The solar-powered lamp was installed in the yard; whenever the sky gradually darkened, it would light up.
As long as the curtains weren’t drawn, at night this light could shine through the window into the bedroom. The entire bedroom would be bright, like one of those nights with a full moon.
On nights when she couldn’t sleep, the zombie could only lie on the bed and read, a bit bored. Luckily, Wen Jiuzhe didn’t sleep for very long each day—he would fall asleep late at night and wake up just as the sky was getting light.
Once he was awake, Xue Ling would rarely feel bored.
Early in the morning, as soon as Wen Jiuzhe opened his eyes, Xue Ling put forward a request.
“When you’re sleeping in the future, can I go out and wander around? I don’t want to lie in bed anymore.”
Wen Jiuzhe agreed at once. “Sure.”
Xue Ling was delighted, thinking to herself that when someone had just woken up, their mind really was muddled.
Wen Jiuzhe added unhurriedly, “If you get carried off in the middle of the night by tigers, leopards, or wolves from the mountains and forests, remember to leave marks along the way, so that when I wake up I can follow the marks to look for you.”
Xue Ling: “……”
“There are tigers, leopards, and wolves here too?” Xue Ling was made a little scared by what he said.
“This house is so close to the mountains—did you forget we even saw a tiger last time?”
Although that one had escaped from a nearby zoo, it still added a bit of persuasiveness to Wen Jiuzhe’s words. What if there were also leopards from some zoo that had escaped here?
Xue Ling gave up the idea of going out alone in the middle of the night, but then she proposed, “Let’s go up the mountain during the day and see if there are any large ferocious beasts.”
Sometimes Wen Jiuzhe couldn’t tell whether Xue Ling was bold or timid.
Seeing how she kept thinking about it, Wen Jiuzhe still went up the mountain with her for a walk.
Xue Ling went carrying a basket, while Wen Jiuzhe carried an axe.
He took the opportunity to chop some firewood; using a large pot over the earthen stove to boil water was still more convenient.
In the low mountain forest there were only birds; not a single trace of any larger animal was to be seen.
Xue Ling, who had said she was coming to look for large ferocious beasts, kept her head lowered, rummaging through the piles of withered branches and fallen leaves.
“How come there isn’t even a single mushroom?” She was greatly disappointed.
Although there were no mushrooms and she went back carrying an empty basket, Xue Ling, having strolled around the small mountain, was in a good mood. Wen Jiuzhe dragged a firewood tree down the mountain, and she also helped drag a slightly smaller one.
The freshly chopped wood gave off a cold, woody fragrance; the branches dragged across the frost-dusted autumn grass made a rustling sound.
Every few steps Wen Jiuzhe would stop and wait for her.
After they returned, Wen Jiuzhe trimmed off the branches and prepared to split the firewood. Xue Ling was also eager to try and wanted to give it a go.
Wen Jiuzhe split wood for a while and then handed her the axe. After splitting two pieces of firewood, Xue Ling lost interest and watched Wen Jiuzhe continue, growing so hot that he took off his outer layer, his undershirt gradually damp with sweat.
The vest she had found for him—a vest an old man would wear.
“Old man Wen” finished chopping the firewood, saw that it was almost noon, and went to the kitchen to make food. Xue Ling just watched, but she wasn’t tempted at all.
Because the edible food and vegetables were very limited, nothing like the old days when she could buy whatever she wanted at the supermarket, the simple big-pot stew Wen Jiuzhe made didn’t look very appetizing.
After taking care of the three daily meals and cleaning, and preparing the necessities of life, often a whole day would pass just like that.
It seemed ordinary and plain, but it would swallow up time; in the blink of an eye, half a month would be gone.
As usual, Xue Ling went to check her “vegetable plot.” Looking at the ground that was still bare after half a month, she finally confirmed that the winter cabbage they had planted hadn’t grown.
“Why? Is it because it’s too cold now? Or is the way we planted it wrong?”
Wen Jiuzhe said, “The seeds probably went bad. They’ve been stored for three years already—being unable to sprout is normal.”
What he said made sense. It definitely had nothing to do with how they planted them; the seeds were bad.
Before going to sleep at night was their daily communication time. Xue Ling looked ahead to next spring’s vegetable garden, telling Wen Jiuzhe to see if there were any good vegetable seeds when he went to the base and trade for some to bring back. She wanted to build a self-sufficient ecological vegetable garden.
Xue Ling had already been learning how to grow vegetables on the tablet, believing that by next spring, she would be able to put the techniques she had learned into practice.
In fact, they couldn’t talk about very much before sleeping. After all, whether writing or using the tablet to input text, Xue Ling was quite slow now. If she wrote a long passage, Wen Jiuzhe would fall asleep while waiting.
Listening to her vegetable garden plans, Wen Jiuzhe once again grew drowsy.
Suddenly, Xue Ling let out an “ao” sound. She climbed up and pushed open the window to look outside.
Under the light cast by the solar-powered lamp, tiny snowflakes were drifting down.
It was snowing!
Wen Jiuzhe was stepped on by her in her excitement and woke up, then also looked out the window. In just this short moment, the snowflakes visibly grew larger.
There was no weather forecast now, but based on experience, this would be a heavy snowfall.
Before the apocalypse, the area around Yu City had gone nearly ten years without a single heavy snowfall, only two or three light snows each year. After the apocalypse, even the weather had changed, and the area around Yu City began to have heavy snow.
Xue Ling remembered that last winter, when it started snowing, she hadn’t yet reached Anxi City.
Because zombies weren’t afraid of the cold, she didn’t take shelter when it snowed. Walking in the heavy snow, the snow landing on her body wouldn’t melt, only piling up thicker and thicker.
If it was raining outside, Xue Ling would most likely find a house to take shelter in, waiting until the rain stopped before leaving. But if it was snowing outside, no matter what she would go and experience a walk in the snow.
Actually, that was quite interesting. The entire world would be filled with silent snow, the snowflakes sticking to her body, giving a feeling of walking in another dimension.
Xue Ling shared her experiences from last winter with Wen Jiuzhe.
On a heavy snow day, she walked into a city full of zombies. The city was clad in silver, the streets piled high with snow that no one cleared away, and the zombies on the streets moved a bit more slowly than usual.
Every zombie had a thick layer of snow on top of it; some had even directly turned into snowmen.
Just thinking about snowmen moving all over the streets—Xue Ling dared say not many people had seen a sight like that.
At the time, she was bored, so she picked up a stainless-steel basin and used a hammer to strike it. The loud sound echoed between the high-rise buildings, and as she went through the streets and alleys, it attracted quite a few zombies wandering by the roadside to follow her.
Although as she kept walking, some zombies gave up because they couldn’t smell human scent and gradually dropped out, there were always new zombies joining along the way… which also let her stage a thousand-person parade in a city on the eve of the New Year.
After finishing her account, Xue Ling asked Wen Jiuzhe where he had been and how he had spent it when it snowed last winter.
Wen Jiuzhe rested his hand behind his head and thought for a long while. “Seems like it was over in Heyang City, doing base missions with a convoy.”
He didn’t really remember much from that time—time and weather all seemed about the same.
Over the past three years, he had spent half the time traveling alone, and the other half moving with different convoys.
Traveling with convoys was usually to earn supplies. After all, he couldn’t directly walk into zombie-filled city blocks like Xue Ling and take medicines or gold to exchange for supplies; he could only trade by completing missions.
He moved between various bases looking for people. Inside the bases there were often all kinds of missions—some required scavenger teams to go into cities to kill zombies and find items, while some wealthy people wanted to travel and would hire many people to protect them.
When Wen Jiuzhe took missions, he usually only looked at the pay. He accepted all types, so he had gained a bit of a reputation in quite a few bases.
People like him—bold enough to take extremely dangerous missions, and with skills this good—were very rare, so the pay he demanded was also higher than that of ordinary people.
Usually, the convoys he traveled with would want to recruit him, or hope he would sign a contract to follow the convoy long-term. But Wen Jiuzhe always refused without hesitation. Precisely because of this, he had fallen out with quite a few convoys.
That time last winter, the base convoy he was with was scavenging in a small city, searching for supplies the base needed, when they encountered a convoy from another base.
Both sides fought over the same batch of goods in that warehouse, neither willing to give way. Coincidentally, the other base’s convoy was one Wen Jiuzhe had traveled with before.
Naturally, Wen Jiuzhe helped whoever’s supplies he was taking. When a firefight broke out, someone from the opposing convoy shouted angrily that they hadn’t expected him to be such a cold-blooded, heartless person—before they had killed zombies together, and now he could turn around and go after them just for supplies.
It almost made Wen Jiuzhe laugh; he hadn’t even remembered who the person speaking on the other side was.
When things were wrapping up, Wen Jiuzhe heard people on this side of the convoy also saying he was frightening, saying they hadn’t expected that he was ruthless killing zombies and just as ruthless toward people, and even went to suggest to the convoy leader not to keep someone like him in the convoy.
If he hadn’t been ruthless, hadn’t driven off the opposing convoy, both sides would have suffered even more casualties.
But Wen Jiuzhe was too lazy to explain any of this to them, and didn’t care how they thought. The next day, after completing the mission and taking the agreed-upon supplies, he left.
He remembered that it seemed to have been snowing nonstop those two days. He drove through the wind and snow and got a bit lost, getting out of the car once to clear off a roadside sign.
Leaning against the sign and looking at the words on it, he thought of Xue Ling.
……
“Seems like it? You can’t even remember something from a year ago?” Xue Ling stopped looking at the snow and turned back to look at him with concern.
“So young and your memory’s already bad, what will you do in the future?”
“What else can I do—get Alzheimer’s, then live off you,” Wen Jiuzhe said.
Nothing could stump him!
“Finding a place to live before it snowed—so nice,” Xue Ling wrote.
She also felt that being able to lie in a warm bed during snowfall was very nice, and that having Wen Jiuzhe beside her was also very nice.
Wen Jiuzhe patted the bed like a lord. “Stop standing there looking. Come over and let me hold you while we sleep.”
Xue Ling tossed her own pillow to him to hug and continued leaning by the window looking outside, when suddenly a big hand grabbed her ankle.
Xue Ling turned back in anger. Wen Jiuzhe was gripping her ankle, motionless, eyes closed, already asleep.
Xue Ling: “……” Sick.
༚༅༚˳ . . ˳༚༅༚
Because of the heavy snowfall, their originally planned trip to New Fourth Base was postponed for several days, and they only went once the snow on the roads was almost melted.
Xue Ling went along as well. She was wrapped in a thick cotton coat, wearing a hat, scarf, gloves, and goggles—anyone who saw her would think she was absurdly afraid of the cold.
Winter made it easier for zombies to disguise themselves.
Wen Jiuzhe wore that blue hat and also put on a thick cotton coat.
Before setting off, he tucked his gun into the holster at the small of his back, then gestured a bit with a short knife, feeling that the thick cotton coat was far too inconvenient. But Xue Ling insisted he wear it, so there was nothing he could do but make do.
New Fourth Base was very lively. A lot of people were gathered around the base gate.
With Xue Ling along, Wen Jiuzhe didn’t casually approach. He found someone by the roadside and asked.
The man took the cigarette he handed over, glanced at his car, and only then said, “The base gate just installed a new detection device. They say it was transported from a large base in the north. When a person passes through it, it can tell whether they’re infected with the zombie virus. Everyone’s here watching the novelty.”
“I heard there was a base somewhere where a scavenger team went out, and one person got scratched by barbed wire outside. Turns out that was enough to infect them. You couldn’t tell at the time—there was a latent period of several days. They returned to the base and suddenly turned into a zombie. Quite a few people died.”
“This new machine can even detect the latent period.”
New Fourth Base was a base with relatively strict checks on entry and exit. During its early days, there had been a secondary zombie wave inside the base, and the base had nearly been wiped out. The base’s leadership learned their lesson and now put a lot of effort into this aspect.
After chatting with the man, Wen Jiuzhe drove off to find a place to park.
He looked at Xue Ling. Her eyes were bright as she raised her writing board: “Is that machine free to pass through? Go check and see if you’ve got any zombie virus lying dormant!”
The bit of heaviness in Wen Jiuzhe’s heart dissipated. “Do you think it’s a hospital doing free physical checkups?”
“Last time we came, I heard them say that in winter there’d be a whole street with stalls selling things, very lively. I originally wanted to take you in to have a look today.”
“I’m not going!” Xue Ling still refused. What if she was discovered—then it’d all be over. People were finally having some fun and liveliness; why should she go scare them?
“Then forget it. Let’s go back today. I’m not going either; there’s nothing I really need to trade for,” Wen Jiuzhe said as he was about to start the car.
Xue Ling immediately stopped him and solemnly told him, “You must go into the base and find a barbershop and cut your hair. I can’t stand looking at it anymore.”
Wen Jiuzhe said, “Last time I said I’d just use a knife to shave it off—you wouldn’t agree.”
Xue Ling wanted to scream: “No! Get it cut properly!”
Cutting a handsome hairstyle would be benefiting her, after all!
