Chapter 273 — Shark? Slaughter the Fish!

It seemed that Wei Zhao had all but finished off the skilled hands around Li Cihua. With those two yellow-rank experts dead, Li Cihua truly had no one capable left to send; he had resorted to trash like Xiao Ma, dreaming of using such crude tricks as playing a ghost to frighten people and snapping a rope, all to bring about an "accidental" death for Wei Zhao or Gu Mengyao.

Even so, Wei Zhao would not let down his guard. Even if Li Cihua had no skilled hands about him, that was only temporary. Li Cihua had said himself that he was not acting alone; he was merely a spokesman in Songshan, and behind him stood a hidden master.

At last Wei Zhao caught a faint glimpse of the coastline up ahead, though how far it was from the city of Songshan he had no way of knowing. He carried nothing with GPS on him, so he could only gauge his rough position by the direction of the sun.

He had not expected the current to carry him so far after he entered the water. Wei Zhao smiled bitterly. If Shen Yushu had not choked on seawater and left him busy tending to her, the sea would never have swept him this far.

A shark... Wei Zhao narrowed his eyes slightly. On the water not far off, the dorsal fin of a shark was cutting swiftly toward him.

Wei Zhao frowned. As a rule, sharks in the sea would not attack a person unprompted and without the lure of blood, for human flesh was no great delicacy to them.

Unless driven by ravenous hunger or stirred by the scent of blood, sharks generally ignored the presence of humans. That, of course, held only in ordinary cases; there were exceptions, sharks of uncommon savagery that prowled the shallows, lying in wait for a chance to strike at their target.

For now Wei Zhao could not tell whether this shark meant to attack him, but he kept swimming toward the shore at his former pace. If the shark had already fed, it ought not to attack him and would simply swim past.

And if it did mean to attack, waiting here for it would do him no good. Meet force with force, water with earth and dams—a single shark did not trouble Wei Zhao in the least.

As he swam, though, the dagger in his shoe was once again gripped in his hand.

Unfortunately, this shark did seem to have marked Wei Zhao as its prey. As though it had caught the scent of a kill, it sped up and came racing toward him.

Skilled as Wei Zhao was, he could not outswim a shark. Seeing it close in, he kept calculating the distance between them without slowing his stroke; only when he was a few hundred meters from shore did he stop, for the shark was by then only dozens of meters away.

As the overlord of the sea, the shark plainly did not regard Wei Zhao as anything worth its notice. In its eyes, he had already become its prey.

Wave upon wave came surging up behind Wei Zhao, growing stronger and stronger in ceaseless succession, and the shark drew nearer and nearer. The great white, its bulk as large as a car, opened its vast, blood-red maw and made ready for its first rushing strike.

Wei Zhao's left hand instinctively tugged at Shen Yushu, keeping her from slipping beyond his reach. In truth her limbs had been clamped tight around him all along; he merely wanted to be sure, so that he could deal with the shark with an easy mind.

His right hand gripped the blade, his left curled into a fist, and Wei Zhao fixed his eyes hard upon the great white.

"Whoosh—" A swell of waves came rushing in, and the shark charged at Wei Zhao. He did not dodge. He floated motionless in the seawater, waiting for the shark's assault.

The shark had likely not expected its prey to hold still. Such a thing rarely happened; a hunted creature's first instinct was always to flee. Wei Zhao's stopping gave the shark a moment's hesitation.

Sharks were among the more intelligent creatures of the sea, and faced with something contrary to reason, one would hardly keep up a blind, ferocious charge. Seeing Wei Zhao motionless, the shark slowed its swimming too, though it seemed to pay no mind to this creature so much smaller than itself.

It slowed its approach, but it did not abandon its intent to attack; it merely closed the distance more slowly.

In an instant the shark lunged savagely at Wei Zhao—perhaps it had lost patience. But at that very moment Wei Zhao struck too, his left fist swinging out and slamming hard into the shark's snout!

That was one of the most vulnerable points on a shark's body, and Wei Zhao knew that weak spot like the back of his hand.

"Bam—"

Such was the force of Wei Zhao's blow that, landed on a man, it might well have killed an ordinary person outright. It could not kill the shark, but it was enough to knock its head sharply to one side.

The shark felt the smart of it, and the pain only stirred its savagery further. Its gills flared, and it made to open its mouth and bite at Wei Zhao. But alas for it, Wei Zhao gave it no such chance: he drove his blade into the shark's gills, slashed up and down a few times inside, then quickly swam off to one side.

The shark thrashed a few times in the water, then went still, drifting slowly to the surface, shorn of its former menace. The gills are one of a shark's fatal weak points, and Wei Zhao had long since grown practiced at striking them.

Having killed the shark, Wei Zhao was hardly about to let it go to waste. Who knew where they would come ashore, or how long it would be? If hunger struck, the flesh might not be choice eating, but it would fill a belly well enough. That was the first rule of surviving in the wild.

He untied the severed cord from his ankle and lashed it around the shark's tail, then swam for shore dragging the carcass behind him. A weight of that order he scarcely even felt.

In his training days, they had bound iron weights to his hands and feet, and even then he had swum just fine.

"Hah—" Wei Zhao hauled himself onto the bank and dumped the shark to one side. The pressing matter was to bring Shen Yushu around first.

Yet when it came to reviving her, Wei Zhao hesitated. By the book, the proper procedure now was artificial respiration, but that seemed rather like taking advantage of Shen Yushu. Because when Wei Zhao saved someone, he had no need of artificial respiration...

And yet he could not quite withstand the pull of Shen Yushu. He was fond of her, more fond than of Gu Mengyao, at any rate. The girl was endearing, the sort one took to easily.

But to take such liberties while she was unconscious—Wei Zhao still could not bring himself to do it. In the sea earlier, there had been no choice in the urgency of the moment, but now there were other ways to accomplish the same end.

That he was fond of Shen Yushu was true enough, and that he wanted to kiss her was true enough as well—but never by such means as this! Wei Zhao did not count himself any paragon of virtue, but neither would he do anything by force.