Young Master Mo, Are You Done Kissing?

Several minutes later, Feng Ling returned gasping with blood on her face. She rushed into the grass where Ji Nuan hid, but Ji Nuan was gone.

“Mrs. Mo?” Feng Ling frowned. “Ji Nuan?”

Her hushed voice drifted in the wind, and in the distance, the riverway of Tonlé Sap Lake was quiet and dark.

No one responded to her.

There was only a cell phone left in the grass, lying there quietly.

—-

I was kidnapped. This was her first thought when she awoke.

Now she was placed on the ground of a room. This room was dark and almost had no light in it, and the air was damp, salty, and was full of the musty smell of decay.

She tried to move, but her hands were tied behind her back, and her legs were bound tightly as well.

For a few seconds, her brain failed to work, when suddenly there was a sound of conversation outside the door, but she didn’t know the language they used.

Ji Nuan took a deep breath, forced herself to calm down, and then looked around.

This was a log cabin very common in Cambodia. It was empty and had nothing in it. A kerosene lamp hung overhead, and the feeble kerosene light was almost nonexistent. There were moths attached to the lampshade, throwing a vast shadow that looked eerie.

Just when Ji Nuan was wondering who kidnapped her, with a sudden bang, the door was pushed open from the outside.

It was two creepy-looking and dark-skinned men. Ji Nuan couldn’t help moving back. Her back was against the wooden wall, and her clear eyes watched them warily. When she saw that they were carrying a dead snake whose skin had been stripped, she choked back the surge in her stomach and clenched her teeth to stop the cry of panic.

One of the men carried that snake, and the other pudgy man held a bad quality gun. The latter took a look at her, grinned, and turned to talk with the man carrying the snake.

They spoke Cambodian, and Ji Nuan couldn’t understand what they were talking about, but looking at their creepy smiles, Ji Nuan leaned firmly against the wall and couldn’t help panicking.

Suddenly, the pudgy man came up to her and squatted down in front of her. He stared at her and reached out to touch her face with his fat, dirty hand.

Ji Nuan immediately moved her head to dodge his touch.

The pudgy man cursed in Cambodian and was about to slap her. Just one second before his hand reached her face, a stooped woman of sixty or seventy suddenly came into the room. The old woman coughed, and the two men immediately stood up and glanced back at her. Although they didn’t seem to respect that woman, they still took a step back and stopped harassing Ji Nuan.

The old woman was holding a bucket in her hand when she came in. She stared at Ji Nuan for a moment, then went up to her, got some water out of the bucket, and spilled it on Ji Nuan’s face. Under Ji Nuan’s confused stare, the old woman rubbed her face hard with her hands until the dust and dirt on her face were washed off. She looked at Ji Nuan carefully for a while and then said a word to her.

She still used Cambodian.

Ji Nuan thought they might be those who kidnapped Mo Jingshen. If they discovered that she was Chinese, she might face more danger, so she pursed her mouth, shrunk her neck as if in fear and shook her head, showing that she didn’t understand what the old woman was talking about.

The old woman paused and asked her in heavily accented Chinese, “Are you… Chi… nese?”

Ji Nuan still shook her head blankly. Her mouth was not gagged, and she could speak, but she pointed to her mouth, motioning that she was mute.

The old woman thought she looked Asian, but she couldn’t be sure which country she was from. After all, Asians looked almost the same and had the same habits. She stared at Ji Nuan for a while, but the latter still pointed to her own mouth, not speaking a word, so the old woman pointed to her mouth too, asking Ji Nuan with her eyes whether she was mute.

Ji Nuan nodded hard and pretended to be unable to speak.

So, this woman is mute. The old woman thought.

The old woman took a look at her again and turned around to say something to the two men in Cambodian. The two men reluctantly came to Ji Nuan and dragged her up from the ground. Ji Nuan didn’t know what they were going to do but seeing the two men following the old woman out, she calmed down and let them take her out.

When Ji Nuan was taken out of the cabin, her eyes were suddenly covered with a black cloth. She couldn’t see anything, so she could only let them carry her off in an unknown direction.

When they reached someplace, the two men put her down, and the old woman came to take off the black cloth from her eyes. She looked down at Ji Nuan for a while, pointed to the direction of the dense forest and made a gesture of explosion with her hands wide open. She was trying to tell Ji Nuan that if she ran out at random, she would step on a minefield and be killed.

Ji Nuan immediately figured out that this must be the center of the forest that Nan Heng and his men were going to attack and where the drug gang was stationed now.

She happened to be brought here.

Could Mo Jingshen be here?

Ji Nuan tried to control her facial expression so as not to expose her real identity. Instead of looking around, she just looked at the old woman in front of her. The old woman untied the rope from her feet and led her to the biggest log cabin, which was right in the middle. There were several middle-aged men and young men in the cabin. When they saw the old woman took Ji Nuan in, they all stared at them vigilantly and angrily rebuked the old woman in Cambodian. It seemed that they were blaming the old woman for bringing a stranger in.

The old woman talked to them for a few seconds and pointed to Ji Nuan, meaning that she was clean and had no dangerous article on her. Then the old woman took Ji Nuan’s hand, smelled it, and said a word. Hearing her words, these men stared at Ji Nuan suspiciously.

One of them was a middle-aged man about fifty years old, with gray hair, a square face, a lion’s nose, and with a scar from the middle of his eyebrow to the left of his face. He coldly stared at Ji Nuan and suddenly asked her in English, “Can you cook?”

The old woman had smelled the spices on Ji Nuan’s hands and thought she was a cook…

Ji Nuan still pretended she didn’t hear anything and just looked at the man in horror and confusion.

The middle-aged man still stared at her and asked her in English, “Which country are you from? How were you brought here from outside by our men? Your hands don’t have the smell of guns or ammunition but only have the smell of food. Who the hell are you?”

She looked helplessly at the old woman beside her and hid behind her in a panic.

At this moment, there was a noise outside the cabin, and an alarm sounded in the forests.