Chapter 152.1: A Banquet Table for the Plants
Jiang Xun indeed wasn’t asleep yet. She was applying her nighttime skincare when, in the mirror, a tall, slender figure appeared silently behind her.
“Hey!” Jiang Xun jumped. “Do you make a habit of walking without making any sound?”
“Someone seems to have fallen asleep,” Wu Heng said. He glanced at the rows of bottles and jars in front of her. “What are those?”
“Toner, lotion, eye cream, that sort of thing. Why? Is that not allowed? Is it that strange?” Jiang Xun put on a show of being displeased. “It just feels really dangerous right now, like I could die at any moment, so I don’t want to look like a beggar when I do.”
“What do you want with me?”
“I want to talk to Xie Chongyi.”
At this moment, Jiang Xun looked every bit like a parent and a team leader. No matter how capable Wu Heng was, he was still just a high school student.
“Is it urgent?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“I’ll give you an energy core. S-rank.”
“Then come over,” Jiang Xun said, changing her tune instantly.
Wu Heng slowly moved over and sat down beside her. Jiang Xun spoke as she activated her ability, “At this hour, the information center will definitely be reachable, but whether we can reach Xie Chongyi is another matter. Ability users like him are out on missions most of the time.”
“But if Xie Chongyi happens to be on a mission with Tang Yan, the information center can get in touch with Tang Yan. Tang Yan can help you find him—it’s just a bit of a hassle.”
Golden light flickered across their faces. In less than a minute, Jiang Xun stuffed an earpiece into Wu Heng’s ear. The voice on the other end was very polite—and also very rude.
“Hello, A1 at your service. Jiang Xun, up until now, not once have you contacted the information center for anything serious. The day before yesterday you contacted me to look at frogs, yesterday to look at monkeys—what is it today? Do you feel like you’re stirring up trouble for no reason, so you only dare show up in the dead of night?”
“I’m not Jiang Xun. I’m looking for Xie Chongyi.”
There was a brief silence on the other end. “Sorry about that. It’s just that Jiang Xun is really, really annoying.”
“Xie Chongyi has gone to the Northern Base.”
“Can you help me get in touch with him?”
A1 knew the relationship between the two of them inside out. Besides, it was the middle of the night and there was almost nothing to do, so she immediately helped connect the call.
“Please wait a few minutes.”
Most of the information center’s network was sustained by Tang Yan’s energy. Because of that, any part of the network could reach him at any time—more precisely, Tang Yan monitored the signal flow of the entire information center.
A1 entered page after page of code. Lines of numbers and letters swept rapidly across the screen, dazzling to the eye, until finally a line of ellipses began blinking endlessly.
After Tang Yan accepted the request, A1’s character projection appeared in front of him.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’m looking for Xie Chongyi.”
Sheng Jiang (Tang Yan) was chewing on a corn cob. “What’s up?”
“Wu Heng wants to talk to him.”
“Oh…”
After going around in a big circle, Xie Chongyi’s voice finally came through the earpiece with a faint crackling sound. Wu Heng glanced at Jiang Xun—whose eyes were shining—then bent his knee to stand up and walked outside the tent.
Xie Chongyi took the earpiece that Sheng Jiang handed him, casually picked up a corn cob from the table, and also walked out of the tent.
As he walked, he lowered his voice and spoke first to the person on the other end of the earpiece. “I’m sorry. I should’ve contacted you first.”
Sheng Jiang happened to catch the latter half of that sentence. He had never seen Xie Chongyi put himself so low before. Curling his lips, he exchanged looks with a few teammates opposite him and mimicked softly, “I should’ve contacted you first~”
“It’s fine,” Wu Heng said, standing by the riverbank. “The communications officer said you’re at the Northern Base now.”
“The Northern Base has fallen by about two-thirds. Moving south will probably happen very soon.”
“We’re planning to leave Shenjian in a couple of days,” Wu Heng said. As for the Northern Base, he felt nothing in particular—and didn’t really care.
“Did you run into anything good to eat in Shenjian?” Xie Chongyi found a stool to sit on, silently calculating how long it had been since he last saw Wu Heng.
Wu Heng said, “Marsh frogs, fish, and mushrooms. All of them taste better than what we used to eat outside.”
“At higher altitudes, the climate and soil are different from the plains, and you can even eat mushrooms?”
“I saw Dr. Chen’s medical notes. He suggested I eat vegetarian food, it’s good for my health.”
Xie Chongyi bit into his corn and couldn’t help laughing when he heard that. “Since when did you start caring about your health?”
Wu Heng tilted his head and thought for a moment. “Earlier today.”
“What happened during the day?”
The boy, separated from Xie Chongyi by thousands of miles, only said that it was nothing.
“Oh—” Xie Chongyi dragged out the sound. “Big brother is lying.”
Wu Heng’s ears warmed. “It really was nothing.”
After he said that, there was no more talking in the earpiece—only the sound of Xie Chongyi chewing on something.
“What are you eating?” Wu Heng asked, curious.
“Nothing,” Xie Chongyi replied lightly.
“……” Wu Heng took the earpiece out, took a deep breath, then put it back in. “Then I’m hanging up.”
“Hey.” Xie Chongyi raised his voice a little. Realizing that Wu Heng hadn’t actually hung up, he said with some dissatisfaction, “I’m eating corn. You should tell me too, what happened during the day?”
Xie Chongyi’s true personality was almost the complete opposite of the cold, aloof nobility he appeared to have on the surface. The feeling he gave Wu Heng was even a bit like—like a huge piece of cotton candy: once it melted, it stretched into fine strands of sugar that wrapped around you from head to toe. The more you struggled, the tighter it stuck, cloyingly sweet, so sweet it hurt your teeth, sweet enough to make every breath feel heavy.
Wu Heng really didn’t know how to handle this strange, unfamiliar sensation.
“The medical notes said you won’t live very long. I suddenly felt that being alive is actually pretty good.”
On the other end, Xie Chongyi lazily said that he knew already, as if the news hadn’t affected him at all. “Me not living very long, what does that have to do with you? Why did that suddenly make you feel that being alive is pretty good?”
Wu Heng was made restless by Xie Chongyi’s relentless probing. Those cloyingly sweet sugar threads seemed to seep into his skin, clogging his breath and nerves.
The boy rarely showed his emotions. The things that could draw them out were basically limited to two categories: food that tasted good, and food that tasted bad.
“I want you to live. I want to live together with you, keep living, always. Is that really so hard to understand?” His breathing quickened, his gray-green eyes like two trembling green leaves.
Wu Heng felt as if his entire body had been brutally peeled open by Xie Chongyi.
An eerie, prolonged silence fell on Xie Chongyi’s end.
The sound of the flowing river drowned out even their breathing.
Until Xie Chongyi finally spoke first.
“Alright. I just wanted to hear you say that you care about me. Don’t be mad,” Xie Chongyi said. Just as Wu Heng thought he would stop there, he continued, “If big brother is a bit more proactive, then I won’t do this again in the future.”
“Give it a few days. Once you leave Shenjian, wait for me in Hanzhou. After that, we’ll head to Deathlands together.” Xie Chongyi’s tone turned more serious.
Wu Heng frowned slightly. With the change in route, they indeed wouldn’t need to go to Yaozhou anymore—but Hanzhou was still just a stopover. “What needs to be handled in Hanzhou?”
“The same local tyrant issue as before. I promised that guy I’d help them deal with it while we’re passing through.”
Wu Heng was no longer the clueless kid he used to be. He asked bluntly, “What can they give us?”
“Manpower, what you’re lacking the most. When the time comes, he’ll do his best to arrange it for us.”
It was indeed a huge temptation. Even though Wu Heng had Lin Mengzhi and the others, they were still far behind a properly trained force.
“That local tyrant, is he troublesome?”
“I’ve heard he’s a gu master? He rarely acts personally, so we have very little concrete information.”
“A gu master?” Wu Heng crouched down, fingers dipping into the icy river water. Before Xie Chongyi could answer, he had already yanked out an eel that had been sneaking up on him—thick and huge, like a python.
Xie Chongyi gave a low hum. “He’s planted gu in quite a few ability users. Once they’re infected, if they want to stay alive, they can’t betray him—and they have to ensure his safety.”
“That powerful?” Wu Heng sounded surprised.
The slick eel was dragged onto the shore, thrashing wildly, its soft cylindrical body slapping the ground and splattering mud everywhere.
The boy drove his fingers in beneath its throat, piercing through. The poppy slipped inside and devoured the organs cleanly. An eel weighing several hundred jin lost all signs of life in less than two minutes.
Xie Chongyi didn’t really care whether that gu master was powerful or not, but he noticed Wu Heng’s distraction almost instantly. The look between his brows darkened. “What are you doing?”
“Caught an eel,” Wu Heng said. “Have you ever eaten eel?”
“I don’t eat eel.”
“Then what do you eat?”
“You.” Xie Chongyi answered without much thought. After saying it, before Wu Heng could respond, he laughed himself. This kind of corny, brainless exchange was something those puppy-love classmates used to say back at school—he had never once found it anything but unbearably dull.
Wu Heng’s breathing hitched. He dropped the eel, which had already lost all ability to resist, went back to the riverbank, washed the slime off his hands, and spoke coolly and calmly, “Do you mean you want to sleep with me?”
Xie Chongyi wasn’t paying attention and snapped the corn in his hand clean in half. The piece he wasn’t holding fell to the ground.
“Yeah.” He came back to his senses, picked up the fallen half, wiped it casually on his pant leg, and didn’t waste it. “I really want to sleep with you.”
“Why?” Wu Heng pressed.
Xie Chongyi said, “Because I like you.”
“You liked me a long time ago? But back at school, you didn’t like me.”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t like you back then. I just didn’t have a chance to get to know you.” Xie Chongyi kept chatting with Wu Heng, no longer interested in eating. He stripped the kernels off the corn one by one and lined them up on the table. “Back then at school, you barely interacted with anyone in your class, right? Did you even know my name was Xie Chongyi?”
“……I knew,” Wu Heng said. He could only remember faces that stood out—either very ugly, or very good-looking.
Xie Chongyi belonged to the latter. From the first time he saw him, he had remembered him.
“But aren’t you face-blind? How did you recognize me?” Xie Chongyi unconsciously pressed on.
If conditions allowed, he even wanted to pry Wu Heng’s body open and put a pair of eyes inside, just to see exactly how much space he occupied in the other person’s world.
Wu Heng lowered his head. “You look better than the others.”
“Who are ‘the others’?”
“People at school.”
“Who exactly?”
“Most of them.”
“So you remembered only a small portion of the people at school? Who were they?”
“Not many.” Wu Heng hadn’t even memorized all the subject teachers, let alone classmates he barely exchanged a word with in an entire day.
Xie Chongyi wasn’t as aggressive as before. Looking at the table full of corn kernels, he smiled in satisfaction. “Actually, you didn’t remember a single one of them. You only remembered me. Am I right?”
Wu Heng’s silence was the answer.
Xie Chongyi fell silent as well.
Their breathing tangled across thousands of miles, twisting into a single thread that bound the two of them tightly together.
“Wu Heng, I miss you.”
Wu Heng used his fingers to dig at the pebbles at the bottom of the water. “You just want to sleep with me.”
“Don’t you want to?”
Wu Heng answered with a question of his own. “Did you… take care of yourself yesterday? That bug was a bit strange.”
“Oh? What’s wrong with taking care of normal physical needs?” Xie Chongyi replied naturally.
“But that bug was holding onto my finger…”
“If you’re willing, you can touch it,” Xie Chongyi lowered his voice, with a faint trace of laughter. “I’m not lying, I’d enjoy it.”
While Wu Heng was momentarily stunned, Xie Chongyi couldn’t stop laughing on the other end. The smile was still lingering in his eyes when, at the far end of the street, swarms of flying ants poured out, crawling over walls and rooftops, instantly taking over the entire road.
Xie Chongyi slowly stood up. The smile on his face hadn’t fully faded yet when he raised his hand to press the earpiece, lowered his gaze, and said, “Alright, big brother, something’s come up on my end. Good night.”
Wu Heng pressed his lips together. “What is it?”
“Ever seen flying ants that show up before the rain? Except now they’ve grown bigger than a motorcycle. The survivor base I’m at right now is basically full of them,” Xie Chongyi rattled off quickly. “Big brother, good night.”
Only then did Wu Heng say good night.
“Good night.” The call was cut off.
A long time passed after the connection ended. Only when there truly wasn’t a single sound left in the earpiece did Wu Heng take it out. He crouched by the riverbank, staring at the endless surface of the water. Never before had he missed someone so intensely it hurt like this.
Whether he liked it or not, right now he really missed Xie Chongyi.
It was far more unbearable than facing food he could see and touch but not eat.