Wen Jiuzhe only stopped to rest after driving the car out of Anxi City’s limits and finding a spot in the outskirts.
Driving for a long time easily led to fatigue. Wen Jiuzhe sat by a clear roadside stream and washed his face to wake himself up. Feeling sticky all over, he simply took off his T-shirt as well, tossed it into the water to soak it, and used it as a towel to wipe the sweat from his neck and chest.
The weather was still very hot now, and sitting in the car had made him sweat all over.
As he wiped his body, he was constructing the next driving route in his mind.
From Wen Xiang, he had learned that her older sister, Wen Yi, had left the Wen family during the chaotic early days of the apocalypse and gone to Andong City.
Wen Yi’s university and job had both been in Andong City, and she had even found a boyfriend there. It was very possible that she was still there now.
Andong City was right next to Yu City. When Wen Jiuzhe had been active near Yu City before, he had heard that Andong City also had a base.
So he planned to take Xue Ling to that base in Andong City to take a look, to see if he could find Wen Yi and obtain the Taisui from her.
But Wen Jiuzhe also knew very well that this hope was slim.
After so long, Wen Yi might not even be alive anymore. Even if she were alive, the Taisui she had taken back then might not still exist.
If he were lucky enough, Wen Yi might not have used the Taisui yet—but even then, it was uncertain whether that thing would still be useful to the current Xue Ling.
Nothing could be confirmed.
Wen Jiuzhe did not want to tell Xue Ling about this so early.
He knew better than anyone how agonizing it was to search while clinging to hope, only to be disappointed again and again. It was better to not hold any hope from the beginning and know nothing.
Wen Jiuzhe’s wet hair dripped water, some of it running down his chin onto his broad chest, some sliding along the back of his neck into the groove of his back.
Large and small old scars were scattered across his smooth, well-shaped muscles, making him look especially sharp and dangerous.
Amid the splashing sound of water, Wen Jiuzhe caught the sound of footsteps behind him. He twisted the T-shirt in his hands and turned his head to look.
Xue Ling was carrying her writing board, strolling over as if nothing were wrong, her eyes fixed straight on his waist.
There was an especially long scar on Wen Jiuzhe’s waist.
Last time, Xue Ling had wanted to ask about it, but when she saw it then she was still pretending to be an amnesiac zombie, so it was inconvenient to ask. She could only pretend she hadn’t seen it.
“You want to wash too?” Wen Jiuzhe curved his eyes, raised a hand to wipe his neck, and asked.
Xue Ling shook her head and slowly raised the writing board toward him.
On it were written “waist, wound,” and a question mark.
Wen Jiuzhe glanced at the old wound on his own waist and said with a smile, “Oh, this one. I got slashed once when I was fighting someone before.”
After saying that, he added another sentence as if to scare her, “My intestines even spilled out back then.”
That stiff zombie face of Xue Ling’s slowly wrinkled. Thinking of that terrifying scene, she walked over, squatted down, and touched the scar on his waist.
Her hand was cold, without the slightest warmth, seeming even cooler than the water in the stream.
Wen Jiuzhe grabbed her hand. Speaking of scars, he also had something he wanted to ask.
He tossed aside the T-shirt in his hand, and Wen Jiuzhe suddenly pressed Xue Ling down to sit on a large rock, lifting up her skirt.
Xue Ling was startled by his movement. After freezing for a moment, she suddenly jumped up, panic-stricken, clutching her skirt as she ran outward, not even bothering with the writing board in her hand, which fell to the side.
She ran to a place some distance away from Wen Jiuzhe, her eyes filled with terror.
Wen Jiuzhe: “……”
Seeing that Wen Jiuzhe did not move, she slowly, as if approaching a dangerous creature, lowered her body and cautiously moved closer, grabbed the writing board in one motion, and ran off. From quite a distance away, she swiped out a few words and held them up for him to see.
“No! It’ll infect!”
With a swipe she erased the words, then wrote again: “Calm down!”
Her writing speed was fast, almost catching up to a normal person’s speed.
What did she think he was going to do? Wen Jiuzhe was both annoyed and amused. In Xue Ling’s eyes, he really seemed to have become a lunatic.
“I didn’t plan to do anything, I just wanted to ask about those injuries on your body—what happened to them,” Wen Jiuzhe said. “Come here.”
Holding up the board, Xue Ling was half-believing, half-doubting. If it were an ordinary person, she wouldn’t be this suspicious, but Wen Jiuzhe’s behavior was just too deranged.
He could sleep while holding a zombie without caring at all, and even kiss her face. What if he really could do something as crazy as sleeping with a zombie? With his ahead-of-the-times mental state, it wasn’t impossible!
He also refused to take the medicine she brought back. Truly worrying the zombie.
Finally coaxing her over, Wen Jiuzhe lifted her skirt and pointed at the place on her thigh where a chunk of flesh was missing. “How did you get hurt here?”
Last time, when he helped bathe her, Wen Jiuzhe had already noticed that she had several injuries on her body. Wherever a zombie had damage, it was shriveled—there was no bleeding and no scabbing, just a dry, tight surface.
At the time, as he wiped those wounds, he had really wanted to ask Xue Ling when exactly they had appeared.
But zombies were ignorant and unfeeling; even if he asked, she wouldn’t give him any answer. So he merely kept silent, pretended that everything was fine, washed her, dressed her, and covered those wounds.
“This injury—was a piece of flesh scraped off?” Wen Jiuzhe’s fingers lightly wiped over it. “Who did it, a zombie, or a person?”
Wrong guess. Neither.
Xue Ling didn’t know how to answer. A faint sense of embarrassment spread in her heart.
Wasn’t she already a zombie? Ordinary bumps and falls wouldn’t kill her and wouldn’t hurt, so she got a little carried away. For a period of time, whenever she saw something, she wanted to try it out and play with it.
Once, by the roadside, she saw a motorcycle that no one wanted. That bike’s design was way too cool, and the key was still stuck in it.
She thought: I never rode this kind of motorcycle when I was alive, so after dying, I’ll experience it!
She also happened to not really want to walk anymore, so she decided to ride this motorcycle away.
But she overestimated herself. She excitedly got on, and in the end that cool motorcycle was smashed to pieces by her, and a chunk of flesh was scraped off her leg.
Seeing the pain on Wen Jiuzhe’s face from his guesses, and the faint trace of ferocity, as if he was about to find someone to settle accounts with, Xue Ling didn’t dare tell the truth.
Because of Xue Ling’s silence, Wen Jiuzhe reached for another wound on her shoulder.
“And here—this was from a bullet, right? Do you still remember who shot you?”
She did remember, but that guy had been dead for a long time already.
Xue Ling grew even more embarrassed. Back when she had just become a zombie, she quite liked joining in the excitement. When zombies sensed human presence, they would swarm over, and when she got bored, she also liked to crowd in and see what was going on.
That guy trapped in the car, surrounded by zombies, was big and burly, yet he cried with snot and tears streaming down his face, holding a gun that trembled and trembled.
The gun wasn’t very good, and he didn’t look like he knew how to use it either. Possibly from being scared, he fired wildly out the car window.
Xue Ling was just that unlucky. She was craning her head on the outermost edge to look inside, stood on a rock to see more clearly, and then got hit by the wildly flailing gun of that big brother.
Aside from her, not a single real zombie present was injured.
“Back then, when you were hit—were you scared?” Wen Jiuzhe asked in a low voice.
Xue Ling: “……”
To be honest, the one who was scared back then was the guy who fired the gun. She was too busy feeling depressed.
She ran off to the side, figured out a way to dig the bullet out of her shoulder. When she went back to look, that guy was already so terrified that he had committed suicide, using the gun to kill himself.
After things like that happened too many times, once Xue Ling sensed human presence, she stopped going over to join the excitement.
Now that Wen Jiuzhe was asking like this, how was she supposed to answer? Saying it out loud would feel very disrespectful to his sorrowful emotions.
“You don’t want to say anything because… thinking about it makes you feel bad?”
It did feel bad, but not the kind of bad you’re imagining.
Xue Ling wanted to escape. She raised the board: “Explaining, troublesome.”
Explaining it would be troublesome.
“Alright, I won’t ask anymore.” Wen Jiuzhe had clearly imagined another tragic experience for her. His thumb rubbed over the bullet hole on her shoulder.
There had originally been a red old scar there. Now, with the bullet hole overlapping it, there was an extra small hole, making it even uglier.
Wen Jiuzhe stared at that spot. Xue Ling remembered that back when the two of them were intimate, he often kissed that spot on her shoulder.
That red old scar on her shoulder had been left when she was very young.
That was back when her mother hadn’t divorced her father yet. Her mother went to work every day. Her father didn’t work, but often went out to play cards with people.
Once, her mother had to go on a one-day business trip and asked her father to take care of her. In the end, her father stayed out all night playing cards and forgot her at home by herself.
She was young at the time. Hungry and thirsty at home, she went to pour herself some water to drink. The hot water got hooked down from the table by her and splashed onto her shoulder, leaving a large burn.
It wasn’t until the next day, when her mother came home and discovered it, that she was taken to the hospital, and in the end this scar was left behind.
This was also one of the triggers for her parents’ divorce. She still remembered being in the hospital, crying in pain, while her parents argued outside the door.
“You’re the woman—taking care of the child is your responsibility in the first place. What kind of household has a grown man taking care of children? Now that something’s happened, you still have the nerve to blame me?”
“I told you not to go out to work, to honestly stay at home and watch the child, hurry up and give me another son. You refused no matter what. How much money can you make going out to work? It’s not even enough for me to lose in one round of cards.”
“Enough, I’m too lazy to argue with you. It’s just a burn, it’s not some big deal. You keep arguing and arguing without end…”
For a long time, that wound on her shoulder truly hurt terribly.
Her parents arguing, filing for divorce, moving with her mother, finding a new job… the wound on her shoulder repeatedly broke open along with it, taking a long time before it finally healed.
In this regard, being a zombie was much better than being human. Whether a large chunk of flesh was scraped off, or a bullet hit her body, she wouldn’t feel pain—at most, it just looked a bit ugly.
During the period when she was most intimate with Wen Jiuzhe, he had also asked her how the old scar on her shoulder came to be.
At the time, she didn’t have a language impairment, but she also didn’t tell him in detail. She only said it was a burn left from being splashed with hot water when she was little.
In truth, Wen Jiuzhe had far more scars on his body than she did. She felt embarrassed to say things to him that might seem like she was selling misery.
Back then, after hearing it, Wen Jiuzhe lowered his head and kissed her scar, just like now—
Xue Ling: “!”
She scrambled away from Wen Jiuzhe, rolling and crawling, pulled her clothes straight, then hurriedly raised the board: “Didn’t you say just looking?!”
“Control your mouth!”
Wen Jiuzhe: “……No.”
He stood up, deliberately squinted his eyes and opened his arms, striding forward. “I’m coming.”
Xue Ling was so frightened she turned and ran. Before long, Wen Jiuzhe caught her. She held up the board and wailed, “Aooo aooo aooo aooo aooo!”
Wen Jiuzhe was broken by her cries and burst out laughing, his face buried in her shoulder, trembling nonstop.
Xue Ling raised the plastic writing board and banged it wildly against his head.
By the time Wen Jiuzhe put that half-dry T-shirt back on and returned to the car, he no longer seemed preoccupied with those wounds on Xue Ling’s body.
A secret: sometimes, when Wen Jiuzhe noticed Xue Ling was unhappy, he would deliberately tease her to make her mood improve.
