Chapter 148.1: Crossing the River
“I’ve never eaten it before. Marsh frogs used to be pretty small—people preferred field frogs or bullfrogs—but the taste should be about the same,” Xue Qi said quietly.
“This counts as wild-caught. Wild ones might taste better,” Wu Heng chimed in.
Xue Qi couldn’t help nodding. “That’s true. But… Wu Heng, are you hungry again?”
It had been less than five minutes since he’d eaten.
“No.”
Xue Qi let out a sigh of relief—at least he didn’t have to worry about Wu Heng eating the entire world and putting it on a plate.
But Wu Heng quickly added, “About thirty percent full.”
Nearby, Wang Ruixiang was using hand signals to assign attack routes to each teammate. He was only halfway through the gestures when a streak of light flashed past the group.
The seemingly still jungle erupted into motion in an instant. From above and below, marsh frogs surged like a tide toward the rapidly moving figure.
The first marsh frog’s belly bulged as it opened its mouth. “Gua—”
The streak of light pierced straight through its abdomen.
Wu Heng landed atop an unusually thick, horizontally growing tree branch above its head. Within his field of vision, the dense, enormous marsh frogs were fully exposed—so many that the end of them couldn’t be seen for the moment.
One hand braced against the nearby trunk, as vine-like threads spread like light, rapidly enveloping the entire tree. From the crown, green light scattered like celestial maidens flinging flowers, bursting forth in an instant and pouring down into the whole stretch of forest below.
Beneath the canopy, marsh frogs that leapt into the air were skewered by green blades and driven straight into the ground. Each body that slammed down made the earth quake with a thunderous impact.
Before long, the ground was carpeted with marsh frogs—either killed outright or pinned to the earth, struggling in vain.
“Wu Heng is getting stronger and stronger,” Xue Qi said, gazing at the distant figure—slender yet upright—and couldn’t help but sigh in admiration. He also pulled back Wang Ruixiang and the others who were about to go help. “Don’t go and get in the way.”
“He’s even stronger than we imagined,” Mo Zhaohong said, unable to hide his envy. In a post-apocalyptic world, such power meant being unstoppable—and he was still so young. From his hair to his fingertips, everything about him proclaimed that he was only eighteen or nineteen.
Lin Jie, however, spoke up about his own observation. “The few Light-type ability users we’ve encountered all seemed to lack much offensive capability, didn’t they?”
“That depends on an ability user’s constitution and will,” Wang Ruixiang replied. “Even with the same attribute, abilities can develop in different directions. Even along the same path—say, two offensive Fire-type ability users—one might wield open flame, while another controls dark fire. But as ability levels rise, all roads eventually lead to the same destination.”
“So that means Wu Heng simultaneously has Wood-type and Light-type abilities, plus a mutated plant that’s still obedient as hell even now, and his powers are developing along multiple paths at once,” Lin Jie said, disbelief flickering in his eyes. “Heh. That kid.”
“He alone is basically a whole team,” Mo Zhaohong said. It was rare for him to feel as relaxed as he had these past few days. At any other time before, his heart had always been hanging in his throat.
“What’s more, haven’t you noticed? Aside from doing odd jobs, we’re mostly redundant.”
What made things even more different from before was that when facing attacks from mutated animal hordes like this, there were always casualties every single time.
It wasn’t that humans were weak—it was that more and more creatures had long since ceased to fit the label of low-level animals.
“No wonder he dared to charge into Deathlands,” Mo Zhaohong added.
At that moment, Lin Jie’s expression suddenly twisted into something resembling severe constipation. “Don’t tell me Xie Chongyi and the colonel sent us here just to do errands for Wu Heng?!”
Xue Qi reasoned, “The colonel wouldn’t do that. Old Xie, though? Definitely.”
Lin Jie let out a cold laugh and leaned back against the tree trunk. “Heh. That kid.”
“Go clean up the battlefield, looks like they’re all dead,” Xue Qi said as he sat down in a folding chair. “Charge, warriors!”
Wu Heng jumped down from the tree. He strolled among the cold corpses of the marsh frogs, then finally lifted two of them—each as thick as a water bucket—that were clinging to each other from a dense patch of shrubs. They were noticeably smaller than the marsh frogs from before.
The boy swung them around once in his hand.
“Gua.”
He reached out and poked one frog’s swollen belly.
As the others ran over in this direction, Wu Heng carried the marsh frogs to the water’s edge and tossed them in.
The frogs didn’t sink. Instead, they bobbed and drifted on the surface like balloons for a moment, and then, beneath the water, strings upon strings of black frog eggs wrapped in transparent mucus began to appear.
Wu Heng squatted down, watching as the marsh frogs laid more and more eggs. The male frog followed closely behind, releasing sperm, while vines silently swept away quite a few of the eggs and hid them away in storage space.
The marsh frogs soon filled a small stretch of water in front of him with eggs. The surface changed from a shimmering green to a glossy black, like a black net riddled with holes spread across the water, swaying along with the ripples.
The female frog that hadn’t finished laying her eggs carried the male on her back and swam back toward the tip of Wu Heng’s shoe, using a textbook frog-swimming posture. She still hadn’t stopped laying eggs—heaps of black embryos wrapped in transparent membranes poured out continuously.
“Gua, wa!” She tilted her head upward, her eyes shining brightly.
Wu Heng lowered his gaze. Rain slid from his eyelids onto his lashes. “I can’t raise you, or all these children of yours.”
“No one can raise this many,” he added, hoping the mother frog would have a bit of self-awareness.
Instead, she kicked hard with her hind legs and jumped straight onto Wu Heng’s shoe, slamming down like a heavy rock.
Before Wu Heng could lift his foot to chase her away, hurried footsteps and labored breathing came from behind. A big red-eyed dog came charging over, its speed rivaling that of a rocket—Shukui moved like a missile.
It slapped at the mother frog with both paws. The frog was struck belly-up, flipped over, and splashed back into the water, where it hurriedly fled.
Wu Heng said nothing, only reached out and patted the dog’s head.
—
After that, just dismantling the hundreds of marsh frogs alone took up most of the day.
The group carefully selected a small portion of frogs with intact skin and bones, dried them, and packed them away—because Wu Heng said marsh frogs could be used as medicinal ingredients.
The rest were divided into three portions: one part was dried into jerky that could be pulled out and eaten on the road; another was made into cold dishes for animals and plants that weren’t affected by parasites and eaten on the spot; and the final portion was cooked into the rations for the next two days, flavored with prickly ash and mountain chili peppers that Yang Xiaoyun had painstakingly found in the mountains.
The massive skeletons and the entrails strewn all over the ground were all thrown into the pond. What looked like a calm water surface erupted into wave after wave the moment the bone frames—still draped with shreds of flesh and blood vessels—hit the water, stirred up by some unknown swarms of enormous creatures below.
The sticky mucus and bloodstains left on the ground were silently licked clean by the forested land itself.
“I thought that by the time we got back, your boats would already be finished,” Jiang Xun said, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the reek clinging to her.
“There was an accident. Nobody wanted that,” Wang Ruixiang said as he carefully removed his glasses and set them down on a tree stump. “I need to rest for a bit.”
“You didn’t do anything at all,” Jiang Xun pointed out mercilessly.
“We did what he didn’t do. That counts as doing something,” Wang Ruixiang retorted in defense of the teammates who had stayed behind in camp.
“If Captain Wen were here, you wouldn’t be this relaxed.”
“Captain Jiang, I need to correct you. Our work has simply become more diverse, not more relaxed,” Wang Ruixiang said as he shook out a blanket and lay down on the planks without even changing clothes.
When night fell, most of the group had already crawled into their sleeping bags to rest. Only three people were still fully focused on building the boats, while Xue Qi hung upside down from a tree on night watch.
Wu Heng wasn’t afraid of the current weather. He lay on a thin sheet of fir planks, a blanket draped over him. Between him and the boatbuilding site was a pile of campfires that still flickered. Among the three working there, Wu Heng recognized only one of them—Yue Shanqing.
Yue Shanqing had clearly joined later than the others, later than everyone else in fact. He hardly ever spoke. Even when he was drenched in sweat, working alongside the other two, his presence remained faint.
Wu Heng fell asleep and, upon waking, saw that two wooden boats had already been completed and laid upside down on the ground. Yue Shanqing was checking for gaps between the planks to prevent leakage.
“Yue Shanqing, when did you join these people?” the boy suddenly asked.
The silence shattered at once. Yue Shanqing looked momentarily bewildered before spotting Wu Heng some distance away, his eyes already open, quietly watching him.
The more Wu Heng looked at him, the more Yue Shanqing resembled a crane—his build, his temperament, even his features shared a certain likeness. Pale skin, delicate bones; the lightness of his frame seemed almost visible to the naked eye. More than that, though, there was a quiet elegance about him, the kind that could not be disturbed.
“Not long ago,” Yue Shanqing said, carefully inspecting the hull of the boat.
“The person you were with before was Zheng Xi. He’s dead?” Wu Heng asked.
“No. He should still be serving as the head of a subdivision survivor zone under the Northern Base,” Yue Shanqing replied. When he spoke of Zheng Xi, there wasn’t the slightest change in his expression.
“Oh. Then his lover’s child—has it been born already?” Wu Heng said, slipping his hand beneath X’s belly.
Yue Shanqing answered no as well, but didn’t explain why.
Wu Heng wasn’t particularly curious. He’d slept enough but had no intention of getting up, so he continued, “Didn’t make it to term?”
“…She was sold,” Yue Shanqing said. “Back in Jingzhou, they ran into a highly reputed ability user from the Northern Base. He was an old classmate of Zheng Xi’s lover.” Seeing that Wu Heng’s gaze was clear and alert—clearly not going back to sleep, and clearly about to keep asking—Yue Shanqing simply continued in one breath.
“The ‘old classmate’ part was fake. The ex-boyfriend was real. From what I overheard, their breakup back then was extremely ugly. A few days later, I heard that she lost the child.”
Wu Heng still hadn’t reacted when a sudden swish sounded overhead. A blue spider slid down on a thread.
“Huh? Shouldn’t this be one of those ‘chasing-the-wife-through-the-crematorium, broken-mirror-reunion’ stories?”
“It turned into a fight to the death,” Yue Shanqing said calmly. “But Zheng Xi’s lover isn’t an ability user, so she came out worse in his hands.”
“Zheng Xi is that much of a monster?” Xue Qi said in disbelief. “Then who did he sell you to?”
Yue Shanqing hadn’t expected Xue Qi to be so blunt. He glanced at him in surprise, and only after seeing that there was curiosity and indignation on Xue Qi’s face—no voyeuristic glee—did he lower his head again.
“To the highest bidder.”
“How high?” Xue Qi pressed.
“…Before the deal could even be finalized, Xie Chongyi arrived with his people.”
“Oh—oh—oh! I remember now. My brother told me about this. He went with Old Xie to handle it, and even brought me candy when he got back. He said they were auctioning flowers, birds, fish, and insects. I never imagined it was actually symbiotic entities.”
At the mention of Xie Chongyi’s name, Wu Heng withdrew his hand from beneath X’s belly and tugged at the blanket.
“The Northern Base isn’t doing well.”
Yue Shanqing responded matter-of-factly. “Every base has its own problems. The weather has become extreme and erratic. The Northern Base hadn’t even recovered from the last rainy season before it was hit with an extreme cold snap. When Meili Town was at minus thirty or forty degrees, the Northern Base was closer to minus seventy. Not long after that, high temperatures set in, followed by more rain.”
“Marine life got overfed, and the microorganisms in the soil were nourished too well. The awakened sea creatures kept attacking the Northern Base, while microbial colonies formed clusters and infected humans from the inside.”
“The Northern Base’s resources are also severely depleted. It was the first large base to be hit by desertification. And after forests and deserts reached a standoff, they began expanding and moving toward the direction of human bases. I think that after the plague, moving south is only a matter of time.”
Wu Heng recalled that Xie Chongyi had mentioned the Northern Base’s southward movement as well.
Listening to it, it felt as though humanity was being purged—driven away.
“I wonder when these days of running east and west will finally end,” Xue Qi muttered.
“Isn’t it good like this now?” the man farthest from them suddenly said in a deep voice. “Before, everyone only thought about themselves, each going their own way. Now there’s only one thing on everyone’s mind.”
“Survival,” Wu Heng said quietly, closing his eyes. Yet after he shut them, Xie Chongyi’s face silently drifted through his mind.
—
They didn’t set off again until two days later. All three small boats had failed their first trial launch—each one taking on water and sinking in turn.
The moment the boats started leaking, Lin Jie vanished the fastest, bolting away in an instant, terrified that even a drop of water might splash onto his pant legs.
The wooden boats’ load-bearing capacity was tested over and over again more than a dozen times. Every ability user in the team who could contribute was put to use: Magnetics reinforced the structure and increased buoyancy, Water types measured the load limits, and Wood types filled in the gaps.
Because it was their first time doing this kind of hands-on work and they lacked experience, the journey was delayed by two days.
Carrying the boats on the road barely affected the ability users’ traveling speed, and they reached the Chunyin River in just half a day.
Normally, ponds appearing among mountains were nothing unusual, and mountain streams even more so—but a river with a smooth surface, almost completely still, winding through the ranges was exceedingly rare.
The Chunyin River coiled between the mountains, looping again and again, cutting off every overland route heading south. Any creature wishing to pass had no choice but to cross it.
“Wait, before we get in the water, there’s a ritual,” Yang Xiaoyun said as he walked to the bows of the three boats. “Do you know what it is?”
“Oh! I know! Worship Mazu!” Xue Qi jumped out eagerly.
“This isn’t going out to sea. I mean naming the boats,” Yang Xiaoyun said. “Back in my hometown, there’s a saying that a boat with a name has a spirit. In a moment of danger, it might save everyone on board.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Hurry up, name them!” Yang Xiaoyun urged.
X squatted on top of Xue Qi’s head and, together with him, moved to the bow of the boat closest to them. Stroking his chin, he shouted toward Wu Heng at the back, “Wu Heng, we’re taking this boat. You come up with a name for it!”
Shen Ping’an walked over with Wu Heng. After a moment’s thought, he said, “You name it. I don’t really have any ideas.”
“You do it, you do it! I’m curious what kind of name you’d give a boat,” Xue Qi said, pushing Wu Heng forward.
Wu Heng glanced at the bird head perched on Xue Qi’s head. “Rex.”
“King?” Shen Ping’an asked.
Xue Qi crossed his arms and shook his head. “I’ve got another take. Rex in dinosaur taxonomy refers to Tyrannosaurus Rex. Don’t you think ‘tyrant king’ sounds way cooler than just ‘king’?!”
“…Either works,” Wu Heng said flatly.
The other two boats had been named as well—one was called River God, and the other Elizabeth.
Yang Xiaoyun shoved the River God hard into the water. “Those foreign devils won’t protect us.”
“……”
**TN
Changing Siwangzhidi to Deathlands
