Eaten Ch.219.2

Chapter 219.2: Way Out

The next day, before dawn, Wen Yuan hurried over to the home of Wu Heng and Xie Chongyi.

“Something happened.”

The incident site was a crossroads closest to the garbage station. Not to mention at night—even during the day, very few people passed by. Usually only garbage trucks came and went, but at night even those stopped running.

On the roadside were more than a dozen large insect-like bodies pieced together. Some were missing half their heads, some only had a pair of mouthparts left. Their caterpillar-like abdomens had lost all signs of life, shriveled and limp. At first glance, they looked like a pile of blackened scrap metal. But that was their post-mortem state. Before death, their wings alone were sharp enough to easily cut a human throat.

“They’re not mutated creatures, so they’re not native to Earth. They’re infected—originally humans.”

“It’s still unclear why they were infected. Everyone in the city was tested before entering.”

“As soon as the situation was discovered this morning, Dou Lu already led a full city energy sweep. She’ll come find us after she’s done.”

Wu Heng listened to Wen Yuan and Xie Chongyi talking behind him and walked forward. He bent down and casually picked up a severed limb. He peeled open the hard outer shell. It was hollow inside. He could only bring a piece of the shell to his mouth. Something that made others instinctively retch just from getting close to him tasted crisp and fragrant to him.

Although it actually tasted quite good, he didn’t eat much. After finishing what was in his hand, he didn’t pick up anything else, just stared thoughtfully at the scattered remains on the ground.

A series of hurried footsteps came from a distance.

Dou Lu had returned with her people.

She ran up to Wu Heng.

“Is the sweep finished?” Wu Heng asked.

“Not yet,” Dou Lu shook her head, looking troubled. “But if nothing unexpected happens, I’ve already found the source.”

Building No. 1 in Xianghu Community had been surrounded. All residents inside had been brought out. Except for those who absolutely refused to go downstairs, the entire building was now empty. Ground-level ability users were standing by, ready to rush in and carry out an arrest at any moment.

Wu Heng appeared silently behind a few guards. They didn’t notice anyone approaching at all—until a hand tapped their shoulders, and they abruptly turned around.

“Here?”

None of them had ever been this close to their leader before. They had rarely even seen him in person. That face—so pale it seemed almost translucent—made them all freeze for several seconds.

“Y-yes.”

“I’ll go up and take a look.” Wu Heng squeezed past them. They didn’t manage to stop him in time. Worried something might happen, two of them quickly followed.

“Did the Chief not come with you?” The two of them were usually inseparable.

“He’s behind,” Wu Heng said. “Which floor?”

“Fourth floor.”

Wu Heng moved quickly and reached the fourth floor first. There were four households on this level, but only one still had signs of living people inside. He pushed open the slightly ajar door at the end of the corridor and saw, at first glance, an overturned shoe cabinet in the entryway and a living room scattered with clutter.

From behind a bedroom door came shouting.

“I won’t let you take him away!”

The voice sounded somewhat familiar.

“Lisa, it’s me.” Wu Heng stepped over the mess of scattered items and stopped in front of the door where the voice came from.

The door suddenly swung open. Lisa stood there, tears blurring her vision.

“This must be a misunderstanding.”

She still looked relatively normal. Her eyes were red and her skin slightly swollen, but that was only from crying too intensely. Wu Heng’s gaze moved past her face and landed on the single bed behind her—on Jiang Lian.

The boy lay there with a pale face. At first glance, nothing seemed obviously wrong. But Lisa’s fear and dazed expression already said everything.

Wu Heng took a step forward.

Lisa refused to move aside. “No…”

All genuine human emotions are foolish—at least Lisa wasn’t as sharp as she used to be. There was no point in protecting an infected person.

Vines silently emerged from beneath her feet and suddenly bound her body. Wu Heng walked past her. Amid Lisa’s screaming, he stopped at the bedside of Jiang Lian.

The young man bent down and pulled Jiang Lian out from under the blanket.

Jiang Lian’s tightly closed eyelids trembled. He opened them a slit, and his pupils—supposed to be human—were still compound eyes, the kind belonging to insects, a deep blue. Wu Heng froze for a moment, and then immediately recalled their first meeting: the scene where Jiang Lian had been pinned beneath a blue butterfly, being gnawed at.

Lisa struggled until she was exhausted. In front of Wu Heng, her ability was practically useless. Sweat and tears poured down her face.

“He’s just a child. He doesn’t know what he did.”

Wu Heng held Jiang Lian. The boy rested his head on his shoulder, offering no resistance as he was carried away.

In the corridor, two guards saw him coming out and finally relaxed.

They were about to follow when, from inside the open room, came a faint rustling sound.

“Go check it,” Wu Heng said.

The guard on his right turned and rushed back in. For a few seconds, the air seemed to freeze. Then a shout came from behind him.

“Leader! Come here quickly!”

Wu Heng and the remaining guard quickly returned to Jiang Lian’s room. Lisa was gone. Only a shattered window remained, with curtains swaying back and forth in the wind.

At that moment, commotion erupted downstairs.

Still carrying Jiang Lian, Wu Heng stood by the window where cold wind rushed in. In the open space below the building, a half-transformed, humanoid insect lay motionless. Xie Chongyi bent down, pulled a blade from the back of its neck, and flipped it over.

On its front face—it was Lisa.

—

Jiang Lian was sent to the research institute, because he was currently the only infected individual who could still retain rationality.

After that investigation, no further anomalies appeared.

So Shen Ruyi took advantage of the incident and personally visited Wu Heng, requesting a city-wide commendation—and preferably a medal—because without him, those dozen infected people would have already killed far more people.

Wu Heng tore off a sheet of white paper, wrote the words “commendation certificate” on it, and sent him away with that.

At night, Wu Zhi also came asking for one.

“Why do you want one?” Xie Chongyi asked with amusement.

“Brother gave Shen Ruyi one but not me!”

On the second day, it was Xie Chongyi who drew Wu Zhi’s certificate this time. Xie Chongyi was good at drawing, and he sketched a chibi-style little girl on it. Wu Zhi accepted it with reluctant happiness.

The next morning, Shen Ruyi came again, holding his certificate, insisting that he also get a chibi-style drawing.

Xie Chongyi kicked him out and hung a sign on the door that read: “Idiots not welcome.”

On the third day, Ruan Silian officially took office as the chairperson of the Suyou City Human Council. At the banquet, Wu Heng only attended for ten minutes—ate an entire table of food—and then left. Dou Lu did not show up.

On the fourth day, Dou Lu and Xue Qi led a team out of Suyou to carry out a rescue operation for the “Wurenxiang” area.

On the fifth day, Ao She—who had been quietly working—received a second major harvest. The homes of Wu Heng and Xie Chongyi were nearly flooded by food deliveries from survivors.

“Wonderful! Wonderful!” As more people entered the city, X’s vocabulary became increasingly chaotic.

On the sixth day, Wu Heng and “Xie Chongyi” fought a battle that destroyed half of the entire villa district. Wu Mo came with his people and suggested confining Xie Chongyi to a specially designed research institute room made for him.

“This is for everyone’s safety. You can’t watch him every second, and there is no one else in the base who can match him besides you.”

The new home was left with only a doorframe. Wu Heng sat on the threshold, blood flowing down his neck, ruins stretching around him. The ground had been turned over several meters deep. Xie Chongyi lay beside him.

He calmly looked at the delegation in front of him, his mind perfectly still. At the edges of his dark green pupils was a ring of gold, like two eclipsed suns.

“Do you think I’m some kind of savior?” Wu Heng tore off a strip of clothing and casually wrapped it around the wound on his neck. “If Xie Chongyi is destroyed, I will destroy all of you.”

“So,” the young man paused—no longer completely devoid of emotion—he raised a hand and rubbed his nose, suppressing a nasal tone, “please think of a solution faster.”

X stood on the crumbling doorframe, looking left and right, shouting loudly:

“Please! Please, please!”

After Wu Mo and his group left, Wu Heng placed his palm against the ground. Vines spread out like a green tide, slowly beginning to repair the surrounding ruins. Halfway through rebuilding, he gave up—the work of professionals should still be left to professionals.

He rested his chin on his hand and sat quietly with a dog, a bird, and the still-unconscious Xie Chongyi, watching him in silence.

After staring for a while, he couldn’t resist and poked Xie Chongyi’s face with a finger. X also tried to poke him—but with a paw, and was swatted away by Wu Heng.

But the dog-bird combo was allowed to lick him.

In the background, the dog and bird ended up fighting over the unfair treatment. Wu Heng chuckled, but midway through his laugh, he suddenly froze.

He realized something.

The scent of the infected individual from a few days ago… was somewhat similar to the scent currently coming from Xie Chongyi’s body.

Wu Heng propped himself up and turned toward Xie Chongyi. He recalled the vines that had been still scavenging around and called them back into his body. Above his palm, wood and light-type energy fused together. The pale green energy, wrapped by vine threads, instinctively moved toward Xie Chongyi’s chest.

The vine threads silently pierced through the skin beneath his clothes.

Xie Chongyi remained unconscious. He didn’t even frown.

Several long minutes passed, and Wu Heng began to feel slightly drained.

Just as he thought his sudden idea might have been nothing more than a fantasy, at the point where the healthy green energy connected to Xie Chongyi’s heart, a glaring black, viscous substance suddenly surged upward.

For the first time in a long while, Wu Heng showed a purely joyful smile.

The black energy impurities traveled along the vines upward. It behaved greedily, almost eagerly—like it couldn’t wait to pour itself into Wu Heng’s body.

The cold energy made him shiver uncontrollably.

In the interweaving and fusion of multiple types of energy, images from the past surfaced before Wu Heng’s eyes.

He saw his and Xie Chongyi’s childhood.

As a child, Wu Heng liked to keep his head lowered, while Xie Chongyi preferred to lift his slightly, always looking as if he were something extraordinary.

Su Mo’s motives were probably good. During that process, there were more smiles than moments of sorrow. The experiment ended before Xie Chongyi entered middle school. During his three years in junior high in Jingzhou, Xie Chongyi was unquestionably the most prominent figure among all prominent figures.

At that time, the apocalypse had not officially descended yet. The magnetic field had not begun to fluctuate abnormally, and energy had not yet erupted. So during those years, Xie Chongyi did not need energy injections.

At this moment, Wu Heng was receiving an overwhelming amount of information—far more than what he had ever obtained from Xie Chongyi himself, or from Wu Mo and those documents.

“The end of all life on Earth is your end as well. But there is another way—to find a new vessel for those energy impurities. However, that’s not possible. No—it is absolutely impossible. You understand better than anyone that this energy originates from Earth itself. Its scale is beyond measure. We all know that.”

Wu Heng felt as though his heart was being torn apart. The scene before his eyes shattered into fragments. He forced his attention back to Xie Chongyi.

The pain within his body had become so intense that he could no longer think clearly. He used all his strength to try to retract the vine threads—but they felt as if they had already grown into the other person’s body.

The energy inside the young man was rapidly draining away.

X and Shukui sensed something was wrong. They suddenly enlarged their bodies—X clamped onto Xie Chongyi, while Shukui wrapped its wings around Wu Heng, desperately trying to separate the two.

Wu Heng’s eyes shifted from green to red, and the pattern of insect-like pupils slowly emerged.

“Brother!”

Wu Zhi and Shen Ruyi arrived just in time. Wu Zhi froze the vine threads between the two bodies with a single strike, then shattered them—finally pulling them apart.

The force of the separation sent both sides flying.

Wu Heng crashed to the ground. X rushed over in a panic and accidentally stepped on his thigh in the chaos.

He didn’t bother to argue. Swallowing the metallic taste rising in his throat, he flexed his fingers slightly. Inside the crystalline light-type energy core within his body, a single drop of black liquid drifted about, occasionally striking the core’s inner wall.

“Shen Ruyi, go check on Xie Chongyi for me,” Wu Zhi said, having chased off the tag-along. She hurried over to help Wu Heng up, tears welling in her eyes. “Brother, are you okay?”

Wu Heng rasped, “I’m fine.”

“Take care of the class monitor. I’m going to the research institute.”

“But your face looks really bad right now.” Wu Zhi said softly. “Like… really, really bad.”

It was the kind of weakness she had only seen in her brother before the apocalypse.

“Wu Zhi…”

His tone shifted slightly.

A chill ran down Wu Zhi’s spine. “Understood! I’ll go right away!”

—

Wu Mo had only just returned to the research institute when Wu Heng arrived right behind him.

He took off his coat and headed straight for the nuclear magnetic detection room, climbing onto the scanning bed without hesitation.

“I need a full scan.”

The young man’s skeletal structure and organs were exceptionally beautiful—almost unnaturally perfect.

But this was not the time to admire that.

Wu Mo stared at the black impurity inside the energy core, unable to make sense of it. “This is…”

Wu Heng remained expressionless. “Something from Xie Chongyi’s body.”

The assistants behind Wu Mo collectively gasped. They looked between the screen and their perfectly standing leader, unsure whether to fear his recklessness or the possibility that the person in front of them had already been replaced by something else entirely. None of them could speak.

Only Wu Mo remained relatively calm.

He adjusted the glasses from his chest pocket and put them on.

“You’re certain?”

“Certain.”

“This is… beyond belief.”

Wu Mo did not show joy. Instead, his brows tightened even further.

He dismissed the assistants, leaving only the two of them in the room. His expression grew grave as he spoke.

“I have to warn you…”

From the research institute it was already an hour later.

Outside the gate, Lin Mengzhi stood there like a utility pole. He had visibly lost a lot of weight.

He looked mentally drained. His black roots had grown out—something that would have been absolutely unacceptable before. Wu Heng was still wondering what he had been busy with these past two days when Lin Mengzhi strode straight toward him. Wu Heng had no choice but to stay where he was.

“Fck fck fck fck f*ck—”

Lin Mengzhi cursed all the way up to him. Before Wu Heng could even speak, he exploded in place.

“I f*cked up and slept with Xue Shen again!”

Wu Heng blinked. “What does that mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like!” Lin Mengzhi said, grabbing his hair. “A few days ago we ate together, right? The next morning I woke up and found myself in the same bed as that bastard Xue Shen. I swear he must’ve used his ability—at the time I didn’t even feel anything wrong, I just left. But guess what happened next?”

“Liu Ning used her hand and halfway through… asked me if I’d been with someone else the night before. I—fck fck f*ck—”

Lin Mengzhi shook Wu Heng back and forth. “And then?”

“We decided the three of us would just be together.”

Wu Heng seriously suspected Lin Mengzhi’s brain had been screwed loose.

“You like it?”  

“Like what?”

“The two of them.”

That question was too complicated for someone like Lin Mengzhi, who had just recently “opened the door to a new world,” and also too trivial for this era. He couldn’t answer it, and he also couldn’t guarantee anyone would seriously think about it.

Anyway—he felt pretty good. He didn’t hate it.

“Whatever. Too lazy to think.” Lin Mengzhi slung an arm over Wu Heng’s shoulder and walked along the street. “I don’t even dare think about it. Getting screwed by two guys in a row—who the hell could even imagine that?”

“Then what did you come to find me for?” Wu Heng asked. He had thought the other party needed some kind of emotional counseling.

“Wu Zhi came crying to me saying you and Xie Chongyi were in trouble. So I came straight from bed to check on you. In case something actually happened.”

“How’s the class monitor?”

Wu Heng unconsciously tightened his fingers inside his pocket.

In his field of vision were the warm, dim streetlights lining the road. The street trees had been cherry blossoms planted two days ago by Yang Xiaoyun’s organization. They said they had already been artificially accelerated with abilities to reach a mature tree age, so next spring they would bloom into a full canopy of blossoms. By then, they could even hold a cherry blossom festival—because culture was important. Culture was the lifeline of humanity.

Beside him, Lin Mengzhi, getting no response, kept talking without pause.

“Actually, I feel like love or whatever doesn’t matter that much anymore now. Before I just wanted to find a girlfriend or something, but now I don’t care. I just want me, you, Wu Zhi… and also your class monitor, all of us, to just be okay together.”

They kept walking forward. Their shadows stretched long across the ground. The taller one kept rambling endlessly, while the one beside him remained unusually quiet.

Wu Heng was thinking about Wu Mo’s words.

“A vessel—unless it has no life. If you want to save him, you will die.”

Under the cherry trees that had not yet bloomed, Wu Heng felt that he had already made his decision.

This world—however it turned out—didn’t matter.

He wanted Xie Chongyi to live.

Author’s note:

Our A’Heng really has suffered year after year (sigh).

As for Dou Lu’s “curse,” a clarification: it’s not actually a curse in the supernatural sense. This is a post-apocalyptic setting, not a supernatural one, so there’s nothing like that.

If Ruan Silian had waited that night—waited until A’Heng arrived and handled things—there would have been no so-called curse. If it had been Liu Shen instead, he could probably have just cheerfully cooked everything into a pot of soup and nothing would have happened.

What was called a “curse” is actually Dou Lu being trapped by herself. The so-called “curse” only “comes true” because she is the one who chooses to act on it. And from Ruan Silian’s perspective, only Dou Lu would be willing to face it without fear and do that task for her.

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