Wen Jiuzhe’s hand covered the box of allergy medicine, but his eyes did not blink as he stared at Xue Ling.
Her head was resting against the car window. The skirt he had changed her into spread out over the seat; looking closely, there were some faint gray marks and stains on it.
She had gone to look for medicine for him. She still had reason. She still remembered him—
Wen Jiuzhe’s breathing suddenly stalled. The pulling uncertainty from last night until now, the pain he felt upon seeing Xue Ling turned into a zombie after three years apart, the hopelessness bred from searching over those three years… at this moment, all of it roared away.
Only one thought remained: hold her.
He climbed into the back seat, his whole body pressing down on Xue Ling, enclosing her completely in his arms.
Master Xue, who had been exhausted from stocking goods all night and was curled up quietly resting in the car, was startled by the man who suddenly got in, said nothing, and squeezed over.
She had already been curled into a corner; now Wen Jiuzhe squeezed her tightly against the car window and the seatback.
He was using a great deal of force. She felt like she was about to be squashed into a flat pancake. Fortunately, she was a zombie now and didn’t need to breathe, otherwise she might have suffocated.
Xue Ling felt that he didn’t seem satisfied with merely squeezing her into a pancake. He reached out and hauled her into his arms again, hugging her tightly. His hand unconsciously searched at the back of her head, as if constantly confirming something.
The palm firmly pressed against her back radiated astonishing heat, still pushing her forward hard.
Before Xue Ling even reacted, her head had already come to rest against Wen Jiuzhe’s neck.
This position was so dangerous! If she opened her mouth, she could bite straight into his neck. Even if Wen Jiuzhe reacted quickly, it would be too late to stop it.
But right now, he didn’t look very clear-headed either. Probably even if she bit down, he wouldn’t dodge.
Xue Ling, who could now only move her head, thought.
Her chest was quiet and still; the heart that once beat there had long since stopped. But at this moment, in the chest pressed tightly against hers, Wen Jiuzhe’s heart was beating very fast, so fast she could feel it clearly.
His breathing was also rapid, occasionally stopping for a moment, as if he were doing his utmost to restrain emotions that were too intense.
Every reaction from Wen Jiuzhe was telling her that he was very agitated.
Xue Ling had never seen him like this. No matter what he encountered, he was always calm, indifferent, wearing that insolent look of someone who never knew what fear was.
Xue Ling remembered that once, they went to ride a cable car. Halfway through, the cable car suddenly stopped due to a malfunction, suspended for a long time a thousand meters up in the air.
The mountain wind was fierce, rocking the cable car back and forth. Everyone inside had gone pale with fright. One person cried and asked, “We’re not going to fall, are we?”
Only Wen Jiuzhe still looked half-asleep. He yawned, reached out to her, pulled her entirely into his arms, and pressed her face against his chest.
“If you’re scared, don’t look down. Nothing will happen.” He said it casually, and in the end even rested his chin on top of her head and fell asleep, because that day she had dragged him out of bed at four thirty in the morning to queue for the cable car.
At that time, his heartbeat had been steady, beating in a regular rhythm.
Not like now, so rapid.
Xue Ling hadn’t expected him to react so intensely. After all, a few days ago, when he suddenly saw her on the street, he hadn’t been this agitated either. He could still calmly, smilingly greet her and talk to her.
Had he gone out just now and been stimulated by something else?
Xue Ling forced her head back, moving a little farther from Wen Jiuzhe’s neck, wanting to see what expression he had now, but his palm pressed her back again.
Xue Ling… Xue Ling waited for a long time, until she was getting a bit impatient, before Wen Jiuzhe finally let go of her.
He stared into her eyes and slowly asked, “You still remember me, don’t you?”
Xue Ling hadn’t planned to hide it after helping him get the allergy medicine. Pretending to be a dumb zombie all the time was a bit suffocating, but she also didn’t want to admit it so easily.
Anyway, she was a zombie and couldn’t talk, so she kept quiet, with no response.
Wen Jiuzhe asked again, his voice lower and gentler this time, his burning fingertips brushing away a speck of ash on her face.
Xue Ling’s gaze shifted away, refusing to meet his eyes.
Wen Jiuzhe suddenly leaned forward, resting his head lightly against her shoulder. In this posture, he looked as if he were showing weakness, and his voice was the same.
“Are you angry… talk to me a bit, Sister Ling.”
Xue Ling: “……”
Oh, oh, oh, listen to that—what is Big Shot calling me now?
She was a year older than him, but before he’d always just called her by name, stubbornly refusing to use anything nicer. Now he knew how to open his mouth.
Xue Ling curled her fingers and used the gaps between them to hook Wen Jiuzhe’s ear, yanking it hard.
Wen Jiuzhe held her and laughed softly. “You really are still here.”
Xue Ling sat on his lap, held by him as he gently swayed her left and right twice.
That steaming, very human scent, and that steaming neck, swayed right back to her mouth again.
Opening her palm and pressing it against his neck, Xue Ling firmly pushed his neck and head away together.
What difference is there between this and eating barbecue right in front of me while I’m dieting?!
There was a time when Xue Ling wanted to lose weight. She ate very little at night and absolutely didn’t eat anything after eight.
Then Wen Jiuzhe started bringing back late-night snacks every day. That aroma seeped in everywhere, forcibly tempting Xue Ling into giving up dieting. In the end, she didn’t even last two days.
Thinking of that, Xue Ling tugged at Wen Jiuzhe’s hair again.
His hair was a bit coarse, with a bit of natural curl, and messy from lack of care.
That head of messy hair unconsciously rubbed against her for a while.
When she was finally released, the sun outside had already risen high.
The car was stuffy. Xue Ling sat under a tree in the yard. Wen Jiuzhe disappeared for a moment, then came back with a small blackboard from somewhere.
The kind that’s placed at the front of small street shops, usually with recommended drinks written on it.
He probably wanted her to use writing to communicate with him. Xue Ling moved her stiff fingers.
Making a curling, grasping motion was fine, but holding a pen and writing wasn’t very convenient.
Looking at the small blackboard placed in front of her, along with a box of colored chalk, Xue Ling didn’t want to move.
Wen Jiuzhe squatted in front of her, bracing the small blackboard and saying, “If you can’t talk, do you still remember how to write?”
Who doesn’t know how to write?!
To prove herself, Xue Ling raised her hand, grabbed a piece of chalk, and slowly began to write on the small blackboard.
The first character: you
After writing it, she felt it looked ugly, and she’d written it very large—one character alone took up half the small blackboard. Xue Ling fell silent for a moment, then continued writing on the other half.
The second character: are
“I am…” Wen Jiuzhe raised his hand and wiped away the two characters that filled the blackboard, letting her continue writing, and made a guess, “How did I know you still have self-awareness? What am I here in Anxi City for?”
Xue Ling wrote the third character, stroke by stroke, slow but firm—and it was also the last one: dog
As that character gradually took shape, Wen Jiuzhe also fell silent for a moment.
Then he suddenly chuckled lightly, wearing a completely unconcerned expression. “Fine, I’m a dog, woof woof woof.”
If he were the type to care about this kind of painless scolding, he wouldn’t have lived this long.
Xue Ling: “……”
Wen Jiuzhe: “Write something else. Anything is fine, even if it’s to scold me.”
He wanted to communicate with her; there were still many things he wanted to say.
Xue Ling dropped the chalk, stood up, stiffly pulled open the car door, then walked back over and smashed the box of allergy medicine he’d forgotten straight into his face.
Wen Jiuzhe’s smile froze for a moment, then returned to normal. He tore off a tablet and tossed it into his mouth.
“All right, I took it.”
Xue Ling cared about him. Every time he realized this, he would feel an inexplicable pain.
This time was no different.
He swallowed the pill, then suddenly leaned over and kissed Xue Ling on the cheek.
Xue Ling’s eyes immediately widened; it really wasn’t easy for her to show such an obvious look of shock with a zombie’s face.
She stared at him for a moment with an indescribable expression, then took the chalk on her own initiative and wrote on the small blackboard: I am a zombie!!!
Those thick exclamation marks conveyed the author’s sense of shock.
“You’re a zombie, I know. So what?” Wen Jiuzhe said with a smiling face.
Xue Ling immediately wrote on the freshly wiped blackboard: Are you crazy?
Wen Jiuzhe seriously recalled for a moment and said, “It’s possible. My mental state hasn’t been very good lately.”
He was becoming more and more impatient with everyone and everything. Before finding Xue Ling, he already needed to suppress the irritation in his heart just to listen to people talk.
Xue Ling went back to rummage through the car. She dragged out a large bag from under the modified car seat.
Seeing the words Anxi Wenkan Hospital on the bag, Wen Jiuzhe finally understood where she had gone to get medicine for him.
Xue Ling rustled around in the bag for a while and found two medicine boxes.
Wen Jiuzhe took them and looked—psychiatric medications for treating mania, depression, bipolar disorder… She’d brought quite a complete set.
Wen Jiuzhe didn’t take them. He felt that his current state was very good, extremely good—better than every single day of the past three years.
Gathered around that small blackboard, Xue Ling gradually wrote a bunch of messy things with no real content or substantive meaning.
Whenever Wen Jiuzhe teased her, she would want to write something back in retaliation, having already forgotten the fact that she hadn’t wanted to write at all in the beginning.
Most of the time, Wen Jiuzhe rested his cheek on his hand and watched Xue Ling slowly write. He wasn’t in a hurry at all, and would even helpfully wipe the small blackboard clean in time—but occasionally he would start wiping before Xue Ling had finished writing.
Xue Ling, who had finally managed to write half of a complicated character: “……”
At a glance, it was obvious he was doing it on purpose, his hands getting itchy again.
Even knowing he was doing it on purpose, she still got angry just as he wished—snapping two sticks of chalk against the small blackboard, and snapping three sticks of chalk against him.
“You don’t have to write overly complicated characters. Leaving them blank is fine, I can guess on my own,” Wen Jiuzhe kindly suggested.
You can guess? Can you really guess it? Xue Ling was unconvinced.
Then somehow it turned into a fill-in-the-blanks sentence, and she deliberately left out characters.
A nine-character sentence—Xue Ling left out four characters and let him guess.
Aren’t you so capable? Guess, then!
“You □ last night □ chickens □ dogs □ didn’t……” Wen Jiuzhe pondered. “Did I sneak around stealing chickens and dogs last night?”
He actually guessed it right! But Xue Ling immediately shook her head to indicate it was wrong.
“All right, I didn’t guess it. Then do you want to know what I went to do last night?” Wen Jiuzhe asked.
Under Xue Ling’s unblinking stare, Wen Jiuzhe lowered his eyelids. “I went to check on the remaining relatives.”
“Even though they weren’t good to me, knowing that they’re doing fine puts my mind at ease.”
The Wen siblings who were nearly chopped up: ?
Xue Ling felt that he looked a bit sad, so she started writing on the blackboard again, steering the topic away from something that made him sad.
The chalk scraped against the small blackboard, squeak squeak. After getting used to writing with chalk, her handwriting grew smaller and smaller, enough to finish an entire sentence.
She wrote: I don’t □ why I □ with □ zombies not □
Wen Jiuzhe read through it character by character and slowly guessed, “You don’t know why you’re different from the other zombies?”
