Xue Ling didn’t really want to go see the Terracotta Army; she said it on purpose.
Who told Wen Jiuzhe to refuse to say where he was taking her—when she asked earlier, he even changed the subject.
Fine, won’t say it? Then let’s just travel all over the country first.
Anyway, Xue Ling was certain the Terracotta Army definitely wasn’t Wen Jiuzhe’s destination.
Wen Jiuzhe didn’t hurry to start the car. He turned sideways to look at Xue Ling. “Are you…?”
Xue Ling perked up her ears, wanting to hear him confess.
“…planning to steal the Terracotta Army?”
Xue Ling: “……”
You steal it! Your whole family steals the Terracotta Army!
“Then could it be that you want to go buy jade?” Wen Jiuzhe put on a deliberately serious look as he pondered.
Xue Ling didn’t want to bother writing to bicker with him. She had never beaten his poisonous mouth before; now that writing was slow and brief, her attack power was even more insufficient.
Suddenly she thought of something. From the pile of books under the seat, she pulled one out, flipped through it noisily, found the sentence she wanted, and circled it with a pen.
Wen Jiuzhe saw the sentence she had circled and was showing him:
“Men are the best at playing dumb. Even if you guess the secret he wants to hide, he will still put on an innocent face and pretend he doesn’t know what you’re talking about—extremely hateful!”
Wen Jiuzhe: “……”
What kind of book is this, writing so well.
“Alright then, do you really have to go see the Terracotta Army now? Can we go another time?”
He lowered his voice to negotiate, the lazy, detached smile between his brows and eyes softened especially by the green shadows and flecks of light outside the window.
Zombie Xue Ling rejected the human’s—parentheses ex-boyfriend parentheses end—temptation.
She lowered her head and flipped books furiously, pulled out another novel, and circled another sentence inside.
“Just look at how guilty you seem, Grandma knew right away you were hiding something from me!”
Wen Jiuzhe read out half the sentence, covered his face with one hand, and sighed.
She’d really found herself a new way to talk.
“It’s not that I’m hiding anything from you… I want to take you back to Yu City to have a look,” Wen Jiuzhe said as if it were real. “I don’t know whether you left any bad memories there, and I wasn’t sure whether you’d be willing to go back.”
Xue Ling lowered her head to dig out books, flipped one, flipped two.
Watching her fail to find suitable words for a long while, Wen Jiuzhe couldn’t help laughing as he said, “If you can’t find anything suitable, then forget it?”
Xue Ling finally circled a sentence that suited her wishes.
“People like me are very strange. Trivial, unimportant things—I can talk about them nonstop from morning till night; but the things I truly care about in my heart, whether love or sorrow, I instead can’t bring myself to say.”
She circled this sentence, then added two words on the writing board as a supplementary annotation: “So annoying!!!”
Wen Jiuzhe was left speechless.
He glanced toward the greenery outside the car window with flickering eyes, then quickly turned back, that usual smile back on his face. With a bit of roguishness, he asked, “Then come back to Yu City with me first?”
“When this trip is over, you can go wherever you want.”
Taking advantage of the fact that Xue Ling wrote slowly and took even longer to flip through books to find sentences, Wen Jiuzhe pressed on one question after another: “Be honest—do you really not want to go back and take a look?”
She was completely in this guy’s grasp! Xue Ling had left Yu City back then because of heartbreak and avoidance, but after wandering around outside for so long, she really did want to go back.
“Let me guess—you’re not scared to go back, are you?” Wen Jiuzhe suddenly said, watching her reaction. “Afraid of being seen in your current state by people you know?”
There was a bit of smug, punchable confidence on his face, like he was certain he’d guessed what was on her mind.
“What’s there to be afraid of? I’ve already seen you—being seen by others isn’t that much worse.”
True enough, the complicated emotions and awkwardness had already been used up when she suddenly ran into Wen Jiuzhe. If she saw other people again, it probably wouldn’t feel that unbearable.
But seeing Wen Jiuzhe so smug made Xue Ling uncomfortable. Swish swish, she wrote two words on the writing board as a counterattack—ex-boyfriend.
The smug certainty and smile on Wen Jiuzhe’s face disappeared.
He pressed his lips together, then turned his head to look out the window again.
Xue Ling hadn’t expected those three words to have such killing power, because for the rest of the drive, Wen Jiuzhe abnormally didn’t say a single word.
Xue Ling sat quietly the whole way, not being harassed at all—it shocked her.
She looked again at the man beside her, unconsciously frowning as he stared at the road ahead.
Oh? What’s up with Brother Wen? Not sleepy while driving today? Got something on your mind?
Finally, after a long time, Wen Jiuzhe seemed to have talked himself into it and spoke again.
“You still care about the breakup, don’t you?”
The moment he opened his mouth, nothing good came out.
If you didn’t care, then don’t stay silent for so long.
He himself seemed to realize that line wasn’t very appropriate. He stopped, then irritably furrowed his brows.
Xue Ling had actually cared quite a bit, but seeing his reaction, she suddenly didn’t feel that bad anymore. She just waited to see what else he could say.
Wen Jiuzhe said, “I want to marry you… is that okay?”
Xue Ling: “?”
You skipped way too many steps in between, didn’t you?
“No!” She snapped back to herself and immediately wrote two huge characters, expressing her huge rejection.
When Wen Jiuzhe saw it, he instead laughed, relaxed and leaned back, saying, “Alright, now you’ve rejected me once too. That balances out half of what happened before.”
He declared it all on his own.
Xue Ling: “……”
Ahhhhh damn it why can’t I talk, I really want to curse him! I really want to curse him loudly!
Xue Ling lifted the writing board and smashed it down hard on Wen Jiuzhe’s head.
“The writing board is the only one. If you smash it and break it, there’s no spare,” Wen Jiuzhe reminded her. “How about using a book instead? That’s not easy to break, and hitting people with it hurts more than this flimsy writing board.”
He looked very experienced at getting beaten.
The car swerved along the road for a bit, then stopped. The passenger door was opened, Xue Ling got out, so angry that she spun around in place, then ran to the roadside and started punching a tree.
Good thing she was already dead—otherwise she was really afraid she’d be angered to death by him again.
Can’t we just properly talk about what happened back then, explain it, properly tell her what he was thinking—is that really so hard?!
After punching the tree trunk twice, Wen Jiuzhe came over and dragged her back. Before she could glare at him, Wen Jiuzhe grabbed her knuckles that had turned bluish and pressed them against his own head. “Just hit me instead. I promise I won’t dodge.”
Xue Ling stared at the head he had lowered while half-crouching, and in the end couldn’t bring herself to strike.
Before, let alone hitting someone, she had never even said anything harsh to anyone; she never argued face-to-face with people.
But scolding Wen Jiuzhe, getting so angry at him that she punched him, had somehow gradually become a habitual thing.
The first time she was so angered by him that she lost her rationality, she kicked him very hard. After she came back to her senses, fear immediately welled up in her heart—she was afraid he would get angry, because he was a tall, intimidating, hard-to-mess-with man. If he got angry…
But he didn’t get angry. He barely reacted at all. Even though she had kicked his leg black and blue, he still spoke to her smiling, not taking that kick of hers to heart in the slightest.
Xue Ling felt that he was like the kind of large dog that looks terrifying but is actually very gentle—kicked by its owner, it wouldn’t let out any frightening cries, would still come over and circle around the feet, and then next time continue to make people angry.
No matter how many times it was kicked, it was still like that.
Afterward, Xue Ling reflected for a long time—does everyone have a violent side hidden in their heart?
No matter what, hitting someone was always wrong.
So she apologized to him in shame, saying she shouldn’t have lashed out, and promised that she absolutely wouldn’t do it again next time.
After hearing her apology, Wen Jiuzhe slung an arm around her neck, pulled her down onto the sofa, and said with an easy smile, “I say, don’t hold yourself to such high moral standards all the time.”
“If you’re unhappy next time, you can keep hitting me a few more times. Anyway, you know—I’m thick-skinned and tough.” He shrugged, speaking carelessly.
At the time, Xue Ling’s heart was full of self-reproach. She looked at him guiltily and retorted, “If I hit you whenever I get angry, then what’s the difference between me and Wen Xuan?”
Because he heard Wen Xuan’s name, Wen Jiuzhe showed a trace of displeasure. He said, “That’s different. I don’t like letting Wen Xuan hit me, but I’m willing to let you hit me.”
Xue Ling held her breath and pressed on, “Why am I allowed? What’s different between me and him?”
Wen Jiuzhe snorted with laughter. “Because you’re much weaker than him. When you hit people, it’s like you’re acting coquettish.”
Xue Ling, who had sworn she would never lay a hand on Wen Jiuzhe again, broke her vow on the spot.
In short, Xue Ling, who had aspired to be a morally upright good person, was forcibly awakened to her violent tendencies by the punchable Wen Jiuzhe. As long as she heard him start acting shameless, she would reflexively want to give him a punch.
Because of his indulgence, she developed a terrible habit.
When she was at her angriest, she had even bitten him—his neck, shoulders, arms, palms… and even his chest, she had bitten them all.
He would look at the tooth marks and even sincerely ask, “Are your teeth okay? They won’t loosen early, will they?”
Once, she bit his arm until it bled. He turned his arm over and over, looking at it, and asked her, “Do you think I should go get a rabies shot?”
Of course he didn’t go get vaccinated. He didn’t even use a single bandage—he just carried her furious bite marks around openly.
During the time she was together with Wen Jiuzhe, what Xue Ling feared most wasn’t that Wen Jiuzhe would hurt her. Instead, she was more worried that she herself would, out of habit, vent her temper on Wen Jiuzhe and resort to violence, eventually hurting him as if it were only natural.
Xue Ling shook off Wen Jiuzhe’s hand, didn’t touch his head, walked forward along the road for a stretch, then lay down right there.
She spread out her limbs, lying on the green, shaded road that had been washed by rain and then dried by the sun, lying there with a death wish that looked like she was about to lie on the tracks.
Wen Jiuzhe walked over and sat down beside her, studying her stiff expression. “Don’t hold it in. Holding your breath harms the body.”
Xue Ling: How else could it harm my body—what, can I still get cancer now or something?
Seeing that she had no intention of getting up for a long time, Wen Jiuzhe lay down as well. He lay beside Xue Ling, squinting as he looked at the light filtering through the gaps in the trees overhead, then moved his head onto Xue Ling’s chest, pressing against her thin chest as he said in a low voice:
“I regret it.”
“If I had known earlier…”
If he had known earlier that there would be an apocalypse, he wouldn’t have brought up breaking up with Xue Ling; if he had known earlier that she would become a zombie, he wouldn’t have left her alone in Yu City.
What Wen Jiuzhe hated most was “if I had known earlier.” There was no such thing as if—regret was the most useless thing. Yet he had been immersed in regret for a very long time.
He didn’t want to think about it, and didn’t want to mention it. It would be better to just let her beat him up instead.
Unfortunately, Xue Ling couldn’t bring herself to do it, and ended up getting herself this angry.
In the end, he still said, “About what happened back then, I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
Although there still wasn’t much truth or explanation in it, this kind of apology without joking around was already rare for him.
Xue Ling was finally coaxed up from the ground by him. More importantly, the sky had turned gloomy again, looking like it was about to rain. Xue Ling didn’t want to lie there and get rained on.
A bit of arguing really didn’t need to be made so tragically dramatic as getting drenched in a downpour.
The weather changed at the drop of a hat. This time, Wen Jiuzhe didn’t stop on the road to avoid the rain, but drove straight into the curtain of rain.
“Then… we’ll head in the direction of Yu City?” he asked for Xue Ling’s opinion.
Xue Ling sat in the passenger seat hugging her arms, carrying a bit of his usual swagger, and gave an unhappy “ao” shout.
Over the next two days, she was clearly still not very happy. Although a zombie’s facial expressions weren’t obvious, her active communication was almost nonexistent.
If she refused to write, then even grabbing her hand to write wouldn’t allow for normal communication.
A zombie who couldn’t speak had a natural advantage when it came to cold wars on this track.
That day, when they parked by the roadside to light a fire and cook, Wen Jiuzhe was still pondering how to cheer Xue Ling up. Suddenly, Xue Ling’s eyes widened as she lunged over, excitedly shaking his neck hard, then anxiously pointing behind him.
The puzzled Wen Jiuzhe followed the direction of her finger and saw a large ferocious beast in the roadside woods.
“A tiger?”
Xue Ling nodded repeatedly, clutching his clothes, extremely agitated.
She was scared to death—she’d just been sitting there sulking, and suddenly a tiger popped out of the woods. Where did a tiger even come from?!
The stupid dog was still sitting here not moving—there’s a tiger! A tiger is coming over! Why aren’t you leaving right now?!
Wen Jiuzhe’s T-shirt was pulled out of shape by her tugging, the collar wide open. He thought for a moment and said, “I get it. There seems to be a zoo around here… How about I take you to the zoo to have some fun?”
