Playing cards, for Xue Ling—who was now a zombie—was a somewhat troublesome game.

First, her fingers were stiff, their bending slow, and when doing fine movements she always seemed clumsy.

Playing cards were thin and slippery; making a zombie hold an entire hand of cards, then choose cards and play them, was far more difficult than holding a pen and tapping on a tablet.

With just a bit of carelessness, the cards in her hand would scatter, and she often couldn’t accurately pinch out a certain card or several cards.

Second, the person she was playing cards with wasn’t even human.

Xue Ling was already miserable enough, yet Wen Jiuzhe sitting across from her still had to look at her cards. As he was laboriously picking up the cards that had fallen to the ground, Xue Ling, realizing her cards had been seen, raised her head and glared at him.

She angrily put down the cards and wrote on the writing board: “Are you human?”

She slapped the writing board pa pa pa.

Wen Jiuzhe twirled the cards in his hand, like performing magic, and shrugged: “Oh, woof woof.”

Then in one breath he played all the cards in his hand and announced: “I win.”

Xue Ling: “……”

Xue Ling stopped playing cards. She hit Wen Jiuzhe instead; this was much more convenient.

In the end, that deck of cards became a prop for Wen Jiuzhe to idly play poker darts with, and he scattered them all along the road.

But the playing cards seemed to give Wen Jiuzhe some inspiration.

He got a set of Aeroplane Chess from someone in the camp and invited Xue Ling to play together.

Xue Ling was just too bored; although she felt this guy definitely wasn’t holding in anything good, she still wanted to play.

Throwing the dice was much easier for her. Moving the Aeroplane Chess pieces was slow, but Wen Jiuzhe wasn’t in a hurry to urge her, just waiting for her to inch them forward slowly.

At first it was fine, but when her red piece was close to the finish line, Wen Jiuzhe suddenly crashed into her piece and sent it back home, making her start over from the beginning.

Xue Ling: “……”

Alright, that’s just how Aeroplane Chess is—pieces are easily sent home by others. It’s fine, try again.

That Wen Jiuzhe would do this didn’t surprise her at all, hehe.

She had almost been fooled by his relaxed attitude, thinking he didn’t want to stir things up today!

From then on, Xue Ling kept her eyes and ears wide open, paying attention to every single piece of hers and Wen Jiuzhe’s, calculating whether her pieces were in danger of being sent home.

Her second piece was sent home, her third piece was sent home……

Other people played Aeroplane Chess with the goal of getting all their pieces into the finish; Wen Jiuzhe wasn’t like that. His goal was to send Xue Ling’s pieces home.

Xue Ling was furious. She also changed her objective and wanted to send Wen Jiuzhe’s pieces home, but when she knocked an opposing piece back home, Wen Jiuzhe didn’t care at all and continued to block her, playing a move that was all about hurting the enemy by a thousand while damaging himself by eight hundred.

Wen Jiuzhe rolled another six and sent Xue Ling’s last piece that had just re-entered the board back home, leaving all four of her pieces neatly lined up at the starting point.

“Alright, you can start from zero again,” Wen Jiuzhe said with a smiling face.

Xue Ling lowered her head and looked at her fists, feeling that her fists were hard, hard.

Wen Jiuzhe: “What’s wrong, Ling, hurry up and continue starting from ‘Ling’.”

When Xue Ling clenched her fists and suddenly lunged at him, Wen Jiuzhe almost at the same time pressed a hand against the rock beside him, vaulted over it, and ran several meters away.

The two of them had been playing the game sitting under a tree by the roadside. The surrounding terrain was open, Wen Jiuzhe was agile, and his reactions were extremely fast—Xue Ling couldn’t catch him.

Unable to catch him, Xue Ling spun around twice in place, grabbed his game piece, and threw it into a nearby small ditch.

But thinking about it still made her angry, so Xue Ling toppled forward and lay face-down on the ground. Since no one was watching anyway, she dug several furrows into the dirt in front of her.

Seeing that she wasn’t chasing anymore, Wen Jiuzhe leisurely walked back and squatted at a not-too-far, not-too-close distance. “Your temper is getting worse and worse.”

“Roar-aoh!” Xue Ling let out a terrifying zombie howl.

“Even if I can’t understand it, I know you’re swearing very viciously,” Wen Jiuzhe coaxed her to get up. “Alright, alright, it’s just a game. I promise I won’t crash into your pieces anymore.”

Xue Ling grabbed a handful of dirt and flung it at his face. Wen Jiuzhe’s body reacted faster than his brain, and he dodged it in one motion.

The zombie who had just lifted her head lay back down again, looking like she didn’t want to get up for the time being.

Becoming a zombie really released one’s true nature—when she was angry now, she was just like a child.

Wen Jiuzhe laughed for a bit, then suddenly said in a tense voice, “Quick, quick, get up fast, lots of ants have climbed onto you!”

Xue Ling immediately got up, hurriedly and frantically checking herself.

She didn’t see any ants, then noticed Wen Jiuzhe was smiling, and only then realized she’d been tricked.

Two years ago, when Xue Ling, a lone zombie, was walking along an endless highway, she had once had the thought of stopping.

It just so happened that there was a dug pit by the roadside. She lay down in it to try, and it fit her perfectly.

She lay peacefully in that pit for three days, hoping that some kind passerby might come by and add a bit of soil, just bury her and be done with it.

But no one passed by—only a lot of ants came.

When she discovered it, there were many ants crawling all over her body. She was so frightened that she jumped out of the pit, slapping and beating at herself, and even soaked in water for a while.

From then on, no matter where she lay down, she wouldn’t lie there for long, and would frequently get up and move around, to avoid ants crawling onto her.

If they crawled into her nostrils or mouth, she really couldn’t stand it.

These little things rarely crawled onto living people, but they showed no mercy to corpses.

Wen Jiuzhe had scared her casually, not expecting her reaction to be so intense—she kept patting herself for a long time, still not reassured, checking herself again, flipping her clothes, touching her hair.

At first he found it funny, but slowly, he suddenly reacted.

Why was she so nervous?

After Xue Ling finished checking herself and found no ants, she angrily went over and kicked him.

She took the writing board and made a solemn declaration: “You can’t use ants to scare me!”

“I will really get angry!”

To let Wen Jiuzhe, this dog bastard, know the seriousness of the problem, she also decided to scare him: “I almost got eaten by a lot of ants before!”

Wen Jiuzhe held the writing board, looking at the words on it. That trace of remaining smile completely disappeared.

After that, he didn’t look for Xue Ling to play those little games anymore, didn’t deliberately tease her anymore, and hardly even spoke.

At first, Xue Ling was quite satisfied with this state, feeling that her warning had intimidated him.

But one day or two was fine; after three or four days in a row, he was still wearing a faint expression, silently driving the car, in a kind of absent-minded, life-contemplating state.

Xue Ling was almost not used to him being this quiet.

She realized that the words she had written before seemed to have had a bit too much killing power, leaving Wen Jiuzhe depressed.

When she discovered this, Xue Ling was speechless.

The points he cared about were strange—no matter how angrily she scolded him, he felt no pain or itch; even getting physical with him, he didn’t take it to heart at all, his skin was that thick.

But saying a few proper sentences to him instead broke his defenses.

Could it really be just because of that sentence, “she almost got eaten by ants”?

Could it be that he had imagined many miserable scenes of her, then felt awful for several days?

Usually when Xue Ling got angry with Wen Jiuzhe, she would only be furious in the moment, and once it passed, it would pass quickly.

But Wen Jiuzhe’s depression lasted several days.

Xue Ling opened the tablet and played, on speaker, a compilation of cold jokes she thought were very funny.

She, a zombie who couldn’t even laugh, was almost laughing herself back to life, yet Wen Jiuzhe beside her showed not the slightest intention of laughing.

Xue Ling: “……” He didn’t even laugh at this—could these cold jokes really not be funny?

At night, Xue Ling was wiping herself clean in the tent.

Recently the temperature had dropped a bit; at night it would be cooler, and Wen Jiuzhe had boiled some hot water for her to use to wash.

Halfway through wiping, Wen Jiuzhe lowered his head and entered the tent. Rolling up his sleeves, he said, “I’ll help you.”

It wasn’t the first time he had helped her; Xue Ling only hesitated for a moment before handing him the towel.

Wen Jiuzhe had her sit on his leg, wet the towel, and helped her wipe. When the warm, hot towel wiped over the distinct bones on Xue Ling’s back, Wen Jiuzhe’s movements stopped.

Xue Ling felt him rest his head against her back, his breathing brushing against the skin on her back.

She was completely encircled in his arms, Wen Jiuzhe’s tone especially gentle: “What does it feel like to become a zombie? Does it feel unbearable?”

“Do you ever want to be freed?”

Those overly gentle, even somewhat eerily soft words reached her ears, and Xue Ling was jolted with alarm, turning terrified as she tried to look back at his expression.

He wouldn’t be thinking that she was living too miserably as a zombie and wanted to give her a quick end, would he?

Xue Ling slapped at the arm he had wrapped around her front. No! Don’t do this! Don’t scare a zombie like this!

Actually, being a zombie was pretty good. Although she had once had the thought of “just bury me,” thinking about it carefully, it wasn’t that bad, and recently she had even found quite a few advantages to being a zombie!

Xue Ling thought of how decisively Wen Jiuzhe chopped off zombie heads on the road, shuddered, and only hated that she couldn’t speak, that she had no way to properly persuade him not to be impulsive!

Wen Jiuzhe’s nose brushed against her back. He lifted his head, saw the fear in her eyes, and revealed the first smile he’d had in days.

“What are you afraid of? I was just asking, I wouldn’t do anything.”

Xue Ling looked at him skeptically for a long while, almost wanting to make him swear, and patted her chest with lingering fear.

Wen Jiuzhe helped her wipe herself clean, and also helped her comb her hair.

Xue Ling absentmindedly pondered, holding her writing board, preparing to have a conversation with Wen Jiuzhe.

She buried her head and wrote for a long time. The theme was: “Persuading people to cherish (a zombie’s) life.”

—Just treat her as being sick right now, an infectious disease, so she could only live apart from others, had encountered some difficulties in daily life, and would also suffer from illness-related pain (mainly hunger). You couldn’t decide to die just because being sick was uncomfortable, right?

And there was even less reason for a patient not to have given up yet, but the patient’s family felt it was too painful to watch and so killed the patient instead, right?

Wen Jiuzhe finished reading the words Xue Ling had written for thirty minutes in three seconds.

“Yes, what you wrote makes a lot of sense—much more sense than those chicken-soup sayings,” Wen Jiuzhe said while combing her hair.

Xue Ling felt his attitude was perfunctory.

She couldn’t let him keep avoiding treatment!

She rummaged out that bag of psychiatric medications, picked out a pill, and gave it to Wen Jiuzhe.

If she weren’t afraid of accidentally poking him, Xue Ling would have wanted to just stuff the pill straight into his mouth.

With the pill already brought to his lips, Wen Jiuzhe couldn’t be bothered to refuse. He took it and swallowed it.

After taking a sip of water, he said, “This kind of medicine isn’t as useful as you think. It’s impossible for it to make people happy just by taking it. In most cases, it’s just a placebo.”

If taken long-term, it would turn into his mother’s situation—propping up a mind that was on the verge of collapse, then making her body even worse. Other than that, it had no use at all.

Not long after swallowing the pill, Wen Jiuzhe suddenly frowned and got out of the car.

Xue Ling heard the sound of him vomiting.

Wen Jiuzhe soon rinsed his mouth and came back, leaning against the seatback. “Doctor Xue, you can’t treat a living horse like a dead one.”

Xue Ling touched the pill box and carefully flipped through the densely packed instructions. It took her quite a while to find the dosage: half a tablet per dose… Such a small tablet—she had thought one whole tablet was already the smallest unit.

Had she accidentally made him take too much, so that was why he vomited?

Feeling a bit guilty, she flipped through again and saw that vomiting and nausea were listed under adverse reactions.

It could also be a normal reaction to the medication!

Although Wen Jiuzhe hadn’t blamed her, he was sitting there looking rather uncomfortable.

Xue Ling cautiously touched him and handed him some water.

Wen Jiuzhe glanced at her, took it, and drank. Xue Ling raised the writing board: “Are you angry?”

“What’s there to be angry about over something like this?” He gave a soft snort-laugh, screwed the cap back onto the water bottle, and set it aside.

Xue Ling wrote: “It’s my fault. I won’t force you to take it next time.”

She was feeling guilty. Although her face was greenish-white and stiff, unable to form many expressions, one could still vaguely see traces of how she used to look.

Right now, it was somewhat like the reaction she’d had the first time she couldn’t help but kick him hard.

The moment before her foot hit his leg, she was still angry; the next moment, realizing she had hit someone, guilt and panic immediately surfaced on her face.

There was obvious fear in her eyes. She stood there at a loss, just like a child who had caused trouble looking at an adult, uneasily waiting for the scolding to come next.

She hit him, yet it ended up frightening herself instead.

What kind of thing was this.

Wen Jiuzhe wasn’t someone with a good temper. The environment he had grown up in had also made him accustomed to violence.

But when he saw Xue Ling’s expression back then, he couldn’t muster even a trace of anger toward her. Instead, he was afraid of scaring her, and subconsciously put on that usual careless smile, lazily saying to her:

“You even dare to hit me—then you can’t let other people who make you angry off either.”

During that period of time, that was the sentence he said the most.

When an angry Xue Ling punched him in the chest, he would rub his chest and smile as he said, “You dare to hit me, so don’t be cowardly toward other people either.”

Maybe hitting him had given her courage; little by little, she also dared to quarrel with others.

After being apart for too long, she started to be afraid again.

Wen Jiuzhe closed his eyes and said softly, “What are you afraid of? Didn’t I promise you I wouldn’t get angry with you?”

Xue Ling: “……”

Was there such a thing? When did he promise that—how did she not know?