Qin Zhen was curious about the sudden fluttering in her chest. After confirming that it was not just her imagination, she paid attention to it almost every moment. Sometimes when the thumping grew faint, she would nudge up against Fu Qi, and after a few rubs, the "thump-thump" beating would start up again.
Fu Qi was also very concerned about this matter. Every once in a while, he would check on her, paying extra close attention to Qin Zhen's skin color and body temperature.
Yet both of these things remained exactly as they had always been, with no changes at all. It was unclear if it was because her heart had only just resumed pumping blood for too short a time.
Compared to the long stretch of time Qin Zhen had spent in the underground tomb, the change in her heart had only happened in the last month or two, so it was only natural that the effects were not obvious yet.
"Could it be that I'm about to... turn human?" Qin Zhen said in surprise.
"I don't know," Fu Qi said. "Theoretically, if the heart resumes pumping blood, other aspects of the body should change along with it."
But no one could say for sure what the actual outcome would be. After all, zombies were roaming everywhere now, and plenty of established theories had already been overturned.
There were so many things about Qin Zhen that Fu Qi could not figure out, and he had no idea if this change was a good or bad thing. He could only stick to their original plan, leading Qin Zhen toward Linxiang.
Their goal was to look up information. The bomb shelter stored decades worth of written materials, a massive amount of data that could never be sorted through in just a day or two. To avoid drawing the vigilance of Country A's people by going in and out repeatedly, Fu Qi had prepared plenty of food and water.
When they had everything ready and arrived near the county seat of Linxiang, Chen Xiang had already started drawing the attention of the Country A forces. The sounds of artillery and gunfire rang out from time to time in the west of the city, luring hordes of zombies over there.
But just as Li had said, this small county had a dense population. Even with all that commotion, there were still a large number of zombies lingering in the east side of the city.
Before breaking into the area, Fu Qi checked Qin Zhen's heartbeat, skin color, and body temperature one more time.
Still not feeling reassured, he took out a knife and made a tiny cut on the tip of Qin Zhen's finger, squeezing out a dark red bead of blood. He asked, "Does that hurt?"
"No," Qin Zhen said. "It just feels a little itchy."
Both the amount of blood and the way she felt were exactly the same as before.
Fu Qi then had her get out of the car. The zombies still paid her no mind at all.
Finally, Fu Qi slipped a zombie disruptor into the pocket of her satchel and reminded her, "If anything goes wrong, use it right away, got it?"
All his actions told Qin Zhen just how worried he was, and she started to fret too. "I'm not really... not really about to turn human, am I!"
"Is turning human a bad thing?" Fu Qi asked.
"Yes!"
"What's so bad about it?"
"If I turn human I have to eat, and to eat I'd have to work to make money. I'd also have to sleep. That takes up way too much time," Qin Zhen said earnestly. "More than half of every day would get eaten up, and I wouldn't have time to surf the internet."
Not like being a zombie, where you don't need to eat, drink or sleep. Once they got internet installed in the tomb, she could lie around surfing the web twenty-four hours a day. That sounded perfect.
It was comfortable, and she wouldn't have to interact with humans, or worry about her identity being exposed and getting arrested and thrown in jail. It was the perfect life a zombie could ever hope for.
"You can slack off at work, and you can have dreams when you sleep," Fu Qi said. "And as a human, you get to taste all kinds of delicious food — ice cream, cake, milk tea, fried chicken... You can take a plane to travel, go watch the sunset in the desert, chase whales out on the ocean, go see snow in the north... You've never experienced any of those things. When you're surfing the internet, can you even understand what netizens are talking about when they mention those things?"
She couldn't. Actually, ever since they left the tomb, Qin Zhen had secretly longed for good food too. But this was the apocalypse, there was none of that stuff around anymore!
"All those things cost money!" she said.
Making money was way too hard. The internet was still the top priority for her.
"I'm pretty well off," Fu Qi said.
That reminded Qin Zhen of the little thing she did every day without fail. She quickly chanted a few lines at Fu Qi: "All your money is mine." Halfway through the chant, she suddenly realized a huge problem.
"The banks are all gone!"
The banks were gone. Even if the zombie virus was wiped out someday, all that money would never come back. What was the point of having money now?
"The safe in my house is really sturdy, and the things inside it are very valuable," Fu Qi said. Seeing the zombie's eyes light up, he added, "But it needs a password to open."
"What's the password?"
"I'm never telling you the password or the address," Fu Qi said. "You little zombie get bored of things easily and toss people aside once you've used them. I have to keep something to hold over you, otherwise you might turn around and forget all about me someday."
"Slander!" Qin Zhen protested, refusing to admit it.
Fu Qi gave a faint, cool smile and asked, "Who's Xu Feng?"
The zombie froze for a second. "The watch!"
Fu Qi asked again, "Who's Zhu Yanjun?"
The zombie blanked out again, "uh-ed" for a good while, and could not for the life of her remember when she had ever heard that name before.
"See?" Fu Qi said. "You never got Xu Feng's watch, so you still remember him to this day. Zhu Yanjun never had anything to keep you attached to him, so you've long since dumped him out of your head. You little slag zombie!"
"..." Qin Zhen wanted to say that wasn't true, but she really couldn't remember who Zhu Yanjun was. Her mouth hung open, and she couldn't argue back at all.
Just as she was left speechless, a loud "boom" went off from the west. The explosion sounded again, billowing smoke rising up, startling the nearby zombies into howling one after another.
Qin Zhen quickly changed the subject, pointing an accusatory finger at him. "You're not taking the mission seriously! You're spouting nonsense, hurry up and go find the files!"
"This is called slacking off at work," Fu Qi said as he pulled out a zombie disruptor. "Who doesn't slack off at work? It's part of human civilization."
"Nonsense!" the zombie didn't believe him.
"You've been in the tomb for way too long and are out of touch with human civilization, so it's normal that you don't know that," Fu Qi rolled up his sleeve, and paused just as the needle of the zombie disruptor was about to touch his skin.
He really wanted to tell Qin Zhen that some of the truth might be cruel, and that she could still turn back now if she wanted to.
But where could she go if they left?
The underground was safe, but she had already lived down there alone for so long. That kind of dull, lonely life — was that really good for her?
Fu Qi looked up at Qin Zhen and saw her looking back at him, full of doubt. "Out of touch..." she was saying, "I'll just surf more internet and catch up."
He lowered his eyes, injected the disruptor into his arm, and rolled his sleeve back down. "Judging by how fast the internet was developing and what the online environment was like before, someone as out of touch with society as you would easily become a topic of discussion among netizens. Then they'd dig up all your old past posts, and before you know it, you'd get accused of being a spy. The cyber police would track you down in no time and come arrest you in the tomb..."
Fu Qi sighed. "Even the zombie clan's number one beauty can't escape ending up in jail."
The zombie was spooked by his story. "It can't be as bad as you say!"
Right now, the forces from Country A were all distracted by Chen Xiang and the others, focused on the west side of the city and the Haixin Charity Hospital. Even the locals from their own country would never think that those old documents were stored in the bomb shelter, much less the foreigners.
As long as they didn't alert anyone, Fu Qi would be able to sneak into the bomb shelter smoothly.
He abandoned their vehicle, got out of the car, and blended into the wandering crowd of zombies.
Qin Zhen followed closely behind him, holding his hand. "You can't trick me," she said. "I used to surf the internet before, I never got into any fights."
"Times have changed, baby," Fu Qi said. "Back before the zombie virus broke out, people could start fights online over literally anything."
Ever since she climbed out of her grave, the zombie had used a cellphone and talked to people remotely, but she had never properly dived into the free ocean of the internet. Curious out of her mind, she tugged at Fu Qi's hand and begged him to explain everything to her in detail.
"Give me an example!"
Even if she couldn't get online right now, just hearing about it would be great.
Fu Qi led her past a few wandering zombies and said, "Fine, go ahead and say whatever you want."
Qin Zhen thought for a second and said, "Hello."
Fu Qi said, "'Hello'? That's way too rude, isn't it? Where we're from, we all say 'Hello' but the polite 'nin'—wait, let me check your IP. No wonder you talk like that."
Qin Zhen choked for a moment and yelled, "Fine, hello *nin*!"
Fu Qi said, "Just a second ago you were saying plain 'hello', and you changed it the second some netizen called you out. If you weren't guilty, you wouldn't have corrected yourself."
Qin Zhen: "......"
"All sugary 'nin' this and 'nin' that online, acting like you're some filial child, but have you ever even said 'nin' to your own parents in real life?"
"......" The zombie clenched her fists.
"Who talks like that in daily life? You just come off like you're forcing yourself to act all high-class." Fu Qi finished the example and added, "Then the person who mentioned the IP earlier could reply that everyone in their place talks that way, and the conversation would spiral into regional discrimination, blowing up into a full-on flame war..."
"Get lost!" The zombie couldn't take it anymore and punched Fu Qi. "You're definitely tricking me!"
Fu Qi's expression turned serious. "Lashing out every other second, that's so rude. You must be some violent maniac. That's terrifying. I'm going to blacklist the entire zombie race now."
Qin Zhen: "......"
She rolled up her sleeves and started chasing after him, landing punches with both fists.
Fu Qi, who had taken a zombie repellent, moved effortlessly through the horde of undead, nimbly dodging her hits as he headed toward the east side of the city.
The Taohua Bay bus stop was on the outer edge of the eastern district, a pretty remote spot. The human and the zombie tussled and fooled around the whole way, and they arrived smoothly after about half an hour. The real trouble was tracking down the entrance to the bomb shelter, which took them quite a while.
Luckily, they found it just before the effects of the zombie repellent wore off.
These bomb shelters were built during wartime to keep people safe from bombing. When peace came, they were repurposed as document storage rooms and had undergone renovations once. But in recent years, humans could barely keep themselves alive, and the half-meter-tall weeds had grown wild all around the shelter, covering up the paths that had once been cleared. That was why it had been so hard for the two of them to find.
On the bright side, that meant no one had come here in ages, so the documents were probably perfectly preserved.
The shelter's copper-green metal door was locked tight. Fu Qi twisted it open with a piece of wire and pushed the door in. The first thing they saw was an office partitioned off by a glass door, with a desk inside. On the desk sat a computer, two potted dead green plants, a few folders, and some random bits like plush toys. Behind the desk was a chair with a lumbar pillow.
Fu Qi guessed the person who used to work here must have been a woman.
Further ahead was a dark, shadowy corridor, with rows and rows of filing cabinets lined up along both sides, packed full of documents.
The place was out of the way, the office was underground, and the whole space was damp and dim. No wonder the old lady's daughter had turned down the job offer back then.
While Fu Qi was still taking in his surroundings, Qin Zhen let out a cheer, pushed the glass door open quickly, and said, "This is the dream grave I've always wanted! This job was made for me!"
Fu Qi was about to call her a hopeless dork, but thought it over and realized she was totally right, and just sighed in defeat.
Fu Qi sent Chen Xiang a message updating him on their situation, then turned around and locked the shelter's main door.
The second the door clicked shut, the whole cavern plunged into darkness—only to light up again the next instant, making Qin Zhen jump.
"It's probably a separate backup power supply and motion-sensor lights," Fu Qi explained.
The place was so isolated, and there were so many documents that needed to be sorted and watched over, but barely anyone ever needed to access them, so there was only ever one staff member working here. No one would want to be alone in this dark, spooky underground spot, so it made total sense to have a dedicated backup power system.
It was perfect, too—looking up documents would be a breeze now.
"There's electricity!" The zombie's eyes were sparkling as she stared at the wide-screen computer, and she called Fu Qi over excitedly. "Hurry up and turn the computer on for me!"
"'For me'?" Fu Qi was in the mood to tease her. "Is every zombie in your clan this rude?"
Qin Zhen pushed the glass door open, threw herself at him, and shook him. "Hurry up and turn it on!"
This was a real, actual computer, exactly like the one she'd always pictured in her head, and she was so excited she could barely contain herself.
Fu Qi let her drag him into the office, booted up the computer, and figured out the password right away—work computers almost always had super simple passwords.
The zombie was so thrilled her hands were shaking. She fumbled with the mouse, wiggling it around for ages with no clue what to click first.
Fu Qi chuckled behind her, leaned down, and wrapped his hand around hers to click a few times. He browsed through the local folders first, skimming through them, but didn't find any information on how the files were coded or organized. He tried opening the official government system website on the desktop, and sure enough, there was no internet connection.
They'd expected that, so it wasn't much of a letdown.
Fu Qi thought for a second about what this job would have entailed, then guided Qin Zhen's hand to click around on the computer. To his surprise, he found a few offline games that the woman who used to work here must have installed to kill time during her boring shifts.
"Plants vs. Zombies." Fu Qi patted the zombie on the head. "Go nuts."
He left the wide-eyed zombie, who was already too engrossed to tell left from right, sitting in front of the computer, and headed deeper into the shelter by himself.
He did a quick walkthrough to get familiar with the layout, and confirmed that the female staff member had kept the place really well organized. Even when the zombie virus broke out and she had to run for her life, she hadn't forgotten to lock the door. There were no dead human bodies inside, no traces of zombies wandering through—only a thick layer of dust covering everything.
The good news was there was nothing blocking their way, but the bad news was the filing cabinets only had number tags on them, no labels for what year the documents were from or what category they belonged to.
There was no way around it. That was the downside of not digitizing old files and keeping them properly cataloged.
Fu Qi walked back to the entrance and started going through the cabinets one by one.
He read extremely fast, only pausing to check key terms and years on the case files, but there were so many documents that even after flipping through nonstop for two or three hours, he'd only sifted through a tiny fraction of them.
He paused for a break, rubbed his temples to ease the tension, and walked back to check on Qin Zhen.
The zombie was still totally hooked on the game. Things were getting tense, and she was leaning so far forward her face was almost pressed against the computer screen, like she wanted to climb right into the game and fight the plants herself.
But she was a total newbie, and before long, the slow-moving zombies in the game broke through her defenses and ate the plants in the house.
Fu Qi waited until she lost the round, then reached around from behind and cupped her face, squishing it playfully.
"Sweetie!" The zombie's face was all squashed out of shape, and she yelled in frustration. Then she huffed angrily, "Did you pick this game on purpose just to mess with me?"
To win the game, she had to make the zombies get their heads cut off. But if she wanted the zombies to win, she couldn't have any fun playing, and she'd lose the level anyway.
That was just cruel. You evil, scheming Fu Xiangxiang!
"You can play a different one," Fu Qi said.
There was no way she was switching. None of the other games had zombies in them, so none of them were half as interesting to Qin Zhen.
She rubbed her hands together, ready to start a new round, and clicked the mouse twice—when suddenly, she felt a warm touch on her left shoulder. Fu Qi had slipped his hand under her collar and pressed it right over the spot where her heart was.
Qin Zhen's heart skipped a beat, and she immediately reached up to hold his hand in place.
Fu Qi stood behind her, looking down at her. His gaze had previously been lowered, resting on the neckline of her clothes, but now his eyelashes fluttered slightly as he asked, "What are you doing?"
"...... Nothing, nothing at all."
Qin Zhen knew he was checking her heartbeat, body temperature, and skin condition again. Fu Qi always did this, paying extremely close attention to every little change in her. She was already used to it, but this time she had been concentrating hard on playing a game, so the sudden feel of Fu Qi's palm on her made her feel a little awkward.
And besides... this position felt really weird.
She couldn't focus her full attention on the computer anymore.
"Is... is there anything different?" Qin Zhen stammered out the question.
Fu Qi pulled his hand back and grabbed hers, seeing that the tiny cut she'd had earlier had already healed. He replied, "No."
Other than the extra heartbeat he could feel against his palm, everything about her was exactly the same as before.
After saying that, he rubbed the top of Qin Zhen's head. "Go back to playing."
Fu Qi returned to his previous spot to flip through the documents, but no sooner had he pulled open the file cabinet than Qin Zhen came rushing over in a great hurry, just like the very first time they had met in the tomb.
Fu Qi said, "What is it? Here to mess with me?"
"I'm here to help!"
"No need." Fu Qi never had any intention of letting her help. Even without that computer, he would have found some other task to distract Qin Zhen.
"But I have to help!" Qin Zhen said righteously. "It's a team member's duty!"
Fu Qi raised an eyebrow. "Oh, so all that serious game-playing you were doing just now was also fulfilling the duties of our number one end-of-the-world squad? No wonder you were so focused."
The zombie's face flushed hot. She lifted her hand and gave his waist a little ticklish pinch.
She had gotten so caught up in the computer she'd been craving that she'd momentarily forgotten the task... but she'd come to her senses right away, hadn't she?
Qin Zhen reached out on her own to grab the materials on the file cabinet, but before she could touch them, Fu Qi caught her hand. He pointed at the documents he had already gone through and put back in their original places, saying, "I'll go through them from the front, and you can double-check them from the back. That way I won't miss anything because my eyes are tired... There are so many files here, if I skipped over something..."
Qin Zhen tilted her head and looked back, seeing the endless rows of file cabinets stretching out of sight. She nodded vigorously right away.
Going through all these case files from the very beginning would be absolute torture!
She obediently started flipping through them from the first one.
After a while of reading, Qin Zhen suddenly spoke up. "Sweetie, how about I just... just live here from now on, and make this my new tomb."
This was a ready-made underground bunker with power, a computer, and Fu Qi right here too. Once she brought her husband and the little zombie over, and stocked up on plenty of water, it would be no different from her old tomb.
Fu Qi was flipping through documents quickly, not even lifting his head as he said, "No can do. This place has historical and cultural value. It's state property, it can't belong to any individual or zombie."
The zombie deflated with disappointment, let out a small sigh, and went back to work.
These documents hadn't seen the light of day for five years, and hadn't been properly taken care of, so they were a little moldy, and every now and then a tiny bug would crawl out of one.
Qin Zhen was a little disgusted by that, plus the work was boring, so she kept wanting to go play on the computer. But when she saw how Fu Qi never took his eyes off the files, she forced herself to keep reading.
Just like that, the human and the zombie settled down temporarily in the air-raid shelter, going through the documents day and night without rest. Occasionally when Fu Qi needed a break, he would let Qin Zhen go play on the computer, and that was the happiest time for her, since she could enjoy the games without feeling guilty.
Fu Qi never forgot to keep an eye out for any changes in Qin Zhen. It was as if that thought was engraved in his mind, he had to check on her every chance he got.
Several days passed like this, so many that Qin Zhen was almost getting tired of the computer games, but Fu Qi was still going at it exactly the same as before. Sometimes Qin Zhen even wondered if he had not changed his posture even once the whole time.
"I'm a top student," Fu Qi said when she asked.
Qin Zhen didn't get what he meant at first, but after he explained it to her, she wanted to look more educated too, so she started reading more patiently and carefully. That ended up with her getting completely absorbed in the old, strange cases written in the files, and she read slower and slower.
Then one day, Qin Zhen came across another bizarre case. She finished reading it completely, fascinated, and then loudly tried to tell Fu Qi all about it.
She called his name several times, but got no response. She turned around and saw Fu Zhen staring blankly at a thick stack of documents in his hands.
This was the first time Qin Zhen had ever seen Fu Qi zone out. She carried the file she was holding over to him and moved closer, saying, "Sweetie..."
She had only just said his nickname when Fu Qi jolted awake as if from a startle, snapping the file shut and turning his face to ask, "What is it?"
His movements were fast, and his expression shifted back to normal in a flash, but Qin Zhen still caught the strange flicker in his eyes. All the many bizarre or cruel cases she had shared with him over these past days had only gotten a lukewarm reaction from him, but this time was different. He must have found some super crucial information.
"Let me see that!" Qin Zhen put down the thing she was holding and scuttled over to his side.
Fu Qi stepped back, holding the file away from her. Qin Zhen let out a curious "Hm?", rolled up her sleeves, and pounced right at him.
In such a narrow, enclosed underground space, how could a human outrun a zombie?
Fu Qi dodged to keep the file away, but his leg didn't move fast enough, and the zombie grabbed his pants and tugged it down hard.
"Let go!" Fu Qi was completely speechless at her shameless behavior. "Fine, I'll show you, come here!"
Qin Zhen patted his leg proudly and said, "Told you it would be easier if you just did that in the first place."
She crawled over to him, sat close by his side, leaned against his shoulder, and asked, "Is this about Hailin Hospital?"
"It is."
They had been investigating this for ages, and they finally had a lead. Qin Zhen was so eager that she reached out to flip through the file, but Fu Qi blocked her hand.
For some reason, his voice sounded unusually low as he said, "The documents here are eaten by moths, they get damaged easily. Don't touch them. I'll read it to you."
"Okay," Qin Zhen said. "Then you have to start from the very beginning, and tell me every detail. I need to recount all of this to Little Chen once we get out of here."
Fu Qi hummed an acknowledgement, leaning back against the file cabinet. His fingertips brushed over the cover of the file, but he just kept lingering there, not opening it for a long time.
Qin Zhen's eyes followed his fingers, fixed on the yellowed, crumpled cover. She could see the big words "Case File" printed on it, plus some smaller words below marking the category and nature of the case, but she couldn't make out anything more.
That was because Fu Qi had chosen a spot a little off to the side, where most of the incandescent lamp's light was blocked by the file cabinet, wrapping both of them in dim shadow.
"Hurry up and look," Qin Zhen urged him.
"This file is sealed. Its confidentiality level is very high, I..." Fu Qi spoke slowly, his voice deep. "...I don't know if I should open it."
It was just like Pandora's box. Once he opened it, he had no idea what the consequences would be, no idea if he could handle what was inside.
Qin Zhen could understand that. After all, this could very well be related to the origin of the zombie virus, the root cause that had brought the whole of humanity to this miserable state.
"Then let... let me read it to you," Qin Zhen offered. "I'm not scared. Your human business has nothing at all to do with us zombies. I'll help you look at it!"
She was being very generous and loyal as she reached out again to take the file from Fu Qi, but the second her hand lifted, Fu Qi seized her wrist in a swift, tight grip.
Fu Qi's hand was like an eagle's talon, holding her so firmly that Qin Zhen couldn't move an inch.
"What's your problem!" Qin Zhen pouted, unhappy. "What's gotten into you lately? You're being all sappy and weird! I'm warning you, we finally found the source of all this, so you need to get serious and stop messing around!"
Fu Qi: "......"
He steadied himself, loosened his grip, rubbed Qin Zhen's wrist that he had been clutching, then let go, saying, "Stay still. I'll look it over and tell you what it says."
He finally flipped open the case file, but his movements were too slight and the light was far too dim. Qin Zhen squinted curiously to try to make out the small characters on the page, but could not see a single line clearly. He simply leaned against Fu Qi obediently and urged, "Read it carefully, don't slack off!"
Fu Qi said, "You picked up one new word and now you're using it everywhere?"
Qin Zhen was growing so impatient he was nearly frantic. "You just, you just won't read it, are you doing it on purpose to waste time?"
"...No."
Fu Qi was indeed stalling for time. If his moment of hesitation earlier had not already tipped Qin Zhen off to something unusual, he would not have wanted Qin Zhen to even find this case file at all.
But there was no turning back now.
"Then read it!"
Fu Qi closed his eyes for a brief moment, opened them again, pressed his lips together firmly, and began to read in a low, heavy voice.
"...Haiyin Charity Hospital in Linxiang County was built in 1979, located at No. 319 Mingguang Road, Linxiang County. Its founder Lin Dongchang once studied abroad in Country B, then returned to his homeland to build Haiyin Charity Hospital, with the original goal of providing assistance..."
