Chapter 104.2: Out of Control Poppy
The notes in the air once more became slow and soothing, floating above everyone’s heads like a preacher’s compassionate chant.
She no longer wanted to find her child. She did not have such a foolish, crude child—Shen She had already been secretly exchanged by the devil.
What mattered most now was to save the other fools of this world.
The woman encircled at the center was clearly an evolved zombie. Her eyes were bright, and she evidently still possessed consciousness—only that consciousness was very likely no longer connected to humanity.
The music was beautiful and pleasing to the ear, with astonishing penetrative power. No object could block it. A cellist’s fingers drew and pushed the bow with the same elegance, no matter when or where.
Meng Haiqing drew his longbow. The arrow shot forth, piercing several zombies that leapt into the air—yet they were completely unharmed.
Bang!
The young man was knocked to the ground by several zombies at once. One of them bit open his throat, blood spraying half a meter into the air. From amid the zombies that were ceaselessly gnawing at him, his hand thrust out, and he shouted, “Her cello can weaken our abilities!!!”
The blackbirds swooped down as well, filling the gaps between several zombies. Blood streamed out from beneath both them and the creatures.
His voice, as thin as that of a mosquito, leaked from a throat that had not yet been completely torn apart. “Humanity… will never be wiped out.”
Xue Shen almost seemed to teleport over. He wiped the blood from his face. One zombie heard the footsteps, turned around, and was holding Meng Haiqing’s severed head in its arms.
Wu Heng sat high atop the encircling wall, lowering his gaze to watch the scene. He was the first to move, slicing several zombie heads cleanly off their shoulders and sending them to the ground.
The blackbirds disdained the mountains of corpses, but they were the finest nourishment for the poppies. Using corpses as soil, as culture medium, the plant drank in madness and grew.
The poppy parasitized the bodies. Without the need for strangling or killing, they naturally grew out through the flesh. The rotting meat and bleached bones around them became fertilizer; bodily fluids became water. One stalk after another, they gathered into a cluster; cluster after cluster, into a field—this was occupation, this was evolution.
The poppy’s main stems remained in their most primitive form—stalks and leaves. The vines were their monstrous mutation, guarding the growth of the main stem, and at the same time guarding the youth above.
Wu Heng hardly needed to lift a finger; letting them run free was the poppy’s comfort zone. It preferred Wu Heng to only care about its food and drink, but not its actions.
And so, beneath Wu Heng’s feet, a lush poppy grove gradually took shape, dense as a forest.
Xie Chongyi showed up beside Wu Heng with two bottles of water. He twisted one open and handed it to him.
“Kuhuang doesn’t have great odds,” Wu Heng said. “Where’s Mr. Mo?”
Xie Chongyi sat down next to him. “The infected inside the city still need to be dealt with. He’s staying there.”
Wu Heng took a couple of sips, his fingers rubbing against the bottle. “You said earlier you had something to tell me after the zombie wave ended. What was it?”
Instead of answering, Xie Chongyi lowered his head and looked toward the jungle of plants outside the city. Amid the mountains of corpses and seas of blood, there was life—but also something eerily out of place.
Wu Heng watched his subtle expressions. He didn’t want Xie Chongyi to be scared of him. If he got freaked out and ran, that’d be a huge loss.
Silently, he sent a signal, hoping the poppy vines would behave—less aggressive, a bit more graceful.
“This thing of yours,” Xie Chongyi asked curiously, “when is it actually going to bloom?”
“…” Wu Heng hadn’t expected him to be thinking about something so trivial after staring for so long. He said he didn’t know. “But probably soon. It’s already branching out everywhere.”
Xie Chongyi nodded, lifting his gaze. “Then when it blooms, give me the very first flower.”
Wu Heng didn’t hesitate, and wasn’t stingy either. “Sure.”
Xie Chongyi smiled.
“Class Monitor,” Wu Heng tilted his head, the dried blood on his face somehow making his surprise even more obvious. “You just showed your teeth.”
“…”
“You usually smile without showing them.” Fake, Wu Heng thought.
Xie Chongyi reached out and wiped away the most obvious scab of dried blood on Wu Heng’s face. “I’m heading down first.”
But just as he stood up, a scream rang out from below the wall. A cello bow stabbed straight into Aunt Min’s heart, then was yanked out just as fast—Ji Zhelan had somehow gotten close to them without anyone noticing.
The guards’ attacks were blocked by the zombie horde surrounding her, shielding her with their bodies. She looked calm, composed, her clothes still neat and clean.
Then a figure leapt down from the wall—it was Wu Dian.
Wu Dian pulled the long staff from behind his shoulder and spun it once in his hand. A group of companions with the exact same face and build appeared behind him. Ji Zhelan hid within the zombie horde, drawing her bow, as Wu Dian leapt out from above her.
The music condensed into an invisible shield. With a loud crash, the shield shattered into pieces. Wu Dian brought the staff straight down—an explosion rang out, and several zombies that had been yanked over at the last second were smashed into bursts of flesh and blood beneath it.
In the next instant, Ji Zhelan appeared on top of the city wall.
“Actually, I’m already dead. What you see now is just a kind of spirit,” Ji Zhelan said, tilting her head, her expression both gentle and vacant. “If you see Shen She, help me ask him this—if he doesn’t play the cello, if he doesn’t perform, what else can he even do?”
She was holding a blood-soaked limb, who knew whose. She lowered her head and took a few big bites, then, looking freshly energized again, raised her bow and started playing.
The air flowed in Xie Chongyi’s palm, surging invisibly toward Ji Zhelan. Her bow snapped in two with a sharp crack. She froze for just a moment.
Yellow, murky fluid kept streaming down her rotting cheeks.
Human will was the weakest thing, and yet also capable of anything. But will needed something physical to carry it. Destroy the vessel that held it, and everything would turn to dust.
Destroying the cello was more effective than anything else.
Ji Zhelan’s body suddenly arched backward. The bow, the cello, and Ji Zhelan herself fell together into the vegetation below.
The poppy vines welcomed all comers, flinging their doors wide open to receive her.
Wu Heng lowered his head and watched as Ji Zhelan’s body was swallowed. Under the dim light, the poppy vines were a deep green; only their newly sprouted leaves were a soft, pale yellow. Stuffed full, they treated their food like toys. As they grew stronger, they became fearless—Ji Zhelan’s body was torn apart, the branches that shredded her propped up bloodstained stems again, leaving nothing below but stark white bones.
After staring for a long moment, Wu Heng’s fingers curled slightly. There was no response from below.
“Class Monitor,” Wu Heng frowned. “The poppy ate Ji Zhelan. They’re out of control.”
Even without Ji Zhelan, the zombie tide didn’t stop. The attacks just became noticeably weaker. As usual, the poppy vines strangled and wiped out every zombie that came close—but this time, what they were killing wasn’t limited to zombies anymore. They started killing the guards too.
Wu Heng watched their movement patterns and attack rhythm. At first, he thought it was accidental friendly fire, but it quickly became clear that it had nothing to do with mistakes. The poppy vines were actually prioritizing guards who got too close.
At the same time, they tentatively stretched their vines toward the stronger ability users. Once they got hit back, they backed off and switched to selectively eating humans instead. Their bully-the-weak, fear-the-strong nature hadn’t changed at all.
Xie Chongyi forged a pitch-black long blade in his palm and handed it to Wu Heng. “I’ll go take a look. You find somewhere safe and stay there.”
“Thanks,” Wu Heng murmured, gripping the hilt tightly as he watched Xie Chongyi jump down.
The boy’s figure was still falling through midair when countless vines lashed out at him like lightning.
Xie Chongyi’s first instinct was to slice them in half at the waist, but out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Wu Heng’s slender, fragile figure above. He changed tactics, dodging instead, using spatial control to pin that bundle of vines against the surface of the wall.
The vines touched the wall and immediately drove in roots. Green spread outward to both sides, overflowing and advancing like ivy, rapidly claiming ground.
On the ground, the poppy vines completely abandoned their usual playful style and struck at Xie Chongyi with brutal, ruthless force.
Xie Chongyi kept dodging, binding the vines into tight bundles and locking them down one after another. This clearly enraged the poppy—they weren’t playing games with humans anymore.
The vines were furious enough to rip themselves entirely out of the ground. They savagely sucked up every corpse around them, shot into the air to hunt down blackbirds, and completely seized the open ground outside the base. Friend or foe made no difference. They expanded and fed wildly, and in the blink of an eye, they turned into something even more dangerous and terrifying than the zombie tide.
Xie Chongyi stood at the heart of the root system, his gaze cold and detached. Deep down, he wondered if Ji Zhelan’s goal from the very beginning had been to make use of the poppy—because nothing was better suited than plants to spread her will.
Wu Heng hated causing trouble for others. He leaned forward, looking down at the ground, his irritation spiraling out of control.
And then an even more troubling realization hit.
The poppy was only influenced by Ji Zhelan—that didn’t mean it had broken away from Wu Heng. They were still part of him. Wu Heng wasn’t the poppy, but the poppy was Wu Heng. When Wu Heng grew agitated, they grew frenzied too, becoming even more violent and savage.
Xie Chongyi only restrained them; he never actually hurt them. Their anger gradually shifted into smug satisfaction.
“Class Monitor! They’re saying there’s a mutated plant outside—” Dou Lu and Shen Ping’an ran out from inside the gate, but the sight in front of them almost froze them in place. The poppy vines had grown to a terrifying scale, blocking out all the daylight beyond the base. They had to tilt their heads back to look, yet all they could see above was a surging sea of green.
“Isn’t that Wu Heng’s poppy?” Dou Lu said in disbelief.
“What’s going on?” Shen Ping’an asked with a frown. Part of the poppy existed inside his body, and he could sense dangerous changes—like how this massive thing in front of them wanted to reclaim the pieces of itself scattered outside, to bring everything back under its control.
“Get back inside. It doesn’t recognize you right now,” Xie Chongyi said, grabbing a zombie corpse from the ground and throwing it over. Leaf plates at the base of the plant rolled up like mats, then spread open again, leaving behind nothing but a small puddle of foul blood.
Dou Lu: “So it still recognizes you?”
“…No.”
Dou Lu had just opened her mouth when a vine suddenly burst up beneath her feet. Her neck and limbs were instantly bound, and she was dragged along the ground before being hoisted into the air above the zombie tide. Right in front of her eyes, the poppy reshaped part of itself into a dagger and sliced open her wrist.
“Holy—Wu Heng, do something!!!” Dou Lu shouted, gritting through the pain.
She tried using her ability, hoping to slip free from the vines, but then it hit her—Wu Heng’s ability level was on par with the class monitor’s. Against the poppy, they barely stood a chance at all.
Xie Chongyi narrowed his eyes. The wildly dancing mass of plants froze inch by inch, and Shen Ping’an seized the moment to rescue Dou Lu.
Just then, a streak of blue light flashed behind them—Sheng Jiang appeared, blade in hand.
“It won’t die, but it’ll need a long time to recover. How much its ability is weakened… that’s unknown,” Sheng Jiang said helplessly. “There’s no choice—it’s out of control.”
Before anyone could react, a surge of watery blue energy shot into the ground. It moved like electricity, only faster, racing straight for the poppy’s roots.
Just as the roots were about to be disassembled, Xie Chongyi appeared at the end of the blue light. He dropped to one knee, plunging the blade into the ground. The blue energy shot along the tip and the shaft, surging into Xie Chongyi’s body. His whole body shuddered, and the handle in his hand jolted sharply.
“Class Monitor!”
Sheng Jiang’s ability was one-of-a-kind. Xie Chongyi’s face suddenly went pale as snow. He coughed up a mouthful of black blood, thick and inky, while viscous black liquid also streamed from his right eye. Lowering his gaze, he cupped his hand to catch each droplet.
His hair fell over his face, but everyone could see it—Xie Chongyi’s right cheek was visibly corroded, eaten away before their eyes.