Chapter 167.2: Returning Home
After leaving the core zone, it didn’t take long to pass through Area A. Between Area A and Area B stood another towering wall, with guards stationed at its base. The uniforms of the Area B guards weren’t drastically different, except their long coats had become short ones, and the blue star on their shoulders had one less point—Area A’s had three.
“Be sure to return before ten tonight.”
“Oh right, where are you heading?”
Wu Heng thought for a moment before giving the name of the residential complex where they had lived before the apocalypse.
The guard frowned. “The one on Jiangyin Avenue?”
“Yeah! On Jiangyin Avenue. Where is it now?” Lin Mengzhi asked.
“It’s in the outermost zone. If you go now”—the guard looked up at the sky—“you definitely won’t make it back before ten. I suggest you either drive or call a car.”
“Area E?”
The guard’s expression turned complicated. He shook his head. The guard beside him said, “Not Area E. The Lowborn District.”
“Low—” Lin Mengzhi’s voice rose in disbelief, but Wu Heng cut him off.
“Where can we call a car?”
…
At the sound of their approach, a beautiful woman in a cheongsam, a shawl draped over her shoulders, shifted slightly in her recliner. She didn’t stand. Her gaze drifted lazily over the group in front of her, her voice soft and coquettish.
“A car? I don’t have any cars here.”
Lin Mengzhi stepped forward. “The guards told us to come here.”
“Lu Jingsen?” The woman finally rose to her feet, brushing her hair back. “Fine. Follow me.”
She turned and walked into the spacious shop. The main hall was completely empty. Without looking back, she continued speaking. “It’s true—I don’t have cars. These days, cars are a luxury.”
She paused deliberately, then turned to smile lightly at them.
“But I have plenty of other means of transportation.”
Before they could figure out what she meant, she pulled up a rolling shutter door inside the shop.
Behind it, a large group of mutated creatures that had been tumbling and wrestling together instantly fell silent. In perfect unison, they turned their heads toward the doorway.
Gulp.
Outside, someone swallowed loudly.
The woman stepped aside, making sure not to block the view. She introduced her business casually. “These are all mutated pets I tamed after the apocalypse. I don’t know whether their original owners are dead or alive. In any case, the people are gone. So I picked them up, let them do a bit of work for me, make a little money, scrape by.”
Lin Mengzhi frowned. “Back when the apocalypse first started, my childhood friend and I saw what happened to pets after they mutated. They ate people. So how come yours—”
“That was just some beasts with no self-control and no upbringing,” she replied coldly.
Then she smiled sweetly at the large, fluffy “darlings” inside.
“Who wants to help Mommy with this order?”
The oversized cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, and rabbits—all far larger than normal pets—collectively ignored her and went back to playing.
Seeing this, the woman shrugged helplessly. “Beasts are still beasts.”
She stepped back a little and tilted her head up, looking at a stack of charts hanging on the wall. At the top, “Work Log” was clearly labeled, recording each mutated creature’s weekly workload. Only a very small number of names had completely blank rows from start to finish.
“Oh, you two—go help deliver a customer. See what the customer wants, and then decide whether you come back with them,” the woman said, randomly picking two of the creatures who had worked the least.
“Finish this job, and only then will you get dinner tonight.”
The mention of dinner immediately perked up their ears.
The threat was effective. From the corner, two tabby cats, each as large as a truck, stretched leisurely and stepped forward with elegant ease.
“You want us to ride on cats?!” Lin Mengzhi’s eyes went wide. The cat in front of him was half a head taller than him, its eyes glowing green. It yawned, revealing fangs longer than a human forearm.
“Dream on,” the woman said, turning gracefully. “There are so many of you—don’t snap their backs.”
Inside the shop, besides her, there was only one employee—but he wasn’t in the main hall. He ran in from the back door, an apron smeared with blood. He grabbed appropriate harnesses from the wall.
The two cats didn’t bow to him. They sat on the ground, licking their paws. The employee jumped up, fastening the harnesses onto them, then led them outside and attached them to the carts.
The woman led the group over, clearly proud of her business. “See? Not bad, right? Eco-friendly, gives these beasts work, spares them the misery of wandering outside, and keeps them safe from hunters.”
“Not bad at all,” Lin Mengzhi said, stroking his chin. “But you’re seriously going to make us ride on this cart?”
“You don’t like it?”
“Do they even know the way?” Shen Ping’an asked, looking at the two giant cats. “Cats aren’t like dogs.”
“The entire Hanzhou area has no place they don’t know. Don’t underestimate them,” the woman said, punctuating every few words with “beast.” Her employee looked skeptical, but she quickly put on a not-quite-pleased expression, then flashed her sly, coquettish smile again. “The point is—it’s cheap. This trip, I only charge two C-grade energy cores. If you used a car? That would cost a lot more.”
Wu Heng glanced at the sky. No time to waste. He stepped onto the cart, held onto the rough railing, and plopped down wherever he found a spot.
The others followed suit, and the employee positioned himself as well.
“Sit tight. They’re pretty fast,” he said, sitting at the very front. His hands were empty—no whip, no reins. Just a single word: “Go.” Instantly, the two cats shot forward like lightning.
“?” Lin Mengzhi, still poking around and full of curiosity, was flung clean off the cart.
X flipped several times midair, then chose to rely on itself, swooping over their heads.
Shen Ping’an reacted quickly. He threw out a vine, looping it around Lin Mengzhi’s legs to pull him back—but the cart was already in motion. Lin Mengzhi had no chance to sit properly. He had to lie flat in the cart, one arm hugging Shen Ping’an’s leg, the other holding onto Xie Chongyi’s, while his lower body swung wildly from side to side.
For the first stretch after setting off, the cart barely touched the ground, only the wheels tapping lightly now and then. But before it could settle, the two cats dragged it airborne again.
The cat-cart tore through the streets at breakneck speed, the scenery on both sides blurring. When the cats turned corners, they could even fling the cart toward the outer walls of buildings along the curve, running so fast that their ears and fur streamed wildly in the wind.
Xie Chongyi held Wu Heng tightly; the others weren’t his responsibility.
Twenty minutes later, the cat-cart abruptly stopped, tipping onto its side on the ground.
The employee climbed to his feet, straightened his clothes, and wore the expression of someone used to this kind of chaos. “We’re here,” he said. From the pocket on the front of his apron, he pulled out two large chunks of dried meat, tossing one to each cat. “Good cats.”
Wu Heng stood there, pale as a sheet. He wasn’t physically sick—he just felt like his soul hadn’t quite caught up with his body.
Lin Mengzhi and Shen Ping’an helped each other up. “You get what you pay for,” Lin Mengzhi muttered, feeling like he might throw up.
The employee looked around, found the entrance to the residential complex, and pointed ahead. “Keep going straight, then turn right—that’s it.”
He added, “Try to be quick. I’ll wait here for you.”
At that moment, Lin Mengzhi spotted a familiar sight—a towering old phoenix tree. It had grown to be as tall as ten or more floors, its branches lush and full.
“A’Heng! We’re home!” His eyes glistened with tears as he turned to call back to his childhood friend, overcome with excitement.
…
The slum area—true to its name—was exactly the kind of place Ning Bizhen thought “low-born people” should live.
Compared to the ABC area, which was already close to the pre-apocalypse cityscape, and the relatively tidy DE area, the so-called slum still showed vast traces of earthquake damage.
Plants grew wildly over collapsed steel and concrete, enveloping everything, stretching into a seemingly endless wilderness—though in reality it did have an end. When Wu Heng and his group entered the base through the outermost wall, all they could see were flourishing crops, yet nobody paid attention to this middle zone.
Humans could only build shelters in the few overlooked empty spaces. The shelters were crude, mostly made by piecing together wood and clearly scavenged sheets of plastic or metal. The roads had never been rebuilt, relying entirely on repeated footsteps to carve them out.
Wu Heng held Xie Chongyi’s hand, but they didn’t walk side by side. Occasionally, someone would step out from the scattered houses around them to steal a glance. After a brief look came envy, followed by fear—they’d duck back inside and never come out again. Here, the faces of humans all shared the same hopelessness.
Lin Mengzhi tugged on Shen Ping’an’s sleeve. “Who said Hanzhou was well-governed by Ning Bizhen? I think that opinion can be retracted.”
At that moment, a lean, dark-haired boy standing by a nearby door stared at them, his eyes growing wider and wider.
These young people seemed even more well-off than the monsters in the ABC area; their bodies bore no marks of apocalypse-era abuse.
His gaze was glued to the four of them. His jaw clenched so tightly it was as if someone had grabbed his neck; he couldn’t breathe. His eyes nearly bulged from their sockets. The overwhelming joy that surged to the top had long since drowned him.
“Yang Ao,” a weak voice came from the dark house behind him, “there’s no food left at home, we…”
“There will be soon.” The boy murmured in a daze, stepping forward and running toward the group that was about to walk away. From his throat came a loud, clear cry that hadn’t been heard in months. “Wu Heng! Class Monitor!!!” Tears poured from his eyes.
Lin Mengzhi was the first to turn back toward the boy shouting for Wu Heng. At first glance, he almost thought a monkey was bounding toward them—so thin and dark it was astonishing.
Yang Ao was crying uncontrollably in front of a few former classmates.
Lin Mengzhi quietly approached Wu Heng. “Who’s this?”
“My deskmate back in school.”
“Did he ever bully you?”
“He used to be nice. Don’t know now.”
“Alright, got it.”
Shen Ping’an looked at the pitch-black, unnaturally thin Yang Ao, unable to hide his own surprise. “Why are you here? This place is…”
“The slum area,” Yang Ao said, his face a mask of misery. “The current person in charge of Hanzhou, that Ning Bizhen, has classified all humans without abilities as ‘sl*ves.’ The dirty, hard work that ability-users don’t want—we do it. The pay is ridiculously low. Damn those ability-users; not a single decent one among them.”
Wu Heng and Xie Chongyi exchanged a glance. Neither saw any irritation in the other’s eyes. Ability-users, with their superior physical constitution and supernatural powers, were practically a new species. Naturally, they didn’t care about ordinary humans without abilities—just as humans once didn’t care about monkeys.
“Isn’t it dangerous to curse people from those areas like that?” Shen Ping’an thought of the man from a few hours ago who had said just a few words and ended up dead on the street.
“Sl*ves don’t get that kind of treatment,” Yang Ao snorted, his eyes fixed eagerly on the group in front of him. “You all left Hanzhou before, right? Haven’t heard anything about you since the apocalypse. When did you come back?”
“Today,” Shen Ping’an replied.
Yang Ao had a lot to say, and Lin Mengzhi quickly interrupted. “We still have some things to handle. How about you go home and wait for us?”
“What things? I know this area well—I’ll come with you,” Yang Ao said, a look of caution and eagerness appearing on his face, something that hadn’t existed before the apocalypse.
After learning where they were headed, Yang Ao moved to the front to lead the way, talking as they walked.
“Wu Heng, do you remember the day you left school? You said the end of the world was coming. I didn’t believe you. I regretted it afterward—if only I had believed you back then.” After a few seconds, he added, “But even if I had believed you, it wouldn’t have mattered. I’m not an ability-user. Even if I’d stockpiled more food in advance, I couldn’t have protected it. Even if no one stole it, I would’ve eventually run out.”
“We can’t survive out there in the outside world at all. Jingzhou claims self-governance, but that just means they don’t care about anything. No one cares whether we live or die. They think we’re a burden.”
“We’re here.” Yang Ao stopped and pointed at the ruins in front of them. “But as for which building you used to live in, I’m not sure.”
“I know,” Lin Mengzhi said.
The boy leapt up onto the rubble and ran toward a familiar direction.
A place where you’ve lived since childhood—even if it collapses into flat ground, even if the sea turns into land and land into mountains—you’ll never forget it.
Lin Mengzhi and Wu Heng worked together to move aside a massive stone slab. This was the vegetable patch where Grandma Lin had been buried. She used to grow all kinds of vegetables here, including pumpkins; green vines once crawled across the entire yard.
But now, the vegetables in the patch had long since been dug up, roots and all.
Before breaking open the ground, both of them silently prayed—prayed that nothing had dug Grandma up as well.
A mud-caked bone emerged into view.
“Old thing!” X reacted even faster than the two of them.
Wu Heng unfolded a paper bag and carefully placed the unearthed bones inside. There weren’t many—about a handful.
Buried beneath were the thimble, the radio, the discs, and other items they had interred with her—things Grandma Lin had often used in life. They gathered those too and took them along.
Lin Mengzhi knelt on one knee beside the pit. When he lifted his eyes, they were already blurred with tears. “It feels like she’s come back to us.”
“She never left us,” Wu Heng said softly.
Yang Ao was already numb to this, but he didn’t show disdain or indifference. He had simply lost the ability to display such feelings. He didn’t know what the “appropriate” reaction was anymore—one that wouldn’t look like a mask.
At first, he would cry for the dead—cry until his eyes were red and swollen, his head dizzy—for companions torn apart by plants and animals, for zombies devouring the elderly and children before him, for every heartbreak and separation. But now, he couldn’t cry at all. He couldn’t even feel sadness.
He felt ashamed of himself in this moment because he was worrying—not about the dead—but about how to ask them for some food.
“Let’s go.” Wu Heng brushed the dirt off his hands and handed the bag to Lin Mengzhi. Xie Chongyi helped lift him over the rubble.
“Ah… she was just a little away from being able to live a good life with me,” Lin Mengzhi sighed, stretching out his hand to Xie Chongyi as well.
“…”
Xie Chongyi just looked at him and smiled.
“Class Monitor, have some decency—there are people here,” Lin Mengzhi urged.
It was still Shen Ping’an who helped pull the person up.
Yang Ao couldn’t wait any longer. “Are we done? Come sit at my place!”
No one refused. If, as Yang Ao said, the outermost district’s survivors truly hadn’t been cursed by Ning Bizhen, then no matter how few they were, they would still know at least bits and pieces about Hanzhou’s current situation and leadership.
Thinking it wise to know the situation firsthand, the group followed Yang Ao and stepped inside his home.