Chapter 383 - 333: Mai Mingle - Everything Is Going Smoothly, Really

Chapter 383: Chapter 333: Mai Mingle - Everything Is Going Smoothly, Really

The pale morning fog crept from the horizon as if part of a long-held plot, its wisps seeping into the world and drifting over the sea. Even people in the same boat, once shrouded in the mist, became nothing more than vague, fragmented silhouettes.

"...Is that some kind of floating trash?" Hai Luwei finally whispered.

They had held their breath and waited for a moment, but no more thuds came from beneath the boat. They swept the area around the hull with a flashlight beam and a fishing rod, but nothing floated up from the dark, heavy water.

"I didn’t see any trash," Emily said, also lowering her voice.

"Maybe it floated—"

Hai Luwei had barely started speaking when another THUD came from under the boat. The three of them jumped, freezing instinctively.

It didn’t sound like trash; it felt like a very heavy object.

Several minutes had passed, and it hadn’t floated away... Why was it still right under the boat?

If it was that man, Ivan... if he could grab onto the bottom of the boat, why hadn’t he swum out a little to call for help?

Whatever it was, just waiting around wasn’t an option.

"You two stay put on the boat," Mai Mingle said, standing up and starting to take off her jacket. "I’m going down to take a look."

Hai Luwei sucked in a sharp breath.

He had been leaning over the side of the boat, as if trying to pierce the seawater with his eyes, squinting and then widening them. Now he slumped, his face full of hesitation. "Uh... well, I don’t handle the cold well... so I won’t go in your place. Why don’t you ask Emily."

Emily, who had just been so generously volunteered, didn’t seem to mind. She shot to her feet and was about to start taking off her clothes when Mai Mingle quickly pushed her back down and told a small lie, "It’s fine! I used to love winter swimming when I was younger."

They were all Hunters; they had all been through countless things more painful and agonizing than diving into cold water. Hearing this, Emily nodded and added, "I’ll keep a close eye on you from the boat. Just in case, do you have a weapon?"

Mai Mingle had no weapon.

She was here on a rescue mission. Who would have thought she’d need a weapon to save someone?

She stripped down to a T-shirt and shorts, shivering uncontrollably. After looking around the boat, she finally grabbed a stainless steel fork from last night’s leftover salad bowl and clutched it in her hand, looking like a budget version of the King of the Sea.

Emily’s thin lips pressed together. It seemed a thousand words were churning in her chest, but in the end, only one sentence came out: "...Be careful."

The moment she hit the water, it was like a million ice needles had pierced her organs, her very soul freezing and collapsing into a small, cold, hard stone.

Mai Mingle realized this was a pain you couldn’t even scream about. The instant she entered the water, she could even feel her heart’s fibers bristling, one by one.

Fortunately, once the fear of a heart attack passed, she managed to force her eyes open. Kicking her legs, she turned in a circle. The sky was still not bright enough, and the water was filled with murky, clinging clumps of shadow. Beneath the boat, it was nothing but a heavy, deep black.

’What now? Swim into that blackness?’

But in the next moment, a strong beam of light shone down from the surface. The light pierced the water, rippling with the waves and spreading out. It was as if someone had scraped away the top layer of an oil painting, revealing the layer of color underneath the boat’s belly.

It was a pale white, slender shadow, connected to two dark, branching shapes.

For a few brief seconds, Mai Mingle was convinced it was a creature just born of the boat and the sea—there was even an umbilical cord connecting the boat to the shadow.

She swam closer slowly, and the blurry shadow gradually sharpened into a recognizable silhouette.

It was a lean, bare-chested man in a pair of black pants. He was floating on his back, face-up, his head lolling half-submerged in the water. He drifted and swayed beneath the boat, as if staring up at the people inside through the hull. But thanks to that "umbilical cord," he hadn’t been swept away by the current.

’It has to be Ivan, right? Who else could it be?’

’Is he unconscious? What is that umbilical cord?’

Mai Mingle held her breath and swam closer, moving outside the beam of the flashlight. With some difficulty, she managed to make out in the gloom that it was a belt. By some miraculous coincidence, the buckle had come undone and a long section of it had slipped out, but the end had been caught on his pants. The buckle itself was snagged in the boat’s boarding ladder.

’...When did he get caught on here? How did it even happen?’

’Did the Nest foresee this coincidence? Is that why it sent me to rescue him?’

Mai Mingle pulled Ivan’s belt free. It floated up lazily like a water snake. She had originally wanted to pull the whole belt off the boat, but as soon as one end was loose, it was immediately pushed away by the current. She reached for it a few times but couldn’t grab it.

’Forget it. The man is what’s important right now.’

Mai Mingle grabbed Ivan’s arm. With a slight pull, she felt his shoulder joint slip out with a sickening ease. His body barely moved, but his arm suddenly grew longer, as if it alone wanted to follow her.

Fighting back a shudder, she let go of his arm, wrapped her own around his waist, and slowly began to swim for the surface.

Underwater, she couldn’t feel or smell anything. It was entirely possible she was pulling a corpse to the surface. The only thing she could be sure of was that Ivan wasn’t swollen, decaying, or bloated with gas.

"Is it really him?"

Hai Luwei and Emily scrambled to pull the two of them aboard. Ivan landed on the deck with a THUD, like a dead fish, his head flopping limply to one side.

Emily quickly knelt and pressed her hand to his carotid artery. After a few seconds, she moved it to his chest.

Soaking wet and blasted by the cold wind, Mai Mingle felt ready to pass out. She burrowed under towels and blankets, shivering violently. Her breath hitched a few times before she finally managed to get the words out, "Is... is he... still a-alive?"

"He’s alive. Very weak heartbeat," Emily said. "I wonder if he was already unconscious before he fell in the water. With injuries this severe, it’s a miracle he didn’t drown... He’s one tough bastard."

She frowned as she surveyed Ivan’s injuries. "Who did he piss off? They were vicious."

"V-Vicious... people, I don’t know..." Mai Mingle said.

The bloody hole in the flesh of one of Ivan’s shoulders had been soaked by the seawater until it was white, swollen, and rotten. There wasn’t a trace of red, making it look like the massive, soft, bloated cap of an upside-down jellyfish.

And that was just one of his injuries.

"Our first-aid kit is useless for an injury this serious... And to be honest, I don’t even know the first aid for a drowning victim," Emily said with a frown. "And he probably has hypothermia?"

"Aren’t you supposed to pat their back to get the water out of their lungs?" Hai Luwei’s face scrunched up. "But in his condition, a couple of pats might just finish him off, right?"

"He still has a faint heartbeat, so we’re not at the worst-case scenario yet. But how to treat him is definitely beyond my abilities." Emily reached a hand toward Ivan, hesitated, then pulled it back and said with determination, "We need to get him to a doctor. Immediately."

The problem was, given his condition, Ivan absolutely could not be taken to a regular hospital.

Not a single one of the injuries covering his body could be explained away as an accident; one look was all it took to see he had been violently tortured. The moment the three of them brought him into a hospital, they’d be detained and questioned by the police.

"Hey, that’s right," Mai Mingle remembered, looking up at Hai Luwei. "That clinic you took me to last time, what was the doctor’s name again—"

"Dr. Nate," Hai Luwei nodded. "It’s been less than two weeks since we were there, so his clinic should still be open. Let’s get to shore first, put him in my car, and I’ll call to see if he’s in."

All in all, everything seemed to be going remarkably smoothly: the man they had searched for all night without success had, by a twist of fate, run right into their boat. The trip back to shore and the process of getting Ivan into the car also went off without a hitch.

Dr. Nate lived in the apartment above his clinic. Although he had been woken up at the crack of dawn, he grumbled his assent over the phone for the sake of the money. Before hanging up, he added a complaint: "In a little while, I won’t have to be bothered by you Hunters endlessly anymore."

"You’re really moving to the Bahamas?" Hai Luwei asked.

"Yep," Dr. Nate’s voice brightened a little. "Tickets are all booked. Leaving on the 20th. I’m planning to spend Christmas there."