Chapter 102: A Good Person
The half-eaten bodies needed to be dealt with. The bitten survivors needed treatment. The stench on the streets had changed from the smell of blood to the reek of rot. The blood on the ground was already turning black.
The rat-woman was locked inside a cage made of iron thorns on all sides. She was very quiet.
Wu Heng walked alongside Liu Ning. Liu Ning glanced at him. “Not all of them are dead. Be careful.”
Vines silently slithered out from beneath the corpses on the ground.
Wu Heng didn’t eat rotten or spoiled things—but it did. It could stuff anything into its mouth. The pools of blood and the corpses of the rat-people scattered everywhere were, to it, nothing short of a luxurious feast.
“No one can betray me—not even a plant.”
Wu Heng was simply letting Liu Ning know that he understood Liu Ning had been right earlier. The poppy had indeed been restless recently.
Liu Ning turned over the corpse lying face-down on the ground. After checking for breath, she covered it with a white cloth.
“You can say no one dares to, but you’re not yet at the level where no one can,” she said. “Even Mr. Mo wouldn’t dare make that kind of claim.”
“The only follower you have is that clueless friend of yours. As for the others,” Liu Ning chuckled, “it doesn’t even count as betrayal, does it?”
“Because I don’t need them.”
Wu Heng kicked aside a rat-man corpse blocking his path, wiping his shoe against the ground.
“If I ever did need followers, then there would be absolutely no one who’d dare betray me.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Liu Ning stopped walking, ending their casual talk. She crouched down, dipped a finger into the filthy blood on the ground, and brought it to her nose. “The scent is strange.”
Wu Heng didn’t dislike Liu Ning. He crouched beside her and casually snapped off a finger from a corpse, tossing it into his mouth. He crunched twice.
Unfazed, he spat it out. “Tastes awful.”
“How is it different from what you’ve eaten before?” Liu Ning asked leisurely.
“I’ve never eaten a rat before. But an hour ago, I bit into one. The meat was tender and fresh. But this taste—” Wu Heng uncapped his flask, rinsed his mouth, and continued, “—this is the taste of a zombie.”
“Correct.”
The stench of a zombie was unique—no other rotting creature smelled the same.
“This smell…” Wu Heng seemed uncertain. He rolled up his sleeves, dragged another corpse toward him, lifted its shirt, and with a ripping sound split its abdomen open. A thick wave of rot burst out, and blackened blood splattered across the ground.
Liu Ning immediately stood and backed away a few steps, worried about staining her dress.
A moment later, Wu Heng wiped his hands on the zombie’s clothing and rose with calm composure.
“This is the same scent I detected earlier today from a female survivor at Shisanhe Base. She had two children. They both mutated into evolved zombies. Their bodies smelled exactly like this.”
There was no sound from behind; Liu Ning said nothing.
Wu Heng crouched motionlessly on the ground. When he finally finished thinking, several rat-men among the wide, silent field of corpses suddenly sat up, swaying—the ones whose heads they hadn’t had time to destroy, whose energy cores hadn’t been removed, the ones that had slipped through the cracks.
Wu Heng looked toward the cage where the rat-woman was imprisoned. She leaned against the carriage wall, head bowed, hands resting flat on her thighs, her whole figure listless and wilted.
“We were deceived,” the boy stood up. His pale, slender fingers were still stained with messy traces of blood, but his expression showed no emotion. “The rat-woman is innocent.”
Before Liu Ning could even react, the figure in front of her blurred into a streak of murky green; in the distance, bone met blade, and several zombies collapsed instantly. Only then did the boy’s complete silhouette reappear beside them.
The speed at which his thoughts began and concluded was almost unimaginable. His strike—decisive and merciless—was even more astonishing, because such traits almost never coexist in a single person.
He turned around, his face calm and untroubled, so different from the one Liu Ning had seen just minutes earlier. Back then she had thought him young, naïve, incapable of carrying any real weight.
Liu Ning suddenly understood why someone so young dared to claim, “No one would ever dare betray me.” Wu Heng had never planned to inspire loyalty through noble character or a well-designed system. His method was absolute domination through strength—after all, no one in history had ever ascended to a throne through speeches and rare personal virtue alone.
Wu Heng walked past Liu Ning. Vines hooked around the cage, and the entire iron door was ripped away.
With a clang, it hit the ground—but there was no reaction from the one inside.
The tail that should have been curled on the ground or tucked between her legs now hung over the rat-woman’s small forearm. Its thinning end extended upward, and Wu Heng’s gaze followed.
The tail was wrapped around the rat-woman’s neck. The skin beneath the coil had already turned purple. Her eyes bulged from their sockets; her lips were slightly parted.
The rat-woman had taken her own life.
“Why isn’t she moving?” Lin Mengzhi had approached at some point. He stretched his neck forward. “Did someone smear lard inside the cage?”
“She’s dead.”
“What?!”
Wu Heng stepped into the carriage and entered the cage. He crouched in front of Quan Jing and tried to remove the tail from her neck.
Her body still held some residual warmth, though with the temperature this high, she must have been gone for a while already.
His gaze drifted downward. Wu Heng noticed her white dress. On the side of the skirt were several blood-red characters. He reached out a hand.
“Hey—what the hell are you doing?” Lin Mengzhi yelped in alarm. He scrambled into the cage and slapped Wu Heng’s hand away. “She’s dead and you’re still tugging on her clothes?!”
“There’s writing on it.” Wu Heng held back the urge to roll his eyes.
Lin Mengzhi helped pull the skirt and stretch it flat.
The two of them tilted their heads as far as humanly possible before they could make out the words.
“I can’t accept that so many people died because of me.”
“So… she killed herself?” Lin Mengzhi didn’t even know this woman. As far as he was concerned: survivor, rat symbiotic body—same difference. She was the root cause of the mutations and infections that killed so many. “Didn’t she say it wasn’t her? Just because she’s involved doesn’t mean she’d definitely be executed. At a time like this, I feel like ability users still have a chance to fight for themselves. Why kill herself out of guilt?”
“It’s not suicide out of guilt,” Wu Heng glanced at him. “She already said it—she couldn’t accept others dying because of her.”
“What’s the difference?”
Wu Heng: “…The difference is: even if the base’s laws found her innocent, she would have made the same choice.”
Lin Mengzhi’s throat felt like a blade was slicing left and right through it. “She was a good person.”
Liu Ning carried the body out and placed it in the backseat behind the driver’s cabin, then called Sheng Jiang over.
The moment Sheng Jiang arrived, he let out a sharp “Oh—”! “Why are so many people dead?”
Liu Ning opened the car door to let him examine the rat-woman, looking thoroughly exasperated. “Something went wrong internally. We thought we found the source, but turns out the source wasn’t the source. And the one we thought was the source of the source went and killed herself.”
“Stop talking in tongue twisters.”
Sheng Jiang stood outside the car door. He drew a circle with his fingers, and pale blue energy flowed in from several directions, converging into that circle. In the center appeared Quan Jing’s white-background ID photo, along with a text panel beside it.
“Quan Jing, 23, second-year graduate student in Sociology at Haicheng People’s University—she got in through direct recommendation. Her record… aside from her academic achievements, she has been involved in public welfare since she was fifteen. Disaster relief, various public infrastructure projects in Haicheng benefiting people with disabilities—she participated in all of them.
Through her alumni legal aid group, she helped victims of domestic violence obtain compensation and custody, helped workers recover unpaid wages six times. She even single-handedly maneuvered through a family that had been abusing their daughter for years and rescued the girl—this incident even trended on social media… Counting everything together, just her monetary donations alone total over three hundred thousand.”
Sheng Jiang withdrew the signal. He turned around, and the lazy expression on his face vanished. “I need an explanation.”
Wu Heng was about to step forward, but Liu Ning stopped him, taking the initiative to speak: “This was my misjudgment. And… I didn’t expect she would use her own tail to hang herself.”
It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. The fear bred by infection had seeped into everyone’s bones. In some bases, killings done under the excuse of infection were rampant; paranoia spread everywhere. Kuhuang was no exception. Even though Jingzhou had repeatedly issued orders stating that indiscriminate killing of suspected infected was unacceptable, it had little effect.
After confirming that Quan Jing had indeed committed suicide, Sheng Jiang let out a long sigh.
His voice wasn’t loud, but it made everyone except Wu Heng feel deeply ashamed.
“Liu Ning, a survivor who had yet to be tried died under your watch. That is dereliction of duty.”
After saying that, Sheng Jiang turned and lifted Quan Jing’s body. “I’m taking her back to Jingzhou.”
Silence fell over the surroundings, broken only by Sheng Jiang’s continued movements as he catalogued the information of the other bodies.
Wu Heng’s gray-green eyes calmly watched Sheng Jiang’s back. He and Xie Chongyi shared the same origin—their scents were similar as well. His hunger stirred again. His desire to go to Jingzhou had already faded considerably, but he found himself hoping that Sheng Jiang and the others would willingly throw themselves, one by one, into his mouth.
After a long pause, Lin Mengzhi assumed Wu Heng was blaming himself, feeling sad. He tried to lighten the mood in a dry, awkward way:
“What’s his ability? How can he even check all this info?”
“Signal and propagation,” Liu Ning replied.
“Ah… oh.” Lin Mengzhi didn’t really understand what kind of ability that was—it sounded like some specialized major at a university.
Silence began to settle again. Wu Heng turned and started walking away, and Lin Mengzhi hurried to follow.
With Liu Ning and the other guards gone, it was just the two of them. Lin Mengzhi lowered his voice, but it was strained with emotion:
“My god… what have we done? That woman was a good person, but how could she be such a good person? Could that information even be fake? Could there really be people this good in the world? A’Heng, I feel so heavy inside.”
Before his emotions could get any response, Wu Heng vanished from his sight.
Dr. Chen lay sprawled on the ground in all directions. Hearing footsteps, he rolled over to sit up.
“You—go find me some books! Wait until I organize the list, then go fetch them all!”
Wu Heng replied calmly: “There are a lot of people outside bitten by rats.”
“Rats? How could they be bitten by rats? Take me to see them!” Dr. Chen shook his white coat, looking energized yet flustered, tugging insistently at Wu Heng.
“You’re a zombie. You know what it means to step out of my space,” Wu Heng said lightly.
“Of course I know!” Chen Meng shouted, tugging harder. “Human life is precious, worth more than gold. Don’t delay—take me out!”
Wu Heng thought about why he had entered the space and come before Chen Meng.
Chen Meng shared some similarities with Quan Jing. Though Wu Heng himself wasn’t the type to be swayed, Chen Meng gave people the right to choose.
Besides, the food in his space seemed to have decreased again.
Wu Heng closed his eyes, his inner rage churning.
“Mm.” He nodded slightly, fingers curling. Chen Meng followed him as they stepped out into the world outside the space.
The moment Chen Meng’s feet touched the ground, he looked around left and right, and blurted out: “Smells so good~~~”
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Author’s Note:
Chen Meng: If you can’t treat it, just eat it. That way, there’s no risk of generating medical trash at all