Eaten Ch.60.1

Chapter 60.1: He’s Dead

Wu Heng sat up in bed.

His food.

The vines instinctively struck in the direction of the earthen house.

Inside the freezing building, the uneven ground was still stained with patches of dried blood.

Xie Chongyi had already woken everyone up. His expression was grim, so no one else dared show displeasure.

Before anyone could ask what was wrong, Xue Shen spoke first: “Where’s Du Yaoyuan?”

Du Yaoyuan had shared a room with Shen Ping’an and Shen She. Shen She shook his head—he didn’t know. Shen Ping’an said Du Yaoyuan had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom but hadn’t come back.

After the two finished answering, Ruan Silian frowned slightly and said, “Earlier, Zhao Ming from the village came by. I was the one who opened the door. He said the village chief wanted to speak with us and asked that one person come over. You were all asleep, so I was planning to go, but I happened to run into Du Yaoyuan, so he went instead.”

Xie Chongyi pulled on his coat and opened the door. A gust of icy wind and snow roared inside.

“I’ll go take a look. You don’t need to follow.”

In truth, no one wanted to follow. One glance outside was enough to see how cold it was.

Other than the class monitor, who else would be this responsible?

The class rep, who used to care only about grades, now had his eyes set solely on battle performance.

“What happened to Du Yaoyuan?” Xue Qi asked. He wasn’t in his wheelchair, sitting instead on Shen She’s lap.

Wu Heng didn’t answer. With Xie Chongyi gone, no one knew.

The place wasn’t far. Xie Chongyi used his ability, and in less than ten seconds he had reached the earthen house.

He rested his fingers on the latch and pushed the door open.

Everything inside looked the same as it had during the day—except for the faint metallic tang of blood hanging in the air.

Xie Chongyi walked to the center of the room and reached up to touch the lightbulb overhead.

Warm.

Electricity had long since stopped working in the apocalypse, and there was no generator in the village.

Ability users could power things themselves, yes—but hadn’t they said there were no ability users in this village?

He lowered his arm.

The bulb above flickered once, then came to life.

It was an old-fashioned bulb, low wattage, its light dim and hazy.

The glow spread across the room in a murky wash—yet somehow, it made several patches on the ground gleam faintly bright.

It was a dull, ashen kind of light—completely different from the clear moonlight outside.

—

Zhao Rui sat slumped in a lounge chair, shotgun in his arms, staring blankly at the moon. Packs of wolves had come for several nights in a row, but tonight, none appeared. The quiet left him deeply bored.

Cre-eak. Cre-eak.

A sound came from the right.

Zhao Rui didn’t look; he already knew it was Zhao Mingxiang coming up.

“You’re just in time. Switch shifts, switch shifts—I need to sleep, I’m dead tired.”

He didn’t even glance at Zhao Mingxiang. He just tugged the blanket over his face and began to snore almost immediately.

Unlike usual, Zhao Mingxiang didn’t insist on chatting for a bit before taking over.

He sat down on the chair beside him, gazed blankly at the mountain ridge across the way for a while, then reached for the rag hanging on the railing. Lowering his head, he began to scrub at the bloodstains splattered across his clothes.

He and Zhao Rui had rushed back to the village in such a hurry they hadn’t packed a single change of clothes. With the sudden drop in temperature, they were wearing hand-me-downs from the elders in the village. The floral cotton jacket Zhao Mingxiang had on was already days old—at this point, even if an entire basin of blood were dumped on it, it wouldn’t show.

And yet he kept wiping, scrubbing with the rag over and over.

In the first two days after the apocalypse began, biting incidents had erupted all over the school.

Zhao Rui had been part of some club—something like a gossip society—and went to the hospital under the pretext of “interviewing” an infected student. He ended up chased all around the ward by that crazed classmate, and when he finally made it back to campus, he told Zhao Mingxiang they should just go home.

The two of them bought tickets and returned to their village overnight. Their parents thought they were skipping school and scolded them furiously. Before either family could drag their kids back by force, the monsters—those that bit and devoured people—appeared in the village.

The houses in the area were scattered; fewer than twenty households were clustered together.

By the time the infection reached where their families lived, Zhao Rui and Zhao Mingxiang were already among the last survivors.

The apocalypse had come so suddenly. During the period when Zhao Mingxiang fell into a coma from his awakening ability, Zhao Rui had to protect both his own family and several nearby households.

He’d taken up a butcher’s knife—and, eyes red with exhaustion and fury, fought until he couldn’t see straight.

The old village chief, meanwhile, directed the remaining people to gather whatever supplies they could.

But after being slaughtered once by zombies and again by mutated wolves, there wasn’t much left—neither people nor provisions.

At night, everyone slept together in the same room—only then could they actually fall asleep.

It wasn’t until Zhao Mingxiang woke up and built the wall around the village that people finally breathed a sigh of relief.

He was the only ability user in the village.

In everyone’s eyes, Zhao Mingxiang was their one and only hope for survival.

“Zhao Mingxiang.”

Zhao Rui’s voice broke through his thoughts and halted his movements.

Zhao Mingxiang tossed the rag aside and leaned back in his chair, his gaze indifferent.

After a long pause, Zhao Rui spoke again, his tone solemn and serious:

“When do you think I’ll ever get to drink milk tea again?”

Zhao Mingxiang shoved him lightly without replying—but his instincts made him turn his head.

In the distance, the small, yellowish earthen house’s light had flickered on again for some reason.

His pupils contracted. He stared at it without blinking, watching as a figure stepped out through the doorway—a tall young man. Even from afar, with his facial features obscured, there was an unmistakable sense of pressure emanating from his posture and presence.

The young man stood at the door, unmoving, his gaze sweeping across the village as if searching for something—and finding nothing.

After a long while, he finally looked down at his feet and started to descend the steps. But the instant he bent his knees and set foot on the ground, his figure vanished.

Zhao Mingxiang’s breath hitched.

In the blink of an eye, the boy’s silhouette reappeared forty or fifty meters away from the earthen house, his form trailing faint afterimages. A few slow-falling snowflakes were knocked off their trajectories, and before the lingering outline of his body could even fade, he vanished again.

Xie Chongyi’s long legs finally stepped onto the stair landing. He opened the door, and his tall, lean figure appeared before everyone gathered in the living room.

…

Xie Chongyi took something out of his pocket and placed it on the floor in the middle of the group.

Lin Mengzhi quickly crawled over to take a look and saw a few strands of fur.

“What’s this?”

“Wolf fur,” Xie Chongyi said, sitting cross-legged.

“Wolf fur…” Xue Shen murmured thoughtfully. “From the village wolves?”

“So where’s Du Yaoyuan? You went out and came back with just a few strands of fur?” Lin Mengzhi rubbed one between his fingers. The fur was coarse—so rough it pricked the skin.

“Dead.”

Xie Chongyi’s eyelids lowered.

“Dead?!” Lin Mengzhi shot upright, disbelief written all over his face. “You’re joking, right?”

Everyone else wanted to question it too—but it was Xie Chongyi who had spoken. The class monitor wasn’t the kind of person who made jokes, much less that kind of joke.

Xue Shen opened his mouth several times, then closed it again. In the end, he only sighed, took off his glasses, and began wiping the lenses over and over with the corner of his shirt.

“He’s not joking,” Wu Heng said calmly. He was holding X in his arms, gently stroking its back as he spoke in a clear, cold voice. “Du Yaoyuan is already dead.”

Lin Mengzhi looked stunned. “A’Heng, how do you know?”

“It told me,” Wu Heng said softly.

At first, Lin Mengzhi thought the “it” he mentioned referred to Xie Chongyi—but something didn’t sound right. Before he could ask, Wu Heng raised his right hand, and a thin vine emerged from his palm.

“This is the part of the plant that burrowed into Du Yaoyuan’s body yesterday. It came back. That means the host has died.”

The scene was chilling.

The plant seemed to possess a mind of its own. Instead of immediately returning into Wu Heng’s body, it coiled lazily around his hand, almost as if playing.

Dou Lu stared at Wu Heng’s right hand, her ears ringing. “It can find its way back on its own?”

“It’s too small,” Wu Heng explained, knowing what she was thinking. “Its own energy is weak. Once it leaves the main body, it needs the host to keep supplying it with life energy. So… unless the host can no longer sustain it, it wouldn’t leave on its own.”

Dou Lu’s breathing grew heavier. Her unfocused eyes sharpened with fury as she suddenly stood up.

“Someone in this village killed Du Yaoyuan? Why? We didn’t even do anything to them!”

“I’m going to make them pay.”

Her voice trembled, choked with tears and rage she could barely contain.

Sure, Du Yaoyuan had a foul mouth—but over this period, they’d still managed to support each other and get by.

A sharp tongue was nothing. If anyone couldn’t stand it, they could slap him behind closed doors.

In this end-of-the-world chaos where life and death hung by a thread, that hardly counted as a real offense.

Shen Ping’an stood up as well. “We’ll go together.”

“Wait,” Xue Shen called out, putting his glasses back on. “Can you two not be so impulsive? Sit down first.”

Dou Lu flung her arm in frustration, then collapsed into Ruan Silian’s embrace, muffling her sobs against her shoulder.

Shen Ping’an also sat back down.

“Old Xie,” Xue Shen asked, “what exactly did you see when you went out?”

“The house was empty—no one there,” Xie Chongyi said, leaning back slightly with both hands on the floor. “There’s at least one ability user in the village… and a mutated wolf. But it’s unclear who killed Du Yaoyuan. It’s possible the wolf itself had awakened an ability. His death might not be connected to the villagers at all.”

Wu Heng caught the vine that had been creeping away and quietly said, “Zhao Mingxiang is an ability user.”

Dou Lu’s head snapped up at once.

Even Ruan Silian, still tearful, suddenly came to herself. “He was the one who came to our door earlier—said the village chief wanted to talk to us.”

“Then maybe we should talk to him first,” Lin Mengzhi offered dryly. “I don’t think the people here seem like bad guys…”

He didn’t even like Du Yaoyuan much—in fact, he found him annoying—but that was all it was.

There were plenty of people he couldn’t stand; that didn’t mean he wanted them dead.

Besides, their ‘Elysium Group’ had only just been formed.

Wu Zhi suddenly turned to him. “Mengzhi, why would you think that? You think they’ll just nod and admit, ‘Yes, we killed Du Yaoyuan,’ right in front of you?”

“…Fair point,” Lin Mengzhi admitted seriously. “Then… let’s think it over first.”

Two seconds later, his expression changed. “Wait—who said you could call me Mengzhi? And also—how come you’re… you’re not sounding as dumb anymore?”

Wu Zhi instinctively hugged Wu Heng’s arm, her tone and demeanor uncannily similar to her brother’s in certain moments.

“Now doesn’t seem like the time to be discussing me, does it?”

She had a point.

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