Although Wen Jiuzhe was still following Xue Ling like a lingering spirit, Wen Yi noticed that the two of them were no longer using tablets to communicate.
Wen Jiuzhe was still pretending he couldn’t speak, and Xue Ling was also pretending not to know.
For the entire morning, Xue Ling didn’t take the initiative to speak to Wen Jiuzhe. She held two tablets in her hands, and Wen Jiuzhe’s tablet had also been confiscated by her.
Wen Jiuzhe didn’t try to snatch the tablet back. He somehow dug out a calculator from who knows where, and chased after Xue Ling while pressing it.
The sounds of “clear, clear, clear” were so noisy that Xue Ling covered her ears and walked forward.
Wen Yi looked at this scene: “……”
Insane, both of them.
After learning that Xue Ling hadn’t managed to keep it hidden, Wen Yi wasn’t surprised. What surprised her was that Wen Jiuzhe actually didn’t come to look for her.
She had thought he would come over immediately to force an explanation.
Their fight lasted until the day the action squad set off for Donghai City.
Wen Jiuzhe was leaving. Before he left, Xue Ling finally returned the tablet to him.
Wen Jiuzhe took back the tablet and typed a sentence: “If you still haven’t figured out how to tell me, then tell me after I come back, okay?”
Xue Ling coldly crossed her arms and watched Wen Jiuzhe get into the vehicle.
After the vehicle drove out of the camp and disappeared from sight, Xue Ling’s face slowly scrunched up.
After reuniting, they had been together the whole time and hadn’t separated again. With Wen Jiuzhe suddenly leaving, Xue Ling felt a little unaccustomed.
She wasn’t familiar with the others in the base, so she ran over to Wen Yi.
Wen Yi was also focused on doing her own work. During a break, she saw Xue Ling quietly lying beside her, looking through a copy of the instruction manual she had previously prepared for Wen Jiuzhe.
“If you’ve got nothing to do, go learn about those heavy weapons. You’ll definitely need them in the future,” Wen Yi said.
“Can I go?” Xue Ling raised her head and asked.
“What’s there that you can’t go to? Just go directly to the training grounds and find someone to teach you. If they’re unwilling, then go find General Hao.”
Xue Ling hesitated for only two seconds. “Okay, I’ll go right now!”
After glancing at her departing figure, Wen Yi continued with her own work.
When Wen Jiuzhe was around, he watched over Xue Ling as if she were the apple of his eye, wanting to block everything for her and shoulder everything himself.
His excessive concern made Xue Ling become restrained as well.
Because of her personality, Xue Ling didn’t want to trouble others and was unable to refuse the goodwill others showed her.
There were many things she wasn’t incapable of doing. The reason she didn’t try was simply because she was concerned about Wen Jiuzhe’s pathological protection of her.
As an outsider, Wen Yi calmly saw through the interaction pattern and difficulties between the two. About this, she had only one thought: men are really a nuisance.
Dating a man like Wen Jiuzhe, whose desire to protect was excessively strong because of his growth experiences, was just asking for trouble.
She hoped that this period of separation would make Wen Jiuzhe’s already rigid, dead brain become a bit clearer.
༚༅༚˳ . . ˳༚༅༚
Xue Ling found the training grounds.
This place was full of soldiers training. Among soldiers wearing identical uniforms, the moment she appeared, she was unusually conspicuous, drawing everyone’s attention.
But no one came over to ask her anything, and no one paid her any mind.
The soldiers here had all received notice that their base had absorbed two special talents whose appearance was no different from zombies.
Two days ago, that male zombie had even come to the training grounds to do a test. Although his style was wild and unorthodox, his results were excellent, so he only came for half a day and then stopped coming.
Today they saw the other one. Even though they were curious, no one looked much, because they had to obey discipline.
In Xue Ling’s eyes, it was that everyone was doing their own thing, and the scene was so serious that it made people feel timid.
She encouraged herself a couple of times in her heart. Since no one came to stop her, she boldly followed along the edge of the training grounds and felt her way over to the firearms training area.
A soldier who was training intently put down his gun and was checking his own results when he suddenly felt there was an extra person beside him. He thought it was the teammate coming to replace him, but when he turned his head and saw, he was almost so scared by the zombie face that he flew up.
Xue Ling quickly took out the tablet she had prepared: “Hello, I’m here to train, can you teach me?”
Xue Ling felt that the expression on the young soldier in front of her was especially cold and stiff. After asking this question, she waited nervously.
But what she didn’t know was that the other side’s heart was also pounding wildly—the cold, stiff expression was from being scared. After finally coming back to his senses and understanding what she wanted, the young soldier slowly showed a troubled expression.
Xue Ling thought he was going to refuse. Unexpectedly, he turned around and jogged to a soldier behind him who looked a bit older, pointed in her direction, and started talking.
Before long, that older soldier came over with him.
“Hello, I already know your situation. It’s no problem if you want to participate in training. Come with me over here, I’ll teach you,” the older soldier said with a cold face.
The young soldier Xue Ling had spoken to first showed a mouthful of white teeth and smiled awkwardly. “This is my captain. He’s really good at shooting. I still haven’t learned well myself, so I won’t teach you.”
Xue Ling relaxed and followed the captain off to the side.
Although the captain’s expression was also very serious, he was very responsible. It was Xue Ling’s first time coming into contact with these things, so she learned very slowly. A zombie’s fingers were stiff too, and many movements she did weren’t smooth. The captain didn’t curse and didn’t urge her; he just patiently waited.
Watching as Xue Ling gradually got the hang of it, the serious captain also smiled, his teeth as white as that young soldier’s earlier.
Xue Ling realized that these soldiers who looked so serious were actually all pretending. When they really smiled, each one was brighter than the next.
When the training came to a pause and they could rest, quite a few people gathered around Xue Ling, all coming to watch her learn to shoot.
Some couldn’t help commenting, offering suggestions, and some even said that the captain wasn’t teaching well, volunteering themselves to teach her.
Xue Ling had played with Wen Jiuzhe’s gun before. That gun was a handgun, not some very good gun.
Wen Jiuzhe had also said he would teach her to use guns, but she felt Wen Jiuzhe needed weapons for self-defense even more than she did, and ammunition was expensive. Many bases couldn’t trade for it. She didn’t want to waste precious bullets practicing, so she hadn’t really gotten hands-on.
Now, what she was learning was the newest model of assault rifle.
The captain teaching her was worried she wouldn’t be able to take the recoil. Xue Ling blinked. “But I’m a zombie, my skin and flesh are very hard, it won’t hurt.”
Captain: “……”
Xue Ling had been hanging around the training grounds for three days, and the captain had somewhat forgotten she was a zombie.
She really was a well-behaved, obedient student, and she could endure hardship. The captain, who had led many thorny soldiers, had never taught someone like this.
Looking closely, aside from her bluish face, she was just a thin, petite young girl. In the middle of a bunch of tall, burly special squad soldiers, she looked especially weak and harmless.
Even if everyone knew she was a zombie, as long as they spent a little more time with her, it was very easy to forget her zombie identity.
A few days later, when General Hao came to the training grounds for an inspection, he noticed a soldier in army-green clothes who was especially short, standing on the shooting range and training seriously.
He looked over there a few more times and discovered it was actually that zombie named Xue Ling.
“She’s already been coming here to train for several days,” the guard went to ask around and then came back to tell him.
General Hao went over and watched her training for a while. After she stopped, he beckoned to her.
“It’s very good that you can take the initiative to learn these things. Having one more skill to rely on means one more opportunity in the future. Let’s strive to make use of our own advantages and strengths. I think you did very well just now—keep it up!”
Xue Ling was encouraged and happily went back to training again.
Training was very hard, but her body didn’t feel fatigued. Being happy mentally, she felt even less of any sense of ‘tiredness.’
Wen Yi would come by every day to check her physical condition and record changes in her data—weight and the like. These were things Xue Ling had previously been secretly recording herself.
Aside from recording, Wen Yi only reminded her once: “You don’t need to push yourself too hard either. Excessive consumption isn’t worth it.”
Xue Ling took advice very well. She only learned the use of heavy weapons and no longer joined the soldiers to run around aimlessly.
A few days later, the captain teaching her was going to take the squad out on a mission. Xue Ling asked, “Can I go too?”
This time, the captain and his team were carrying out a routine task—traveling about two days’ distance to a city hospital to transport equipment.
Regularly clearing out nearby zombies, going into zombie-occupied cities to search for important supplies, escorting research teams when they went out, and so on—these all counted as routine tasks and were part of their daily work.
“It’s better now. Before, we had to do even more. When the base was first established, we had to go out to look for surviving populations, move bricks to build the city, and even go outside the city to plant wheat and harvest wheat.”
When Xue Ling was allowed to go out on a mission with their squad, she had nothing to do while sitting in the vehicle, so the soldiers in the squad talked to her about their previous missions.
“You’ve really worked hard. When I came to the Beizheng Base, I saw it and felt it was built so well, and there’s also all that grain that can support so many people. All of this is thanks to you.”
Xue Ling still remembered the shock she felt when she arrived at Beizheng Base and saw the vast fields of wheat and the towering city walls.
The soldier who was speaking felt embarrassed by the praise and hurriedly said, “Those wheat fields are grown by the people in the city now. We only planted them the very first time. Later, once the fencing was installed and the surroundings became safe, we didn’t need to come anymore.”
“Opening up land is the hardest and most difficult part,” Xue Ling said with genuine admiration for them.
The squad soldiers who spent the most time with her no longer cared about her strange appearance. Being praised by her the whole way, each of them was all smiles, proud and pleased.
When they got out of the vehicle to set up camp, the captain punched each of them once in irritation, telling them to rein in the smiles on their faces.
At night, the soldiers took turns resting, while Xue Ling wandered around the perimeter of the camp.
The sentries had changed shifts twice. Seeing Xue Ling still wandering about, they shone a flashlight at her feet.
“We’re guarding here. There won’t be any danger. You should go rest,” they said to her.
Xue Ling wandered over and held up her tablet: “But zombies don’t need to rest, and I can’t sleep either.”
The sentry scratched his head hard, not knowing what to say. He had forgotten again that she was different from them.
Actually, Xue Ling could find a place to sit, but she couldn’t sit still, so she came out for a walk.
It was fine during the day when there were things to do. At night, when everyone was asleep and everything was quiet with nothing happening, Xue Ling would easily think of Wen Jiuzhe.
When Wen Jiuzhe was around, he usually slept very late. On nights like this, with bright moon and sparse stars, Xue Ling liked to come out for a walk, and Wen Jiuzhe would follow her.
Accompanying her as they circled the same place again and again.
Then from time to time he would say a few things, like: “Walking in circles like this, doesn’t it look like a donkey pulling a mill?”
“Xue Ling, there’s a snake by your feet!”
“There’s a house in that patch of woods. Do you remember that horror movie we watched before? It looks a lot like the house in that movie. Want to go take a look?”
“Xue Ling, come over a bit. You’re stepping on someone’s grave. Be careful he might crawl out and grab your foot.”
“Can’t see the road clearly. Give me your hand, I’ll hold it.”
After recalling all those words and actions of his, deliberately picking trouble and scaring people, Xue Ling felt that she didn’t really miss him that much after all.
