Chapter 100
Chapter 100
The group did not linger. Before long, they were back on the road.
The sky gradually faded from pitch-black to a murky gray before finally settling into a lifeless, deathly white.
Day had arrived, yet not a single ray of sunlight pierced the heavy cloud cover. A suffocating gloom hung over the world.
Perhaps Qingshui and Song Yunqing’s earlier performance had proven their ability to survive.
Guan Yuzhen and Quan Lin no longer deliberately walked several paces ahead of them. Without a word, they adjusted their positions and naturally fell in just behind Qingshui and Song Yunqing, one on either side.
Qingshui noticed the subtle shift. She knew better than to reject kindness, so she accepted their unspoken support.
When Qingshui’s steps began to falter again, Guan Yuzhen moved closer, discreetly offering her body and arm for support. Qingshui did not stand on ceremony. She let a little of her weight rest against the woman, conserving what little precious strength she had left.
And so, beneath the gloomy sky, the group of seven silently made their way along the abandoned highway.
After walking for who knew how long, they spotted a bridge spanning the valley ahead.
The bridge itself was still mostly intact, though the approaches at both ends had sustained varying degrees of damage.
Wen Lianfeng studied it for a moment, then selected a sheltered recess beneath the bridge as a temporary rest stop. The entrance was partially concealed by a collapsed guardrail and dense vines.
Everyone filed inside and squeezed into the cramped space. Utterly exhausted, they either sat down or leaned against the walls, seizing the chance to recover their strength.
Wen Lianfeng did not rest immediately. She first signaled for Chu Jingchu and Wu Wujie to conceal themselves on either side of the entrance and stand guard. Then she turned her gaze toward Qingshui, who was leaning against the wall, her breathing still weak.
She shot Quan Lin a look.
Understanding at once, Quan Lin silently and carefully took a box of medicine from his backpack.
He opened the box, and a trace of reluctance surfaced on his habitually silent face. A moment later, he quickly removed a single tablet and handed it to Wen Lianfeng.
Wen Lianfeng took it, walked over to Qingshui, and crouched in front of her. Holding out the tablet, she said, “Ibuprofen. Take it.”
“We’ll rest here for another two hours.” After a brief pause, she added, “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure someone is always on watch. Focus on recovering.”
She then pulled two compressed biscuits and a bottle with only a third of its water remaining from her backpack, handing them to Qingshui and Song Yunqing.
Qingshui accepted one biscuit and the tablet. After hastily forcing down the biscuit, she swallowed the medicine with some water.
The faint bitterness dissolved at the back of her tongue before sliding down her throat.
The medicine would not take effect that quickly, but she felt slightly more at ease all the same.
She leaned back against the cold, damp concrete wall and closed her eyes, trying to force herself to rest.
Perhaps the medicine was beginning to work, or perhaps her extreme exhaustion had finally overwhelmed her overstimulated nerves. Either way, the incessant noise in her head seemed to recede, fading into a more distant background murmur.
Her body still ached, and the cold remained, but the debilitating sense that she was about to fall apart had eased slightly.
Just before her consciousness sank into darkness, the question buried in her heart slipped out before she could stop it.
“What… do you keep looking at?”
Wen Lianfeng, Chu Jingchu, and Quan Lin had repeatedly glanced back and watched the distance behind them. Their almost neurotic vigilance was far from normal.
A brief silence followed.
Then Wen Lianfeng spoke. Her voice no longer carried the teasing edge of a gambler, nor the deliberately lighthearted tone she had maintained before.
Instead, it held a profound gravity.
“Madmen…” she began.
“…A group of Madmen,” she continued, lowering her voice until it was barely more than a breath. Yet somehow, that only made her words clearer and more chilling. “They’ve been following us this whole time.”
In that instant, the air beneath the bridge seemed to freeze.
Wen Lianfeng did not look at either of them. She gazed up at the sky, as though lost in memory.
“Every time we found high ground and looked through the binoculars… we could see them.” Disgust seeped into her voice as she described them. “They trailed us like shadows, never too close or too far. Right behind us. Between the trees. On the far side of a hill… You could feel them there, but you could never be sure exactly where they were or how many there were.”
She took a deep breath, a chill creeping into her voice.
“And… every single time we spotted the Madmen, it didn’t matter whether we picked up the pace or took a detour. The next time we saw them… there were always more.”
She turned, sweeping her gaze over every exhausted, numb, tense face beneath the bridge. Finally, her eyes settled on Qingshui and Song Yunqing’s pale faces. She enunciated the despairing truth one word at a time.
“We can’t shake them. No matter what we do.”
Qingshui’s heart sank.
No wonder.
No wonder Wen Lianfeng was so vigilant that she had even been willing to fire a gun to test for an ambush.
No wonder the group had always moved with the frantic urgency of people being herded along.
No wonder they overreacted to every potential threat.
Wen Lianfeng spoke again. “There were… nine of us at first… but…”
“…Four are already dead.”
An almost emotionless female voice came from the entrance beneath the bridge, finishing the sentence for her.
It was Chu Jingchu.
Nine people. Four dead.
Song Yunqing abruptly raised her head. Her vacant eyes fixed on Wen Lianfeng as she asked hoarsely, “You… tried fighting them?”
“Of course we did,” Chu Jingchu cut in impatiently, agitation and frustration coloring her voice. “At first, we thought we could wipe out the Madmen too. We concentrated our fire and wasted most of our precious ammunition killing nearly all the ones we could see at the time. And what happened? There were always one or two hiding in the most impossible places, or some that ran so fast we couldn’t kill them no matter what we did. And then…”
She paused. The memory of that terrifying sight seemed to surface in her mind, and an almost imperceptible tremor entered her voice.
“Then, after we thought we were safe for the time being, we’d look back or find somewhere to scout from… and the Madmen would appear again. There would always be another huge group of them, sometimes even more than before.”
Wen Lianfeng leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
Chu Jingchu’s account had dredged up the memories she least wanted to revisit. She would never forget the eyes she had seen when she looked back through her binoculars from high ground, amid the overlapping shadows of the trees and the swaying figures of the Madmen.
They did not possess the same clouded insanity as the eyes of ordinary Madmen. Instead, they gleamed with an eerie scarlet light.
That man, that Madman… or perhaps some kind of “leader” of that group of Madmen?
It had been following them all along. It had never stopped.
At the thought, a deeper chill crawled up her spine. She clenched her fist unconsciously, her nails nearly digging into her palm.
Yet when she opened her eyes again and found her gaze drifting back to Qingshui, the tension at the corners of her mouth eased by the slightest degree.
Still… heaven was on her side after all.
Wasn’t it?
Anazu
bone chilling