"Get in! Hurry!"
Song Shiya had meant to turn toward her Huolala truck, but Shen Ye held her hand in a vise-tight grip.
When she looked back, she saw that the Man-Eating Tree Spirits' vines had already covered her truck.
"There's no time! Get in my RV. We need to go!"
Shen Ye growled at her and gave her hand a gentle tug.
Song Shiya was no fool. She decisively abandoned her Huolala truck and climbed into Shen Ye's RV.
The engine roared, and the RV rammed through the still-writhing remains of the Tree Spirits like a beast of steel, struggling free of the Man-Eating Tree Spirits' encirclement.
An Ning's Volvo was already waiting up ahead. Only after the RV emerged did she accelerate again and continue toward Qianxing Village.
Shen Ye gasped for breath, his hands still trembling on the steering wheel.
He glanced down at his left leg and right hand. His trouser leg was soaked with blood, and the wounds the barbs had gouged into the back of his hand were still bleeding. A smeared, bloody handprint stained the steering wheel.
[Current killing points: 3105]
As he hacked his way through the Tree Spirits, his killing points had passed the three-thousand mark without him noticing.
The price was several teammates who had been sucked into dried-out corpses by the Man-Eating Tree Spirits, left forever in that woodland of death.
He was hardly in good shape himself. Intense pain kept stabbing at his nerves.
If Song Shiya hadn't been continually using Light of Holy Healing on him from the passenger seat, he might already have passed out from the pain.
Through the rearview mirror, he watched the Tree Spirits drag his teammates' mangled bodies back to the roadside with their vines, their roots sinking into the soil again.
The mouths on their human faces slowly closed. Their hollow eye sockets faced Shen Ye, but they did not pursue him.
The convoy drove on along the muddy road for quite some time before finally leaving the Man-Eating Tree Spirits far behind.
Only when they were completely out of sight did Shen Ye's taut nerves finally relax, and he let out a long breath.
"We almost died back there."
Song Shiya leaned back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed, her voice so weak it was barely audible.
"That was more than a close call."
Shen Ye shifted his left leg. The wound had stopped bleeding and scabbed over, but every movement still tugged painfully at it. "Your Huolala truck is gone for good."
"If it's gone, it's gone. It's just a shame about all the supplies in the back."
Song Shiya opened her eyes and turned to look at him, the faintest smile tugging at her lips.
"Come to think of it, how many times have you saved me now?"
Shen Ye didn't answer. His gaze stayed fixed on the road ahead.
Only after a while did he speak. "I was saving myself."
Silence hung between them for a few seconds, then they both let out a quiet laugh almost at the same time.
The numbness of having narrowly survived left little relief in their laughter. Instead, it carried the exhaustion of people who had grown accustomed to death.
The RV continued onward.
Shen Ye noticed a crooked sign by the roadside.
An arrow pointed ahead, with the words "Qianxing Village" written in large, uneven strokes.
Unlike the sign at the entrance, this one was made entirely by hand from wood.
He glanced at the odometer and kept driving without a word.
About ten minutes later, the odometer had ticked up by nearly eight kilometers, yet the muddy road ahead still stretched on with no end in sight.
Weeds covered the hillsides on either side, without even a glimpse of a house.
"Why aren't we there yet?" Shen Ye muttered.
Song Shiya looked equally puzzled.
"The sign at the entrance said five kilometers. We've driven at least forty or fifty by now, haven't we?"
"More than that." Shen Ye tapped the steering wheel. "We've covered almost seventy kilometers since we turned in at that junction."
Song Shiya fell silent for a few seconds, then said softly, "Our world is still getting bigger. It defies all common sense."
They exchanged a look.
They had both noticed this before, but their earlier estimate had been that the world had only grown three or four times larger.
Now, however, it seemed that multiplier was still increasing.
Shen Ye thought for a moment before replying, "Ever since that hazy Red Moon appeared in the sky, and spatial rifts opened everywhere with Eldritch crawling out to prey on people, common sense hasn't applied to our world anymore."
Song Shiya opened her mouth but said nothing.
That was the truth. Ever since the apocalypse began, every change had continued to overturn her understanding of the world.
After resting for a while, she raised her hand again and pressed it against Shen Ye's right shoulder. A soft white glow rose from her palm.
Light of Holy Healing enveloped the deepest wound on his wrist one last time, and flesh slowly knitted together under the influence of sequence power.
The bloody holes left by the barbs gradually filled in, a thin, dark-red scab forming over them.
Shen Ye could clearly feel that most of the pain had faded, and strength returned to his right hand.
"That's enough. It's mostly healed. Get some rest."
Before he could finish, Song Shiya's hand slid off his shoulder.
She had already fallen asleep against the seat, her head tilted to one side, her breathing slow and even.
Her normally rosy lips were now bloodless, and thorns had scratched several bloody lines across her pretty face during the fight.
Shen Ye glanced at her, grabbed a bottle of water from beside him, bit off the cap, and took a deep swig.
Only the low hum of the engine remained inside the RV.
He drove alone, crossing one hill after another.
The Red Moon had long since sunk behind the western ridgeline, while a blue-gray glow spread across the eastern horizon.
Dawn on the tenth day of the apocalypse slowly rose from behind those seemingly endless ridges.
In the dim morning light, the outlines of buildings finally appeared ahead.
They had reached Qianxing Village.
The entire village lay tucked halfway up the slopes between two mountain ridges, dozens of self-built houses stacked in tiers along the terrain.
Most of the red-brick outer walls had never been tiled, and the mountain damp had stained the exposed bricks dark brown.
Some buildings had been abandoned halfway through construction, with rebar jutting from the tops of concrete pillars like broken bones.
An enormous banyan tree grew at the village entrance. Its aerial roots hung down into the soil and sprouted new trunks, twisting and tangling together.
Beneath it stood a stone table, with several stone stools tilted or toppled around it.
A wooden Chinese chessboard still lay on the tabletop, but the pieces that had once rested on it had been blown to the ground at some point.
A dozen or so vehicles were parked not far from the stone table.
Nearly all their windshields were shattered. Blackened rainwater had pooled on the seats, which were covered in gray-green mold, though the vehicles looked as if they had only recently been abandoned.
Farther into the village, a concrete road barely wide enough for two vehicles side by side wound uphill.
The doors of the houses lining the road were tightly shut. Outside a few homes, clothes that had long since dried still hung out, swaying silently in the morning breeze.
The entire village was unnaturally quiet.
There were no crowing roosters, no barking dogs, not a single human voice.
Even the passing wind made no sound. Everything was as silent as death.
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