Chapter 102
Chapter 102
The mountains and forests still stretched endlessly around them.
Qingshui repeatedly swept her gaze over the shadows on both sides of the road, her ears pricked. She fought desperately against the whispers in her mind that kept trying to drag her into numbness, struggling to force herself back into a state of utmost vigilance.
Just then, the vicious curses shifted into a faint plea.
“Save me…”
The voice drifted in and out, trembling with the despair and anguish of someone on the verge of death. Its timbre was blurred and indistinct, as though several voices had overlapped and become distorted underwater.
Captain…?
Sister Fang…?
No, no… Was that Dorm Leader?
Qingshui shuddered violently. For a split second, all her senses were stripped away. The air stopped flowing, all sound ceased to exist, and only boundless darkness and suffocation remained.
“Save me…”
The voice came again, a little clearer than before. Immediately afterward, another, more urgent and terrified voice joined it.
“Run…!”
Chaos.
Noise.
She was clearly still moving forward, yet it felt as though she had stepped into another, terrifying world.
“Don’t look back! Run…”
“Go, Qingshui…”
More and more voices crowded in, growing ever louder and more chaotic.
“…Hah…”
She struggled to break free from the tide of voices threatening to swallow her whole and drew a deep breath. For a brief instant, the spinning before her eyes and the clamor in her ears came to a halt.
In that fleeting moment of clarity, someone yanked her arm sharply to the side. The force made her stumble, wrenching her completely out of that suffocating trance.
She looked up blankly and met a pair of calm yet probing eyes. It was Quan Lin. At some point, he had moved closer, and he was the one who had pulled her aside.
“I’ve called you several times, but you didn’t respond. Are you all right?”
Quan Lin kept his voice low, revealing little emotion, but his gaze lingered on her pale face and trembling wrist. Guan Yuzhen had also turned around and was watching her in silence. There was concern in her eyes, along with something more complicated.
Qingshui opened her mouth. “I’m fine.”
She realized that the voices haunting her mind had already begun to distort her perception of reality.
Qingshui continued onward, but she could feel Quan Lin’s probing gaze lingering on her for a long time.
After traveling a little farther, the group reached a bend where the road rose slightly.
Wen Lianfeng made a hand signal. Chu Jingchu immediately understood and scaled the slope beside them in a few quick movements.
She took out her binoculars, adjusted the focus with practiced ease, and surveyed the direction they had come from.
Through the lenses, the winding gray-white road lay empty. None of the twisted, staggering figures they feared were anywhere in sight.
Chu Jingchu observed the area carefully for a full two or three minutes. She repeatedly adjusted the focus and even checked several narrow passes and gaps in the forest that could easily have been overlooked before swiftly returning to the group.
She breathed a sigh of relief and walked straight over to Wen Lianfeng.
“They didn’t follow us.”
Wen Lianfeng showed no particular reaction. She merely gave a slight nod, as if the result did not surprise her.
“Keep moving,” she said simply before taking the lead once more.
Yet Chu Jingchu caught an almost imperceptible change beneath her calm response.
Ever since they had discovered they were being tracked, agitation had clung to Wen Lianfeng like a shadow, seeping into almost every pore. But now, it seemed to have faded… if only slightly.
Why?
Chu Jingchu’s gaze involuntarily drifted toward the girl who had been walking silently near the middle-rear of the group.
Chen Qingshui.
Had it started… when she joined them and displayed that astonishing marksmanship?
Wen Lianfeng hadn’t said much, nor had she shown excessive enthusiasm, but Chu Jingchu could sense a subtle change in her.
It showed in the way some of the tension had left her, faint enough to be almost imperceptible.
That change made Chu Jingchu frown inwardly.
It wasn’t that she objected to newcomers. In the apocalypse, gaining another powerful fighter was something anyone would welcome. But Wen Lianfeng seemed too quick to place so much hope in an unknown newcomer, to let someone whose mental state was clearly unstable ease so much of the pressure on her shoulders. It stirred an instinctive unease in Chu Jingchu.
Their group had made it this far at the cost of four companions. At its core, it was nothing more than a band of survivors temporarily bound together by their desire to stay alive.
Trust was fragile. It couldn’t withstand much strain.
As their leader, Wen Lianfeng had always been the one holding that fragile balance together. She had to remain absolutely calm and objective. She couldn’t allow personal feelings to sway her judgment so easily.
Chu Jingchu opened her mouth, watching Wen Lianfeng’s composed profile as she walked, wanting to say something.
But when the words reached her lips, she fell silent again.
She remembered all the correct calls Wen Lianfeng had made and the courage with which she had led them out of one desperate situation after another. In the end, her instinctive trust in Wen Lianfeng outweighed the unease and doubt in her heart.
Now wasn’t the time for internal conflict. The threat behind them hadn’t truly disappeared. It simply hadn’t shown up through the binoculars for the moment.
In the end, she said nothing. She merely clicked her tongue, as if mocking herself, then quickened her pace to catch up with Wen Lianfeng.
Walking near the rear flank of the group, Quan Lin appeared to be casually scanning their surroundings, but his peripheral gaze flicked several times toward Song Yunqing before settling on Qingshui.
One girl was hollow and numb. The other alternated between vigilance and dazed distraction. Yet in an incredibly short time, both had somehow gained an extraordinary degree of Wen Lianfeng’s trust and reliance.
Wen Lianfeng had even handed the precious rifle directly to Qingshui. That meant the two of them would become the group’s main fighting force.
But… would they really?
At times, they were excessively alert, like birds startled by the mere twang of a bowstring.
At other times, they seemed to lose touch with the world around them, their minds clearly abnormal.
He had even noticed Chen Qingshui, the crack shot, occasionally moving her lips without making a sound, as though talking to someone no one else could see.
There was something unstable about them, an aura that both resisted and blended into this insane world.
They… might have gone mad long ago.
Or perhaps they were teetering on the brink of madness.
The thought flashed through Quan Lin’s mind, but he immediately shook his head inwardly, his lips twisting into a bitter, self-mocking smile.
What right did he have to judge them?
In a world where order had collapsed and monsters ran rampant, after witnessing and taking part in untold bloodshed, death, and despair, who didn’t have a few demons living inside them?
Whose nerves hadn’t been crushed and twisted out of shape time and again?
Who could still guarantee that their so-called “normality” wasn’t simply another, better-hidden form of madness?
Everyone trudged forward in numb silence to avoid confronting the unanswerable question: Why keep living?
In this world, of all those who had survived, who wasn’t a Madman?