Wild boar

Wild boar is both a real wilderness threat and the crucial nonhuman force that reshapes Shen Tang’s attempted escape from the traffickers on the Deserted Island. Its snoring reveals its presence before dawn; its charge scatters the traffickers, kills or gravely injures many of them, and drives Shen Tang into a desperate physical confrontation. The animal’s appearance converts a human kidnapping plot into a struggle governed by animal strength, terrain, timing, and improvisation.

Discovery in the Wilderness

Shen Tang encounters the animal while hiding among trees as the sky begins to brighten, making concealment increasingly difficult. After hearing snoring, she follows the sound and discovers a large boar with fierce fangs sleeping nearby. The discovery is frightening precisely because the animal is not merely a passive obstacle: its size, weapons, and uncontrolled power make it more dangerous than any ordinary pursuer, while its sleeping state gives Shen Tang a brief advantage.

Instead of fleeing immediately, Shen Tang turns the boar’s location into a tactical opportunity. She gathers several large rocks, climbs into the trees, and waits above the animal. The plan depends on redirecting the boar’s aggression toward the people pursuing her rather than confronting those people directly. In this moment, the animal is not domesticated, commanded, or safely instrumentalized; Shen Tang can only provoke it and hope that its instincts produce the result she needs.

The Charge Against the Traffickers

Shen Tang eventually smashes the rocks down onto the sleeping boar. The attack hits its mark. When the animal wakes, the first sight before it is the group of people holding lamps. Angered by the blow, it snorts, scrapes its hooves twice, and charges. The traffickers realize the danger only after the attack has begun, then scatter in terror.

The consequences are severe. The narrative presents the boar’s power as fiercer than a tiger’s, and wailing soon rises from the darkness as it tears through the group. Shen Tang watches from the tree, horrified by the bloodshed but relieved that her plan has worked. She does not regret setting the animal against them, judging the traffickers’ deaths too light a punishment for the harm they have probably inflicted on countless girls. The boar therefore becomes the immediate agent of a rough, uncontrolled justice that human institutions have not yet delivered.

The rising sun changes the scene from hidden terror to uncertain aftermath. Shen Tang wonders whether the police have arrived and whether Gu Huaian has discovered that she is missing. While still gripping the Tracking Ring and watching the sunrise through the branches, she experiences a brief contrast between the night’s violence and the cleansing magnificence of morning. The animal’s attack has not ended the danger, but it has broken the traffickers’ control over the landscape.

Return to Its Base and Shen Tang’s Crisis

After crashing into several people, the boar wanders before returning to its original location, which Shen Tang recognizes as probably its main base. She remains in the tree, shivering and praying that it will not find her. The first success of her plan thus turns into a second danger: the animal does not distinguish between traffickers and the person who provoked it.

Luck eventually fails her. After staggering around twice, the boar discovers Shen Tang, backs away, and violently charges the tree. She hugs the trunk, yet the impact makes the tree sway; a second strike follows soon afterward. Although the tree is thick, Shen Tang realizes that it cannot withstand the boar’s brute force indefinitely. The encounter forces her to make a final decision rather than continue waiting for rescue, showing that the animal remains an active threat even after it has served as her escape mechanism.

When the rescue group reaches the area, it finds bloodstains but no sign of Shen Tang. Most of the traffickers are dead or seriously injured because of the boar, while the animal itself is later found lying on the ground with its stomach still weakly rising and falling. Its survival is uncertain, and Shen Tang’s whereabouts are briefly unknown, intensifying the rescue scene. The discovery of the wounded animal confirms that the violence has damaged both sides of the encounter rather than producing a clean human victory.

The Bare-Handed Victory

Once Shen Tang is found, Gu Huaian stops joking, arranges helicopter transport, and contacts the hospital under Gu Enterprise so that surgery can begin immediately if necessary. Only after these preparations do the rescuers ask what happened to the boar. Shen Tang answers that she beat it, astonishing everyone. The animal’s body shows internal injuries but little external damage, and Shen Tang points to her injured hands as evidence of how the damage was done.

Shen Tang then says that she killed the boar and asks that it be taken along, wondering whether wild boar meat tastes good. Her wounded condition does not prevent her from treating the episode with a mixture of pride, practicality, and appetite. While waiting for the helicopter, she repeatedly boasts about using the animal to drive away the traffickers and defeating it bare-handed. The contrast between the emergency preparations around her and her insistence on recounting her own prowess gives the Wild boar episode its comic aftershock without erasing the brutality that preceded it.

The narration frames her feat through a playful comparison with the legend of Wushuang beating tigers: where that legendary figure defeated tigers, Shen Tang has beaten a wild boar. The comparison elevates an improvised survival act into a recurring image of her superhuman strength. Gu Huaian’s attempt to make her drink water, and his irritation when she says she is not thirsty, further places the animal encounter inside their relationship: he responds to the danger by organizing medical rescue, while she responds by displaying the scale of what she has accomplished.

Narrative Significance

The Wild boar is not a recurring companion or a symbolic character with a human voice. Its importance comes from its material independence and its refusal to remain within human plans. Shen Tang can locate it, strike it, and redirect its anger, but she cannot control its movement, its target, or the damage it causes. The animal’s agency breaks the traffickers’ apparent advantage and exposes how fragile their power becomes when the setting is governed by forces outside their criminal organization.

At the same time, the boar magnifies the novel’s contrast between Shen Tang’s vulnerable circumstances and her unusual bodily capacity. She is hiding, isolated, and waiting for rescue, yet she devises a plan that exploits the animal’s instincts and later claims to defeat it with her hands. The episode therefore joins survival thriller, violent reversal, and comic legend-making: the boar is first a sleeping danger, then an instrument of escape, then a predator that turns back on Shen Tang, and finally the opponent whose defeat confirms her superhuman reputation. Its decisive function is to transform Shen Tang from a hunted captive into the person who changes the entire balance of the rescue scene.