After turning into a zombie who retained her rationality, and realizing her own peculiarity, Xue Ling had thought about the reason why countless times.
But to her, this question was as unsolvable as why the zombie outbreak happened, or why the apocalypse arrived.
When she lay in the roadside wild grass watching the stars, Xue Ling had thought—could it be that at some unknown time she had been exposed to radiation, and that was why she mutated?
When she sat under an abandoned roadside melon shed sheltering from the rain, Xue Ling thought again—was it possible that, like Spider-Man, she had been bitten by some virus-carrying insect and so became Zombie-Man?
When walking alone on a long, deserted highway, Xue Ling pondered—could it be that she was actually some kind of laboratory product, that her past experiences had all been artificially implanted, that everything was fake?!
When she stood under a park tree staring blankly at wandering members of her own kind, Xue Ling’s thoughts scattered to novels she had once read—had she actually awakened a superpower? The kind where, after being infected by zombies, one could still retain rationality!
From there she imagined all the way to the idea that she might be the key to ending the zombie virus, that a special antibody capable of eliminating the zombie virus could be extracted from her body.
One day, researchers in white lab coats would capture her and take her into a laboratory—wasn’t that how all kinds of novels and movies played it out?
And yet now Wen Jiuzhe was saying so lightly that he knew the reason.
…You know the reason? Why do you know the reason? I don’t even know—how do you know?
Xue Ling had that doubt again: exactly who is the zombie here, you or me?
She looked at Wen Jiuzhe; Wen Jiuzhe looked at her. The two of them stared wide-eyed at each other in silence for a while.
Just as Xue Ling couldn’t hold back anymore and was about to pounce over and vigorously shake his shoulders, Wen Jiuzhe spoke. He said, “It’s because you ate Taisui.”
“What is ‘Taisui’?” Xue Ling wrote the pinyin on the little blackboard.
To be fair, for a zombie to write these crooked, uneven letters was even more strenuous—and uglier—than writing Chinese characters.
Under her pinyin, Wen Jiuzhe wrote the two characters “太岁.”
Xue Ling looked at those two characters and suspected that Wen Jiuzhe was messing with her.
The last time she’d seen the words Taisui seemed to have been in a fantasy movie.
It said that Taisui was one of the raw materials Qin Shi Huang used to make an elixir of immortality, capable of reviving the dead and regrowing flesh on bare bones—of course that was artistic fabrication from fantasy works, pure nonsense!
Xue Ling cast Wen Jiuzhe a contemptuous look, feeling that what he’d made up was even more outrageous than all the things she herself had imagined.
She drew another question mark on the little blackboard, expressing her doubt and wanting to hear how he planned to keep making things up.
Xue Ling guessed that Wen Jiuzhe would, like countless times before, throw out a hook and then refuse to say the rest, deliberately making her anxious.
Speaking only halfway through was this bastard’s old habit.
But this time Wen Jiuzhe surprisingly didn’t relapse. He looked at the two characters on the little blackboard, his tone very even:
“Three years ago, the Wen family once took something out of the ancestral grave. After identifying it, Old Master Wen believed it was Taisui, and a very rare and special kind at that. I took some of the Taisui back with me, and by sheer accident, you ate it.”
This sounded a bit too real. Xue Ling hugged the little blackboard again and drew another question mark, wanting to ask when she had ever eaten that thing.
She wrote “what” and hadn’t yet had time to write “time” when Wen Jiuzhe guessed her question and said, “I put it in the refrigerator, wrapped in gold paper. You ate it. Do you remember?”
With Wen Jiuzhe’s reminder, Xue Ling remembered.
That was not long before they broke up, around the time of Qixi.
That weekend, she was off work, and Xue Ling slept until nearly noon before crawling out of bed. She had low blood sugar at the time; when she got up, her whole head was spinning and her vision swam, so she opened the refrigerator to look for something to eat to tide herself over.
At the time, there was only bottled water and raw leafy greens in the refrigerator. Xue Ling was feeling terribly unwell when she suddenly spotted a round ball wrapped in gold paper hanging on the refrigerator’s side rack.
That packaging looked exactly like a certain brand of chocolate.
She didn’t remember putting that thing into the refrigerator herself—then it must have been Wen Jiuzhe who did. The two of them had been living together for several months already, and he often put fruits, drinks, and snacks into the fridge.
Could this chocolate be Qixi chocolate he bought for her? And he only bought one?
Xue Ling was feeling awful and didn’t think much about it. She peeled open the gold paper of the “chocolate,” saw that the thing inside was black and round, and stuffed it into her mouth and ate it.
At first she didn’t taste anything. She chewed and swallowed it, and only then did an indescribable bitterness belatedly well up. Xue Ling, who just a moment ago had felt like she was about to faint, was instantly jolted awake by the bitterness.
She clutched her chest, feeling miserable and dry-heaving. She couldn’t throw up no matter how hard she tried, and only after drinking two cups of water did she manage to suppress that bitterness that felt like it was about to flip her skull open.
She finally realized that it wasn’t chocolate. Pinching the gold paper from the wrapping, she suspected that she might have eaten some kind of bruise ointment Wen Jiuzhe had put in the fridge.
Just then, Wen Jiuzhe came back. When he saw the gold paper in her hand, he showed a strange expression.
“You ate what was inside?”
Seeing his expression at the time, Xue Ling’s heart immediately began to pound. “What is it? Is it not something you can eat?”
Wen Jiuzhe’s expression then was more serious than ever before. He frowned so hard that he frightened Xue Ling, who hurriedly and nervously asked him what it actually was.
Wen Jiuzhe fell silent for a moment before speaking with a grave expression: “That was dog shit I picked up by the roadside.”
Xue Ling: “……”
You look like dog shit!
The solemn look on Wen Jiuzhe’s face suddenly loosened, and that infuriating smile appeared again. He walked over, took the gold paper—still smeared with a bit of black residue—from her hand, and put it away.
“All right. What was inside was actually a kind of wild fungus. A friend gave it to me, for pranking people… how did you actually eat it?”
“You put it in the fridge on purpose just to mess with me, didn’t you?” Xue Ling demanded.
Wen Jiuzhe merely smiled nonchalantly, without explaining.
Later, he forcibly took her to the hospital for an especially thorough examination. At the time, Xue Ling even felt that he was making a big deal out of nothing.
And because of his overly serious attitude, Xue Ling once again suspected that what she had eaten might be poisonous. Just as she was starting to get nervous, Wen Jiuzhe said that doing such a detailed examination was to see whether her frequent anger had caused her to develop breast cancer.
In the end, the examination results showed that everything was normal, with no problems at all, and the matter was put aside.
Only now did Xue Ling understand why Wen Jiuzhe had reacted that way back then.
…After being a zombie for three years, she had even suspected that the meteorite she saw at the astronomy museum as a child might have had radiation, but she had never suspected Wen Jiuzhe.
Xue Ling pinched the chalk, feeling at a loss for words.
Wen Jiuzhe said, “It was only after I went back this time that I found out the Taisui you ate had a problem. Basically, that’s the reason.”
He looked calm, but his hand kept fiddling with a piece of chalk, rubbing his fingers white.
If Xue Ling wasn’t mistaken, he might be feeling uneasy?
Did he think that she would blame him?
After becoming like this, Xue Ling had, of course, suffered.
But she knew that if she hadn’t become this kind of peculiar existence, and instead had been an ordinary zombie, she might now be wandering around familiar places, eating relatives and friends, or other people she knew, without even being aware of it.
Compared to that, this was still better.
Speaking reasonably, she should even thank Wen Jiuzhe.
But! With Wen Jiuzhe, she didn’t need to be reasonable!
So Xue Ling, bristling with momentum, hammered Wen Jiuzhe a few times, pounding his arm until it turned red.
After venting her anger, she wrote “xie xie” on the little blackboard. The Chinese characters for “thank you” were too complicated—she didn’t want to write them.
Receiving a thank-you, Wen Jiuzhe’s expression was extremely complicated. He finally released the piece of chalk and smiled like he didn’t actually want to smile, so it looked a bit ugly.
“You actually said thank you to me.”
Because Xue Ling always felt that being alive was still better than being dead. Even though her body was dead now, wasn’t her soul still not dead? That was still better than everything being dead, right?
To be honest, Xue Ling now felt especially relaxed.
It was the kind of satisfaction that came from a reasoning problem she’d been pondering for a long time finally getting an answer—no longer needing to dwell on it, no longer needing to struggle with it from time to time.
There was also a tiny bit of disappointment—it wasn’t an awakening of superpowers, nor an alien experiment!
Mutating because of accidentally eating the legendary Taisui taken out of a grave—this was way too localized. It made her now not want to call herself a zombie, but want to call herself a jiangshi.
Suddenly, inspiration struck Xue Ling. She scribbled rapidly on the little blackboard: “Is there anyone else like me?”
Wen Jiuzhe must have seen it—otherwise, how could he be so certain?
“Who?” Xue Ling was still writing the complicated character for “who” when Wen Jiuzhe folded his arms and turned his head away.
He didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to mention the name “Wen Xuan” in front of Xue Ling.
Seeing her ask so urgently made him even more unwilling to say it.
She wouldn’t think that Wen Xuan and she were in similar situations, that they were on the same side, would she?
Wen Jiuzhe snorted in disdain.
Seeing him lazily holding his arms and not speaking, Xue Ling raised her hand and pushed him. Wen Jiuzhe wiped the little blackboard clean in front of her.
Xue Ling: “?”
She carefully observed the expression on Wen Jiuzhe’s face and suddenly understood.
Whenever she mentioned Wen Xuan before, he would be unhappy, putting on an annoyed, arrogant face, because he really disliked Wen Xuan and didn’t like others bringing him up—so could it really be such a coincidence?
Xue Ling tried writing the character “煊 (Xuan)” on the blackboard.
Before she finished writing it, Wen Jiuzhe wiped it away. His smile was faint. “Writing just a single ‘xuan’ character by itself—doesn’t that look a bit too intimate?”
Xue Ling was speechless. Writing was already so difficult for a zombie; as long as he knew who it referred to, wasn’t that enough? And yet he still insisted on her writing it out fully.
She threw the chalk in her hand at Wen Jiuzhe. He tilted his head to dodge it and said, “That’s right, it was him. But he’s already dead. There’s no need to go see him.”
Xue Ling hadn’t planned to go see him anyway. She was just confirming it—so there really had been someone else like her. Then could there be even more people like her?
Xue Ling’s mood improved because of this news, but Wen Jiuzhe’s mood was not so wonderful.
They drove away from that place. Along the way, Wen Jiuzhe often looked ahead with a contemplative expression. Xue Ling sat in the front passenger seat, the two seatbelts on her body having become one.
The window was open, hot air from outside blowing in. Xue Ling saw scenery familiar to her, and scenery unfamiliar to her, but she could tell—they were on the road leaving Anxi City.
In her arms she held a plastic children’s magnetic drawing board that Wen Jiuzhe had somehow found somewhere. This one was lighter and cleaner than the little blackboard.
She pried the pen out of the groove on the side, wrote the two characters “where to,” and held it up toward Wen Jiuzhe.
Wen Jiuzhe glanced at it and instead asked, “Why aren’t you making any sounds now?”
Before, she would often let out bursts of zombie roars, but after being exposed, she no longer liked to roar.
Xue Ling: “……”
Asking even though he knew the answer—didn’t she need to save face? Now that everyone knew she still had rationality, if she kept making such ugly noises, she would feel embarrassed too!
Wen Jiuzhe said, “Don’t burden yourself. If you want to roar, just roar. Your voice is deep now, quite imposing, like a fierce tiger descending the mountain.”
The black modified car driving along Anxi City’s national highway suddenly swerved on the road, weaving out an S-shaped path.
