Yellow Helmet knew very well that Qin Zhen was different from ordinary people, but she knew nothing about Qin Zhen’s past. Simply to repay Qin Zhen for the zombie repellent, she temporarily set aside her original plans and traveled with Qin Zhen to Beiyue Base.
She had never searched there before anyway. Perhaps her sister had happened to wander there.
There were many checkpoints ahead. Even with the pass Zhou Yin had given them, they still needed to make some extra preparations, just in case—Yellow Helmet put makeup on Qin Zhen.
This makeup was completely different from Fu Qi’s “whitewashing,” and also different from Qin Zhen’s tentative attempts at applying makeup. It was a highly technical job, practically a face-changing illusion.
Qin Zhen almost failed to recognize herself when she looked in the mirror.
Then Yellow Helmet pulled out a pair of scissors and got to work, giving Qin Zhen a choppy, shoulder-length haircut.
When it was Qin Zhen’s turn to cut Yellow Helmet’s hair, she made a mistake and cut it too short. Yellow Helmet gave her several icy looks, then simply shaved her own hair into a buzz cut.
The two girls drove their battered little car onto the road, clattering and banging all the way.
There really were many lines of defense along the route to Beiyue Base. At the first two checkpoints, there were more of their fellow countrymen. After seeing the pass Zhou Yin had given them, they waved them straight through. But when they reached the third group, something went wrong. A foreigner insisted that they take off their clothes for inspection before he would let them pass.
As the standoff dragged on, an argument suddenly broke out behind them, beside another vehicle.
“…She’s a zombie! Capture her, and we can solve the zombie virus and restore society to normal!”
“Then you’ll become an ungrateful bastard! How will you face your ancestors, or the Patriarchs of the Three Pure Ones? Aren’t you afraid heaven will send down thunder and strike you to ash?”
The fierce argument drew everyone’s attention. When they turned to look, they saw a young man stagger out and shout, “I know where she might be hiding! I’ll take you there. She’s at…”
Before he could finish, another young man who looked exactly like him came running out behind him and tackled him to the ground. He then grabbed a peachwood sword and began beating him with it, cursing as he did so.
“I’m going to beat you to death, you heartless bastard! You’ve disgraced the principles of our Daoist tradition! I’ll strike your name from the family records and expel you from the temple!”
The two wrestled with each other, kicking up clouds of dust and throwing everything into chaos.
The foreigner who had been giving the two girls trouble finally learned through his subordinate’s translation why the brothers were fighting. He immediately ordered his men to pull them apart.
“Where is she?” the foreigner demanded impatiently.
The one with the bruised and bloodied face was about to speak when the other, held back by several men, struggled to kick him and shouted, “You treacherous bastard! You piece of dog shit! If you dare tell them, you’ll be struck by lightning tomorrow!”
The battered young man hesitated.
“Speak! Where is she?” the foreigner demanded, grabbing him by the collar, but a fellow-countryman officer stopped him.
The officer studied the battered young man for a few moments. Only then did he stammer, “She might be hiding… in the little cabin on the back mountain of our Qingyang Temple…”
Having obtained the clue, the group hurried into their vehicles and disappeared in less than two minutes. The two fighting brothers were taken away as well. Not once did any of them glance in Qin Zhen or Yellow Helmet’s direction.
Yellow Helmet and Qin Zhen continued on their way. Along the road, Qin Zhen, sitting in the passenger seat, rummaged through her backpack and pulled out the Rubik’s Cube that had been with her for a very, very long time.
She stuffed it into Yellow Helmet’s pocket and said, “H-here. It’s for you!”
Yellow Helmet glanced at her twice. “Are you in a good mood?”
“Hehe.” Qin Zhen giggled twice and waved her hands. “It’s just so-so!”
It was obviously an excellent mood.
Thinking about the contents of the twins’ argument just now, and remembering that Zhou Yin had once called her “Little Daoist Jiang,” Yellow Helmet immediately understood everything.
The world was difficult, and life was bitter, but fortunately, there was still a little hope.
Yellow Helmet’s mood improved as well, and she began humming while driving.
After listening for a while, Qin Zhen picked up the tune and hummed along.
After that, they encountered several more groups of search personnel. Some waved them through directly, while others deliberately made things difficult for them. But just as Xu Feng had said, every group had one or two people who had interacted with Qin Zhen before.
She could no longer remember the names of several of them, or where she had met them. They merely looked familiar to her. Yet they all still remembered her, and did their best to pretend they did not know her.
Once, Qin Zhen even saw Ye Hui.
She was just as cool and dashing as ever, making Qin Zhen both envious and shy.
They fought their way through checkpoint after checkpoint. There were mishaps, but every one of them was eventually resolved. Only after the lush green summer had passed and the leaves had turned yellow did they finally break through the search teams’ tight encirclement.
The journey became much smoother after that. Occasionally, they encountered other survivors. They worried at first, but the survivors never cared about the affairs of the bases. When they saw the wanted posters scattered around by the foreigners, they either cursed the foreigners for littering and having no manners, or picked up the posters to use as kindling. Hardly anyone bothered to read them.
Qin Zhen and Yellow Helmet took turns driving every day. During their breaks, Qin Zhen continued drawing her comic. She drew about her experiences with Fu Qi, as well as the people and events she encountered along the way. She also cursed Fu Qi once a day, as usual.
Overall, it was a very pleasant journey—apart from the fact that she never received another message from Fu Qi, and that Yellow Helmet fell ill.
Yellow Helmet’s illness began with a bleak autumn rain.
At the time, they were passing near a base. Something seemed to have happened there, and the gas stations along the route had not been resupplied in time. Every one of them was empty.
Their car could not make it to the next gas station. It stalled halfway there, forcing them to abandon it and set out on foot to find another means of transportation.
Unfortunately, it began to rain.
Yellow Helmet fell ill after getting soaked. At first, she only coughed. Later, she developed a fever. They tried all sorts of physical cooling methods, but nothing worked. Her condition became so serious that she could barely stand.
Qin Zhen decided to go into the city to find medicine.
“Don’t. I’ll be fine if I just tough it out…” Yellow Helmet tried to stop her, because the area was not very safe. Two days earlier, when they had passed through a town, they had seen smoke and gunfire billowing from inside, as though someone was searching for something.
The only people with enough firepower to cause that kind of disturbance were the foreigners.
But if they did not find medicine, Yellow Helmet might die.
Qin Zhen went anyway.
She removed her makeup and disguised herself as a zombie. She went to the hospital in a nearby small county town. Sure enough, there were people in the city, because the zombies inside were unusually active.
Qin Zhen was extremely cautious. Something that should have taken half an hour took her three hours. She finally secured the medicine and was about to leave when she ran into a human.
It was a man with pale skin and light brown eyes. At first glance, he looked somewhat like one of her fellow countrymen, yet somewhat like a foreigner too.
Qin Zhen had deliberately climbed out through a window behind the pharmacy because she was afraid of running into humans. The man seemed to be trying to escape a horde of zombies and intended to climb in through the same window. The two of them came face-to-face.
Qin Zhen froze. The man was stunned as well.
But there was no time to think. Zombies had already caught their scent and were converging on them.
Qin Zhen pretended to be a slow-moving zombie, roaring as she reached for the man.
Whatever. She would finish the act first. At worst, she would have to “die” one more time.
However, whether she had given herself away or the man had his own reasons, he didn’t use a gun or a knife—Qin Zhen had clearly seen the knife hanging behind him, still dripping with the filthy black blood of zombies.
The man came at Qin Zhen with his bare hands, leaving her deeply conflicted. Should she bite him or not?
If she didn’t bite him, she would expose the fact that she wasn’t normal. But if she did, how filthy!
While she hesitated, the man had already raised his hand and attacked. He was using a standard grappling technique. Qin Zhen had experienced it before at Fu Qi’s hands, so she recognized it at a glance—and was caught just as easily.
The man opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but then closed it again. Behind them, the zombies were already surging in, while the furious sound of gunfire rang out from outside the pharmacy.
There was nothing left to say. He was definitely on the same side as those foreigners. If she didn’t run, she would be captured and taken away for experiments.
Qin Zhen stopped pretending. She turned toward the man, bared her teeth, and gave a vicious bark.
Who could have expected that?
The man flinched in surprise. Qin Zhen took the opportunity to kick him hard, then, while he dodged, plunged headlong into the mass of zombies and hurried away.
There were quite a lot of people in the hospital. Between pretending to be dead and dodging around, it took her most of the day to finally make it out.
After finding Yellow Helmet, Qin Zhen hurriedly gave her the medicine, then drove away. They traveled for three days without sleep or rest. Once Yellow Helmet had recovered, Qin Zhen drove for another day and night before the two of them finally stopped.
Looking back on it afterward, Yellow Helmet asked, “Their people were right nearby. Why didn’t he call out to them?”
“I don’t know.” Qin Zhen hadn’t had time to think about it then. “Maybe he was st-stuttering? Or mute?”
Yellow Helmet thought that possibility unlikely. “Could he have been sent out with the foreigners to look for you too? Someone you knew?”
Qin Zhen was certain about that. “No.”
The man’s appearance was far too distinctive. If she had ever seen him before, there was no way she wouldn’t have remembered him at all.
The two girls couldn’t figure it out, so they simply stopped thinking about it and turned their attention to a new problem. They had been too focused on running earlier and had taken a wrong turn. If they wanted to go to Beiyue Base, they would either have to retrace their dangerous route or take a huge detour.
While the two of them were worrying over the problem, a thousand kilometers away, Fu Qi was observing the center of a city from the roof of a high-rise building through a pair of binoculars.
It was the forty-seventh day since he had been released from the base—and the forty-seventh day since he had set out to find Qin Zhen.
Through the binoculars, the streets were packed with zombies. Their limbs were stiff, their movements frenzied, and they threw themselves recklessly at the vehicles transporting equipment.
As Fu Qi swept his gaze across the scene, something suddenly blocked his view. He lowered the binoculars and saw a cigarette being held out in front of him.
“I just looted it off a zombie.” Xu the Second had one clenched between his own lips, making it bob up and down as he spoke. “Your second brother is generous, huh?”
Fu Qi didn’t take it. “Smoking is bad for your health.”
Xu the Second looked at him as though he were crazy. “Who still cares about health at a time like this? You’ve got to live it up for as long as you can!”
“Your mental health.” Fu Qi raised the binoculars again and continued carefully distinguishing the zombies in his field of vision. In a casual tone, he added, “I heard the smell of cigarettes can trigger the berserk factor in a zombie’s body. You’d better be careful.”
“What?”
This was the first time Xu the Second had heard such a theory. At first, he dismissed it completely. But after taking two puffs and watching the hazy smoke rings drift away, he clicked his tongue and asked, “Fu Laoqi, are you telling the truth, or are you messing with me?”
Fu Qi didn’t answer.
Xu the Second smacked his lips. “I feel like you’re pulling my leg again, but that private base was attacked by zombies some time ago. It did seem to have something to do with smoke from a fire…”
He had been out on missions the whole time, and a few months earlier, he had also been sent to help search for Qin Zhen.
Those foreigners had gone charging around in a grand circuit and hadn’t found so much as a hair. They returned dejected and empty-handed, then began throwing around talk of racial unity and the continuation of human civilization. They used moral coercion alongside international pressure and negotiated for several days. In the end, the others had no choice but to agree to let Fu Qi go out in search of her.
But even after allowing Fu Qi out, they still didn’t trust him. They split up the three members of his team, placed tracking devices and bugs on each of them, and had a large group of foreigners follow them at close range to keep watch.
Xu the Second felt aggrieved on Fu Qi’s behalf. Sometimes, he really wanted to advise Fu Qi to do what he had done when he seized the guns and killed Head of the Kobayashi Family—turn around, fire a few shots, and wipe out all those people once and for all!
But Fu Qi had far more patience than he did. He neither rushed nor lost his temper. During the period when he was confined to the base, he had remained calm and composed, either submitting to joint international interrogations or discussing the zombie virus with Academician Jiang and the other researchers. Even after being released, he still didn’t seem anxious in the slightest.
Xu the Second felt that, after a few months apart, Fu Qi had practically become half a researcher.
“Fu Laoqi, tell me honestly. This thing about smoke triggering some kind of berserk factor in zombies—is it a new discovery by Academician Jiang and the others?”
Fu Qi said, “Hard to say.”
Xu the Second snapped, “Hard to say my ass!”
“Stop swearing all the time. You taught Little Zombie to say ‘you bastard’ last time, and I still haven’t settled that account with you.”
“She didn’t need me to teach her! She was rotten to the core already!”
Mentioning Qin Zhen reminded Xu the Second of how she had deceived him emotionally. All those days and nights he had spent blaming himself, all the time he had worried about Fu Qi’s mental state, all the effort he had made to keep their relationship secret—in the end, Fu Qi and Qin Zhen had teamed up to play him for a fool.
Xu the Second grew even more depressed. He took a hard drag on his cigarette, then remembered Fu Qi’s theory from earlier. With a look of distaste, he tossed the cigarette to the ground and crushed it beneath his shoe. Leaning against the rooftop railing, he glanced at the densely packed zombies below and said with complicated feelings, “So I was actually the first one to see the truth.”
The remark failed to move Fu Qi. Instead, it touched something in several of the foreigners nearby.
One of them stepped forward and rattled off a few words. Xu the Second couldn’t understand him and said impatiently, “When you’re on someone else’s turf, speak their language. Is that really so hard to understand?”
The man’s face darkened. He held back his anger and switched to halting Chinese. “Picture. Portrait.”
Xu the Second said, “Haven’t I drawn one already?”
Everyone who had ever seen Qin Zhen had been ordered to draw a portrait of her. Xu the Second couldn’t draw at all. At first, he had worried that his portrait would be so ugly people would mock him for having no artistic talent. But once he saw everyone else’s efforts, he realized theirs were even worse. The drawings were bizarre beyond belief: some had turned her into the Black Bear Demon, while others had drawn a human with a snake’s tail…
In the end, his portrait was actually the most recognizable.
At least it had a nose and eyes, with all four limbs accounted for. You could vaguely tell it was supposed to be a human being.
He had drawn it too well, and now he had become a target. These people practically wanted to pry open his skull and look inside his brain to see what Qin Zhen really looked like.
“Cooperate. Draw another,” they ordered.
“Do I look that easy to bully?” Xu the Second exploded, pointing at Fu Qi. “Qin Zhen belongs to him too. Why don’t you dare force him to draw?”
Even Xu the Second had never imagined that one day he would be treated like a pushover.
It was humiliating.
“You miserable bastards! You all pick on me, don’t you!”
The words gave Fu Qi a strange sense of familiarity. He remembered the aggrieved look on Qin Zhen’s face when she had said, “Everyone bullies me.”
He couldn’t help letting out a soft laugh.
Xu the Second felt mocked and flew into a rage. “I’m not drawing anything. If you’ve got the guts, shoot me. Come on—aim at my head!”
That outburst immediately took the wind out of the foreigners’ sails.
After all, things were different now. Everyone had official authorization, and the Chinese government had explicitly stated that Xu the Second and the others were merely assisting with the search for Qin Zhen out of international goodwill. If even one person was deliberately harmed during the process, the government would pursue the matter to the end.
The foreigners had only gained entry through joint international pressure. Without official permission, searching for Qin Zhen in a country this vast would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
They did not dare push too hard. The leader lifted his chin toward Fu Qi’s back, signaling that having Fu Qi there was enough, and ordered his men to retreat.
Xu the Second felt a little better. Standing beside Fu Qi, he cursed, “Bunch of bastards!”
Afterward, he glanced at Fu Qi. Seeing that Fu Qi was still holding up his binoculars and scanning the area, he knew that Fu Qi was looking for Qin Zhen. Xu the Second’s heart sank again.
He thought that girl named Qin Zhen was both hateful and pitiful. Every time he thought of her, his heart turned sour and his eyes grew hot—making him feel utterly lacking in manly dignity.
He let out a heavy sigh and gazed at the zombies below. “Fu Laoqi, how did things end up like this?”
Fu Qi’s fingers tightened. “It’s my responsibility.”
Everything was his responsibility. From the moment they first met in the tomb, the very first thing he had said to Qin Zhen had been wrong.
If he had put aside his curiosity then, captured Qin Zhen as an ordinary mutated zombie, and reported her to the base immediately after they got out, everything would have been completely different.
If he had not possessed such an overwhelming urge to explore, he would never have gone to such lengths to trick Qin Zhen into investigating her past with him. And in the process, he would never have developed feelings for her that he should not have had.
If that had happened, perhaps the zombie virus would already have been dealt with. B Country’s secret experiments would never have been exposed, those cruel events of the past would never have come to light, and no one would be suffering like this.
But which was more cruel—to let Qin Zhen become a laboratory test subject without knowing anything, or to let her figure out her origins while wandering and hiding, bear the weight of her agonizing past, and walk knowingly into the laboratory as she was now?
Which did she find more painful?
Fu Qi had no answer.
But he had caused all of this. He was responsible for it.
“‘My responsibility, my responsibility’—you say it every day. Now everyone knows she’s your girlfriend!” Xu the Second was thoroughly annoyed. “You two never stop flaunting your love!”
“…” Fu Qi cast him a glance. “Being the second-in-command is about the best you’ll ever manage.”
As they spoke, someone came over to report that the medical equipment had been successfully brought out and that they could withdraw.
They had originally set out to find Qin Zhen. On the way, they happened to encounter a large-scale zombie attack on Feiyun Base, which suffered heavy casualties. They had therefore stayed behind temporarily to help the base retrieve medical equipment for rescue operations.
The initiative now lay with Fu Qi. The foreigners had no choice, yet they were also afraid that Fu Qi would slip away. They did not dare let him venture deep into the city, so they had no choice but to send their own people in to help—and, while they were at it, search for any unusual zombies.
Now that the objective had been completed, all the scattered teams withdrew and gathered at the temporary settlement outside the city. The three male members of the First Apocalypse Squad also assembled under close surveillance.
“No leads in the east,” Chen Xiang reported dejectedly.
Old Mo was not one for words. His light tea-colored eyes met Fu Qi’s briefly before he pointed southeast and shook his head.
Fu Qi nodded. His gaze swept over the pink pig hair clip that had appeared on Old Mo’s sleeve. He paused ever so slightly, then looked away.
After listening to their exchange, one of the foreigners asked, “Now that we’ve helped them, where are we going next?”
Fu Qi lowered his eyes and glanced at his palm. “Northwest.”
“How do you know?”
Fu Qi replied, “Just a guess. If you want to go southeast, that works too.”
The foreigners fell silent.
The next day, heavy snow began to fall from the sky. Fu Qi gazed at the murky gray heavens, touched the pink pig hair clip in his pocket, and walked off in the direction opposite to Qin Zhen.
