At this moment, he tapped her teeth with the knife again, his gaze still cold and empty, but Lily Bennett read a different meaning in it.

He signaled her to continue speaking.

Lily Bennett immediately collapsed to the ground, her whole body turning limp like a puddle of mud, unable even to lift a finger.

She gasped for breath, her voice choked with the relief of survival: “…I—I’m really sorry for how I treated you before. You know so much, I can’t compare to you at all… The nanny always praised you while hitting me. I just didn’t want to get beaten… I’m sorry, I didn’t know Mike Harris would treat you like that… I’m really, really sorry…”

Perhaps driven by her survival instinct, for the first time she recited her lines with such sincerity that even she believed them: “I’m sorry… I really do want to help you. These are medicines from my hometown. If you don’t believe me, I can use them on myself first.”

No response.

Eric Carter remained silent throughout.

After a while, he put away the dagger and pulled her up.

Only then did Lily Bennett have a chance to look around the tent.

Eric Carter’s bed was a bit more upscale than hers—at least it was a real bed, not a sleeping bag, but there was no pillow or quilt, only two thin blankets.

At the head of the bed sat a metal bucket filled with murky, bloody water. It seemed he had already done some basic wound care.

He seemed to enjoy making masks. The only decoration in the tent was a wooden rack displaying all kinds of masks, each marked with a date in red ink, but without exception, all of them were chilling to behold.

For some reason, there was one white mask on which he had drawn detailed facial features, making it even more terrifying.⑴

Lily Bennett was about to look at the other masks when suddenly two dull thuds sounded behind her, startling her—Eric Carter had tapped the headboard with the handle of his knife, signaling her to turn around.

Lily Bennett really wanted to ask: Can’t you speak?

But on second thought, she dismissed the idea. He had spoken to the manager before, and Mike Harris’s group had said he could do ventriloquism and sing.

Clearly, he just didn’t want to talk to her.

Seeing her turn around, Eric Carter slid the dagger back into his boot, took off his shirt, and revealed his back, raw and bloody.

He was frighteningly thin, but even more frightening were the wounds on his back—his skin was almost completely peeled away as if burned, exposing raw, wet flesh, caked with dirt, gravel, and grass.

…With injuries this severe, he shouldn’t have survived at all.

Yet not only had he survived, he’d even managed to pin her down with one hand while limping.

How was that possible?

Whatever, she’d already traveled through time—why worry about this?

Lily Bennett took a deep breath and found some ibuprofen in the first aid kit—meant for both him and herself, since her back was still aching.

She popped out a capsule and handed it to him, then took one herself in front of him. “This is for pain relief.”

Eric Carter stared at her for a moment, then took the capsule from her hand and swallowed it.

Lily Bennett had wanted to tell him she had electrolyte water to help swallow it, but to her surprise, he just gulped it down directly.

She had to swallow her words, took out an iodine swab, wiped the scrape on her own arm first, then looked up and asked, “Is this okay?”

He nodded slowly.

Lily Bennett found tweezers, scissors, and hemostatic powder in the first aid kit and began cleaning his wound.

Luckily, she’d watched quite a few first aid videos to kill time while packing her hiking bag, or she really wouldn’t have known how to handle this kind of injury.

However, some areas had already fused into a mass of brownish-red rotten flesh, which she had to remove before she could apply medicine and bandage him.

What surprised her was that Eric Carter didn’t make a sound from start to finish, as quiet as a corpse.

She couldn’t help but ask, “…Doesn’t it hurt?”

No response.

She had no choice but to shut her mouth and continue treating the wound.

She didn’t know if the ibuprofen was working for him, but it was definitely working for her—when he pinned her to the ground, the pain had nearly brought her to tears, but now it finally didn’t hurt anymore.

Lily Bennett sped up her wound cleaning.

She regretted not buying injectable chitosan; supposedly, that stuff could stop bleeding in three seconds—some of Eric Carter’s wounds were so big they made her dizzy, and she wasn’t sure if the hemostatic powder would work.

But as soon as she sprinkled the powder on, the bleeding stopped.

His recovery was astonishing—his leg was clearly broken, yet aside from a slight limp, it didn’t seem to affect him at all.

With a body this resilient, was he even human?

Eric Carter showed no sign of surprise.

He picked up the hemostatic powder’s packaging, seemingly more interested in the ingredients list.

Lily Bennett regretted it even more—why had she bought imported hemostatic powder? The packaging was all in English, and he could read it.

What if he handed the package to the manager and they got the villagers to burn her at the stake?

“…Don’t worry,” she forced herself to explain, “it’s for stopping bleeding, no side effects… Once the wound scabs over, it’ll fall off on its own.”

He still said nothing, but handed the package back to her.

Lily Bennett breathed a sigh of relief.

She looked at the first aid kit; there was still a bottle of electrolyte water and an energy bar inside.