Strange Liu Jialiang

"We'll divide the area into sections and look out for each other. More importantly, no one acts alone! Not a single person is allowed to be on their own!"

"Understood!"

This time, the response was more unified than ever before. Mainly because they were hungry, which had improved everyone's discipline.

The group favored sticking together. People in movies always liked to split up, but in reality, those who went off alone were more likely to die!

Dividing into groups went smoothly. Shen Cheng led one group, and Jiang Yu'an led another.

The college student with glasses led one group, while two middle-aged men who had been relatively steady on night watch each led a group.

Liu Jialiang was assigned to Lin Yang's group. Liu Yan came over of her own accord and said she wanted to follow Lin Yang. Her reason was:

"Brother Lin said he wouldn't let me out of his sight."

Lin Yang didn't remember saying that to her, but he couldn't be bothered to argue.

"And you." Lin Yang pointed at a tall, skinny young man in the crowd who had barely spoken the whole time, then picked out a middle-aged woman who had only joined them that morning.

"You two are with me."

The five groups dispersed, searching in five different directions through the teaching building.

Lin Yang led his group deeper into the third floor. The farther down the corridor they went, the darker it got. All the overhead fluorescent tubes were broken, leaving only rusty fixtures hanging on the walls.

There were footprints here, buried under ash and forming two distinct layers. That meant someone had been here before.

The air smelled of moldy paper mixed with rotting wood.

"There's so much dust. Is there really food in this godforsaken place?" Liu Yan covered her nose, her voice muffled with disgust.

Someone beside her said, "Don't worry. Follow Lin Yang and you'll eat three meals a day!"

Someone else muttered, "I doubt it! More like we'll miss nine meals in three days..."

Lin Yang said nothing.

He figured that since there had been a refrigerator in the other classroom, there had to be more elsewhere.

They pushed open the first door. It was an ordinary classroom, with desks and chairs scattered across the floor. Half a line of chalk writing remained on the blackboard, but it was too blurred to read.

The drawer in the teacher's desk had been pulled open. It was empty.

A schoolbag lay on its side in the corner. Lin Yang opened it and looked inside, but found only a few exercise books ruined by water. There was no food.

Lin Yang leafed through the exercise books. He couldn't make sense of the writing at all. It was strange, like ghostly scribbles!

The second door.

An office. The documents on the desks had rotted into a mass of pulp, and the metal cabinet stood wide open. Inside were only rusty nails and a few paper clips.

A layer of dust coated the window glass, and the light coming through was dim and yellow. A broken mop lay in the corner.

No food.

The third door, the fourth, the fifth.

Classroom after classroom, empty drawer after empty drawer, dust and rust in every room.

Liu Yan limped along with an irritated look on her face.

The others nearby searched on their own as well.

The fat man's group could be heard from the other end of the corridor now and then. Some were rummaging through things, while others were cursing.

Someone shouted, "There's nothing here either!" Apparently, none of the groups had found anything.

Lin Yang frowned. "Could there really be no food at all?"

Something suddenly occurred to him, and he looked toward the building opposite, at the classroom across from his spawn point!

He led the others to the opposite building.

His gaze swept over the furnishings inside!

The classroom's layout was almost identical to the one they had been staying in, with the same positioning and window angles, the same teacher's desk and storage room.

His gaze stopped on the wall at the back of the classroom.

There was a door there, in the same spot as the door to the storage room he had found before!

He walked inside.

The storage room door was shut. The paint on its handle had worn away, exposing the silver-gray metal beneath.

Lin Yang gripped the handle and turned it. The door opened.

It revealed a storage room similar to the old one, with the brooms and trash cans arranged the same way.

He quickly searched the room.

He ran his fingers along the bottom edge of the doorframe, then stopped at the corner of the wall.

There was a tiny hidden compartment tucked into a groove in the baseboard. It was impossible to notice without looking closely.

He reached inside, and sure enough, his fingertips touched something!

A key.

It was a rusty iron key much like the one for the refrigerator in the other storage room, with its teeth intact.

Lin Yang examined the wall closely again and found a barely noticeable gap in it.

There was a keyhole beside the gap, half hidden by several rotting cardboard boxes.

Lin Yang pushed the boxes aside, inserted the key into the keyhole, and turned it. With a click, the lock sprang open!

The refrigerator built flush into the wall opened!

Cold white light spilled out of it.

Liu Yan sucked in a sharp breath behind him. The tall, skinny young man's eyes went wide.

Looking at what was inside, they cried:

"Th-this is! A refrigerator! Food!"

"We found food!! We found food!"

The skinny man's gaze trembled.

"This refrigerator blends right into the wall. A normal person would never have noticed it, and you even found the key!"

Lin Yang said nothing and stepped forward.

There was less in the refrigerator than in the one in the other storage room.

Three bags of sliced bread, three cartons of milk, a few bottles of mineral water, a few vacuum-packed chicken sausages, and an unopened bag of biscuits.

It wasn't much, but divided among everyone, each person could have half a piece of bread and a mouthful or two of water. That would get them through today.

"Brother Lin! You really did it!" Liu Yan's voice was thick with admiration. She stepped forward and reached for the food in the refrigerator.

"There isn't enough here to go around. Let's quietly split it among ourselves."

A flash of greed appeared in the skinny man's eyes too.

"If we share this food with everyone, we'll each get an ant-sized portion. But if we split it ourselves, we'll get plenty!"

"Yeah, yeah!" Liu Yan reached out to take some!

Lin Yang raised his hand and knocked hers away.

"Don't touch it!" Lin Yang took the contents of the refrigerator out one by one and stacked them on the floor beside it.

"We'll take it back and share it with everyone!"

Liu Yan looked somewhat resentful and didn't understand why.

But Lin Yang understood that once trust collapsed, it could never be restored!

In a desperate situation, relying on petty tricks wouldn't keep you alive for long.

As he spoke, he glanced at Liu Jialiang out of the corner of his eye.

Liu Jialiang stood at the entrance to the storage room, his back against the doorframe. He wasn't looking inside, nor was he looking at the food anymore.

His gaze remained fixed on some people out in the corridor, and he seemed lost in thought. He appeared not to care at all about the food they had found.

Lin Yang silently observed him.

On the way back, they ran right into the fat man's group.

The fat man spotted the pile of things in Lin Yang's arms from a distance. He froze for a moment, then took off running toward him.

In the space of three seconds, his expression changed from exhaustion to shock to delight!

"Holy shit! Brother Lin, you! Where did you find all this food?"

He turned and shouted to the people in his group.

"See that? Brother Lin found food again! Follow Brother Lin and you'll get fed!"

Lin Yang's expression remained unchanged.

By the time he led his group back to the agreed meeting point at the entrance to the old classroom, the other groups had already arrived.

The good news was that no one had died.

The bad news was that no one else had found food.

Shen Cheng leaned against the wall empty-handed, and the people beside him didn't look too happy.

The other two groups were empty-handed as well. When they saw the food in Lin Yang's arms, they fell silent for two seconds before swarming around him.

"Food!"

"Oh my god, it really is food!"

"Brother Lin, how did you find it? Everything on our side was empty. There was nothing at all!"

"I'm so fucking hungry. Quick, quick, give me a bite first-"

"Line up."

Lin Yang put the food on the teacher's desk, and the noisy crowd immediately fell silent.

"One at a time!"

The only other person who hadn't returned empty-handed was Jiang Yu'an.

She pulled five ham sausages out of her windbreaker pocket and placed them on the teacher's desk.

The writing printed on the sausages' plastic wrappers was blurred, as though they had been soaked in something and then dried.

She didn't explain where she had found them. She only said two words.

"Take them."

The five ham sausages, together with the bread and milk Lin Yang had brought back, were barely enough to half fill everyone's stomachs.

Distributing the food took quite a while.

Some people's hands were still trembling as they accepted their bread, while others opened the biscuits and squatted in the corner, nibbling at them.

Someone was so moved that a couple of tears trickled down as they said, "There's something in my mouth to chew!"

After receiving his portion, the middle-aged man in the plaid shirt stared at the half piece of bread in his hand for quite a while. Then he looked up and said to Lin Yang,

"Thank you, you're my real dad!"

The fat man sat cross-legged on a desk, slapping his thigh as he chewed his bread.

"Now that's more like it! We need full stomachs to have the strength to fight Facelings! Next time I run into one, I'll smash its fucking balls with my club!"

"There are still five of them. Can you really smash them all to death?" someone said quietly.

The air in the classroom instantly turned cold. Every chewing mouth paused for a moment.

That was right, there were still five Facelings! Things might seem peaceful now, but there was no denying that everyone was in danger at that very moment.

The fat man rolled his eyes. "Can't you stop ruining the mood?"

No one answered.

Lin Yang, however, looked at Liu Jialiang. He tore open a ham sausage and handed it to him.

"You're hungry, aren't you?"

Liu Jialiang looked up at him and nodded.

He took the ham sausage, but didn't eat it right away. He simply held it, tightening and loosening his grip.

His behavior seemed perfectly ordinary.

Yet Lin Yang's expression grew a little more suspicious. There was something wrong with this guy!

He had been acting strangely since they were looking for food that afternoon. They had been going from one uncertain meal to the next for days, but never mind that he hadn't been excited to see food.

He didn't even stuff it into his mouth the moment he got it?

Was he a Faceling or not?

That answer could only be revealed after twelve o'clock.