Eaten Ch.104.1

Chapter 104.1: Out of Control Poppy

Wu Heng watched Xie Chongyi’s back, anticipation flickering in his eyes.

—

“Why haven’t big brother and the others come back yet? Don’t they get off work?”

Wu Zhi pressed herself against the window, staring out at the empty street. The alarm inside the base had sounded two hours earlier, and since then there had been no further movement. They had no way of knowing what was happening outside.

Xue Qi leaned back against the headboard. “How about you push my wheelchair and we go out to take a look?”

“When big brother left this morning, he told me not to run around and to stay obediently at the inn and wait for him to come back.” Wu Zhi clearly did not approve of Xue Qi’s suggestion.

“When did he say that?”

“He just did.”

Xue Qi turned around to look about the room. “Where did Ruan Silian go?”

“Big sis went downstairs to buy food.”

The inn also sold meals. The owner was a tall, skinny middle-aged man who, face stiff as wood, made it clear that he didn’t accept bargaining. Ruan Silian held the menu, eyeing the exorbitant prices, and ordered three bowls of plain noodles in clear broth. In addition, she added a poached egg and a serving of braised meat for each of Wu Zhi and Xue Qi.

Since opening for business, it was rare to encounter someone so free with money. The owner glanced at the person placing the order in surprise, and was even more astonished when he realized she was just an ordinary girl with no supernatural abilities.

Still, it wasn’t all that unusual. The owner quickly came to his senses—these days, people selling themselves just to survive were everywhere.

“Do you want chili?”

“For the two portions with meat, make one extra spicy,” Ruan Silian said. She knew perfectly well what the owner had been thinking during those few seconds of appraisal, and she didn’t take it to heart.

The kitchen worked fast. She carried several takeaway boxes upstairs.

Thud, thud, thud—

A flurry of hurried footsteps sounded above her head.

Ruan Silian stepped aside to make way.

Several ability users rushed past at great speed, their steps heavy, the noise like huge boulders rolling down a mountain. They swept past the slender girl standing close to the wall. The one at the very back cast a quick glance at the delicate, clear-featured figure pressed against the wall—then turned back.

He blocked her path, his gaze sliding from her face down over her body. The longer he looked, the more the lecherous greed drained from his expression—until his eyes landed on the several bowls of noodles in her hands. He said nothing, only pulled an extremely dissatisfied face, then went downstairs.

“Where have you been?”

“Saw a woman—was gonna strike up a chat, but turns out she’s taken. You know…”

Their loud, careless voices gradually faded into the distance. Ruan Silian returned to the room, only to be tackled into a full embrace by Wu Zhi. “I heard someone talking about you from upstairs.”

Xue Qi sat on the windowsill with his back to the door, hiding his merit and fame. “I made him fall flat on his face.”

Ruan Silian smiled and called the two of them over to eat.

Wu Zhi picked up her chopsticks and said, “After we eat, we’ll rest. If my brother still isn’t back by daybreak tomorrow, I’m going to go look for him.”

The room was as hot as a steamer. Holding her bowl, Ruan Silian sat by the window. After Wu Zhi finished speaking, her eyes followed the street into the distance—the alarm lights were still on. The danger had not yet passed.

Outside the city, the tide of corpses continued its advance until four in the morning. Wu Heng didn’t care whether Kuhuang would fall or not. He slept on the single bed Xie Chongyi had in the rest stop. The poppy vines coiled around the frame of the lower bunk, standing guard like a soldier.

When Xie Chongyi, reeking of blood, approached, the vines wrapped around the entire bed, enclosing the boy within, taut tendrils aimed straight at him.

“Tsk.”

Before Xie Chongyi could figure out a way to get closer, a rush of flapping wings sounded behind him—X plunged headfirst into the poppy thicket.

A vine and a bird tangled and tore at each other right in front of Xie Chongyi, each striking with lethal intent at the other.

Xie Chongyi could tell that the two creatures had been dissatisfied with each other for a long time.

The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind it. The vine and the bird called a temporary truce, leaving green leaves and feathers all over the ground. Xie Chongyi quite naturally lay down beside Wu Heng.

The poppy kept a vigilant watch on Xie Chongyi, while X lay on its back on Wu Heng’s other side.

—

An hour later, melodious cello music drifted in from outside, the howls of the zombie horde sounding like its accompaniment.

Shen Ping’an was the first to rush into the rest station, filthy blood still streaming down his face. “The woman X mentioned—the one holding a cello—has appeared. It’s Aunt Ji.”

After swallowing hard, Shen Ping’an looked at the two people on the bed, still bleary-eyed with sleep, and went on. “The black bird flock has reached Kuhuang, but their target isn’t the zombies.”

“It’s the base. The survivors.”

Wu Heng turned over and closed his eyes.

Xie Chongyi leaned against the headboard, grabbing a vine and gripping it tightly in his hand. As he stroked the leaves along the vine’s length, in the place he couldn’t see, Wu Heng opened his eyes.

“Don’t touch that one.” Wu Heng’s ears inexplicably heated. He sat up, snatched the constantly writhing vine from Xie Chongyi’s hand, tucked another one in its place, then lay back down.

Xie Chongyi asked thoughtfully, “What time is it?”

“Just past five. It’ll be light soon.” Behind Shen Ping’an, the droning hum of the approaching flock sounded like dozens of airplanes closing in.

X jumped from the bed to the headboard. Before it could even spread its wings, a shrill, piercing cry drew infinitely closer above the rest station. A rapid clatter of impacts followed, and then came cries for help and screams.

The stench of blood and fresh flesh drifted into their noses. Wu Heng, who had only eaten brunch and lunch the day before, was already ravenous. He sat up, swung his legs over Xie Chongyi’s, and got out of bed at top speed.

Shen Ping’an naturally followed close behind Wu Heng, turning and leaving the rest station.

X followed right after them.

The faint glimmer of dawn that had just appeared vanished again. A black curtain fell once more over the base’s sky as red-eyed blackbirds gathered into a vast, airtight net.

They tried to shroud the entire sky above the Kuhuang Base, but their numbers made that impossible.

So instead, the flock was now concentrating above the defensive works where the base was resisting the zombie tide. From time to time, individual blackbirds broke away like stray bullets, diving to attack the guards and ability users on the ground.

They were four or five times larger than ordinary blackbirds, powerfully built, with enough impact force to smash a grown man several meters through the air, leaving him spitting blood.

Humans who failed to react in time were immediately grievously wounded by the sharp-eyed blackbirds and then torn apart and devoured by the flock.

The core manpower holding back the zombie tide was clearly Wu Dian and Sheng Jiang. The two of them stood atop the city wall. No one knew how many rotations of guards had already passed at their sides, yet they themselves had not rested at all—Wu Heng could smell it on them: fatigue, exhaustion, a lack of freshness.

He seemed to be spacing out. Not far away, a blackbird immediately broke away from the flock, drew in its wings, and hurtled straight toward him.

Shen Ping’an couldn’t even form the thought to urge Wu Heng to snap out of it. He raised his hand, and the vines burst up from the ground.

But in the instant before the blackbird reached him, Wu Heng came back to himself. He thrust out his arm, and the bird’s body froze in midair, its blade-sharp beak inches from his face.

A blackbird’s heart had already grown to nearly the size of a human’s. Wu Heng drew his hand out from the bird’s body; in his palm lay a fist-sized, vividly red heart, still beating.

The blackbird’s body crashed heavily to the ground, twitched a few times, and then X darted out from behind the two of them, tore off several chunks of flesh, and flung them into its mouth. A few drops of blood splashed onto Shen Ping’an’s face.

Wu Heng bit into the bleeding heart of the mutated blackbird as if biting into an apple.

Whether it was the bird heart’s naturally delicate, compact structure that gave it such tender, springy texture, or the result of mutation, so far there was no food whose flavor could compare to it—except his own heart.

X wrapped its wings around Wu Heng’s thigh, opened its mouth wide, stretched out its tongue, and caught the blood dripping down from Wu Heng’s chin.

Like a ghost. Like a vengeful bird.

—

The blackbirds were working in coordination with the zombie horde, trying to take down Kuhuang—this base that was nothing but a storehouse of food for them.

Many of the guards they had glimpsed briefly that morning were now torn into mangled heaps of flesh. Those could at least be called intact bodies; quite a few others had already ended up in the bellies of blackbirds or zombies.

Amid the dense, surging zombie tide in the distance, a woman in formal attire stood out starkly. No one could miss her. She sat atop several corpses, her back perfectly straight. As she tilted her head, strands of hair slid down, and with practiced elegance she drew the bow across the strings. The music was blood, and it drove the zombie horde into a frenzy.

A day earlier, this cello had still been on Shen She’s back.

No matter where Shen She sat, he carried the instrument with him. The cello was his second life—at least, that was how Ji Zhelan saw it.

And so, on the road where mother and son broke away from the group and headed alone toward Kuhuang, they had a fierce argument over whether or not to abandon the cello.

The melody from the strings was lingering yet all the more mournful. All of a mother’s painstaking devotion was poured into it. The woman’s gray-ashen fingers dragged the bow across the strings until it screeched, her mind filled with her child’s cold indifference and naïve innocence.

“Abandoning the cello is the same as abandoning yourself. You think that today you are only casting aside a single cello; tomorrow you will cast aside other things you carry with you. In the end you will have nothing left. You will begin by casting aside virtue, wisdom, and kindness—and finally, your humanity.” Ji Zhelan had never imagined that the child she had raised with such care would not only fail to hold fast to himself in this age where humanity lay in ruins, but would instead go with the flow of the masses. “Do you also want to become a supporter of primitive society?! Without a cello, you are a stray dog with no place to belong!”

“Mother, that is you. Not me.”

He was that cold-blooded.

Ji Zhelan had every reason to suspect that Shen She might never have loved the cello at all.

The music drifting through the air was no longer lingering—it was shrill and terrifying, like a guillotine severing vertebrae. Beneath the flock of birds, the zombie tide let out wails like ghosts and wolves.

Ji Zhelan walked along with the cello on her back, nearly fainting—Shen She had thrown the instrument onto the highway, and she had gone back to retrieve it.

Shen She walked ahead of her. Fifty meters? A hundred? Or five hundred? Gradually, the back of her child disappeared from Ji Zhelan’s field of vision.

She collapsed to the ground. She did not know how long had passed when a faint, intermittent growling drew near. The stench of decay carried on waves of scorching heat struck straight at her soul, forcing her to open her eyes—just as that blackened, fetid maw snapped toward her.

How tragic, Ji Zhelan thought.

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