Three years ago, the time the two of them went traveling together, they went to Lanba City.
At the time there were two options: one was Lanba City, the other was Yuanhu City. Xue Ling hesitated for a long time, and in the end chose Lanba City.
Xue Ling’s thinking at the time was that there might be fewer tourists in Lanba City than in Yuanhu City, so it wouldn’t be too crowded.
Who would have thought that that year there would be so many people traveling to Lanba City!
Not only did they encounter a malfunction on the cable car, after coming down the mountain and going to another attraction, at the Ten-Thousand-People Square they were squeezed by a sea of people until they couldn’t move, submerged in the crowd, and were shoved for nearly two hours before finally walking out of that street.
That time was the first time in Xue Ling’s life that she discovered she was actually afraid of crowds.
It was right at the cross street, with black masses of heads on all sides, stretching endlessly as far as the eye could see.
The surging crowd was packed tight; Xue Ling nearly fainted from being squeezed.
Wen Jiuzhe stood behind her. Hearing her say with a look of despair that she was about to be unable to breathe, he suddenly raised an eyebrow, lifted his arm, and hoisted her up.
Sitting on Wen Jiuzhe’s shoulders, Xue Ling, who hadn’t come back to her senses for a long time, while breathing in the fresh air up high, also felt countless pairs of eyes looking over.
Wen Jiuzhe was tall to begin with, standing out like a crane among the crowd; with this move, Xue Ling sitting on his shoulders was practically being enthroned on the spot, becoming the focus.
Almost everyone nearby turned their heads in unison to look at them, and quite a few people even raised their phones toward their side.
They had originally gone to see the statue in the plaza at the end of that street, but in the end she became the attraction being watched. At that moment, she was as stiff as a statue itself.
She was so embarrassed that she grabbed Wen Jiuzhe’s head hard, but Wen Jiuzhe didn’t care at all about the gazes of so many people around them, and asked her, “Can you breathe now?”
Even more unable to breathe!!!
Xue Ling wanted him to put her down, but that little bit of space had long since been filled by people, and even if he put her down there was nowhere to set foot.
In the end, Xue Ling bent over in despair, buried her face in Wen Jiuzhe’s head, and was carried by him out of that long street.
That night, Xue Ling saw herself in Lanba City’s trending videos.
After that, she had always regretted it—why had she chosen Lanba City back then! How great it would have been to choose Yuanhu City!
Yuanhu City had a famous large lake, famous Buddhist temples and Daoist abbeys, and famous museums… which one wasn’t better than a cable car malfunction high-altitude fright! Which one wasn’t better than a socially-dead internet-famous plaza street!
Returning to the present, Xue Ling patted the writing board in her hands and repeated once more.
—Going to Yuanhu City to have fun.
“All right.” Wen Jiuzhe drove the car toward Yuanhu City.
“Where do you want to go play? By the lake?”
To the Yuanhu City Museum. Xue Ling told him.
Wen Jiuzhe stopped the car again.
The Yuanhu City Museum was very famous. Back when the zombie outbreak happened, it was right during a holiday, and the museum was still holding a special themed exhibition. Could you imagine the foot traffic inside the museum?
Right—about the same as a hospital.
The zombie outbreak came too fast and too suddenly. Places that had once been packed with people were now also packed full of zombies.
Even though Wen Jiuzhe was stronger than ordinary people, and in the past often went with convoys to exterminate zombies to earn supplies, he wasn’t so arrogant as to think he could clear a doomsday museum alone, quickly, and without injury.
Of course Xue Ling had never thought of letting Wen Jiuzhe accompany her in; if he went, what difference would there be from throwing fish feed into a koi pond.
She wanted a zombie to go alone.
“You stay farther away, outside, and wait for me.”
Wen Jiuzhe confirmed with her, “You mean, you’re going to leave me here and go stroll the museum by yourself?”
Xue Ling nodded.
Whether or not Wen Jiuzhe was willing deep down, he still parked the car on a street with relatively fewer zombies and watched Xue Ling get out.
She changed into a T-shirt and a long skirt, had a small bag slung on her, and walked toward the museum, her back looking buoyant.
“Knock knock.” Wen Jiuzhe suddenly tapped on the car window.
When Xue Ling turned back to look at him, Wen Jiuzhe said with a smiling expression, “If you still don’t come out by nighttime, I’ll go in to look for you.”
After saying that, he rolled up the window, propped one hand behind his head, and leaned back against the driver’s seat.
Xue Ling: “……”
Are you afraid I’ll take the chance to run away or what?
The Yuanhu City Museum she had always wanted to visit—when she was alive, she hadn’t had the chance to stroll it; now this small regret was gone.
As a zombie, Xue Ling swaggered straight into the museum.
Although it took a bit of time to find an entrance she could get into, it didn’t matter—today, when she visited the museum, she didn’t need to line up.
The power in the museum had long since gone out. Xue Ling walked from the still relatively bright lobby into pitch-black exhibition halls.
Each hall that had lost its lights was pitch-dark; the exhibits inside the glass cases were still in the same state as many years ago, and the groups of zombies in the halls wandered around the display cases—they had all been “visiting” for three years.
Xue Ling: “……”
Wen Jiuzhe hadn’t waited long in the car before he saw Xue Ling come out—much faster than he had expected.
Moreover, no matter how he looked at her, she seemed a bit crestfallen, her spirits low.
Her current state was a bit like that time they went traveling to Lanba City—after she got angry from socially dying in the plaza street, she had declared she was going alone to the bar street to listen to an open-air concert, didn’t want him following, and told him to stay in the hotel and sleep.
In the end, the concert had just started; after two songs were sung, she ran back to the hotel.
She even brought him snacks and drinks from that street, then sat by the bed with a sullen face.
“So, back so soon?” he asked.
“It’s not fun,” she said.
Wen Jiuzhe took the snacks she brought back and ate a couple of bites, then casually handed them to her and asked, “Want some?”
“I’m not eating, I don’t have an appetite,” she said.
Wen Jiuzhe finished the snacks in a few bites, stood up, grabbed his phone, and walked out. “Let’s go.”
“It really wasn’t fun, their singing was even off-key, none of it sounded good.” The person saying this followed him very honestly.
And then she had a great time at that “not fun” open-air concert, cheering loudly together with the people around her, and with her appetite wide open, eating all the way from one end of the street to the other.
Later, she pushed him into a bar again, timid yet fierce, clanking glasses and drinking inside.
—She was someone who needed companionship very much.
Thinking of this, Wen Jiuzhe suddenly smiled.
He watched Xue Ling climb into the car and asked her, “Back so fast?”
Xue Ling sat down properly, slowly groped for her writing board, and wrote weakly: “Not fun.”
Still the same way, Wen Jiuzhe thought.
There was an extra bag in Xue Ling’s hands—a museum cultural-creative cloth tote. From inside, she took out several museum commemorative badges, peripheral notebooks, cultural relic plush dolls, and also an extra-large museum commemorative T-shirt, a size Wen Jiuzhe could wear.
She tossed the souvenirs she had grabbed along the way over to Wen Jiuzhe’s side, then rested her head against the glass and quieted down.
Last time, when she went to the hospital at night, she hadn’t been afraid at all, but just now, the more she wandered around the pitch-dark museum, the more scared she became. When she passed by that ancient tomb exhibition hall, she didn’t even dare go in to look, so afraid that the mummies inside would suddenly sit up.
No, wait! Xue Ling suddenly reacted—weren’t moving corpses everywhere? She herself was one too.
What was there to be afraid of about ancient mummies? In a few hundred years, she would be an ancient mummy herself!
After thinking a bunch of random things, Xue Ling noticed that Wen Jiuzhe hadn’t said anything the whole time in the car, and she strangely raised her head to look at him.
Wen Jiuzhe leaned there, his gaze fixed on the distant museum, as if pondering something.
“What are you thinking about?” Xue Ling raised her board to interrupt his thoughts.
Wen Jiuzhe glanced at her. “I’m thinking about what method I could use to go to the museum with you.”
Xue Ling: ?
No way, it’s this dangerous and you’re still thinking of ways to come with me? You’re way too clingy, aren’t you?
She shook her head in refusal.
“I don’t want to go again.”
Wen Jiuzhe looked at what she had written, but snorted. That look clearly spelled out “I don’t believe you,” extremely cocky.
“I really don’t want to go anymore.” She reiterated her stance. “Next, let’s go somewhere else.”
Seeing Wen Jiuzhe still staring at the museum and thinking, Xue Ling stripped him of his driving privileges, took hold of the steering wheel herself, and drove the car away from the area around the museum.
She drove for a while, then stopped after some time to write and ask, “Which road do we take to go toward Yuanhu?”
Wen Jiuzhe didn’t know either.
They drove around aimlessly on the streets, avoiding roads with lots of zombies. The farther they drove, the more remote it became, until they stopped in front of a small roadside bookstore.
Inside the bookstore, there was a zombie crawling on the ground, slamming into the closed glass door with loud bangs.
Xue Ling beat Wen Jiuzhe to getting out of the car and charged straight toward the little bookstore, and then… failed to open the lock wound around the bookstore entrance.
She fiddled with it for a bit, then stiff-faced, turned her head to look at Wen Jiuzhe.
Wen Jiuzhe got out of the car, thoughtfully pried the lock open and tossed it aside, then stepped back a few paces and gestured to her. “Please.”
Xue Ling pushed the door open, went in, and dragged that zombie away.
She dragged that zombie away behind the bookshelves and disappeared. Wen Jiuzhe, gripping a short knife in one hand, also walked in, his fingers idly flipping through the shelves.
He wanted to look for a map. Even without a detailed one, local travel magazines usually came with maps.
Xue Ling came over quickly. Seeing Wen Jiuzhe browsing the shelves, she also cast her gaze over and began flipping through them.
This bookshelf must have been ransacked once before. Very few books were left on it; most were students’ tutoring books, practice workbooks, and the like.
There were also a small number of novels, some social science books, and a few well-known philosophy bestsellers.
One book looked very familiar. Xue Ling had bought it before—marketing accounts said that after reading this book, one would gain a new understanding of life; it was a high-quality book that could influence a person’s entire life.
After she bought it, she read a dozen or so pages and gave up, because it was written in obscure philosophy. She left it idle for several months.
Later, when Wen Jiuzhe lived with her, she had seen him flipping through that book a few times; he finished the entire thing.
Worthy of being a Chinese Language and Literature major—unexpectedly possessing a reading ability that didn’t match his appearance at all!
Xue Ling picked a few books from the shelf. After hesitating, she still pulled out that familiar book as well.
She’d look at it again—maybe now she could finally read it.
Before, when she was alive, she couldn’t read it because her mind wasn’t calm. Now her mind was very calm, with not a bit of disturbance.
Wen Jiuzhe found a map and took a few thin travel booklets. Xue Ling hugged a pile of books.
Wen Jiuzhe didn’t comment on her stack of books, instead helping her take more than half of them.
Spotting that familiar book, he took it out and looked at it a couple more times. “Isn’t this the one you used to weigh down instant noodles?”
Xue Ling: “……”
He got into the car and put away all the books she’d taken, then pulled one booklet from the travel pamphlets he had and handed it to Xue Ling.
“Here, read this.”
Xue Ling thought it was something else. She took it and looked—on the flashy cover were a few big characters: Chicken Soup for the Soul Most Needed by Contemporary Young People.
