Chapter 31: I don’t care who dies
Rich second-gens were the most detestable creatures—at least, that’s what Qu Yan had always thought ever since he started working at the reptile house.
He looked at Wu Heng’s face and smiled brilliantly. “I thought no one would ever find out. You… not bad.”
Then he lowered his head. When he raised it again moments later, his expression was smug and arrogant. “So what if you discovered it? I’ve been tormenting him for over a week. I enjoyed it! It was worth it!”
Beneath his human features, pairs of spider eyes flickered into view again and again.
Xue Qi’s lips moved, his voice so faint it was nearly soundless: “Careful.”
When Wu Heng forcefully shoved the boy away, two dark puncture marks were already imprinted on the back of his hand.
Bang.
A thunderous crash. A black spider, more than twice the size of the blue spider, appeared not far from Wu Heng. Its blood-red cluster of eyes glowed, and several legs—each longer than its own body—gleamed with a cold, metallic sheen, anchoring the massive creature firmly to the ceiling like iron nails.
From this angle, its back bore a vivid streak of red.
Wu Heng recalled what had been said earlier that morning: the shopkeeper was a mutated redback spider.
And not only that—before it had fully transformed into a spider, it had already wanted to bite people. Zombie, spider…
It hung suspended above the boy’s head, its fangs clashing with a metallic clang clang, saliva dripping down in thick drops.
The wound Wu Heng had inflicted on its humanoid form was still faintly visible, but so tiny it was negligible, seemingly having no effect at all.
In its eyes, the figure of Wu Heng standing small upon the ground looked not only insignificant, but strangely… enticing.
The kind of person he had always dreamed of becoming—that must be it. Even in the face of imminent death looming right above him, he remained utterly unshaken.
“How did you know he was here?!” Qu Yan’s eyes nearly split apart with rage.
Wu Heng: “I saw it.”
“Saw it?” Qu Yan stared at the boy from a strange angle. “We were all outside. How could you have seen it?”
Wu Heng didn’t answer. His arm dropped, and at once, X flapped its wings and flew onto a specimen cabinet nearby.
A few flashes of green flickered before his eyes.
“You’ll find out soon enough.” Seven or eight vines shot upward like arrows, stabbing toward the black spider on the ceiling.
The black spider leapt down onto the specimen cabinet. It glanced back at the holes the vines had punched into the ceiling, and a hazy suspicion flickered in its mind.
Clacking its fangs against the glass, it threatened, “I’ll kill him.”
Qu Yan thought to himself: since Wu Heng had gone so far as to stab him in the back for Xue Qi’s sake, he must care a lot about whether Xue Qi lived or died.
But Wu Heng’s expression stayed calm, green waves rolling forward beneath his feet, surging straight toward the specimen cabinet.
“If you want to kill him, that’s your business. If I want to kill you, that’s mine.”
Qu Yan hadn’t expected Wu Heng to show absolutely no concern for Xue Qi. He leapt onto the cabinet next to him—glass shattered beneath his feet, and mingled with the sound of breaking shards came the sharp whistle of spider silk slicing through the air.
Wu Heng raised his hand. Vines immediately snared the spider silk and yanked it down hard toward the floor. The vine slammed against the tiles with a deafening crack, shattering them instantly, and from below, more vines coiled around the supporting pillar, silently wrapping around several of the spider’s legs and wrenching it straight off the column.
The spider crashed heavily to the ground.
As the threads snapped, the black spider quickly swung its fangs, slicing through more than half of the vines in an instant.
Bang! Bang! Bang! The vines struck so fast that their trajectory was impossible to follow, stabbing into the spider’s body several times—but the wounds were all superficial.
When Wu Heng struck out again, he realized that halfway through, the vines suddenly lost their strength. His fingers went numb and trembled, and he quickly pulled back.
On the pillar, Qu Yan turned his body, his spider’s swollen abdomen jutting out as he slowly crawled back up to the very top. “Wu Heng, the venom’s taking effect.”
Once he reached the top, he actually began weaving a web at a leisurely pace.
“If I’m not mistaken, what allowed you to find Xue Qi is that thing inside your body, isn’t it? You two are symbiotic. So what it senses, you can sense too. What it sees, images of it appear in your mind. Otherwise, I really can’t imagine how you knew I’d hidden Xue Qi in the deepest specimen cabinet of the reptile house.”
“If you hadn’t discovered it, then by now I would have replaced Xue Qi. And most likely, we’d be very good friends. Because honestly, I quite like you.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you—my name is Qu Yan.” The spider revealed a ghastly pale human face and smiled down at the boy below.
The man didn’t look that old—at a glance, probably not even thirty.
Wu Heng lowered his eyes, swiftly glancing at the back of his bitten hand. A layer of black was already spreading across it, and that strange color was slowly seeping upward from bottom to top.
His figure was thin, his complexion pale, yet his expression remained calm and detached.
Qu Yan rustled away, carefully and deliberately weaving his web as he talked: “In truth, I haven’t really done anything bad, have I?”
“Take Xue Qi for example. At first, I thought highly of him—cheerful personality, diligent at work, never late or leaving early. Until one payday. I remember his hours only added up to 3,280 yuan. But the moment he got paid, he immediately treated every single employee at the reptile house to afternoon tea. I looked at the bill—that one tea session cost him 31,068 yuan. Do you know how disgusting that felt?”
“In truth, I’m not resentful of the rich. I have my own pride. What I despise is that kind of obliviousness to suffering people like Xue Qi carry. Who doesn’t have their own difficult scriptures to recite? If he really didn’t have any, then I just wrote one for him. Look at him now—hasn’t he become much more sensible?”
“This world now is survival of the fittest. Xue Qi’s skills aren’t up to par, and I still spared his life. However you look at it, I’m practically doing charity work.”
Wu Heng didn’t listen to a single word of what he was saying.
Why hadn’t Xie Chongyi and the others come yet? He was starting to lose his grip.
Qu Yan had already finished weaving the framework of his web. Then he circled around its center again and again. The web was big enough to hang more than a dozen humans upon it.
“I’m guessing you’re waiting for them to find you. Don’t worry—they’ve already been affected by my ability. Their visual perception is distorted. Even if they walk right past you, they won’t see you.”
“Just like how you all mistook me for Xue Qi earlier. From beginning to end, I was Qu Yan all along.”
The web he wove was dense and snow-white. It didn’t even look like a web—it looked like a seamless sheet of white cloth.
Wu Heng didn’t need to think about it to know—it was woven specifically for him.
Qu Yan hung himself upon the web, peering down at Wu Heng from above.
The boy’s mask had long since fallen away. Damp strands of hair clung to his forehead, and his lifeless eyes gave him the appearance of a fragile ghost, ready to dissipate at any moment.
Qu Yan couldn’t help but climb a little lower, narrowing the distance between them. Then he said:
“I’ll give you a choice now.”
“One—you kill the counterfeit in the specimen cabinet with your own hands. From then on, I’ll be Xue Qi, and we’ll be friends.”
“Two—I kill the counterfeit in the specimen cabinet myself, and also you. Afterward, I’ll still be Xue Qi.”
“Choose.”
Wu Heng looked toward the specimen cabinet not far away.
To be honest, the blue spider’s colors were unusually bright and vivid. Even in the dark, it gave off a faint glow. The fine hairs on its legs looked soft to the naked eye. But perhaps it was only because Xue Qi had been trapped for so long and his body was weakened that he appeared completely without aggression. He didn’t look like a monster—only like a specimen.
“I hate trouble the most.” Wu Heng parted his lips, his tone cool and indifferent.
“You’ve made your choice?” Excitement that could hardly be concealed flickered in Qu Yan’s eyes. The web behind him shuddered violently.
Wu Heng said, “I don’t even know Xue Qi. And I don’t want to die yet.”
As he spoke, he pulled out the spring knife he always carried in his uninjured hand. The instant the blade snapped open, he drove the full length of it straight into Qu Yan’s mouthparts with lightning speed.
A piercing screech followed, and Wu Heng was hurled more than ten meters away by the spider’s fangs.
It felt as though a boulder weighing hundreds of pounds had slammed into his chest. Collapsing on the ground, Wu Heng coughed violently, the taste of blood flooding his mouth.
Da-da. Da-da.
The pitch-black spider moved toward him. From Wu Heng’s perspective, it was nothing short of a gigantic beast. Looming above him, it seemed to be passing judgment. Its long legs stood like towering pillars around its body. Any one of them, raised and lowered at random, could crush his skull into paste.
Qu Yan raised his saw-like fangs, sneering coldly: “You don’t know what’s good for you.”
As he brought them down in a heavy strike, Wu Heng’s eyes flashed, and he rolled swiftly aside. Without the slightest hesitation, he twisted the blade in his hand and sliced off his poisoned arm at the wrist.
He scrambled to his feet and kicked his own severed hand away.
Pain and numbness were severed by Wu Heng’s single cut; the poison could no longer suppress the vines’ power. They went berserk, stabbing toward the black spider like a meteor shower.
The display cases around them were smashed one after another; glass shattered and sprayed everywhere. The paintings hung on the walls and the artificial rockeries and ponds were destroyed in an instant.
Chunks of floor flew up as the ground began to collapse. Thick and thin vines raised great surges above the floor; the main vines, like giant constrictors, quickly coiled up the stone pillars, plunging deep into the earth and monitoring the black spider’s movements throughout the hall.
Wu Heng leaned against the wall, his face a ghastly, terrifying white. The writhing vines in the room reflected an icy green off his pallor.
Suddenly his eyelashes trembled; a gap opened in the canopy of vines before him, and a spider—gripped by several legs—was hauled upside down and brought in front of him.
“Neutralize the poison,” Wu Heng said.
Qu Yan snorted coldly.
In an instant a blade pierced the spider’s chest; its breast looked hollow. Wu Heng, not entirely sure, whispered to Qu Yan, “Is the energy core here? Your energy core—surely it can cure your poison. Perfect—the spider is wood-attribute.”
Qu Yan laughed in bursts, his huge abdomen heaving; his fangs tried to slice but were powerless. “For money?” he sneered.
“I don’t know him, and I don’t know you,” Wu Heng said, fingers tracing the blood-red patch on the black spider’s back. “But you lied and you threatened me. In fact, I’m not certain the Xue Qi I saw was the real Xue Qi, and I can’t guarantee you’re fake either.”
Qu Yan’s eyes flickered; he stared at Wu Heng. “You—”
Wu Heng pursed his lips into a calm smile, composed and refined. “I just wanted to try. If I die, I die. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Whether any of you lives or dies doesn’t concern me much.”
“Found it.” Wu Heng’s eyes lit up. He pulled out the knife and tossed it aside, then directly thrust his hand into the spider’s body and drew out the energy core glowing with green light.
It was the darkest wood-element core he had obtained since the beginning of the apocalypse.
But if it had to be graded, it would probably only count as D-rank.
He didn’t think Qu Yan was all that powerful—the redback spider was only dangerous because of its venom.
Qu Yan could no longer make a sound. Its body went slack, and the vines surging in from all directions immediately tore it to shreds.
After absorbing the energy core, Wu Heng reattached his severed hand. It hurt—badly—but aside from the circle of bright red marks left on his wrist, it was whole again.
Whether it was because Qu Yan’s ability hadn’t yet dissipated, the voices around them had gone completely silent.
Wu Heng stepped forward to the specimen cabinet. He tried the door with his hand—it wasn’t locked, so it opened at once.
“Can you turn into a human?”
As he was now, far too large, far too inconvenient.
Xue Qi looked at Wu Heng, a flicker of respect in his eyes along with faint fear. “I can, but… there are nails in my legs. They need to be pulled out first.”
Wu Heng glanced at his spider legs—each one had a metal nail as thick as a finger driven into it.
He raised his hand; the vines drifted over like strands of hair, gently wrapping around the nails one by one.
The moment he began to pull, Xue Qi let out a scream of unbearable agony.
Wu Heng was seized in a desperate embrace by Xue Qi’s fangs and limbs. His tone remained cool and detached: “Bear it.”
As soon as he said it, several nails were pulled free, blood beading on their tips. Xue Qi shifted back into human form, collapsing against Wu Heng’s shoulder, convulsing with pain that wouldn’t let up.
Wu Heng cast a glance down at his legs.
The denim below the knees had already darkened, soaked through with blood, the fabric stained to near-black.
“You know my brother,” Xue Qi said with difficulty. “Don’t tell him about me. Don’t tell him I’m a human spider. Say I’m Spider-Man—Spider-Man sounds like a hero. ‘Human spider’ just sounds like a monster.”
Just as Xue Qi finished speaking, Lin Mengzhi’s voice came from a distance.
“A’Heng!” Lin Mengzhi’s face was full of panic. “Where the hell did you run off to? The two of us have been looking for you forever—you scared me to death… Wait, why do you look so pale?! Like a ghost!”
“I’m fine.” Wu Heng looked toward Xie Chongyi and Xue Shen, who were walking over, and stepped aside.
When Xue Shen saw Xue Qi, all the scolding words he had ready disappeared without a trace. He jogged up to Xue Qi. “How did you end up like this? Didn’t Lin Mengzhi say you were managing just fine?”
Xue Qi pulled a long face. “Brother, my leg’s ruined. Qu Yan’s been draining my blood to drink every single day!”
The air froze at once. Then Lin Mengzhi burst out with a string of curses—“f*ckf*ckf*ckf*ckf*ck”—ten times over. “That’s inhuman!”
Wu Heng didn’t join in the denunciation. When the law loses its supervisors and enforcers, when order and morality collapse, it’s only a matter of time before human animality takes over, even becoming the primary driver of human behavior.
He leaned against the side to rest, his arm weak and itchy from the recovery process.
He rubbed and scratched at it, completely unaware that Xie Chongyi—separated from him by just one person—had been sneaking glance after glance at him.
—
After the reptile house was taken down, the group finally got to relax and rest.
“Let’s go to the supermarket, grab some water, wash up, and change into clean clothes. We all stink right now.”
The supermarket had big jugs of mineral water and toiletries ready-made. Wu Heng carried a bucket of water into the fresh produce section and scrubbed himself with particular seriousness. Next to him lay a set of pajamas he’d picked up directly from the store shelves.
As he washed, X stood nearby, splashing some water on itself and shaking its fur. It was dirty too—though it didn’t do any work, people kept using it as a towel.
When Xie Chongyi came over, Wu Heng had just slipped the soft, plaid pajamas onto his little white fish-like body. The latter was bent over, fussing with his filthy clothes, face full of hesitation—probably torn about whether to keep them. As for the shoes, he clearly couldn’t bear to part with them, holding them in his hand in advance.
“Enough,” Xie Chongyi walked up, snatched his dirty clothes and broken shoes, and tossed them aside. “There’s plenty upstairs.”
Wu Heng thought this was an extravagant, wasteful bad habit.
“How’s Xue Qi?” He didn’t actually care about Xue Qi—he just didn’t have anything to say to Xie Chongyi. He never had much to say to anyone, so he just brought up whatever came to mind.
Xie Chongyi was wearing deep gray cotton pajamas. If not for the fact they both knew perfectly well what time it was, he would have looked exactly like some young master who had gotten up late and was strolling through the supermarket in his sleepwear without a care for what others thought.
At the mention of Xue Qi, his tone paused slightly. “If any one of us were to awaken another ability, Xue Shen would most hope for regeneration—or something that could heal everything.”
Hearing this, Wu Heng understood.
Xue Qi’s leg was probably really useless now.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Qu Yan?” Passing a few aisles, Xie Chongyi’s voice suddenly cut through, cold and emotionless.
“What about Qu Yan?” Wu Heng hesitated, baffled.
Xie Chongyi turned his head and glanced at Wu Heng. He knew Wu Heng liked to put on an act, but even an act ought to have its limits…
Forget it—none of this really had anything to do with him anyway.
“Nothing,” Xie Chongyi’s tone turned cold as he strode ahead.
Wu Heng chased after him a few steps, then gradually stopped. Standing still, he thought it over carefully, but couldn’t make any sense of the shift in Xie Chongyi’s attitude.
Wu Heng didn’t need friends, nor did he need to deal with social relations—such things were just trouble to him.
But Xie Chongyi was different. Xie Chongyi was food.
At that moment, Lin Mengzhi was upstairs happily picking out trendy brands, and had no time to give him advice about handling interpersonal problems.
Wu Heng lowered his eyes, his expression becoming the picture of meek obedience. He held it for a while, then hurried after Xie Chongyi.
From the moment he took that first step, his expression hadn’t changed; even when he caught up, he still wore that same carefully fabricated look of docile gentleness.
“Help me pick out some clothes,” he said softly, blocking Xie Chongyi’s path.
The boy had just washed his face, and naturally his body too. His neck and face were fair and smooth like ivory, looking utterly harmless—like a fragile willow branch swaying unsteadily in the breeze, or like reed blossoms drifting on the surface of a river.
But Xie Chongyi couldn’t help recalling what Xue Qi had just said:
“That Wu Heng, he’s brutal with himself—just chopped off his own hand, clean! Said it and did it! What kind of thing is he, huh? How can you just chop off a hand and stick it back on? Even in the information age, development wasn’t that fast!”
Xie Chongyi’s eyes were drawn involuntarily to Wu Heng’s hands.
Xue Qi hadn’t said which hand it was. So… which one had Wu Heng chopped off just now?
He knew Wu Heng had a dark heart—he’d said it himself, that they were the same kind. But Xie Chongyi truly hadn’t expected that Wu Heng would treat him no differently than he treated anyone else.
Xie Chongyi admired people like that, but he couldn’t say he liked them.
Keeping someone like that close was like carrying around a live time bomb—dangerous.
With that thought, a faint trace of hostility seeped into Xie Chongyi’s gaze and tone, though it was hard to detect.
When Xie Chongyi was in a good mood, he was cool and aloof, distant yet refined; when he was in a bad mood, he actually smiled. At a casual glance it seemed fine, but a closer look was enough to chill the heart.
Wu Heng didn’t look closely. His lashes lowered, giving him the appearance of being in the wrong.
The more Xie Chongyi looked, the more irritating it became.
“You want me to pick out clothes for you?” Xie Chongyi leaned down slightly, tilting his head to look Wu Heng in the eyes. “What if I pick a dress—will you wear it?”
The boy froze for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”