In a cold cave, Su Jishi and Xiao Xia hugged their legs and leaned together, and in front of them was a burning bonfire.
Xiao Xia was staring blankly at the campfire. Although she and Su Jishi went to record ‘Wilderness Winners’ before, and she discovered that Su Jin was an all-rounder, there were so many people following them at that time, unlike now, when only the two of them were in the entire mountain forest.
Su Jishi displayed excellent wilderness survival skills. She took advantage of the faint moonlight. She not only found a cave in the rolling hills, but without the help of any modern tools, she also created a fire-igniting wooden bow out of rattan and twigs!
It was a pity that there were only a limited number of branches that could be used to fuel the fire, so the small cluster of fire was only enough to warm their hands and feet.
Su Jishi patted her head and softly reassured her, “It’s okay, when the day dawns, we will find the way out.”
Unfortunately, they sat withered for a long time, and instead of welcoming the sunrise, they waited for the snowfall.
Morning light was blocked behind the clouds, while drifting snowflakes fell from high altitude, paving the road in front of the cave.
Su Jishi’s heart tightened. Between two choices of ‘going out in the snow to find the exit,’ and ‘starving and trapped in the cave’, she finally gathered the courage to step out of the cave.
The world was white as far as the eye could see.
Su Jishi stepped out of the cave where they were hiding. She looked back at the cave behind them, and suddenly, a look of surprise appeared on her face.
Looking around, she discovered that the mountain forest grew extraordinarily ‘strange’: the surface was rugged; there were ravines; weeds filled the gaps, and the green hills that stood in the distance also appeared like God’s work after chopping blindly with a machete.
If she were to use two words to describe it, she could only say ‘strange rocks and strange peaks.
“I know where we are!” Su Jishi reached out and touched the strange rocks beneath her feet. The uneasiness in her heart also subsided by three points.
The strange rocks and mountains in front of them were extremely typical ‘karst’ landforms, a unique karst landform formed by the dissolution of soluble rocks by water (including rain and groundwater) over thousands of years.
In the entire capital, only the southwest corner of the Taihang Mountains had such a large area of karst landforms!!
As far as she knew, the natural resources in this area were very well developed and rich in supporting tourism resources. They could definitely find people as long as they keep walking! Moreover, karst landscapes never lacked water. As long as they could find a water source, they would definitely encounter villages.
Su Jishi immediately shared her deduction to Xiao Xia. Xiao Xia couldn’t distinguish between the southeast and northwest, and also couldn’t understand what was karst and what wasn’t. She only understood that there were people around the area! And there would be a lot of them!!!
They wouldn’t freeze to death in the mountains!!
With the hope of survival, a wave of heat immediately rushed down their hearts and into all their limbs.
The two each held a branch, which they could use as walking sticks, and also as pathfinder sticks.
Fortunately, there were no life-threatening beasts in the mountains in the dead of winter, and the snakes had gone into hibernation early. The only thing they needed to fight was the freezing cold and hunger.
Su Jishi had encountered things like getting lost in the wild several times in her extensive field exploration experience. In a no man’s land, even with a map and a compass, it did not mean that a task could be successfully completed. It was common to get lost.
You must not panic when lost. As long as you have sufficient water and food, you could definitely survive.
If you lacked water, you could drink ice and eat snow; if you were without food, you had to follow the wildlife to find their food reserves.
Xiao Xia thought Su Jishi would take her to dig wild potatoes and sweet potatoes, so she was extremely dumbfounded when Su Jishi suddenly dumped her down jacket after looking around for a while and with a speed that defied gravity, she scuffed a few steps and climbed a tall tree!
Xiao Xia couldn’t identify what kind of tree it was. It just looked bare with a few leaves on the branches.
Xiao Xia tilted her head and looked up at Su Jishi’s butt: “…Sister Su, what are you doing?”
Su Jishi replied, “I’m climbing high to find the road, and find something to eat along the way.”
Wild potatoes and sweet potatoes were definitely the most satisfying. If they really couldn’t find them, they could just dig rabbit nests and snake holes. But with the snow everywhere, they couldn’t find food on the ground, so she could only try to ‘search up’.
Soon, she found a tree hole, a little smaller than her head, in the tall tree trunk.
Two big fat squirrels were nesting in the cave, looking at Su Jishi in surprise and wariness.
Su Jishi inwardly mumbled a couple of apologies, then reached out her hand and smashed the enemy’s lair!
“Squeak-squeak-squeak!”
The squirrels were so startled that they scurried out of the hole with a whoosh. However, they didn’t dare to run far and could only land pathetically on other branches, watching this human bandit snatching their winter supplies.
This was a very deep squirrel nest. Su Jishi poked her hand in until part of her armpit was buried into the hole, and only then did she touch food at the bottom.
Squirrels habitually stockpiled food before winter arrived, and they didn’t stock up on ‘how much they could eat’, but on ‘how big the hole was’. The pine nuts were as clean as a pin, and wildflowers were stored somewhere, hidden in the hole together. Su Jishi grabbed five handfuls until she filled both her pockets, but the grain stored in the tree hole was still bottomless.
Su Jishi took them for what they were worth. Although the pine nuts were tiny, they were high in calories and did not require much to provide them with enough energy. Most importantly, squirrels were living things no matter how small they were. If she were to take all their stash away, they would starve to death.
Su Jishi returned with a full load. Xiao Xia was shocked by her ability to find food, and it wasn’t until she was stuffed with a handful of pine nuts did she snap back to her senses.
“Sister Su-Su-Su-Su…Why are you so powerful, ah?!” She said from the bottom of her heart, “Even a man wouldn’t be able to do better than you! Is there anything in this world that you can’t do?”
Su Jishi thought for a moment: “…Peeing standing up?”
Xiao Xia:”…”
While cracking pine nuts, they struggled forward with one foot deep and one foot shallow in the mountain forest.
Obviously, they were in a sorry and dangerous survival field, but with the pine nut shells the two people dropped along the way, it inexplicably added a touch of comedic effect to it.
There was no sun in the sky, and they had no way to judge the direction. They could only find a reference point, following the ridge down the mountain. They ate snow when they were thirsty, and ate pine nuts when hungry. They didn’t know how long they walked, but they did not find the village they had expected.
Su Jishi was in tiptop condition, but Xiao Xia was weak. She insisted on moving forward in the snow for a period, but her legs gradually felt like a lead, and no matter how she tried to move, she couldn’t walk.
The two found a leeward place to rest for a while. Xiao Xia’s excitement was dampened, and the fear she suppressed once again bubbled up.
“Sister Su…we won’t die here, right?” Xiao Xia said shakily, “I-I am still young. The CP I’m fanning has not married yet. The TV series I’m binge-watching is still unfinished, and the fanfiction book that I bought hasn’t been shipped. I can not die, ah!!!”
If there was emoji at this time, Xiao Xia definitely would have sent a series of crying emojis.
Su Jishi reassured her, “Everything will be fine. If you die, I’ll burn the fanfiction book for you.”
“…” Xiao Xia cried even louder.
Su Jishi discovered that her joke was too out of place. Crying would make Xiao Xia consume too much energy, so Su Jishi quickly covered her mouth: “Do not cry. There’ll be an avalanche in a moment.”
Xiao Xia peeled her hand away and lay in a big shape into the snow, crying, “Then let me freeze here! This way, in a few decades or so, there will be a billionaire, a playboy, a philanthropist, or scientific genius who’ll dig me out and thaw me out. They’ll use super alloy to make me a shield for a uniform!”
Su Jishi: “…I think I can guess exactly what CP fanfiction book you have bought.”
Just as the two were talking, a blur of movements suddenly erupted beyond a valley.
Xiao Xia was startled and immediately jumped up from the snowdrift. The top of her head was full of snowflakes, completely unlike the person who had just given up on herself and said she wanted to be frozen in place.
She scurried to Su Jishi’s side, shivering and clutching her armpit, and asked in a whisper, “This..that won’t be a wolf, right?”
“Yeah.” The possibility of a wolf in the mountainous area of Beijing was too low. Su Jishi replied in a low voice, “But it may be a wild husky.”
“…Are there wild huskies?”
Because of the presence of strange rocks everywhere that blocked the vision, Su Jishi could only rely on the sound to judge. The place where the noise came from was just a few hundred meters away from them.
Gradually, the voices grew closer and clearer ——
——”Squad Leader, I really heard someone crying in this direction!”
—— “You heard wrong. In this deep forest, who else would come here to suffer besides us?”
Su Jishi and Xiao Xia looked at each other, and both saw intense joy from each other’s eyes!
People, there were people!! They really weren’t hallucinating!!!
They immediately ran out of the place where they were hiding from the snow and stumbled towards the source of the sounds.
They turned around one boulder after another, then braked sharply and stopped in front of a steep cliff.
The cliff was nearly fifty meters drop, and the protruding rock wall became a natural climbing point. And now, there were five or six people, carrying large backpacks, wearing straw hats, covered in dust, swooping on the rock wall. They were wearing thick and windproof jackets. A lot of snowflakes had piled up on their straw hats, and their dark complexion almost merged with the rock surface.
It was just that they were each with a hammer in their hands, clanking against the jagged rock wall.
Xiao Xia stared blankly at this group of ‘mountain workers’, and was at a loss on how to greet them.
The group of people looked rather young, and they looked like they were in their early twenties. One of them used a hammer to carve a stone, put it to his mouth and licked it. After a couple of ‘ptooey-ptooey’, he then gave it to the man next to him.
“Eh, Squad Leader, can you taste this? I can’t distinguish its lithology.”
The man who was called the Squad Leader pushed the stone away in disgust: “Get lost, can you disgust people less? You, dog, licked it, and now you want me to try it?”
Xiao Xia: “…” She subconsciously took a step back, looked at Su Jishi, and timidly said, “Are they also lost? They’re all hungry to the point of eating rocks…”
Unexpectedly, Su Jishi’s face cleared up.
“No.” She smiled, the corners of her eyes and the tips of her eyebrows dancing together. Xiao Xia swore that this was the most genuine smile she had seen on Sister Su’s face in the past few months.
Su Jishi said leisurely, “We’ve met a geological exploration team.”
Peek-Aboo 
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