Eaten Ch.68.2

Chapter 68.2: Dumplings

Ruan Silian eagerly helped everyone refill their bowls. “Then eat up! Meals like this don’t come around often.”

Xue Qi lifted his chopsticks. “Shouldn’t we… keep her?”

“Keep… her?” Ruan Silian was caught off guard.

“We’ll see,” Xue Shen said calmly, placing a piece of food into Xue Qi’s bowl. “Focus on eating.”

Wu Heng kept his head down, eating in silence, never again touching the basket of mugwort cakes.

He sampled each dish one by one, and in the end, only the dry-fried wolf tenderloin, mugwort-stem pork rib soup, and pan-fried wolf chops earned his approval.

The others, long tired of eating meat, found the vegetables far more satisfying. No matter how delicious the meat was, at that moment it couldn’t compare to the freshness of greens—even wild ones. In fact, the wild flavor made them all the more fragrant.

The two large plates of dry-fried meat and the whole pot of rib soup were nearly devoured by Wu Heng alone.

He also ate seven or eight wolf chops; since there were few seasonings available, Zhang Jinya had used finely chopped mugwort for flavoring instead. It turned out surprisingly fragrant and refreshing, cutting through the greasiness. But for dishes where vegetables took up too much of the plate, Wu Heng didn’t touch a single bite.

—

Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the village, Zhang Jinnan, Huang Yu, and Li Qiong had found a house and discovered some thick, warm clothing inside. They hurried to change into them—it had been a long time since they’d felt this warm.

No howling wind, no snow biting at their skin, no exhausting travel, and no mutated beasts lurking nearby.

“Pah! Those little bastards actually moved the bus just to keep us away!”

Zhang Jinnan’s once-handsome face had grown gaunt and haggard from the apocalypse. He spat viciously, hatred burning in his eyes.

Huang Yu, wrapped snugly in a blanket, said, “That’s only normal. If it were you, wouldn’t you have moved it too?”

Zhang Jinnan’s expression darkened. He opened his mouth to retort but swallowed the words back down.

When Zhang Jinya pushed open the door, the three of them turned toward her at once. Their gazes landed on the food basin she was carrying—small, covered with a mismatched pot lid, a single rib hooked over the rim.

Zhang Jinnan strode forward and snatched the basin out of her hands.

Then, turning his back to her, he chose to share the hard-won hot meal with Huang Yu instead of Li Qiong.

As he lifted the lid, the rich aroma filled the room. Huang Yu’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“How do they have this much food? There’s even meat?!”

Zhang Jinya let out a nervous sound. “There aren’t just three of them — there are six, seven, eight, nine, ten, maybe even more. We’ve run into teams like that before; they’re good fighters. Finding food for them is nothing.”

Zhang Jinnan shook the food container in his hand, displeased. “And this is all you brought back?”

Zhang Jinya sat down beside him. “This is all they gave.”

Zhang Jinnan gave a wicked grin. “Then figure something out. Don’t waste that face of yours.”

Zhang Jinya’s face instantly turned pale. She bit through the corner of her lip, the chill once again piercing through her whole body.

Not far away, Li Qiong looked at her with pity. In truth, he had seen plenty of people like Zhang Jinnan. Back when he was trapped at home, afraid to step outside and short on food, there were already people selling the bodies of their relatives in exchange for something to eat.

At that time, such things weren’t too common yet. But after the earthquake, when humans were forced to abandon their uninhabitable homes and venture out in search of food and survival, human lives became as cheap as weeds. As long as one could live, selling one’s body became commonplace — mothers offering themselves to ability users or those with abundant supplies to save their children, children selling themselves for their parents, fathers or elders treating their family members as goods to be traded… Some ability users even held bidding contests over an attractive woman or man. It was beyond comprehension.

Li Qiong had once seen people take their own lives — even ability users — because they couldn’t accept the collapse of the world, because humanity was walking down a road that could only end in extinction.

Having survived to this point, Li Qiong thought of himself as already strong enough.

At midnight, Zhang Jinnan hauled the half-asleep Li Qiong off his bed. Leaning close to his face, he said, “Zhang Jinya told me where there’s food. You’re coming with me to bring some back.”

Li Qiong struggled. “Don’t forget how that man killed Zhou Bo this afternoon. You still dare to go?”

“At a time like this, what the hell are you afraid of?” Zhang Jinnan scoffed. His fingers casually clamped down on Li Qiong’s testicles. “You going or not?”

The two of them wrapped themselves in a blanket, sneaking through the snow in the direction Zhang Jinya had told them.

Their footsteps were almost soundless. Wu Heng and Ying Liuquan woke up at the same time, got out of bed, and met each other in the living room.

Ying Liuquan put on his black-rimmed glasses. “I’ll go take a look. You keep sleeping.”

“I’ll go with you?”

Ying Liuquan shook his head firmly. “Seems like it’s those people from this afternoon. I can handle it. You sleep.”

The wolf meat was tightly buried under snow, frozen solid into lumps of ice. When Zhang Jinnan saw so much meat, his eyes went red. He shook open his bag. “Hurry up and pack it!”

Li Qiong got a kick in the backside. He bent down, reaching out to grab from the pile of meat in front of him.

Before his fingers could touch it, a string of footsteps sounded behind them. A young man with sleepy eyes stood there, looking at the two.

“What are you doing?” Ying Liuquan tilted his head slightly. “Stealing from us again?”

The word stealing made Li Qiong jolt up in panic. “No—no, we’re not! We didn’t!”

Zhang Jinnan saw it wasn’t the people from the afternoon, but rather a stranger — someone who looked timid and weak. Straightening his back, he said, “What the hell’s it to you?”

Ying Liuquan ignored him completely. Frowning, he looked at Li Qiong. “Can’t accept what you’ve become, can you? Then why keep listening to him?”

“N-no…” Li Qiong’s eyes went wide. Suddenly, he turned and shoved Zhang Jinnan to the ground, kicking him twice in a frenzy. Zhang Jinnan curled up, howling and cursing in pain, clutching his stomach.

Li Qiong froze, then looked helplessly at the young man in front of him. He could tell the other understood him. At once, he stammered, “How should I address you, sir?”

“My surname is Ying,” the young man said. “You can call me Teacher Ying.”

“You’ve… been a teacher before? No wonder,” Li Qiong murmured. His eyes grew wet without him realizing it. “I really didn’t want to steal. It’s him—he kept forcing me. They all did. No one understands me. I think this world’s gone insane. They’re insane. They’re the ones who are wrong.”

Ying Liuquan spoke gently, “The fact that you can still tell right from wrong shows that you’re different from them.”

Li Qiong’s face lit up with a trembling joy.

But the words that followed chilled him to the bone.

“Even if they’re wrong,” Ying Liuquan said softly, “you’ve still been under their protection, haven’t you?”

“Yes… yes, but…”

A faint red glimmer passed through Ying Liuquan’s eyes. “But I understand your suffering. You’re too pure, too righteous. Haven’t you realized? You no longer fit in with this world. It only brings you pain. I think you have the right to end this unhealthy relationship early.”

Snowflakes drifted down. When they melted, the icy water seeped through Li Qiong’s skin, chilling him to the core.

He shivered and gave a bitter laugh. “That’s true. All this time, I’ve been blind to kindness—benefiting from others while despising what they do. I told myself I was better, but I still relied on their protection.”

“But no matter what, I can’t become like them.”

The young man crouched down, picked up the dagger on the ground, and without hesitation drove it into his own neck.

Blood sprayed across Zhang Jinnan’s face. He froze for several seconds before letting out a strangled, horrifying scream.

Li Qiong’s body slowly slumped to the ground, a peaceful smile resting on his lips.

Ying Liuquan turned to look at Zhang Jinnan. The man’s terror swallowed him whole—he howled, unable to meet the young man’s gaze, and turned away, stumbling and crawling as he fled into the darkness.

After burying Li Qiong, Ying Liuquan returned to his room.

Aside from Ying Liuquan, only Wu Heng knew what had really happened.

Wu Heng found himself developing a kind of admiration for Ying Liuquan; the next morning at breakfast, he even took the initiative to place two dumplings into Ying Liuquan’s bowl.

This act brought both benefits and drawbacks for Ying Liuquan—

The benefit was that Wu Heng’s attitude would inevitably influence how the others saw him; being accepted and recognized by the group gave him an unfamiliar, almost tender feeling in his chest.

The drawback, however, was just as obvious: his only teammate, Xie Chongyi, began to repeatedly bring up the word “dumpling” during training sessions.

Ying Liuquan spotted a sparrow pecking at something on the ground. “That looks like a mutated sparrow, doesn’t it?”

Xie Chongyi lay flat in the snow, his eyelashes frosted with ice. “Looks more like a dumpling that learned to hop.”

Ying Liuquan pointed toward a tree. “And that one—red squirrel?”

Xie Chongyi glanced over, his tone perfectly calm. “A dumpling that learned to climb trees.”

Ying Liuquan had lived through a turbulent life, and though not oblivious, he gradually sensed that Xie Chongyi treated Wu Heng differently—but why, he couldn’t quite figure out.

“Xie Chongyi,” he said at last—ever the teacher, even if his ability was modest, he still cared for his students—“Wu Heng only gave me two dumplings. You don’t seem very pleased about it.”

Xie Chongyi toyed idly with a dagger in his hand. “I’m not.”

He just wasn’t happy—because Wu Heng had disobeyed him. He’d already said: no one else was to be treated specially, except himself.

But was unhappy the same as angry? Not necessarily.

Ying Liuquan trudged through the snow with difficulty; his psychic abilities did nothing to strengthen his body. Gasping for breath, he said between pants, “I can tell—you like Wu Heng. You’re a student with a strong sense of self, and so is he. It’s natural that you’d be drawn to him.”

Xie Chongyi raised an eyebrow. “Don’t overthink it. He’s just a friend.”

“Then you…”

“I don’t like it when my friends give dumplings to someone else.”

After training ended, they returned to the main camp. All the other squads came back with plenty of loot, cheering and laughing, but the last team to return looked far from pleased.

Ying Liuquan tossed a bucket-sized mutated red squirrel into the kitchen and looked at Shen She. “Shen, you can keep the squirrel’s pelt. Maybe make a couple of gloves out of it.”

The red squirrel’s fur was sleek and shiny. Dou Lu immediately raised her hand. “Can you make me a small bag instead? I don’t want to carry around the snake-skin pouch anymore.”

As they began distributing the day’s spoils, Xie Chongyi headed upstairs. He had intended to go straight to his own room, but the path took him past Wu Heng and Lin Mengzhi’s room. He cast a quick, unobtrusive glance inside.

A large, fluffy parrot rested at the head of the bed, its head lowered and eyes closed in a nap.

Leaning against the bird was a young boy, legs bent, a book open on his thighs. He was engrossed in reading, but every now and then his hand reached toward a nearby cabinet—on top of which sat a full basin of sliced, dried meat.

Xie Chongyi watched for a moment, then lowered his head, biting a finger encased in a glove. The contrast between his lean, long fingers and the rough texture of the glove was striking.

With a sharp snap, a pair of highly coveted wolf-skin gloves was tossed carelessly into the corner.

He then walked straight toward Wu Heng, who was lounging comfortably at home, practically sprawled in contentment. Wu Heng lifted his eyes as Xie Chongyi approached, a look of mild curiosity on his face.

Walking to the bedside, Xie Chongyi gave his partner no time to react, his movements uninterrupted as he knelt on the edge of the bed with his right knee. As Wu Heng tried to sit up, Xie Chongyi’s slightly cool palm slid beneath Wu Heng’s soft, loose sweater, pressing against his waist to keep him in his half-reclined position.

Xie Chongyi bit Wu Heng’s earlobe, his palm digging into the soft, supple curve of his waist. “Wu Heng, help me.”

—————————————————————

Author’s Note:

Cover X’s eyes and say: Don’t look at indecent things.

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