Chapter 187.2: Typhoon
After finishing their meal, the two walked out of the inn. It was around eight or nine at night, but the streets were already sparsely populated. Few people dared to walk around at night in the apocalypse—even within the base. With law and order on the verge of collapse, human territory wasn’t much safer than the wilderness.
The boss sat by the door, sighing heavily. But the moment he saw the two guests looking like they were about to head out, he snapped out of it and immediately became alert. “Where are you going? Didn’t you see the rain’s getting heavier?”
Wu Heng ignored him and walked straight past. Xie Chongyi, however, was extremely patient. “On a date,” he answered.
“At this hour?!” the boss shouted, jumping to his feet and hurrying after them. “This isn’t like inland areas—our weather changes in an instant!”
Wu Heng had already taken the passenger seat. Vines hidden beneath the tires silently crept into the car, and X and Shukui climbed in as well.
“Where are you even going for a date? And you’re driving?” The boss was unusually meddlesome.
“The seaside?” Xie Chongyi said casually.
The boss suddenly turned serious. “I’ll go with you.”
“…”
Without waiting for a response, the boss climbed into their car. He sat in the back seat, but after only a few seconds, he slipped and ended up squatting down, his plump face squeezing in next to Wu Heng’s arm. “Going to the seaside is great—I know the way. I’ll guide you, save time. Let’s go, go, go!”
Since they were leaving the next day, the “date” was secondary—Wu Heng mainly wanted to head to the seaside to gather some food to take with them. The boss was a local, so bringing him along wasn’t a bad idea; otherwise, they might not even find the coast, let alone make it back.
A car key appeared out of thin air in Xie Chongyi’s hand. He got into the car, started the engine, and without much pause, slammed his foot on the accelerator. The vehicle lurched forward violently.
The boss was a middle-aged man, someone experienced in life. He immediately grew alert. “You don’t know how to drive, do you?”
“Just haven’t driven in a long time,” Wu Heng glanced at the big head beside him and said calmly.
Before the boss could even say “That’s good,” the jeep’s tires let out a sharp screech as it shot onto the road like an arrow. The boss was flung from the back toward the last row, landing between the dog and the bird. Before he could react, the car jolted again and sped forward—
This wasn’t “haven’t driven in a long time.” This was basically not knowing how to drive at all!
It was raining heavily, and guards were still on duty at the gate. From afar, they spotted the car rushing toward the entrance and waved a hand.
Xie Chongyi slammed the brakes. Wu Heng, caught off guard, pitched forward, but a hand moved ahead of him, blocking his forehead. Behind him, the plump boss slammed into the seat with a loud thud.
A guard in a black raincoat approached the window. Rain streamed off the brim of his hat like a curtain as he knocked on the glass.
Wu Heng lowered the window just a crack, but rain immediately splashed onto his face. He used his ability to block the water.
“It’s raining hard!” the guard shouted as soon as the window opened. “I suggest you go back. Whatever you need to do, wait until the rain stops!”
Concern flashed across the young man’s soaked face, and he raised his voice even louder than before. “We suspect—a typhoon is coming!”
“A typhoon?!” the boss leaned forward from the back seat.
The guard recognized him. “Uncle Yao! Why are you here too? You’re going out?!”
“At this season? A typhoon? Are you joking?” Yao Donghai’s face trembled with tension.
“Yes. Three storm eyes have already formed. Two of them have relatively stable speed and paths, but the third one is very dangerous!” the guard shouted. “So I advise you to turn back! It’s best not to leave the base for the next few days!”
Wu Heng and Xie Chongyi exchanged a glance.
‘Seafood doesn’t have to be eaten right now,’ he thought.
“No!” Yao Donghai’s face shifted between pale and flushed. “My wife went out to sea today, I—”
“Uncle Yao!” The guard cut him off without mercy. His tone was persuasive, but his words were cold. “In the apocalypse, people die every day. The ones still alive have to keep living. Go back!”
The window rolled up. Rain pounded against the car roof like buckets being poured down, and the sound of the wind began to rise.
The headlights came on. The engine revved twice. Xie Chongyi turned the steering wheel halfway, and the car began to turn left—clearly preparing to head back.
“No—no, no!” Yao Donghai cried out hoarsely. “We can’t go back! My wife is still out at sea!”
“That’s your wife,” Wu Heng said. “Not mine.”
“I gave you dinner for free—you can’t do this!” Yao Donghai was practically on the verge of tears. “Do you know how precious food is to humans now? And you ate so much!” he shouted, his emotions spiraling.
“A typhoon is coming,” Xie Chongyi glanced at him. “You want to throw your life away too?”
Yao Donghai’s gaze went blank. He didn’t react for a long moment. Just as the car finished turning around, he suddenly pulled open the door and jumped out. “You think I’m afraid of a typhoon?!” He slammed the door shut, and his figure vanished into the curtain of rain in an instant.
Xie Chongyi raised an eyebrow, casually reached over to switch on the interior light, and continued driving back.
The streets were now completely empty. The rain alternated between heavy and light, changing at an unusually rapid pace.
A faint little yellow light flickered as it approached from the opposite direction.
Their car brushed past Yao Donghai’s dilapidated three-wheeler.
“He went on his own,” Xie Chongyi said, amusement in his tone.
Wu Heng took two hard, dry meat rolls from his pocket and tossed them onto the back seat. The dog and bird pounced on them, making crackling sounds as they tore into the food. Only then did he speak: “Class Monitor, do you want to actually see what the eye of a typhoon looks like?”
“You want to help him,” Xie Chongyi stated bluntly.
“You too,” Wu Heng replied. If anything, Xie Chongyi was actually kinder than him. And Wu Heng’s leniency toward Yao Donghai wasn’t purely sympathy—he was more intrigued by the thrill of being in extreme weather.
“…Fine,” Xie Chongyi said with a smile, turning the steering wheel all the way.
…
Yao Donghai didn’t even have time to react before a hand stretched out from the storm, grabbed him, and yanked him into a cramped space where he couldn’t breathe for a moment. Terrified, he quickly shut his eyes. When he opened them again, a dog and a bird were staring at him without blinking.
He scrambled to his feet. “Why are you guys out here again?”
“We heard that typhoons can wash a lot of marine creatures ashore, so we wanted to go take a look.”
“Huh???”
The jeep sped past the forest that held back the tides, while clearly visible spirals of wind swept chaotically across the land from several kilometers away.
Yao Donghai stayed pressed against the window, nervously watching the ever-changing weather outside.
Before the apocalypse, Changzhou had been a coastal city that lived off the sea. Now the base had been moved inland, with large stretches of flood-control forest and thorny woods planted along the way to block monsters from breaking in. But these only worked above ground—some creatures skilled at moving underground would still appear silently near the base.
The closer they got to the sea, the worse the environment became. Puddles covered the ground, and pitch-black water plants glimmered with a cold, eerie sheen in the night.
When the tires rolled over them, they even seemed to writhe in pain.
“Be careful. Once we’re past the protective forest, anything could pounce on us,” Yao Donghai said, swallowing nervously.
Wu Heng rolled down the window, using his ability to push away the rain. Clear traces of wind slashed wildly through the air.
From the back came Yao Donghai’s sigh. “This is too terrifying.”
“How long has it been since you last went out to sea?” Xie Chongyi sensed something unusual.
“Ah, that… I haven’t gone out since the apocalypse, haha. I’m the stay-at-home one in my family, haha…” Yao Donghai forced a laugh, but it suddenly cut off. “What is that?!”
Buzz—buzz—
Several pairs of protruding red eyes bobbed up and down in the night, blown off balance by the wind, yet closing in on the jeep at an alarming speed.
Wu Heng turned his head, and several streaks of light shot out with precision. The mutated creatures crackled as they fell to the ground, splashing water everywhere—revealing just how massive they were.
Yao Donghai stuck his head out the window, straining to see the several large corpses being flung farther and farther away. Blood was spreading out beneath their bodies.
“Aedes mosquitoes—there are tons of these near the coast,” he said, only managing with great effort to make out the black-and-white markings on their bodies and their calf-sized bulk.
After saying that, his expression turned blank for a moment. His body suddenly jolted. “Where did they get that blood from?!”
“Could it be my wife?!”
“No,” Wu Heng said, looking at the increasingly low-hanging clouds outside the window. “That’s not human blood.”
“How do you—”
Wu Heng: “I’ve tasted it.”
Yao Donghai finally fell completely silent. He calmed down, even his overheated body temperature dropping along with his nerves.
Forget the two young people in front—even the dog and the bird on either side of him seemed far stronger than he was. Yao Donghai’s heart pounded wildly. How had he dared to get into strangers’ car in this chaotic world?
Wu Heng had no interest in what Yao Donghai was thinking. He stared out the window without blinking. The rain grew heavier, but it couldn’t block the clouds surging in from all directions. Purple lightning flashed from time to time, splitting the clouds apart, turning the world as bright as day for an instant.
No creature likes extreme weather. Any being that claims dominance could be crushed to pieces under such conditions.
A squall line stretching for hundreds of kilometers became increasingly clear, and the wind grew stronger.
The land lay completely exposed. The speeding jeep was like a grain of sand. The sound of the sea began to emerge.
Waves over ten meters high slammed violently against the shore. Massive rocks stood firm under the combined assault of wind and waves. Beneath the water, glowing pink seaweed flickered in and out with the rise and fall of the waves, covering most of the visible sea.
A battered, ramshackle boat crashed heavily into the rocks. The hull shuddered with a loud crack, the mast tilted, and the seaweed below stirred in response.
A girl leaning against the railing was drenched from head to toe. She glanced at the reddened sea around her and froze for a moment.
“Mom… how did we end up here?”
She tried to use her ability to move the ship, but it advanced with extreme difficulty, as if something underneath was dragging it back.
Yao Yue leaned her upper body over the side to look below—and sure enough, the red, jointed vines had already latched onto the hull, writhing aggressively.
“Be careful,” Li Qin appeared behind her. Just as she spoke, several glaring red spikes shot up from beneath the sea. Thanks to Li Qin’s quick reaction, they only grazed past Yao Yue’s cheek.
The ambush failed. The thing stood towering beside the ship, its massive branches looming over the people on board. The plant-like veins on its surface were clearly visible as it slowly grew more offshoots.
Though fatigue was already showing on Li Qin’s face, her expression remained resolute. She stepped forward and reached out her hand. Immediately, a branch extended from the red growth and wrapped around her fingers.
The next second, blue electrical light surged through its entire body, penetrating down into the portion submerged underwater.
Soon, the mutated red algae across the entire sea became agitated, as if bouncing wildly beneath the surface.
Half a minute later, Li Qin withdrew her hand. The red glow on the water dimmed. The branches in front of the ship went limp and sank back into the sea, and the red growths clinging to the hull gradually lost their grip.
“Xiao Yue, go—now!”
—
A flock of seagulls swept across the sky, repeatedly blown off course by the fierce winds. Wu Heng leaned back in his seat, using his ability to stabilize the vehicle so it wouldn’t be flipped over by the gale.
Lightning tore across the sky. As they drew closer, the salty, fishy scent of the sea grew heavier. The moisture in the air thickened—not just from the rain—and even using abilities to repel the rainfall made little difference.
“At a time like this, there probably won’t be any mutated creatures,” Yao Donghai spoke again. “People who grow up by the sea know—you don’t fight the ocean, and you don’t fight the sky.”
Wu Heng lazily lifted his eyelids, barely acknowledging the comment.
Catching his reaction, Xie Chongyi found it a bit endearing—he could have ignored Yao Donghai entirely, yet he still gave a response, as if unwilling to let the moment fall into awkward silence.
In an instant, a blinding light flared. The air temperature surged, and a deafening crack exploded across the land.
Wu Heng felt as if the car had slammed into something massive and immovable right in front of them. Unfazed, he thrust his arm straight out the window—but before he could even release his ability, there was a crack. His wrist bone snapped, and his fingers were scorched black.
Only then did Wu Heng and the others in the car realize that the phenomenon outside wasn’t some mutated creature—it was lightning.
“Pull your hand back.” Xie Chongyi’s expression darkened; it was rare for him to show his displeasure so openly.
Wu Heng withdrew his hand and saw it still smoking. He blew on it twice.
Another bolt of lightning struck. Xie Chongyi shifted his focus and jerked the steering wheel in another direction. Where the lightning landed, a pitch-black crater had formed, with flames even flickering inside it.
Under the combined assault of lightning and violent winds, by the time the jeep reached the shore, it was already battered and scarred. Yao Donghai scrambled out of the car, stumbling as he ran against the wind, climbing onto the rocks and anxiously looking out.
Inside the car, compared to the overwhelming chaos outside, it felt like a completely different world—an eerie, suffocating silence.
Tap… tap—
The boy slumped over the steering wheel, absentmindedly tapping it with his fingers. Most of his face was buried in his arm, only a small part of his jaw visible, and even that lay in shadow—only revealed when lightning flashed through the clouds.
Even the dog and the bird sat upright in the back, unusually well-behaved.
Wu Heng had already healed his injury. He vaguely sensed that Xie Chongyi was in a low mood—and that it was because of him. After hesitating for a few seconds, he called out, “Class Monitor.”
It took a while before Xie Chongyi responded. He lifted his head from his arm and stared at the vast, endless sea ahead, his eyes seemingly unfocused.
Wu Heng followed his gaze and looked forward as well.
He had never seen the ocean before. Before he could even get a clear look at the distant sea, a sudden movement came from beside him—his arm was yanked, and Xie Chongyi had already leaned in close, his features enlarging right before his eyes.
Wu Heng’s soft neck fell into Xie Chongyi’s grasp. Cool fingers pressed inward, slowly tightening, compressing muscle and windpipe together.
“You know I wouldn’t hurt you,” Xie Chongyi said with a faint smile, as if it were nothing more than a casual joke.
Compared to being choked, this was the moment Wu Heng truly felt a bad premonition.
Sure enough, the next second, Xie Chongyi released him and slipped his right hand inside his open coat.
The smell of blood drifted out from beneath his clothes. With a crack, Xie Chongyi’s brow furrowed slightly.
Wu Heng frowned too, at first out of confusion—but that confusion quickly vanished. The blood wasn’t anyone else’s—it was Xie Chongyi’s. He recognized the scent clearly.
Xie Chongyi placed what he had taken out of his body into Wu Heng’s naturally curled hand.
Warm. Sticky. Hard…
Wu Heng’s eyelids twitched violently. Holding his breath, he slowly lowered his gaze—
It was half a rib bone.
There was no time to think. Wu Heng immediately reached with his other hand, trying to find Xie Chongyi’s wound to heal it.
Xie Chongyi brushed his hand aside and said lightly, “No need. If you feel pain when I feel pain, then my goal is achieved.”
After saying that, he even casually pinched Wu Heng’s cheek, his tone relaxed. “Get out of the car.”