Chapter 114
Chapter 114
Wen Lianfeng would never forget.
She would never forget that day. That moment. Those faces.
She leaned against the edge of the bed, her voice as calm as if she were telling someone else’s story. Yet her eyes, which had weathered countless storms, now resembled two bottomless wells, reflecting something beyond words.
“That day, we were tracking a woman.”
“It was a major case the Cangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau had been investigating for years. Drug trafficking, smuggling, human trafficking, murder-they did it all. Their leader was a woman named…” She paused, then shook her head. “Forget it. Her name doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’d finally found a lead that day.”
Qingshui watched her calmly. Chu Jingchu had already set down her bowl, and her breathing had noticeably softened.
Wen Lianfeng had led her team in surrounding one of the woman’s key operatives at a factory on the outskirts of the city. But their target had slipped away, leaving them empty-handed.
She quickly realized something was wrong and followed the trail to a shopping mall.
A bustling shopping mall.
Their target had grossly underestimated their determination. Even amid the crowds, Wen Lianfeng’s hawk-like gaze remained locked firmly on them.
She knew the target thought the noise and commotion would provide the perfect cover. What they had forgotten was that, in a world governed by order, some pursuits could never be swallowed by the crowd.
One team moved up through the fire escape to cut off the target, while another secured the elevators and stairwells. Wen Lianfeng entered through the main entrance with two officers.
Everything went smoothly.
They closed in on the third floor and cornered the target inside a store. Wen Lianfeng even heard one of her teammates announce over the radio that they had made the arrest.
Her teammate’s voice was stern. “Captain, we’ve got them surrounded! There’s no way out!”
She was on the second floor at the time, rushing toward the third. Hearing that, she breathed a sigh of relief and quickened her pace.
When Wen Lianfeng arrived, she saw two of her teammates pinning down the target. At the sight of her, their serious expressions softened into faint smiles.
“Captain!”
A smile tugged at Wen Lianfeng’s lips. She was just about to give the order to take the suspect in when she abruptly heard a laugh.
“Heh… heh…”
It came from a pair of brothers who had recently joined her team.
The older brother still had one hand pressed against the suspect’s nape, while the younger pinned the suspect’s legs. Beads of sweat from the chase still clung to his temples.
Their faces had been taut with exertion, but now, that tension began to crumble away, piece by piece.
It started with the corners of their mouths.
The older brother’s mouth moved first. As though pulled by an invisible hand, his lips slowly curled upward. What had been a faint, polite smile twisted into an inexplicable grin of mounting excitement.
His eyes remained fixed on Wen Lianfeng, but his pupils gradually contracted, like a cat’s under a harsh light. They shone with a terrifying brightness.
“Heh… heh… Captain…” he said, a sickly sweet, spine-chilling tremor in his voice. “Look at him… He’s shaking so hard…”
The younger brother reacted a moment later.
At first, he froze, as if he couldn’t understand what the muscles in his own face were doing. Then that same unnatural smile crawled across his face.
His lips stretched apart, exposing stark white teeth. Laughter rolled up from his throat, growing louder and more deranged until it intertwined with his brother’s.
“This is fun… So much fun…” the younger brother murmured, his eyes unfocused. “Let’s… let’s all play together, okay?”
It wasn’t the laughter of officers celebrating an arrest. It was something… uncontrollable, bubbling up from the depths of their throats. Louder and louder, the laughter grew.
Then, right in front of Wen Lianfeng, they committed an atrocity. With their bare hands, they tore the criminal to pieces. When she tried to stop them, it only made them more excited.
An enormous, grotesque smile-one that did not belong to them at all-blossomed across their faces.
Their mouths stretched wider and wider, until their cheeks seemed ready to split. Then every member of the team turned to look at her.
Wen Lianfeng would never forget those eyes. Not for the rest of her life.
Those were faces she knew. Xiao Xia’s face. Ah Kun’s face. The Deputy Captain’s face. But whatever lurked behind their eyes was no longer anyone she recognized.
It was something hollow and deranged, something burning with pure malice.
They smiled as they stared at her, as if looking at their next prey.
“Captain…”
That voice was still calling her the way it always had.
“Captain… why aren’t you coming over? We caught them…”
“Come here… Come here…”
This was the second time in Wen Lianfeng’s life that she had been engulfed by absolute terror.
The first had been many years ago, when that woman had tried to drown her at sea. The suffocation, the feeling of death closing in inch by inch-she had thought she would never experience anything like it again.
But this time was different.
This time, it wasn’t just fear.
It was the most primal dread mankind felt toward the unknown, a terror rooted in the deepest recesses of the human soul.
People you knew. People you trusted. People you would willingly entrust your back to.
In a single instant, monsters had taken over their bodies.
“I ran.”
Wen Lianfeng’s voice had regained its calm, as though she were recounting something that had happened to someone else.
“I opened fire. Then I ran.”
She opened her eyes and looked at Qingshui and Chu Jingchu.
“I ran all the way down the fire stairs. Behind me, I could hear their footsteps and their laughter as they called out, ‘Captain.’ I didn’t dare look back. I didn’t dare stop. I didn’t dare think.”
“I don’t know how long they chased me. All I know is that by the time I burst out of the mall, the streets were already… in complete chaos.”
Her voice grew softer and softer.
“Screams. Maniacal laughter. Blood everywhere. Some people were running, others were chasing them, and some were crouched on the ground, gnawing on other people. Cars had crashed into one another, and flames towered into the sky. That world-the world I’d lived in for forty years-completely collapsed in that single moment.”
“After that… I joined forces with a group of survivors, and we escaped that hell. Then we headed to a military base I knew about.”
Wen Lianfeng lowered her eyes.
“By the time we arrived…”
She didn’t finish, but Qingshui had already guessed the answer.
Chu Jingchu asked the question for her. “What happened to the base?”
“It was practically deserted,” Wen Lianfeng said. “Only some of the soldiers assigned to remain behind were still there.”
She paused.
“They said that ten minutes earlier, they’d received a Level One Alert. Most of the police forces across East China had been urgently redeployed to North China for a classified mission.”
“A classified mission.”
Chu Jingchu repeated the words, an indescribable emotion in her voice.
Wen Lianfeng continued. “The next few days… were a nightmare. A nightmare none of us ever wanted to remember. There were Madmen outside and despair within. We were trapped in that base, guarding supplies we couldn’t take with us as we waited for help that might never come.”
“I tried to contact my superiors. I tried everyone-every single contact I knew.”
“Nothing.”
Her voice turned cold.
“Not a single response.”
“And it wasn’t just me. None of us-no one who still had working communications equipment-could reach anyone. The government, the military, the police, the fire department… all the institutions that should have responded had vanished off the face of the earth.”
As for Wen Lianfeng’s… friends overseas, the only response to her message had been a stream of utterly vile abuse. They cursed her like lunatics and told her to wait-they would come back and kill her.
Qingshui heard Chu Jingchu’s breathing grow heavier.
“A classified mission. No contact with our superiors. A national crisis.”
Wen Lianfeng enunciated each phrase, then looked at them.
“This wasn’t a biological weapon. No one did this deliberately.”
“This truly was a sudden disaster-one that came to slaughter humanity.”
A deathly silence fell over the room.
A long time passed before Wen Lianfeng spoke again.
“After fifteen days trapped at the base, I trusted that damned instinct of mine and decided to leave. I didn’t know where I would go, but I knew sitting there and waiting to die wasn’t my style.”
“On the day I left, I received one final message.”
She looked at Qingshui.
“It was from my superior.”
Qingshui said nothing.
“He said-”
Wen Lianfeng’s voice suddenly dropped to a whisper, as though she were revealing a secret that could not be spoken aloud.
“Humanity is finished.”
Four characters.
They sounded so weightless, yet they were like four massive boulders bearing down on everyone’s hearts.
Wen Lianfeng looked at Qingshui and Chu Jingchu, the corner of her mouth twitching faintly.
“Tell me,” she said. “What could throw every country into chaos in an instant? What could leave governments with no time to protect their people? What could keep the military from showing up for so long?”
“The Madmen?” She shook her head. “No. That’s not it.”
She stared at them.
“It was something even more terrifying than the Madmen.”