Chapter 196: The North Has Already Disappeared
Xue Qi couldn’t be bothered to explain. He grabbed a stick and turned to leave.
At that moment, it was only four in the afternoon, yet it was already completely dark.
The once-quiet forest was now filled with the cries of various animals, rising and falling, sometimes near, sometimes far, impossible to tell which direction they came from.
Ao She was carrying someone and couldn’t move quickly. On top of that, after losing his ability, he had also lost the night vision that ability users possessed. So the role of leading the group fell to Xue Qi.
As night deepened, the temperature dropped further and further. The cold air poured into lungs already strained by the altitude, making their legs feel as heavy as if they were filled with lead, impossible to lift.
All around them was desolation.
No one dared to stop, and no one could. Whether fast or slow, the group kept moving forward. In every person’s heart, a single thought stubbornly supported both body and mind: stopping meant surrendering to this dense forest—stopping meant death.
It was too cold—colder and colder. X jumped down from Shukui’s back and into Lin Mengzhi’s arms.
With a scarf wrapped around his head, Lin Mengzhi was so exhausted he couldn’t even straighten his back, looking like an old woman. He shook X off. “Go find your mom.”
X rolled its eyes, bounced back past Lin Mengzhi, and leapt into Xie Chongyi’s hands, trying to burrow its head into his clothes—it was just too cold outside.
It was clever. It knew to shrink its body down to a normal size at times like this—first, to reduce its weight so others would be willing to carry it, and second, because the larger its body, the more energy and heat it would consume. It needed to conserve its strength.
And third—this wasn’t something only it had considered. Xie Chongyi understood it just as well. After bothering everyone else, it deliberately avoided bothering Wu Heng. It wasn’t that it didn’t dare, but rather that it couldn’t bear to make Wu Heng do such tiring work. Unless there was no other choice, it believed deep down that this kind of physical labor should be done by others.
Xie Chongyi held it effortlessly. But beside him, Wu Heng’s complexion was already looking bad. Xie Chongyi swept the beam of a flashlight across his face—it was deathly pale.
Wu Heng sensed the gaze from beside him.
“It’s too cold.” His voice had gone hoarse. Standing still, he turned his palm upward; from the center of the petal, the vine threads that crawled out were weak and limp.
It wasn’t just the cold—altitude was also a factor. The higher the elevation, the less suitable it was for most people and plants to survive. That was why vegetation on plateaus was mostly moss, and trees tended to grow as low shrubs.
At this moment, birch and pine trees were still present, which proved they hadn’t yet reached high altitude. It was just that Wu Heng’s body had already begun to feel unwell.
“I’ll carry you.” Xie Chongyi pulled X out from inside his clothes and tossed it onto the ground.
The gray parrot rolled several times across the fallen leaves, scrambled up, and flapped its wings, angrily squawking at the person above.
Wu Heng shook his head. “Not for now.”
Only then did Xie Chongyi pick X back up. A bird under the eaves has no choice but to bow its head—X put on a “just this once” expression and slipped back into the warmth of his clothes.
“The others should be feeling worse.” Wu Heng himself was relatively alright. He had never liked the cold to begin with—something that could be traced back to his childhood. Children who weren’t loved often knew just how biting winter cold could be, and that kind of cold usually followed them for life.
Wu Heng had only lost his wood and light attributes, but he was still a plant symbiote—still, in a sense, an ability user. But most of the others in the group had reverted to ordinary human physiques, and the increasingly extreme climate posed a far harsher trial for them.
Fame and fortune no longer mattered to humanity. They had returned to something primitive—they needed food, water, and most importantly, a source of fire.
Shen Ruyi was on the verge of collapse. Hunger was already the least worth mentioning sensation. The exhaustion was indescribable—his whole body felt like it was falling apart, as if several sacks of cement were piled onto his shoulders. Even his bones ached, and hunger only intensified all of it.
If he could just get a little food, he believed he wouldn’t be this exhausted. But no one would give him any—not even his own older brother. To be precise, this “order” had been given by that very brother, while the others simply carried it out in silent agreement.
This world had gone mad. His brother had become a lackey of the man who killed their mother.
Through the blur of scalding tears, a flickering light appeared in his field of vision. He wiped his eyes and looked closely—it was several wooden houses.
Shen Ruyi immediately ran toward them.
“Holy shit!” Lin Mengzhi almost fell over in shock behind him. “Did he see a ghost?”
Dou Lu leaned on the stick in her hands, panting heavily. “There seem to be houses ahead… and light.”
“In Deathlands? Where would people come from? Even if there were, they wouldn’t be here.”
“Could it be a mirage?”
“Aren’t mirages in deserts?”
“They can happen in the mountains too.”
“It’s probably not a mirage,” Xue Shen had already taken off his glasses. He looked toward the wooden houses. “Let’s go take a look. It might be people who chose to live in seclusion after entering Deathlands.”
“The apocalypse… living in seclusion? Sounds like they’re trying to cultivate immortality, haha.”
Shen Ruyi ran so fast that his figure had long disappeared. The others weren’t moving quickly; as they advanced, they carefully observed their surroundings. The closer they got to the houses, the sparser the trees became, until finally there was a wide clearing surrounding the buildings. On the open ground were neatly stacked piles of timber, along with old tree stumps that clearly had been there for years.
Behind the houses lay an even larger clearing, with even more wood piled up.
“Looks like a logging camp,” Ying Liuquan said. Noticing that Ao She seemed about to set him down, he immediately tightened his grip around the man’s neck, nervous. “Don’t put me down yet—th-thanks.”
They passed through the stacks of wood and arrived at the door of the wooden house.
Wu Heng and Xie Chongyi were walking at the back. Xie Chongyi wasn’t even walking side by side with him—he had fallen behind by some distance, and at one point even disappeared for two minutes.
The boy caught up, his palms smeared with wood shavings and rust dust.
“Beitianqing Logging Camp—an old logging site in the north that was shut down long ago. The person in charge had the surname Lin. I don’t know what he looks like exactly, only that he suffered a lot of discrimination as a child because of a birthmark on his face. But he was exceptionally gifted—he got into one of the top three universities in the country at sixteen, later went abroad, and after returning was hired by a bank. Yet within a few years, he resigned and went to Beitianqing Logging Camp. For more than twenty years after that, he never left the camp. If those records aren’t fabricated, he should be over fifty by now.”
Wu Heng stepped on the ground beneath his feet, the soil already somewhat hardened. “How does the class monitor know so much?”
“I’ve read some of the books he wrote.”
“A writer? Very famous? Good writing?”
Xie Chongyi gave a meaningful look. “I just happened to see them in a bookstore. I wouldn’t say they were bad, but many parts felt like ramblings in a dream. I later looked into it—he had a fairly serious mental illness.”
“Besides, he hasn’t published any new works since he turned thirty.”
Wu Heng was still waiting for Xie Chongyi to continue, but at that moment, the door that Shen Ruyi had been pounding on slowly opened. A short, middle-aged man wearing a thick felt hat stood under the light. He spoke, “Who are you people?” As he talked, a fist-sized birthmark on his left cheek shifted with the movement.
…
“It’s all meaningless.” Old Lin poured each of them a cup of hot water. Watching the group of children, frozen through, eagerly clutch the cups to warm their hands, he simply turned and tossed a few more pieces of firewood into the iron barrel.
White smoke billowed, and sparks of ash scattered. Those standing close couldn’t stop coughing from the choking fumes.
“What do you mean?” Ao She asked.
“Everything you’re doing now—including what those before you were doing—is meaningless.” Old Lin repeated himself. At the same time, he told them that others had already reached Deathlands ahead of them—and had passed through here before them.
Old Lin made a round through the house and finally brought out a plate of dried peanuts.
Shen Ruyi immediately reached out, grabbed a large handful, and stuffed them into his pocket.
Xie Chongyi watched the flickering flames, and Old Lin—who seemed calm on the surface but was actually restless. He kept pacing around the room, looking as if he were trying to find something to offer the guests, yet in the end produced nothing, nor could he sit still in a chair.
“If something isn’t a perfect result and is therefore considered meaningless, then most things in this world are meaningless—living included,” he said slowly. After finishing, he took a sip of hot water and smiled faintly at Old Lin, who had suddenly turned to look at him.
“For me, that’s indeed the case,” Old Lin said, pacing around the room once more. Then he suddenly pushed open the window. Cold air rushed in as he stood with his back to everyone and said, “Because the north has already disappeared.”
Someone’s cup fell to the ground with a clatter, hot water spilling everywhere.
“Not long after you began climbing this mountain, you should have already felt that everything here doesn’t match your impression of the south—the forest, the vegetation, the sunlight, even the animals. Those are all characteristic of the north. And this Beitianqing Logging Camp as well. We might be ghosts, or perhaps just an illusion. Even we ourselves don’t know what we are. But one thing is certain: it’s the change in magnetic field energy that caused us to appear here.”
“Human territory is disappearing. One day, this place will disappear too—humans as well.”
No one behind him spoke. They had not experienced what Old Lin had, but the fall of the northern base was indeed a fact.
“You can rest here tonight. Think carefully about whether you want to keep going forward.”
“It’s winter. I don’t have extra food to give you—I’m still hungry myself.” The gloom and despondency faded from Old Lin’s expression, replaced by a thin, almost childlike air. The lamplight illuminated the birthmark on his face, making it look like a flickering flame.
After hearing Old Lin’s words, Wu Heng drank several cups of hot water in a row. His body gradually warmed up. Thinking back to the two rainy seasons and the increasingly violent surges of energy, Old Lin’s words weren’t without reason—but at a time like this, if survival was on the line, who had the luxury to talk about reason?
All he wanted was to live a little better than the day before—never to be cold, never to go hungry. He would only do what he wanted to do, and as for life and death, he would leave that to fate.
“Since we’re staying the night, I’ll prepare dinner,” Ao She said, forcing himself to stand when he saw everyone slumped in their chairs from exhaustion. Raising his voice slightly, he asked, “What should we eat tonight?”