When Wen Jiuzhe sneaked into the Wen family to carry out some activities suspiciously resembling those of a villain, Xue Ling did not obediently stay in the car either.
The car wasn’t locked. She pushed the door open and got out directly, took a turn around the small courtyard, pressed herself against the wall and didn’t hear any movement outside, then immediately quickened her steps to push the door.
The courtyard gate was locked, but that was fine. She turned around, pushed the door to go inside, and came out from the door on the other side of the house.
Didn’t expect that, did you? She can open doors. Wen Jiuzhe, you were careless!
Xue Ling came onto the street and walked forward along the shadows cast by the houses.
After walking for a while, she saw a pharmacy with shattered glass doors, bent down and slipped inside through the broken doorway.
The shelves were almost all empty. Xue Ling wandered around casually, didn’t see what she was looking for, and had no choice but to turn around and go back out.
The apocalypse had started for so long now—if you were to say what was hardest to come by, it was definitely medicine. Little street-side pharmacies like this were the first to be completely cleaned out.
So she estimated that there was no way she would gain anything from this kind of small pharmacy.
At times like this, if there was anywhere that would still have the most complete supply of medicine—Xue Ling looked toward the large characters of Anxi Wenkang Hospital in the distance.
That would of course be the large hospitals packed full of zombies that no one dared to break into.
Fortunately it wasn’t particularly far, and Xue Ling didn’t have anything else to do anyway, so she decided to stroll over and look around while she was at it.
She had passed nearby just yesterday. Xue Ling came to the street in front of the hospital entrance again, this time seeing it more clearly. At a glance it was all heads—zombie density was very high.
A normal person would want to turn around and run the moment they saw it, but zombie Xue Ling—she could walk sideways through here.
After becoming a zombie, every time she crossed the street she walked sideways.
Of course, even if she wanted to crawl on the ground or hop along, no one would care.
Arriving at the main entrance of the hospital, the large iron gate was tightly locked, and there was also a large stretch of messy fencing in front.
Behind the gate, zombies were packed together shoulder to shoulder, heads crowding, countless hands reaching out through the gaps in the iron gate and waving outside.
For humans, a hospital like this was a dragon’s lair and tiger’s den; for Xue Ling, it was probably equivalent to a weekend supermarket—just a bit more crowded, that was all.
She had long since picked out the place to enter the hospital. Walking to the security booth, she swished and pushed open the glass window, climbing inside through it.
The security guard inside the booth swayed about in the cramped space, heard the movement and “looked” toward her.
Xue Ling picked up a baton from the ground that was covered in dust, braced it against the approaching security guard and pushed him away, taking that conspicuous flashlight from him.
Click, click.
She tested it and saw it still worked, so Xue Ling accepted it.
Twisting open the door of the security booth, she successfully entered the hospital. Of course, the first thing she faced was a large wave of zombies crowded near the entrance.
Xue Ling was already very accustomed to this feeling of moving through a zombie horde. Actually, it was pretty much the same as rushing to catch a train at the station during the New Year, or visiting popular attractions during holidays.
As fellow zombies, the zombies were not interested in her. It was just that zombies were sensitive to sound, so quite a few zombies still gathered over here as if joining in the excitement.
The instinct to join in the excitement was carved into their DNA—even after turning into zombies, they still hadn’t lost it.
Xue Ling forcibly squeezed gaps out of the zombie crowd. When it really didn’t work, she would randomly choose an unlucky zombie and smash his leg hard with the baton—knock one down and there would be a gap.
If you really had to say it, it was actually a bit easier than squeezing through tourist attractions. After all, the zombies she shoved aside wouldn’t curse at her or lose their tempers, and no one would take advantage of the chaos to grope her.
After successfully breaking through the patch of zombies at the entrance that could trigger trypophobia, Xue Ling slightly stiffened as she patted the ugly dress on her body.
Then she swayed her way deeper into the hospital.
The pharmacy, the pharmacy—where is it?
Based on her previous experience going to hospitals, picking up medicine should all be next to the payment hall.
She glanced at those mottled signboards and entered the emergency hall straight ahead.
The glass doors were locked, the lock half hanging, half falling off outside. Xue Ling took off the lock and pushed open the door that had been sealed for three years.
The zombies wandering inside were generally fresher than the ones outside that had been exposed to wind and rain for three years—at least their clothes weren’t as badly faded and tattered.
Xue Ling ignored all the surrounding zombies and naturally wove through the hall, lifting her head to look for the signboards.
A zombie beside her who wasn’t watching the road swayed over, about to bump into her. Xue Ling shifted her steps to let him pass, and also moved far away from him.
Nothing else—just because this zombie smelled especially bad.
Some zombies grew drier and drier, basically without much smell, but some zombies with more severely damaged bodies would rot and stink—this one was like that.
Anxi Wenkang Hospital was too big. This hospital was quite different from many public hospitals she had been to before. She searched for a long time and still didn’t find the pharmacy.
There was also no one she could ask for directions here, so she could only search slowly.
The hospital filled with zombies was abnormally quiet. Occasionally, if there was a bit of noise somewhere, it was always something that a randomly wandering zombie had accidentally knocked down.
A group of zombies, like sunflowers, uniformly turned their heads toward the direction where the sound came from. Not sensing the presence of humans, they turned their heads back again.
The light gradually dimmed, becoming a bit hard to see clearly. The hospital’s power supply system had long since broken down. There were no lights. Xue Ling clicked on the flashlight.
As the beam wavered, the hospital’s hallways became even more frightening. When the flashlight occasionally swept past, it illuminated faces of zombies—bluish, with varying degrees of damage—ghostly shadows everywhere.
Someone more timid, standing here, could be scared to death on the spot.
In the past, Xue Ling hadn’t been particularly brave either, but she had gotten used to it, and still calmly and intently searched for the pharmacy in this horror-movie-like environment.
Found it! In a good mood, she happily swung the flashlight, drawing a circle on the ceiling, then spent some effort entering the pharmacy.
Nurse ladies in uniform slowly walked by the medicine shelves, large patches of blood on the chests of their white uniforms already turned black.
Xue Ling walked a bit faster than them, bypassed several of them, and searched the shelves.
There was a lot of medicine here, all kinds of it. Xue Ling didn’t recognize most of them. She rummaged for medicines she was familiar with, and after finally finding some, checked the production date and expiration date—expired!
Could expired medicine still be taken now?
Xue Ling hesitated for a moment, then chose to keep searching. In the end, she did manage to find some medicine with shelf lives of more than three years that hadn’t yet expired.
Then she looked at the vast stretches of shelves.
Since she was already here, she might as well take more with her.
Although at the start she had only wanted to find one kind of medicine, it was just like going to the supermarket— even if at first you only plan to buy a bottle of soy sauce, when you leave the supermarket you’ll still be carrying a big bag of things.
Xue Ling pulled out a big bag from the dispensing counter window and began stocking up.
That night, both Xue Ling and Wen Jiuzhe gained quite a lot.
When it was almost dawn, Wen Jiuzhe climbed over the tall walls of the base and left the Qiuzhuang Base.
He didn’t go straight back to that small courtyard, but instead parked the motorcycle he had casually found as transportation on a stretch of wasteland, got off, and lit a cigarette.
Only a pale fish-belly white had appeared on the horizon, and the wind brushing past his cheeks in the wild still carried a bit of the coolness of night.
Wen Jiuzhe leaned against the bike. White smoke was slowly exhaled by him, then torn apart and pushed away by the wind.
He stared absently at the horizon, raised a hand, and rubbed his cheek.
Just now, he had repeatedly sought confirmation from Wen Xuan and Wen Xiang about the matter of Taisui.
What could be preliminarily confirmed was that Wen Xuan’s mutation was because of the Taisui that the Wen family had taken out of the ancestral tomb.
The Wen family’s eldest young miss, Wen Yi, who had left the Wen family around the same time as him three years ago, had indeed also taken away a portion of the Taisui.
But she hadn’t taken much—this was what Wen Jiuzhe inferred based on what Wen Xuan and the others said.
The remaining Taisui had been eaten by Wen Xuan. He had eaten a bit more than Xue Ling, and therefore his condition was better than Xue Ling’s.
Before leaving, Wen Jiuzhe considered for a moment whether to kill Wen Xuan.
In the end, he gave up.
Perhaps in this world only Wen Xuan’s situation was the same as Xue Ling’s. If Xue Ling’s abnormality were discovered, with Wen Xuan around, Xue Ling wouldn’t be the most dangerous one.
He thought of even more—if Xue Ling’s situation wasn’t as good as he imagined, he could still find a way to have someone study Wen Xuan. Perhaps a method could be found to make Xue Ling better.
So Wen Xuan couldn’t be dealt with for the time being.
But before he left, he had put Wen Xiang’s neck right next to Wen Xuan’s mouth.
It was time to test their sibling bond.
Whether Wen Xuan would bite Wen Xiang to keep his secret… that, he didn’t know.
He flicked off the ash from his cigarette and tugged at the corner of his mouth.
He couldn’t kill Wen Xuan for now, but he absolutely didn’t want to let him have it too easy.
On the road leaving Qiuzhuang, Wen Jiuzhe had once felt an urgent pull to return home. From the moment he heard about Taisui last night, he had really wanted to go back and ask Xue Ling, to ask whether she truly still had rationality.
But halfway through the drive, blowing in the night wind, that scalding emotion in his heart gradually cooled.
He calmly began to doubt what Wen Xuan had said in his mind. Had he really not lied?
Even though, in order to confirm it, he had repeatedly interrogated and threatened him until Wen Xuan was nearly driven to a breakdown, perhaps he had still lied?
Or was there a possibility that Wen Xuan’s abnormality was due to other reasons, not because of Taisui, and that Xue Ling was not as he had guessed, still possessing rationality?
What if he had guessed wrong?
His luck had been bad since he was young, making him feel that this time it was impossible for him to be this lucky as well.
Wen Jiuzhe thought expressionlessly, then took another deep drag on the cigarette. Leaning against the bike, he looked at the road he had come from, not getting back on to return for a long time.
Having gone a whole night without sleep, his dispirited and gloomy aura was tinged with weariness.
Twenty-four-year-old Wen Jiuzhe already looked like a mature man, full of charm.
But he had not been like this a few years ago.
At nineteen, the year he had just entered university, it was the most disheartened and destitute period of his life.
His mother’s illness worsened, and she lay in the Wen family’s hospital, needing emergency rescue at any moment.
Several times he had the thought of taking his mother away. Old Master Wen felt that he had come of age and wanted to break free of control, and so became even stricter in controlling him.
The Wen family had a vast estate, with companies spread across Anxi City and even Xia Province. On the surface, they had long since laundered themselves clean, but privately they still had some black industries. Old Master Wen was reluctant to let his eldest grandson, Wen Xuan, take over, and so wanted to cultivate Wen Jiuzhe to do it.
And in Wen Xuan’s view, Old Master Wen had begun to value this illegitimate son, so he found him even more displeasing to the eye, and the frequency with which he made trouble for him gradually increased.
Changing his university and major was both humiliation and warning.
Wen Jiuzhe was unable to resist. Even though he could strangle that useless Wen Xuan with one hand, when the other swung clubs at him, he still could not fight back.
Old Master Wen hoped he would be a docile dog for the Wen family. From the time he entered the Wen family at twelve, he had been grinding down his temperament, and after several years, was still not very satisfied with him.
With Old Master Wen’s indulgence, Wen Xuan’s treatment of him only intensified.
Sometimes when Wen Jiuzhe saw Wen Xuan’s face, a surge of vicious anger surged up in his heart that he could not suppress.
Because he disliked Wen Xuan, he was also disgusted with Xue Ling at the beginning.
Something that trash like Wen Xuan could set his sights on—could it be anything good?
He knew of the person “Xue Ling” far earlier than Xue Ling knew him.
At first, it was from hearing Wen Xuan discuss her with others.
Wen Xuan said, “It’s that Xue Ling from the external liaison department of the neighboring teachers’ college. I like this type.”
“These girls nowadays, one by one, have no self-respect. What? That Yang Siwei from the arts department? That one won’t do—too seductive-looking, not suitable for marriage…”
“You don’t understand anything. Just wait. As long as I want to chase her, it’ll definitely be easy.”
He often talked about Xue Ling, between the lines full of confidence that victory was assured.
He had always been like this since childhood—whatever he set his eyes on, he had to get it, as if the entire world should revolve around him.
At one event, Wen Jiuzhe saw the Xue Ling Wen Xuan spoke of.
She had delicate features, was not very tall, and her temperament gave people a gentle feeling with no sense of aggression.
Guarding the entrance to the event venue, she patiently answered everyone’s questions, helped people with directions, and handed out water.
Her colleague slipped away halfway and asked her to guard it alone. She frowned with difficulty, yet still agreed, staying there the whole time in the sweltering heat.
She looked soft and lacking in any personality at all, more irritating than he had imagined, Wen Jiuzhe thought.
