The pterosaur's ambush was like a sudden, waking nightmare—it struck fast and vanished just as quickly.
But the trauma it left behind was indelible. Donald's agonizing screams still seemed to echo through the valley, and the fresh pool of blood he left behind was already drawing countless greedy ants.
One dead, one fled.
In the blink of an eye, the six-person expedition team had been reduced to four. Aside from Alice, whose calmness remained terrifyingly absolute, the three grown men looked as miserable as if they had just attended a funeral.
The atmosphere was suffocatingly oppressive. Everyone fell completely silent, looking as if they were carrying a thousand-pound weight on their shoulders.
However, at this very moment, Alice couldn't afford to care about the fragile emotional states of these adults.
The sun was already slanting westward. If they couldn't find the plane wreckage before dark, the entire group would highly likely become dinner for nocturnal predators.
"Stay close to me. Do not fall behind."
Alice issued a low warning. They weren't far from the mist-shrouded valley now, and she needed to focus all her attention on pathfinding and avoiding danger.
The terrain in this area had become even more complex, the vegetation increasingly wild and primal. Every step risked a twisted ankle, and the grim reaper could be hiding behind any bush.
They trekked for another half hour, forcing their way through a dense patch of thorny vines, before their field of vision suddenly opened up.
But it was a dead end.
The group found themselves standing at the edge of a sheer cliff.
Before them lay a bottomless abyss. A freezing mountain wind howled violently upward from the depths, whipping their clothes and making it feel as if the wind itself was trying to drag them down into the endless darkness.
"Alice... did we get lost?"
Hughes nervously poked his head out to glance at the roiling clouds of mist below. He immediately yanked his neck back, his face deathly pale as he asked the question.
"There's... there's no path here."
Alice didn't answer verbally. She merely raised a finger and pointed silently to the right side of the cliff face. "Who says there's no path? Isn't it right there?"
Banner, Strange, and Hughes followed her gaze.
All three men simultaneously inhaled sharply.
"You call that a path? Are you absolutely sure that's meant for humans to walk on?" Strange's voice completely cracked. His hands, which had never once trembled while holding a scalpel, were now gripping his own collar in a white-knuckled death grip.
The "path" Alice was pointing at was a natural ledge carved out by millions of years of wind erosion along the practically vertical, 90-degree cliff face.
The ledge snaked and twisted, looking exactly like an ugly scar slashed across the precipice.
At its widest point, it couldn't have been more than 50 centimeters across—barely wide enough for a person to stand sideways. At its narrowest, it could only accommodate half a foot. The surface was littered with loose gravel and slick with moss. A single slip meant a shattered body at the bottom of the abyss.
Even worse, this path had absolutely no handrails or safety measures whatsoever.
To their left was a freezing, solid rock wall. To their right was a sheer drop into an unfathomable void.
"You've walked this path before?" Strange stared at Alice in pure disbelief. "What were you thinking? Are you insane?"
"Of course I've walked it."
Alice nodded calmly.
She wasn't about to tell them that half a month ago, shortly after arriving on the island, she had been too careless and was targeted by a starving cougar. To escape being hunted, she had been forced into this exact dead end.
At the time, she only had two choices: be torn apart by the cougar, or jump.
Her sheer survival instinct allowed her to discover the ledge. Biting the bullet, she flattened herself against the rock wall like a gecko and inched along that literal lifeline for an entire hour before finally escaping.
Later, while searching for water, she had even braved the return trip.
"After that time, I swore to myself I would never walk this path again," Alice thought, a wave of self-deprecation washing over her. "I didn't expect to jinx myself so quickly. Karma is a real bitch."
Strange stepped up to the ledge and boldly glanced down.
God be his witness, he swore he absolutely did not have a fear of heights. He had sipped coffee on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York, and he had flown in a helicopter through the Grand Canyon.
But just one look at the bottomless sea of mist below sent his entire head spinning, and his stomach cramped violently.
This was a primal, biological vertigo—an evolutionary survival mechanism where the brain violently warns the body: Get away from here, or you will die.
Because of the thick mist swirling below the cliff, it was completely impossible to see the bottom. Occasionally, a few birds flew past, looking as tiny as specks of dust against the clouds.
If someone slipped and fell... Strange knew that even if his medical skills were magnified a hundred times, even if he possessed the power to drag the dead back from hell itself, it would be utterly useless.
Because falling meant guaranteed death. They likely wouldn't even find a body to bury; it would just be a flattened paste of meat.
"Do we absolutely have to go this way? Is there any way we can take a detour?" Hughes asked, his voice trembling with a hint of a sob. His calves were visibly shaking.
Alice spoke with a flat, detached tone. "If we don't take this path, we'll have to climb all the way down to the valley floor and cross through the densest part of the primeval forest. Down there..."
Before she could even finish her sentence.
ROAARR!
A deafening, earth-shaking roar suddenly erupted from the depths of the valley below the cliff.