The masked man Wáng Jùnjié was holding by the collar looked beneath his feet, realizing with horror that he was now several hundred meters above the ground.
Panicking, he began waving his arms and legs.
"Hey, easy, you want us to fall or what?"
"Let me go! Let me go, damn it!"
The man, who was struggling harder and harder, was beginning to test Wáng Jùnjié's patience, who was having the greatest difficulty keeping them in the air.
"Ugh, you're really annoying..."
Wáng Jùnjié immediately let go of the masked man's collar, and he fell like a stone.
During his descent, he began screaming at the top of his lungs, searching with his eyes below him for somewhere he could grab onto before hitting the ground.
But below them, only the immense forest stretched toward the horizon, except for a rocky peak where Wáng Jùnjié had been standing moments earlier. There was nowhere that could slow his fall. He was either going to crash violently onto the earthen ground or be impaled on a tree branch.
He thought he was going to have a heart attack when he turned his head to his right and realized that the man who had just let him go was falling beside him, lying down with his arms hanging loosely.
The masked man looked below him again. He could see the ground approaching at an incredible speed. Realizing that his death was only a few seconds away, he closed his eyes as tightly as he could. So tightly that tears began to flow from the corners of his eyes.
Wáng Jùnjié, falling beside him, began to speak to him.
"You know, all of this is your fault. No, I assure you, I really intended to talk with the rest of you, but you had to attack us first. I mean, you're really the ones who started all of this after all. Now I'm going to give you one last chance."
While his eyes were closed, the man felt something grab the top of his collar and felt himself stop suddenly, as if he had been brought to a halt.
For a few moments, he did not dare open his eyes, wondering if this was what death felt like. But when he finally opened them, he realized that his feet had stopped a few centimeters above the ground.
He felt the thing holding him by the collar from behind let go, and he fell heavily.
"Hop."
Wáng Jùnjié let himself fall to the ground beside the man and crouched down to get to his level.
He waited for the trembling man to raise his eyes toward him and then spoke.
"I'm going to give you one last chance to get out of this alive if you give me the names of all your little friends."
Wáng Jùnjié let his sentence hang in the air, waiting for the man's answer, but instead of answering him, the man began to smile.
"Haha. It's too late. You should never have come back to the ground. Now that we're on the ground, you have no chance of getting out of here alive. Hahahaha."
Wáng Jùnjié sighed.
"You really think I can't see all your little friends hiding in the branches around us?"
The man's face turned pale.
"Tch."
He suddenly put a hand into his pants pocket and threw something onto the ground. Immediately, thick smoke covered the entire area.
"Looks like I won't have a choice..."
In the distance, still on the rocky hill, Lǐ Guódòng heard screams, then thick smoke suddenly rose from a grove in the middle of the forest.
He blinked and the next instant, a gaping hole could be seen where the smoke had been. It was as if the forest had disappeared in a circle with a radius of one kilometer. Nothing but emptiness remained. The ground and the forest had simply disappeared without leaving a trace.
He heard a breath on his right, and when he looked over his shoulder, he jumped.
Wáng Jùnjié was now standing to his right, his hands in his pants pockets as if he had always been there.
"I'll admit they caught me off guard, I didn't think there would be this many, but well..."
He let a small pebble he had been tightly holding in his hand fall to the ground. When it touched the ground, the small pebble made an enormous noise, as if an object weighing several hundred kilograms had just been dropped onto the ground.
Wáng Jùnjié barely seemed to glance at it, he slightly raised his left foot and crushed the pebble beneath it, causing it to sink into the ground.
Then he took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and placed one at the corner of his lips. Realizing that Lǐ Guódòng was staring at him, he held out the pack.
"Cigarette?"
The surprised expression faded from Lǐ Guódòng's face, and he took a cigarette from the pack and placed it at his lips as well.
He held a finger in front of it, and a flame appeared above his finger, lighting the dried tobacco.
Wáng Jùnjié watched him out of the corner of his eye before taking a metal lighter and lighting his cigarette.
He inhaled deeply and let out a puff of smoke.
"So you have an affinity with fire."
The old man smiled slightly. "No, I'm earth type."
He paused for a moment, then continued in a different voice, heavier.
"My daughter was fire type. She died at the same time as this city."
The two men contemplated the ruins of buildings rising above the forest. Residential buildings, stores, schools. If one looked closely, they could see abandoned cars that had been overtaken by the passage of time.
Everything was still there, as if the world had suddenly stopped.
Wáng Jùnjié looked at Yinchuan one last time before dropping his cigarette butt and crushing it with his left foot.