Survive at All Costs

Yang Yong did not dare to blink.

On the iron roof of the car, that dark shadow had been crouching for three days.

It faced away from him, like a charred human shape, but a vertical eye bulged on the back of its head.

That eye was closed.

The last time it opened, Old Zhao was chewing compressed biscuits.

Biscuit crumbs were still stuck to the corners of his mouth when his head was gone.

There was no sound, no blood.

The man was as if erased from the world.

Yang Yong's fingernails pinched into his palms, pressing out four crescent moons.

He told himself: do not blink.

Blinking also counted as moving.

Move, and it would wake up.

The bus wreckage was like a beast disemboweled.

The iron plating rolled up, seats were crooked, and seat sponge squeezed out from the cracks, blackened by rainwater soaking it.

Yang Yong stuffed himself into the gap between two rows of seats, his left hand tightly covering his mouth, his right hand gripping a sharpened piece of steel rebar.

The steel rebar was something he snapped off the seat frame, one end ground for three days and three nights, ground until it could pierce iron plating.

Must not breathe loudly.

Must not make a sound.

Must not let it know you are here.

These three rules were not memorized. They were carved in.

The first rule was bought by A-fang with a scream.

She only shouted half a sound before her neck snapped.

Her head tilted to one side, and her eyes were still open, looking in Yang Yong's direction.

Yang Yong did not dare meet her gaze.

The second rule was bought by Teacher Glasses with his leg.

He ran three steps, and before the third step landed, he was dragged under the seats.

Only one shoe remained in the aisle, its shoelaces untied.

The third rule was bought by that migrant worker brother with his fists.

He smashed down a piece of rebar, the rebar bent, and his chest also caved in.

A fist-print caved inward, like someone punched outward from the inside.

Yang Yong bit these three rules into his teeth.

He did not dare breathe, did not dare swallow saliva, did not dare let the urge to urinate distract his attention.

He treated himself as a corpse.

A corpse does not move.

Forty-eight hours.

He lay prone for a full forty-eight hours.

His legs were numb to the point of losing sensation, his arms were sore to the point of trembling, and the urine held back made his lower abdomen feel like it was about to burst.

He did not dare move.

Until that thing finally stood up, like a piece of paper blown apart by the wind, floated out the car window, and disappeared into the halo of the Red Moon.

Yang Yong did not move immediately.

He lay prone for another six hours.

It was not caution.

It was fear.

Fear nailed his bones to the ground.

When escaping from Guancheng, there were still twelve people by his side.

Teacher Glasses.

The breakfast shop couple.

Three migrant worker brothers.

A young mother holding an infant.

Four young people whose names he did not know.

And Xiao Liu.

Xiao Liu was two years younger than Yang Yong, still had acne on his face, and always said his younger sister was waiting for him in Guancheng.

When he screamed, Yang Yong was only two rows of seats away.

Yang Yong saw his mouth open, then something cut off his voice.

He didn't save Xiao Liu.

He just buried his face in the crook of his arm and bit down on his own wrist until it bled.

Whenever he thought of Xiao Liu afterward, he remembered that half-finished cry of "Mom."

Now he was the only one left.

They didn't all die at once.

They disappeared one by one, as if something had picked them out, silently and without warning.

The breakfast shop owner was still counting rice grains when she died.

She counted them one by one. When she got to the thirty-seventh grain, she was gone.

Her husband disappeared the next day, too.

That night, Yang Yong heard him crying.

He wasn't wailing. He was crying with his teeth sunk into his own wrist, his jaw trembling, broken sobs coming from his throat like air leaking from bellows.

Yang Yong felt for his canteen, wanting to hand it over.

There was only half a bottle of water left.

He stopped.

The next morning, that spot was empty.

All that remained was a slipper, its sole worn down to half, and a small patch of gray soaked with tears.

Yang Yong kicked the slipper under the seat.

He didn't dare look.

If he did, he'd think: am I next?

When he stood up, his legs could no longer bend.

He leaned on the twisted seatback and slowly forced his knees straight.

It hurt, but pain was a good thing.

Pain meant you were still alive, not yet turned into one of those things.

He checked his backpack.

Two cans of luncheon meat.

One had expired three months ago, and the other had a bulging lid.

The one with the bulging lid had been left behind by the migrant worker. Before he died, he'd said, "Don't throw it away. You can eat it even if the lid's bulging. When you're starving, it's all meat."

Yang Yong had never eaten it.

Every day, he took it out, looked at it, then put it back.

Half a bottle of water, cloudy and yellow.

A hardtack biscuit, hard as a brick.

A length of rebar sharpened to a point.

That was everything he owned.

It was also all the security he had.

Not enough.

Nowhere near enough.

From Guancheng to here, a hundred and twenty kilometers. He'd ridden for two whole days.

The highway was full of abandoned cars. Some were still smoking; some still had people sitting inside...

Or rather, things that had once been people.

He'd learned one thing: don't look inside the cars.

He'd looked once.

A family of three had been sitting in that car.

The father gripped the steering wheel, and the mother held the child.

All of them were looking at him.

Three faces pressed against the window, the corners of their mouths slowly stretching into grins.

Yang Yong ran.

He ran for a long time.

After that, whenever he passed any vehicle, he kept his eyes fixed on his toes.

Toes, toes, toes.

If he didn't look, he wouldn't be seen.

He found the little blue bicycle at a gas station.

The lock was still hanging from it, with the key in the keyhole.

The convenience store door was half open. On the counter sat an unopened bottle of water and a half-opened pack of biscuits.

The owner had probably gone to get gas, and then... never came back.

When Yang Yong got on the bike, its rear tire was half flat.

He had no time to pump it up.

The Red Moon was about to rise.

When the Red Moon rose, don't stay for long in a place without cover.

He had seen someone who didn't believe it.

That person stood in the moonlight. Their shadow moved first, and then the person moved.

Yang Yong pedaled the bicycle as fast as he could.

He didn't dare look back.

He was afraid he'd see his own shadow moving too.

Morning.

A convoy appeared at the end of the highway.

Almost by reflex, Yang Yong threw himself into a roadside drainage ditch.

It was full of mud and rotting leaves, and it stank so badly he nearly threw up.

But he didn't move.

Stinking was better than dying.

He lay in the ditch, watching through the weeds.

Ten minutes.

Three off-road vehicles, a yellow school bus, and behind them motorcycles, tricycles, and bicycles, with thirty or forty people packed close together.

He remembered what the bespectacled teacher had taught him before he died: in a procession disguised as Eerie, nobody's feet touched the ground.

Yang Yong stared at their feet.

Their feet touched the ground.

There was mud, dust, and holes worn through their soles.

They were people.

His nose suddenly tingled.

He hadn't seen living people in a very, very long time.

But he didn't rush out right away.

He raised the rebar above his head.

That was a rule of the apocalypse.

Before approaching any group, you had to raise your weapon.

It showed that you weren't Eerie, and that you wouldn't launch a sneak attack.

Otherwise, the other side would shoot before you could get close.

The window of the first off-road vehicle rolled down.

A shotgun poked out, aimed at his head.

"Stop."

Yang Yong stopped.

He heard his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

He slowly unzipped his jacket, exposing his chest.

There was no Weirdness Mark.

Silence fell inside the vehicle for a few seconds.

The window lowered a little farther, revealing a face wearing gold-rimmed glasses.

Around thirty years old, with a cold gaze, like he was looking at a math problem.

"What's your name?"

"Yang Yong."

"Where are you from?"

"Guancheng."

The man in the gold-rimmed glasses was silent for two seconds, as if calculating something.

"Guancheng fell three days ago. How did you survive?"

"I played dead."

The man in the gold-rimmed glasses looked at him for a while.

That gaze made Yang Yong feel as if he'd been taken apart and spread out on a table, page by page.

Then the gun barrel withdrew.

"Follow us. Don't fall behind."

Yang Yong swung onto the bicycle and pedaled hard.

The rear tire was still flat.

With every turn of the pedals, the wheel hub creaked.

But he didn't care.

At last, he didn't have to be alone.

The convoy was more orderly than he'd expected.

It wasn't a chaotic flight from disaster. It was more like... an army.

A bedraggled army.

The distance between every vehicle was kept precisely at twenty meters.

Go too fast and you'd crash into the one ahead; go too slow and you'd fall behind.

Falling behind meant death.

Yang Yong rode at the back of the convoy.

It wasn't that they were excluding him. He'd chosen to be there.

When he'd escaped Guancheng, he'd stayed at the back the whole time too.

Because the back had one advantage...

If you ran into Eerie and had to run, the people ahead of you would take the hits for you.

He remembered the person who had once taken the hit for him.

A middle-aged man he didn't know, running in front of him, was dragged into a car by a hand.

Yang Yong hadn't looked back.

He had survived.

He told himself: this isn't selfishness. This is how you stay alive.

But... that night, he threw up.

The convoy traveled for an entire day.

There wasn't a single attack.

That wasn't normal.

In the three months since the apocalypse began, Yang Yong had never seen any group travel safely for an entire day.

Not even ten people, not even with guns, not even hiding inside an armored vehicle.

Eerie always came.

Like sharks that had smelled blood.

But this convoy had been safe the whole way.

He began to observe them.

In the first vehicle was the man in the gold-rimmed glasses.

Some people in the convoy called him Old Cao; others called him Captain Cao.

He rarely got out of the vehicle and was always holding a notebook, writing and sketching.

Light reflected off his lenses, making his eyes hard to see.

In the second vehicle was a woman.

In her twenties, with short hair, dressed in black, and a knife hanging from her waist.

The scabbard was black, the handle was black, even the guard was black.

Yang Yong noticed a detail.

Everyone in the group automatically gave her a wide berth as they passed, keeping three steps away.

It wasn't because they were afraid.

It was instinct.

Like a flock of sheep avoiding a wolf.

In the third vehicle was a brawny man two meters tall.

He was the only Transcendent who would talk to ordinary people.

Yang Yong heard someone call him Brother Zheng.

His name was Zheng Xiaofeng.

Zheng Xiaofeng broke a biscuit in half and gave it to a child.

The child took it but didn't dare eat it, hiding it in his pocket first.

Zheng Xiaofeng saw, but said nothing. He just scratched his head.

There was a black crack on the back of his hand.

Like a pattern in stone.

Yang Yong glanced at it again.

Zheng Xiaofeng immediately pulled his hand back into his sleeve.

As they were making camp at dusk, Zheng Xiaofeng came over and tossed him a pack of compressed biscuits.

"Eat. I've seen plenty of people starve to death. More than I've seen killed by the Eerie."

Yang Yong caught the biscuits.

He didn't eat them.

First, he glanced around. Someone was watching.

Someone swallowed.

Someone looked away.

In the apocalypse, no one gave you things for no reason.

Unless...

"What do you want me to do?"

Zheng Xiaofeng grinned.

"Clever."

He crouched down and lowered his voice.

"Tomorrow, the convoy will pass a village. Old Cao says we can go in. I need someone to help me move something."

"What?"

Zheng Xiaofeng didn't answer.

He just glanced at his right hand.

Yang Yong followed his gaze...

There was a black crack on the back of Zheng Xiaofeng's right hand.

It didn't look like a wound.

It looked like a pattern in stone.

Zheng Xiaofeng pulled his hand back into his sleeve.

"Are you going to help or not?"

"I am."

Yang Yong didn't hesitate.

Because in the apocalypse, only useful people could stay alive.

He had to make himself useful.

The next day.

Three characters on the road sign: Qinglongzhai Village.

Old Cao opened the car door, stood by the roadside, and raised his binoculars.

He watched for a long time.

Long enough for people in the group to start shifting about uneasily.

Then he took a small white flag out of his pocket and planted it in the dirt at the village entrance.

The flag bore symbols Yang Yong couldn't understand, like some kind of ancient writing.

Old Cao pushed up his glasses.

"Eighty percent chance we can enter."

He turned around, his gaze sweeping over everyone.

"Half an hour."

"When the half hour is up, the convoy leaves on time."

"Whether or not everyone has come back."

The crowd fell silent for a moment.

Then it surged forward.

Hungry. Everyone was hungry.

Yang Yong saw a man gnawing on tree bark, blood all around his mouth.

He saw a mother give the last half of her biscuit to her child, then lick her fingers.

They were too hungry to care about that twenty percent chance.

Yang Yong was hungry too.

His stomach was contracting, hurting, and growling.

He knew something was wrong with this village. It was too quiet.

But his feet had already started moving.

When he reached the village entrance, he instinctively looked up.

The sun was high.

There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

But a sudden chill shot up his spine.

It was too quiet.

Gray-tiled roofs and white walls stood against the mountainside.

The great banyan tree at the village entrance blocked out the sky. The stone table and stools beneath it were spotless, as if someone had sat there drinking tea just yesterday.

There was even a teacup on the stone table.

Half a mouthful of tea remained at the bottom.

How could a village like this still exist three months into the apocalypse?

He whipped around.

Old Cao was still standing beside the road sign, his glasses reflecting the light so Yang Yong couldn't make out his eyes.

Sister Ying stood with a hand on her knife, her gaze as sharp as a blade.

The countdown had already begun.

Thirty minutes.

Yang Yong turned and ran toward the village. He had only one thought.

Find something useful.

Prove that he was useful.

Then... stay alive.

He didn't want to be alone anymore.

After taking two steps, his chest suddenly began to burn.

It was the furnace pendant that had come with him when he crossed over.

Yang Yong nearly cried out.

Three months.

For three months, he had touched it every night, called to it, and begged it.

It had been like a piece of dead iron.

But now, a voice engraved itself directly into his mind...

[Ping, the Thousand-Hammer, Hundred-Refinement Furnace has activated.]

[Ping, 3 instances of "abnormal matter" detected in the area ahead.]

[Ping, current energy is insufficient; unable to analyze.]

[Ping, recommendation: collect energy under the Red Moon, then scan again.]

The burning sensation faded.

Yang Yong stopped, his heart pounding like a drum.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to fall to his knees.

But he did none of those things.

He crushed that wild elation between his teeth and swallowed it down.

People surrounded him.

In the apocalypse, any anomaly could be fatal.

He couldn't let anyone know.

He took a deep breath and kept running toward the village entrance.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the time to investigate.

He'd survive today first. Then he'd see.