! And we still have five people missing right now! Three of my friends, and two of your staff are unaccounted for. We don’t know if they are dead or alive!”

Just then, Chen Xiao paused in midsentence. Before he could continue, a sound drifted in from outside that made everyone’s skin crawl.

A long, drawn-out howl.

The shrill cry sounded like some wild beast, vaguely wolf-like, yet sharper and more piercing than a wolf’s howl. When the first cry came, it still sounded far away, and from the direction it seemed to be coming from, it appeared to be somewhere near the top of a mountain a little distance off.

But after that first howl, one after another of the same eerie cries rose quickly from all around the villa district. Some were long, some short, some shrill, some savage...

Howls sounded all around them, near and far, light and heavy, distant and close.

When that first cry rang out, everyone froze. But once the howls continued from every direction, the whole place erupted in chaos. Some of the women immediately burst into frightened tears, while others cried out in alarm.

“Quiet! Quiet!”

Chen Xiao ran first to the door and slammed shut the entrance leading from the villa hall to the outside world.

Then he swiftly switched on every light in the hall.

With all the lights blazing, the room was bright as day. Beneath that illumination, and with the comfort of light, human nature still leaned toward brightness, and everyone’s nerves eased just a little.

“Everyone, calm down!” Chen Xiao kicked over a male employee who was screaming hysterically, then seized him by the collar. “Shut the hell up! You’re a man! Right now the women are...”

Darkness. Night. The unknown terror of the unseen. These were all things that could gnaw at a person’s mind.

Dragged and shaken by Chen Xiao with all his strength, the man finally calmed down a little.

Chen Xiao looked around and shouted fiercely, “Does anyone object?”

Naturally, there were objections. Chen Xiao was only an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old youngster at first glance, and many of the employees were older than him. How could they let some raw kid give the orders?

Chen Xiao said nothing. He walked straight to the coffee table in the hall, raised his fist, and smashed it down.

The thick solid-wood table split open with a huge hole.

Although his strength ability had weakened, Chen Xiao could still manage a blow like that.

“Does anyone still object?” he asked, forcing his expression to look as ferocious as possible.

Seeing the hole punched through the coffee table, anyone who had wanted to object immediately shut their mouths.

“Everyone listen to my orders!” Chen Xiao pointed at one of the staff in front of him. “You. I need you to answer a few questions.”

Though the man was visibly nervous, he still gave satisfactory answers to Chen Xiao’s questions.

First, there were indeed no weapons on this island. After all, it was a resort, not a military base. There were electric batons used by the security staff, but that was all.

Second, communications on the island had been cut, but thankfully the electricity was still intact. In the villa’s basement there was a properly designed generator set and backup batteries, enough to guarantee normal power supply throughout the villa. At the very least, lighting, television, and air conditioning could still be provided. Chen Xiao confirmed again and again that the generators were installed in the basement, in a sealed underground space, and should not have been destroyed.

Third, with communications lost, the only way to contact the outside world would be by sending someone out by boat. But given the current situation, Chen Xiao did not dare risk sending everyone away on the little yacht. Once they left the shore and encountered danger on the lake, the situation would become uncontrollable.

According to the staff, every day local workers from outside would deliver fresh food by boat. The time was around noon each day. In other words, someone would arrive by boat and come ashore in about ten hours.

The most important issue was the map.

Later, forcing himself through fear and nausea, Chen Xiao returned to that office, which now looked like a slaughterhouse, and at last found a map in one of the drawers.

It was a survey map of the island and the buildings on it.

No matter what, Chen Xiao had not given up hope of rescuing the missing companions. Whether it was Lu Xiaoxiao, Jin Buhuan, Teacher Monica, or the two missing employees...

After a rapid analysis, Chen Xiao made a decision: for the time being, he would reject everyone’s idea of taking a boat and fleeing overnight.

The yacht was too small, and it was open-topped. There was no sealed cabin, and anyone aboard would have to sit out on the deck. Since it was possible that winged predators were involved, that would be far too dangerous.

Out on the vast lake, if they were attacked on the water...

The only road left was to hold out.

But this villa was too fragile to be defended for long.

For no other reason than that these villas had originally been built for leisure and recuperation, each room had huge floor-to-ceiling windows. And because the scenery was lovely here, with no noise pollution around it, none of the windows used special double-layer insulation glass. They were ordinary panes.

What was most infuriating was that even the bathrooms had windows facing outside. The design philosophy had been: full light, fully open, a luxurious room with an unobstructed lake view...

Windows like these would not stop even a large beast; a normal person could smash one open with enough force.

“Is there any sealed room with better security?” Chen Xiao frowned.

“Then only the basement,” a staff member replied.

“That won’t do.” Chen Xiao immediately rejected the idea. The basement was fully enclosed, yes, but it was also a dead end. If danger really came, there would be nowhere to run.

“Then... there’s the tool room used by the staff,” one employee suddenly remembered. “It’s right beside the villa. You go out through the left corridor from the hall. The tool room has windows too, but they’re not very big, and there are thick iron bars on them. It stores the tools needed here—vacuum cleaners, cleaning supplies, and gardening tools for trimming the plants and so on. From that window, you can also see the pier directly.”

“From now on, no one is to split up. No one is allowed to act alone,” Chen Xiao said with a sigh. “Everyone, come with me to the tool storage room. The windows and doors here are all glass. Too unsafe.”

As he spoke, he walked first to the coffee table he had smashed through and tore off the two legs, each as thick as a forearm. He waved them in his hands a couple of times; the weight was just about manageable, so he tossed them to two male staff members.

“We need something we can use to defend ourselves.”

“There are two electric batons in the security room,” one guard said hesitantly. “But... the security room is outside... about fifty meters to the right of the courtyard.”

Outside...

Hearing the cries rising faintly from beyond, who would dare leave the house and run out there now?

By the way, do we still have any monthly votes?