Content Warning: Gruesome bodily injury. Seriously.
With the engineer still recovering, and the adrenaline of survival being replaced by the boredom of surviving, everyone is looking for a change of scenery.
Zhou Xiwei has gone for his hike, and the yacht crew are splayed out in the library of the school, half of them reading fiction and the others reading all sorts of science and survival books, like they’re going to Robinson Crusoe their way out of this.
Oh, and the deckhands are definitely trying to figure out how to create a still, now that they’ve checked with Director Xi and confirmed that of all the strange things on this island, liquor is not one of them.
Not a single bottle.
Chef Bohai, who swears to have already finished the cooking sherry, is helping. While playing footsie with a certain stew, under the book-laden study table. (That stew is the person who actually killed the bottle, to be clear about things).
Zhou Xiting has escaped from Mother Song’s endless rehashing of the same stories about the ladies and the mergers and the parties back home. Where she’s escaped to, no one is sure. Except Director Xi, who is in a walled garden, taking her through a very nostalgic tour as they check on sprouts and spy on bunnies that neither has the heart to chase away from the turnips, even if it means that they have less to put in their stomachs.
And then there’s the four boys– who go to the beach in borrowed swim trunks.
That’s where the trouble begins.
—
Young people always have an air of invincibility about them. Can’t-happen-to-me-itis.
Then, the real world kicks the shit out of them. Then, they learn to be more cautious and tempered. Or they die. One of the two. Like the old saying goes, there are old men, and there are bold men, but there are no old bold men.
But despite very nearly drowning less than a week prior, Song Bai, Qian Li, Zhang Zhiping, and even Mr. Head Injury have not learned their lesson. They’re still immortals, the way that only those born with silver spoons in their mouths ever experience.
The coldness of the water? Just a chance to test their manhood, and denigrate whoever is delicate enough to refuse to stay in.
The fear of drowning? Not something that they’ll admit to, if they still feel it. Not surrounded by the type of limiting masculinity that characterizes such friendships.
The weirdness of the island, the doubts that they may have and the internal contradictions between them–? All go without saying. No, really, owning up to it would be terrifying.
Everything is fine as long as they insist it is.
So they head to the beach that everyone else still shies away from. They look at the water that very nearly turned them into unclaimed corpses at the bottom of the sea, for crabs to feast on and fish to hide, and they–
Go in. Go in, and don’t notice the shadows that float closer, as they let their wildness out and their mouths run away from them:
“Fuck! Cold, cold, cold as a fucking corpses’ thighs.”
“Been fucking a lot of corpses, Zhiping?”
“Well, you know, your ex is a real dead fish-”
And so on and so forth. Even quiet Qian Li and gentlemanly Song Bai are drawn into the bullshit, splashing and shit-talking and in general letting loose, after days of having to be restrained for the sake of the Song parents and Miss Zhou and untouchable XiXi.
“Don’t call him that.”
“Come on. Seriously?” Dongqi raises an eyebrow provocatively, yet holds his hands up in a placating motion. “Look, I admit that I tease him a bit more than I should. But it’s your fault! You’re the one that’s made him such an easy target.”
That’s a new one, and Song Bai is temporarily rendered speechless. Seeing an opening, Ding Dongqi looks to Zhang Zhiping for backup, and actually gets it. Which is a surprisingly decent strategy for getting the words out. After all, Zhiping is far more diplomatic than he is.
“Not to pile on, but you know you kinda… Act like a flower protector? Always, but especially around him. You act like he’s delicate, so everyone picks up on his delicacy. You take care of his feelings, so everyone knows that he’s got more of them than average. And then, you know, there’s his other feelings-”
“Stop.” Song Bai balls his fists under the water.
“He’s not here. What, you can’t admit it even then?”
No, he really can’t. Zhou Xiwei is his little brother. That’s all. He won’t discuss anything else with anyone. Especially outsiders. And despite the ‘friendship,’ that’s what these people around him are, if they push it.
“What I’ll admit is that he’s my best friend. And my little brother.” Ding Dongqi snorts and Song Bai’s voice rises. “What I’ll admit is that, if it comes down to it, I will choose him over each and every one of you. Got it? Putting up with it, keeping the peace– that’s for him. Not you. So fucking stop it. Whatever you think you know, whatever crystal ball you think you have to peer into his head, leave it alone. Or I’ll remove you from his life. And mine. Got it?”
Qian Li backs away– from the water, or the conversation and the terror of picking sides, when his family’s planning and design firm does equal business with all of them.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Qian Li isn’t the same. He can’t afford it. At all.
Qian Li quietly steps out of the water and wraps himself in a towel. As soon as they all stop glaring at one another, he’ll make an excuse, maybe–? He weighs his family’s future contracts against the risk of a blood infection, and prepares to cut his foot with a jagged piece of broken shell to get out of it.
A scream-
Qian Li looks out, just in time to see Ding Dongqi disappear into the waves. A moment later, Zhang Zhiping cursingly follows him down. Qian Li drops the shell. Freezes.
Song Bai is left to be the rescuer, of course.
—
Song Bai doesn’t think of himself.
Even in the middle of an argument, towards guys that he wants to punch, when he hears their pain and sees them fall, he springs into action without a thought. Zhang Zhiping is closer, but he’s also self-rescuing– A moment after squatting down, he springs back up, cursing about, ‘fucking stings’ and shaking his leg like he’s trying to fling something off.
But Ding Dongqi is just–
Missing.
Zhang Zhiping kicks and limps and winces back to shore. Song Bai wades deep and fearless towards where that fucking idiot was last annoying him from. Screaming and thrashing is bad, but the silence is worse. If you’re screaming, at least you’re not dead. Song Bai sees a flash of white sand a stroke away– and on this pitch black ledge, it can only be Dongqi’s skin, refracted.
He blindly dives and pulls and fishes up a man. A man who is not okay.
“Fuck. Fuck! Qian Li, go– get the medic, fucking run for it!” Song Bai orders without looking. Ding Dongqi, and his convulsing body, takes up all his attention. When he turns to the shore, and sees Qian Li still standing there, he bellows, “Go! Scream! Run! Get someone!”
Qian Li still doesn’t move. Doesn’t move until a limping, moaning Zhiping makes it to the shore and shoves him out of his temporary paralysis. Then, finally, the moron takes off running. Though if it’s too late–
Song Bai doesn’t know how they’ll explain themselves to Dongqi’s family.
Look. He’s an ass.
He’s more of a predator than Song Bai would like to admit. He’s also a very loved only son, in that distant way that so many of their peers suffer from. After all, you don’t develop such a troublesome personality without someone (or a whole family of someones) spoiling you rotten.
He’ll be missed, if he’s gone.
Song Bai hoists him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and panics at the way a scream whistles out from behind Dongqi’s locked jaw and clenched teeth. Not good.
Fuck, he hopes that medic is the real deal. He hopes Qian Li finds him fast.
He hopes the last words he says to Ding Dongqi aren’t all about how he’d abandon him.
He-
As they make it to the shore, he feels the convulsions increase and has no choice but to press Zhiping into service and try to get a handle on this, though all the medical training he has comes from his university military drills and watching hospital dramas on television with his parents. But it’s what he’s got to work with.
“Towels, get one down, help me lay him out.”
At least Zhang Zhiping knows how to listen, and how to work through whatever is making him shiver and sweat. He holds Ding Dongqi’s shoulders while Song Bai holds his hips, looking up and down and trying to figure out what is turning Ding Dongqi pallid. What’s making him look like he’s about to take his last breaths.
Song Bai can’t find anything.
He runs his hands from the soles of his feet up to his thighs. He turns him on his side, in case he needs to vomit, or there’s something latched against his spine. He checks the back of his head and curses himself, wondering if this is throwing a clot; if this is his fault, for giving into Dongqi’s fiery insistence that ‘that pussy doesn’t even hit that hard’ and that his fall sounded worse than it was. They shouldn’t have gone swimming, he knows his wrongs.
Still nothing.
Ding Dongqi’s mouth starts foaming, and the convulsions accelerate.
He’s going to die. Fuck!
Song Bai tries to force his mouth open, fingers turning into a gnawed-on, bloody mess in the process. The pain- doesn’t matter, don’t think about it. He can’t withdraw, he has to get his airway clear, what if there’s something lodged in his throat?! Zhang Zhiping kneels down and tears off his wide-strapped leather watch, and tries to wedge it in.
The leverage gives them some space, but it’s dark and they don’t have light and– fuck, his throat looks like it’s closing, but they can’t tell for sure. They don’t have anything to intubate (even if they did, would they just blindly stick it through?!)
Fuck, Ding Dongqi-
“Is he- oh God, is he dying?!” Song Bai’s eyes fly up, and he finds a crowd developing. Finds a palefaced Zhou Xiwei, asking after Dongqi’s situation. Qian Li shouts from a few paces away, “He’s coming, the Director is helping him find their medical kit, but he’s coming! Old Ding, hold on!!”
Ding Dongqi already can’t hear him.
His lips, toes, the tips of his fingers dug into the sand– they’re all turning purplish. Song Bai tries mouth to mouth, but he can’t get any air down. It all crashes against Dongqi’s closed throat and comes back out without delivering any oxygen to him.
Fuck, he’s dying- fuck, he’s-
Song Bai keeps trying. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t-
He doesn’t know how a simple swim turned into feeling someone dying beneath him.
—
Shan Haoyu was the first on the scene, but he didn’t interfere.
Why would he, when the person being judged has taken aim at his brother, and been rude to nearly everyone from both parties? To watch him die with impassive eyes, to hear him flop and wheeze and collapse with deaf ears– Shan Haoyu knows that means there’s something wrong with him.
That he’s standing outside of the human experience. He should feel something about this.
But he’s seen so much death. It’s become expected. Routine. He can’t make himself care about it, anymore than he weeps for a palm frond torn apart by insects and gales and disease. It’s part of the natural order of things. A way of life, on the island.
But then Zhou Xiwei runs up beside him, and Shan Haoyu’s perspective shifts.
For the first time since they’ve met, Shan Haoyu sees what it looks like, when Zhou Xiwei cries.
Sees him upset, more than he was even when his life was in danger, when he was first pulled from the ocean and still searching for his foster parents. And Shan Haoyu finds that hates it. He hates that this island, where he wants Zhou Xiwei to stay, is daring to make him unhappy so soon. He hates it more than he’s baffled, that Zhou Xiwei can weep for someone that has clearly been so cruel to him.
Anyone can care for those that are kind, but Zhou Xiwei cares for everyone. Cares for people that his life would be better absent the presence of. This is why Zhou Xiwei is a good person.
And in his goodness, Shan Haoyu finds himself wavering.
Finds himself wanting to match, just a little, even if it means intervening for someone that doesn’t deserve it.
Ding Dongqi deserves to die, but Zhou Xiwei doesn’t deserve to witness it. Zhou Xiwei shouldn’t be traumatized like this. Shan Haoyu makes his decision and steps forward.
“What happened?” He addresses himself to Zhang Zhiping.
Since he already knows perfectly well how the island has punished this particular sinner, he just needs an excuse to step in and say what he knows. And Zhang Zhiping should have been let off with a warning, of the same type that’s felling the pervert slowly stilling on the shore.
“I don’t– I felt a sting, this horrible pain in my calf, at the same time, Donqi-” That’s enough.
Shan Haoyu cuts in and points down towards the purple lightning and shiny pink skin that’s wrapping around Zhang Zhiping’s leg like infected henna. The kind of injury that would be front-and-center, if there wasn’t a bigger catastrophe laid out on the beach towels.
“The jellyfish.”
Shan Haoyu moves closer and makes a show of inspecting Ding Dongqi’s skin. To his credit, Song Bai quickly makes room for him, while starting on chest compressions. “I didn’t think anyone would want to swim, given what happened. I apologize for not warning you about them.”
“But- there’s no marks? And I’m okay, so why is he-?” Zhang Zhiping sounds much more pleasant, when he’s on the verge of weeping. But Zhou Xiwei sounds worse, so…
“Either he’s allergic, or it’s still connected and pumping venom into him.” Shan Haoyu motions to the drawstrings of Dinq Dongqi’s swimming trunks. “The last place to check.”
Song Bai blanches but does his duty, pulling down Dongqi’s bathing suit after confirming no ladies are present.
“Oh FUCK!”
Found the jellyfish.
—
There’s so much swelling and welting, that it’s hard to understand what they’re seeing at first.
But it’s bad. Horrific. Enough to make anyone go into shock. Maybe even enough to kill. Zhou Xiwei has to turn his back to them and squat, head between his knees as he tries to erase the image and get back his breath.
Wrapped around Ding Dongqi’s most intimate parts is a massive jellyfish, large enough to encapsulate even his horribly swollen equipment. It’s a species that they’re unfamiliar with– completely transparent, with thin black veins the lance through the body and down into tentacles, as well as the oral arms, which are tangled around his shaft like they’re actively trying to devour him. The longest of the tentacles terminate against his upper thighs, spreading black and purple like rot, or long webs of mold across the ceilings of a decaying mansion.
Rotten wood.
Zhou Xiwei throws up the remnants of his breakfast. Qian Li follows suit.
“What- what do I do, can I just-?”
The medic still isn’t around. Ding Dongqi is turning from blue to purple. Right or wrong, Song Bai isn’t sure, but he can’t leave him like this.
He wraps a towel around his hand, grabs the transparent head of the hateful thing, and pulls it off. He throws the carcass down the beach and swears as bright red blood blooms out, covering the tentacles and the one arm that have been left behind, after Song Bai’s quick and dirty eviction of the poisonous ghost.
He wraps both hands in either end of the towel, and apologizing under his breath, lifts Ding Dongqi’s cock and tries to unwind as much of the leftover arm from him, in case there’s still venom in it. In case it’s still hurting him.
In case he’s about to die, and this is all they can do to give him an intact corpse and a little dignity back.
He pulls and he unwinds and his eyes burn at the swollen, bleeding, macerated mess that is Ding Dongqi’s once-cherished manhood. He can’t be delicate enough, he can’t find all the filaments, not with the towel between him and Dongqi’s skin. He wants to throw it off–
Zhiping is okay, so even if he gets stung, it shouldn’t endanger his life, and if it can make any type of difference for Dongqi, he has to try. As fate would have it, the minute he abandons the towel, he hears the sound of the Xu Wang running towards him, a red plastic emergency kit in hand.
Shan Haoyu steps away, making space, and filling the guy in. Jellyfish, venom, it had several minutes to pump into him, and there’s still tentacles lingering very close to his femoral arteries, can’t get any air in.
—
Before anything else, there’s an epipen that somehow isn’t out of date, stabbed directly into Ding Dongqi’s thigh. The training of a boat medic isn’t just for show, and by the end of the short summary, the man has nitrile gloves on and a pair of long medical tweezers in his hands.
He sprays the entire area with a tinted surgical disinfectant, to help the kind of horrid infections that open wounds and the ocean conspire to create, and to provide some sort of contrast to help him find any lingering transparent filaments, now that the easy-to-spot frilled arms and black tentacles have been pulled off.
He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t react to the monstrosity of what was once a piece of human anatomy now looking like an over-roasted yam, splits and cracks and all. He just works with a single-minded focus. Just does what he can to stop further damage, and stabilize his frothing, bleeding, weeping patient.
It works.
It shouldn’t. But it does. The medic frowns as praise is heaped down on him.
“Oh god, he’s- he’s breathing, it’s working, you did it! Oh god, thank you so much, thank you- It’s not money, I know, but I swear, his family is going to take care of you, as soon as they hear about this.”
He’s not out of the woods yet.
The medic flips through the compartments of the kit, counting gauze and sterilizing agents and painkillers. The expired box of antibiotics. He checks and he remembers what training he has, about chemical burns, which is as close as he can come to finding an equivalency for this. How long it takes to heal. The risk of infection, when the urethra has been compromised. When there’s no supplies for a colostomy or a catheter, to try to keep the area clean and gauzed and treated with enough ointment to help heal, but not enough to lead to rot or sloughing skin.
It’s hateful arithmetic.
He doesn’t have enough. He knows it on the first pass, but he still goes through the count again.
Even if he did, he’s not prepared for this. Sure, he’s trained.
Trained even more than he would normally be as the Ru Yi’s requisite medical officer, thanks to working as an army nurse before his second career as a well-tipped steward. Otherwise, how could he touch someone so messed up? But now that the adrenaline of ‘get it done’ is over, he’s all too aware that a) what little he did, it’s a miracle that it worked and b)…
Based on their supplies… if Ding Dongqi survives, he’s going to wish he hadn’t.
They can’t put him in a healing coma, they can’t even give him the good drugs. He’s going to be in horrific pain, for weeks, if not months, and every time he eats or drinks, he’s going to pay for it with skin-splitting, pus-pumping pain.
“We’re not done yet. We need to get him into a sickroom. Wherever is cleanest. And then we’ll need to start treating the area.”
Start treating the area and pray the guy lucked out and will have some type of merciful nerve damage, that will keep him from feeling that unending fire the minute he wakes up and realizes what’s happened to him.
Who knew a jellyfish could be so fucking dangerous?
Shan Haoyu steps back and instead of watching, returns to comforting Zhou Xiwei instead.
Author’s Corner: My search history will never be the same, let me tell you.
The island is cute when it is petty, but when it decides to punish in earnest, it really exposes itself as something inherently outside of human understanding. Or human foibles about things like mercy. That being said, although this is not the most severe punishment to come, it is by far the most graphic and detailed.
Apologies to yams and yam enthusiasts everywhere.
Aaaah I was waiting for the notification ! I must be a bad person because I laughed so much at the island punishment. The more gory details, the more I was laughing (-_-;)・・・
Thank you for the chapter ! (And there’s no yam where I live so no harm done (to me) eheh)
Haha, it’s good as long as you like it. 🌺
Since Guide to Falling doesn’t have such scenes, I’m worried readers that came over from it may not be able to stomach some of Wake, and this scene is definitely the litmus test! Personally, I have always enjoyed fluff and blood but not everyone has the same taste. We’ll see, we’ll see.
It’s good, all good. Fluff and blood, keep going! Btw his punishment really does sound worse than death right now. More so than someone’s previously suggested sitting on a rusty nail scenario.
And there were times in Guide to Falling where some of us readers would probably not have objected to this particular punishment 😶
I LOVE THE GORE!! Keep it coming!! 🫶🏽🫶🏽
I imagine by the end of the story you might be on the FBI watchlist with your search history!! 😂
Thanks for the chapter 🫶🏽
a nice punishment for the scum that he is 👌
I… I have mixed feeling about how you managed to take it a step further than my rusted nail proposal.
I’m reaaaally curious about how you managed to think about something like that 😂
Oh, I love the island and its sense of justice!
Also, not related to this, I’m re-reading Guide To Falling. Because I need more while I wait for new chapters here 😃
Aside from Old Ding getting a chance (probably wasted, but still) to reflect, I am curious if Song Bai will treat Zhou Xiwei differently after hearing their observations. It’s easy to write them off as stupid, but they are all well bred and educated, right? I was kind of surprised he considered him to be his best friend. I got the sense Zhou Xiwei considers himself outranked by Song Bai’s other friends.
Good! The perfect punishment!! Haoyu is gone already, I love it ♡
Well, that was satisfying !! Author, I like you, hehe…..😂
I’m afraid my reaction to this chapter seems to be a bit off the norm… all I can think of it is… Poor jellyfish! What a disgusting way to die! They could have at least thrown the poor thing back in the ocean, and maybe it could live to recover from its trauma…
As a yam enthusiast, I’d just like to go on the record to say that I’m 100% okay with this punishment. Also that I’m a bad person and probably wouldn’t last long on the island.