Back when the two of them were still boyfriend and girlfriend, Wen Jiuzhe would occasionally anger her too much. At times like that, the method he thought of to make peace was—
“Do you want to go somewhere to have fun?”
Accompany her out to play—so long as she had fun, she would end up too busy to stay angry.
Just like last time at the zoo.
Wen Jiuzhe stood up from the river water, his whole body dripping wet, water falling down in streams.
Actually, he felt a little unhappy himself, thinking that this time he hadn’t said anything unpleasant, nor had he done anything, and didn’t know why she had suddenly exploded.
But when he saw her on the shore—Xue Ling having pushed someone and now sitting there hugging her legs, her face buried in her knees—he couldn’t help but soften.
He took one step up onto the shore, wiped the water from his face, squatted in front of her, lowered his voice, and asked, “Why are you unhappy?”
Xue Ling didn’t raise her head, only showing him a hair whorl, and the back of her head that was no longer round.
He cautiously made his movements even gentler as he touched Xue Ling.
“How about this—why don’t you push me down one more time? I’ll let you push me, isn’t that okay?”
He pulled Xue Ling’s hand up and shook it a little. Xue Ling still didn’t raise her head, slowly clenched her hand into a fist, and then slowly punched him once in the chest.
It wasn’t a heavy punch, but it made Wen Jiuzhe’s heart in his chest thump heavily, as if she had gone straight through his skin and truly smashed into his heart.
Not realizing that he was already smiling, Wen Jiuzhe held her fist and said, “If you’re going to hit me, why not use a bit more strength?”
“Come on, I’ll take you…” He directly lifted her up into his arms, “I’ll take you to a place.”
Changing out of his soaking-wet clothes by the car, Wen Jiuzhe drove the car away from the planned route, heading toward a desolate little road.
The road was very bumpy, and by the time they drove farther, there was no road at all.
This terrible road jolted Xue Ling out of her terrible mood. She looked out the car window, her mind continuously popping up question marks—where was he taking her now?
When the car left all visible roads and drove into the grass, Xue Ling couldn’t help but stick her head out a little, and then she got smacked in the face by roadside branches several times.
“Ahem.” Wen Jiuzhe rolled up the window. “Don’t stick your head out.”
There was no way to keep silent anymore!
Xue Ling picked up the writing board and asked, “Where are we going?”
“I’m taking you to a good place.” Wen Jiuzhe said mysteriously.
The road ahead couldn’t be driven anymore. Wen Jiuzhe got out of the car, pulled Xue Ling out as well, dragged her along, and walked deep into the dense grass.
He walked in front. His tall figure pushed aside most of the sharp grass blades, and when he encountered thorny grass, he would even step on it with one foot, forcibly opening up a path.
Those grass blades wouldn’t leave any marks on a zombie’s tough skin, but they would carve thin red scratches along Wen Jiuzhe’s arms.
But he didn’t care. He casually brushed aside grass as tall as a person, walking while also distinguishing directions, recalling the location.
Xue Ling lowered her head to watch near his feet, very afraid that a snake or some other terrifying insect would suddenly slip out.
“We’re here. This is it.”
The grass gradually thinned. They walked out of the wild grassland and arrived at an open flat area. There were many fragments of stones and sand on the ground, as well as several strange pits.
“Guess what these pits are?” Wen Jiuzhe squatted down by a large pit with a smiling face. “Be bold—guess.”
This pit was several meters deep. At the concave bottom, a pool of water had collected, and beside it grew some lush green grass.
Xue Ling activated her dead brain, hesitated, and wrote two characters: “Tomb raiders’ holes?”
Wen Jiuzhe: “……” This guess was a bit too bold.
He revealed the answer: “Meteorite craters. You remember, right—that meteor shower.”
Three years ago, when the zombie virus was rapidly infecting this land, there had been a meteor shower.
That day, many satellites launched by humans fell, and together with them fell meteorites large and small.
From the ground, it was an extremely spectacular meteor shower.
“I was nearby at the time and saw those meteorites fall,” Wen Jiuzhe said.
That was when he was rushing back from Anxi City to Yu City, on his way to find Xue Ling.
He was anxious to the extreme, because the earth suddenly jolted and shook, overturning both man and car onto the roadside.
Falling meteorites struck a tall signal tower in the distance. The cables caught fire, even triggering a blaze.
The sky was clearly daytime, yet it looked dim, and at the same time was lit up a fiery red.
He was forced to stay nearby, watching the “meteors” streak across the sky above his head, and for the first time acknowledged what they called “the end of the world arriving.”
“And you—where were you then?” Wen Jiuzhe looked at Xue Ling.
After a while, Xue Ling scratched out two words—at home.
By that time, she had already become a zombie. There was nowhere to go, so she wandered aimlessly mixed in among a group of zombies, strolling and thinking about life.
Her kind were all searching for the scent of humans, roaring and restless. Only she widened her eyes, raised her head, and watched the “meteor shower” in the sky.
That scene was far too shocking. From the beginning to the end, she watched without blinking, forgetting the passage of time.
When the meteor shower ended and she came back to her senses, all the nearby zombies had left with clear targets, leaving only her standing there blankly, not knowing what to do.
This meteor shower didn’t bring her any other trouble at the time, because no meteorites fell nearby. She only saw the magnificent meteors tearing across the sky.
For a modern person who had only recently still been human, her first thought back then was: what a pity, my phone is gone—I can’t take pictures.
Then she heard someone upstairs nearby breaking down and shouting: “It must be this meteor shower—the zombie virus was brought by the meteor shower!”
Although the zombie outbreak came first and the meteor shower came after, this loudly wailing brother clearly no longer cared about such cause-and-effect relationships.
Whether the zombie virus had anything to do with this meteor shower had yet to be determined, but it was true that after this meteor shower, global communication signals completely collapsed.
When Xue Ling, a zombie, wandered around everywhere to join in the excitement, she heard quite a few people discussing this issue.
Some said that this meteor shower caused changes in Earth’s magnetic field, which was why communication signals all went wrong.
After all, every method of contact and communication had completely failed. Even three years later, to this very day, it still hadn’t recovered.
If you turned on a car radio now, you still wouldn’t hear a single sound.
One tall and one short—two silhouettes squatted by the meteorite crater, looking down.
“Gloop.” Wen Jiuzhe tossed a small stone, which splashed into the little pool of water in the pit.
“Do you want to go down and take a look? Maybe we can even find a meteorite.” Wen Jiuzhe said.
He remembered that Xue Ling used to like meteorites. She had once enthusiastically bought a meteorite pendant.
After staring at it for a long time, he felt that that “meteorite” didn’t look any different from a stone by the roadside, so he asked her, “Don’t you think this is very likely a fake meteorite?”
Xue Ling said, “It is a fake meteorite. Real meteorites couldn’t possibly be this cheap.”
“You know it’s fake and you still bought it?” Wen Jiuzhe felt puzzled.
“It’s like when I buy a wealth-attracting bracelet—do I really think it can attract wealth?” Xue Ling looked completely matter-of-fact.
Isn’t it all just placing a bit of one’s romantic fantasies and beautiful expectations? Who actually takes it seriously.
That was how Wen Jiuzhe learned that she liked meteorites.
Later, because of some marketing accounts’ talk about “meteorites causing cancer,” Xue Ling painfully put that pendant away and switched to a “pass every exam” bracelet bought from a temple.
Because at the time she was suffering over exams, memorizing textbooks until late every night.
She even took the opportunity to get him a silver bell bracelet meant to protect physical health—of course, Wen Jiuzhe absolutely refused to wear it.
Wen Jiuzhe slid down along the slanted wall of the meteorite crater, the gravel and sandy soil under his feet tumbling downward.
He reached a hand out to Xue Ling. “Be careful. Give me your hand.”
Xue Ling felt it was a bit troublesome. For this kind of pit, rolling straight down was actually the most convenient and fastest—she had always done it that way before. Anyway, she wouldn’t get injured or feel pain.
But Wen Jiuzhe was holding his hand out, waiting for her, so she could only follow his wishes and go down slowly.
They went down to the bottom of the pit, stepping beside that small pool of water.
Xue Ling tilted her head back to look at the sky. Overhead it was a vivid, tile-blue color; the weather was very good.
Wen Jiuzhe was already squatting there, starting to rummage through the stones on the ground, asking her, “Which ones here are meteorites—can you tell?”
Xue Ling also squatted down and began flipping through stones at the bottom of the pit.
She wasn’t planning to look for meteorites, she just intended to find two nicer-looking stones and call it a day.
Actually, she liked meteorites more when she was a child. After growing up, she didn’t like them that much anymore.
It was very normal for many children, when they first came into contact with the universe, to become interested in things like aliens, space, and stars.
When Xue Ling was little, she had watched an animated film about an orphan searching for his relatives.
The stone the orphan wore with him was a meteorite, and he was actually an alien child left behind on Earth. One day, his alien family finally found him based on that meteorite, came in a spaceship, and took him home.
Back then, when she was still quite young, Xue Ling inevitably had similar fantasies—that maybe she, too, was an alien child, and that loving relatives would come to Earth to reunite with her.
But after that thought appeared, what followed closely was guilt, as if she were rejecting her own mother.
So that little girl back then had seriously agonized over it: if alien parents really came looking for her, should she leave her Earth mother or not.
Liking meteorites for that reason became a bit hard to admit after growing up.
When Wen Jiuzhe asked her why she liked meteorites, she pretended to be very artsy and even told him about the birth of stars, saying she liked meteorites because the universe was very romantic.
At this very moment, when Wen Jiuzhe insisted on finding her a real meteorite before he would leave, Xue Ling felt a bit regretful about putting on an act back then… Why did she have to pretend like that at the time!
Holding two pebbles, she tugged at Wen Jiuzhe’s clothes, urging him to leave.
Wen Jiuzhe let his clothes be pulled into an extra-extra-large size, standing firm as a mountain while rummaging through stones.
“The two you found aren’t meteorites.” And he looked down on her stones with disdain.
“See? This is a meteorite.” He dug out a black stone with pits on its surface and some tiny reflective crystals.
Holding it in his palm, he asked her, “Is one enough, or should I find you another?”
Xue Ling: “……” He actually knew what meteorites looked like.
Alright, that’s enough, let’s go.
Wen Jiuzhe found it strange. “Why are you in such a hurry?”
Nothing much—Xue Ling was just afraid there really might be radiation in this meteorite crater. If they stayed here too long and something happened to Wen Jiuzhe…
He wasn’t exactly a very normal person to begin with. If radiation affected him and he became even more bizarre, what then!
Hearing a faint tearing sound from his clothes, Wen Jiuzhe stood up. “Alright, then let’s go.”
Xue Ling took the meteorite from his hand and buried it back in its original place.
Only after returning the meteorite to the meteorite crater did she push Wen Jiuzhe up.
Wen Jiuzhe went up first, then pulled her up.
“A wasted trip. You’re just like Ye Gong loving dragons—you claim to like them, but when there’s a real meteorite, you don’t dare take it.” Wen Jiuzhe laughed at her.
Xue Ling lifted the two white pebbles she had picked up and tried to smash him with them. Wen Jiuzhe raised his arm to block.
“Why are you so eager to leave? I was even planning to camp here with you tonight.”
“You don’t want to rest in this kind of natural pit?”
No thanks.
Xue Ling thought to herself, It’s not like I haven’t slept in a meteorite crater before.
She didn’t tell Wen Jiuzhe that she had actually seen this kind of meteorite crater several times already.
On the road from Yu City to Anxi City, she had gotten lost more than once. She had long since seen meteorite craters and had even seen a satellite crater.
The satellite in that pit had been dismantled into scattered pieces, leaving only a bit of wreckage.
Right beside it was another very large meteorite crater.
She had rolled down from the edge, dug around at the bottom, and unearthed a large meteorite.
That night, she used that meteorite as a pillow and lay there all night, looking peaceful yet excited.
Every sci-fi movie she had ever watched from childhood to adulthood replayed in her mind. Her head was full of thoughts about whether she would mutate, about zombie super-evolution, and the like.
But nothing happened all night. By noon, the sun was especially scorching, so she could only climb out of the pit resentfully and continue walking along the road.
