"Sun Hang, do you think this guy is hiding his strength, or did he suddenly have an epiphany and opened up his governor and conception vessels like I said?" Ya Qiaoxi looked at Sun Hang.
"I don’t know." Sun Hang shrugged, giving a quality answer.
"Speaking of which, I still find it hard to believe—are you really that Sun Hang?" Charles looked at Sun Hang. "Why won’t you tell that Chen Family young master your true identity? If he knew you’re the Sun Hang who took down Chimera 17, he might just worship you like an ancestor."
"Too much trouble." Sun Hang gazed at the chaotic camp of the three major family hunter teams in the distance. With the passage of time, the initially disciplined camp had begun to dissolve into chaos. Many hunters were seated in small groups playing cards, some had even removed the tires from their off-road vehicles and were using them as makeshift barbells, while others engaged in certain unspeakable trades... Sun Hang even saw two big guys, after a short chat, link arms and climb into a vehicle, which then started rocking back and forth.
Damn, could these two be from Celestial City?
"You can’t seriously be expecting to find someone from this crowd to accompany you on that... oh, Egypt expedition, right?" Charles lifted a corner of his gas mask, took a sip from his canteen. "I’ve been stuck in this hellhole of Yumen for two and a half years; I know exactly what they’re capable of... For top-tier hunters like you, these people must not be worth your time. As for the real experts, they won’t come to join such a hunting team at all."
"I also said that those capable folks are not short on money in the first place," Ya Qiaoxi chimed in. "Sun Hang keeps insisting that if the bounty is high enough, quantity will lead to quality... But it seems now that a sky-high bounty only attracted a bunch of opportunists out to share the spoils. The more opportunists there are, the less the real experts want to get involved. This is what they call Gresham’s law."
"Is that how you use Gresham’s law?" Sun Hang shot Ya Qiaoxi a glance. "Besides, it’s not like I gained nothing; that guy is still lying in the Eternal Freeze Coffin."
"Ha... The chance of running into someone like Jin Hongyi is about as likely as winning a jackpot lottery of five million," Charles screwed the cap back on his canteen, stashed it in his bag. "In novels, that’s the true protagonist treatment... I’ve seen too many who thought they had a protagonist’s halo, but in the end, these guys all..."
At this point, Charles abruptly stopped. Sun Hang turned to look at him with a slight surprise, only to find a tinge of melancholy rising off Charles.
"What happened to them in the end?" Candle Dragon asked.
"In the end, they got crushed like ants." Charles heaved a deep sigh, and the sadness gradually dissipated. "Just like those who died in the Canyon of Giants, no funerals, no graves, no compensation, at most they’ll just be marked as ’missing’ in the Hunter Management Bureau’s files. A few years down the line, they’ll be completely forgotten, as if they never existed."
"Didn’t expect you to be a bit of a poet, talking so sadly," Ya Qiaoxi teased. "What’s up, one of those trampled fellows a friend of yours?"
"A friend, I guess," Charles chuckled dryly. "He saved my life, but sadly I couldn’t save his. I can’t find his remains, nor do I know if he still has family in this world... The only thing I can do is remember him, keep him alive in my memory for as long as I can. Once I’m dead, probably no one will know someone like him ever existed... What’s that saying again? People die three times?"
"The first death is when you stop breathing, marking biological death. The second is at your funeral, signifying sociological death. And the third is when the last person who remembers you dies or forgets, that’s when you’re truly dead." Candle Dragon said slowly.
"It seems death is quite a messy business," Charles whistled, "messy and not neat at all."
...
...
Hexi Corridor, Unmanned Area.
Cheng Ming looked at the nearly boundless wasteland outside the car window, his mood as calm as a still lake—even though the convoy had just escaped from a ’death sandstorm,’ losing nearly a fifth of its members.
Cheng Ming personally saw two slower vehicles being swallowed by the vortex-like sandstorm, their occupants unable to even let out a scream before being consumed by the storm. He watched as the communication channel numbers of these vehicles flashed a few times before switching to offline status.
A grain-sized speck of sand struck less than thirty centimeters away from Cheng Ming, shattering the vehicle’s right-side rearview mirror, leaving the window glass covered with fine scratches and cracks. Thanks to the film sandwiched in the glass, the window didn’t shatter completely.
"First time in the unmanned area of the Hexi Corridor, hard to get used to?" The woman next to Cheng Ming asked.
This was the masked woman standing behind Bai Lingqiu in the interview that day. She claimed to be Bai Lingqiu’s bodyguard, code name "Miss Shadow," a free hunter employed by the Bai Family.