Chapter 50
Chapter 50
“This way… Hurry!”
A familiar, hoarse voice sounded right beside her ear, thick with urgency. A hand clamped around her arm and practically dragged her along as they stumbled behind a half-collapsed slab of concrete.
Harsh panting echoed through the cramped space. Qingshui couldn’t tell whose it was.
Her hands were shaking. She felt around the body of the person beside her, and her fingers came away slick with warm blood.
“Sister Fang…?” Her voice was painfully dry.
“Shh… Keep it down…” Sister Fang leaned against her, breathing unevenly, yet still tried to summon her usual smile. Her voice was barely a whisper, each phrase coming in fits and starts. “I’m fine… Just a graze… Let me catch my breath…”
Qingshui didn’t believe her. The overpowering stench of blood told a different story. She frantically searched Sister Fang’s body, only for her hands to come away stained a glaring red wherever she touched.
She yanked the gauze from her pocket and fumbled to press it against the wound, wrapping it as fast as she could. But the cloth was soaked through almost at once. Warm, bright-red blood kept welling between her fingers, carrying away Sister Fang’s warmth and life with it.
“Don’t… Don’t waste your strength…” Sister Fang gently laid a hand over hers. It was deathly cold.
She coughed, and more dark-red blood spilled from the corner of her mouth. Her voice grew faint and hazy, as though drifting in from somewhere far away. “Sorry… Xiao Qingshui… I don’t think… I’m going to make it… this time…”
“No! Stop talking! Save your strength!” A sob crept into Qingshui’s voice without her realizing it. Her hands moved even more frantically, but all she accomplished was staining more strips of cloth red.
Despair rose like a freezing tide, swallowing her heart inch by inch.
Sister Fang seemed to smile, her breathing weakening further. “Listen to me… I… can’t walk anymore… They’ll smell the blood… They’ll be here soon…”
“That doesn’t matter! I can carry you!” Qingshui babbled.
“Then… neither of us will make it out alive.”
“We will. No, didn’t we promise? We’d never abandon each other, never give up…”
“I’ve been bitten,” Sister Fang said.
“No… No!” Qingshui practically screamed. At last, tears spilled down her cheeks, mingling with the filthy blood smeared across her face. “I have medicine! I’ll go find it! Wait for me! Please, just wait for me! Please, hold on a little longer! I can save you!”
“Qingshui…” Sister Fang cut her off. For one fleeting moment, her voice became clear, filled with an almost cruel calm. “Kill me.”
Qingshui went rigid. Her hands froze.
“While I’m still myself… make it quick… Don’t let me… turn into one of those things…” Sister Fang’s voice faded once more, carrying both a plea and a sense of release. “You… can do that… can’t you?”
Trembling, Sister Fang pulled up one corner of her already tattered pant leg.
Just above her ankle was a vicious bite wound so deep that bone showed through. A web of fine black veins was already spreading from the wound up her calf.
It wasn’t a graze. It wasn’t a stray bullet.
It was the infection.
An infection with no cure.
In that instant, every sound receded into the distance. The world became a silent expanse of gray and white. Every hope Qingshui had clung to now seemed so feeble, so laughable.
“Qingshui…” Sister Fang called again. “Do it.”
Silence stretched between them, long and suffocating.
Qingshui bowed her head, her shoulders shaking violently. She took her hand away from the wound, then gently wrapped her arms around Sister Fang.
She could still feel the last traces of warmth in Sister Fang’s body. She could smell that familiar mixture of gunpowder and sweat clinging to her. And she could feel the life within that body slipping away, never to return.
I’m sorry.
She said the words silently in her heart.
She slipped both arms around Sister Fang’s neck and crossed them. After a moment’s hesitation, she wrenched her wrists in opposite directions with sudden force…
Crack.
The body in her arms went rigid, then fell completely limp. Sister Fang’s head drooped lifelessly against her shoulder.
It was done.
She had ended the life of the companion she trusted most with her own hands.
Emptiness.
A vast emptiness engulfed her in an instant. There was no relief, only a deeper cold and the sensation of plummeting into an abyss. She clutched the body as its warmth slowly faded and curled in on herself.
Tears poured silently down her face, but she couldn’t make a sound.
Then…
“Why…”
A faint voice suddenly whispered right beside her ear.
“…didn’t you even try to save me?”
Her body went rigid.
“Why?”
“Qingshui, why didn’t you try a little harder?”
No… That wasn’t true… She had already…
Qingshui trembled all over as she slowly raised her head.
The weight in her arms remained, but it felt different. It was no longer the familiar woman, but something lighter, something more… broken.
She looked down.
The “person” in her arms was dressed in rags, her body twisted at a grotesque, unnatural angle. Where her abdomen should have been… there was nothing. Only a huge, gruesome cavity, black and dark red inside, completely empty.
And that face… It was deathly pale, contorted in agony and despair.
Disheveled black hair clung to her forehead, but those eyes… those slightly upturned, fox-like eyes stared at her in despair. Tears mingled with blood and streamed endlessly from their corners.
“Dorm Leader…?” Qingshui murmured blankly, her voice no louder than a whisper in a dream.
“Qingshui…” Li Wei’an’s lips moved. Her voice was barely audible, yet every word came through clearly, laden with endless hurt and accusation. “It hurts so much… It hurts…”
“Where does it hurt?” Qingshui asked instinctively, her voice dry and strained.
“My stomach…” The girl’s gaze drifted out of focus. “They… cut my stomach open… They cut off my arms and legs… It hurts… It really hurts… Why didn’t you…”
“Why didn’t you come save me?”
Her voice abruptly turned shrill, brimming with resentment and disbelief.
“Why didn’t you come save me?!”
“Why?!”
Each accusation left Qingshui at a loss.
I… I…
“Qing… shui?”
“Qingshui!”
The voice had changed. It was no longer the anguished accusation from her dream, but a soft call tinged with hesitation and concern.
The scene before her shattered and peeled away like fragments of a broken mirror. The darkness receded, and the searing pain and icy cold vanished. In their place came the damp chill of the cave, the rough stone beneath her, and a face filled with worry.
It was An Xiaolin.
She was crouching in front of Qingshui, one hand still suspended in midair as though she had just been about to shake her awake. She looked unwell too, with dark circles beneath her eyes, but her gaze was full of concern.
“Qingshui, did you have a nightmare?” An Xiaolin asked softly.
A nightmare…
Qingshui blinked. The final, agonized accusation and those tear-filled fox-like eyes still lingered in her mind, sending a sharp palpitation through her chest. Her throat bobbed. Her mouth felt parched, and an oppressive tightness weighed on her chest.
“No. I didn’t.” She heard her own voice, hoarse and calm, betraying no emotion. Bracing herself with one arm, she sat upright and avoided An Xiaolin’s searching gaze.
An Xiaolin slowly withdrew her hand. After a moment of silence, she said quietly, “I heard you… calling for Dorm Leader.”
For an instant, the air inside the cave seemed to freeze.
Even Lin Hao, who had been leaning against the opposite wall with Pingping in his arms and pretending to sleep, snapped his eyes open and looked over.
Silence.
A suffocating silence.
Li Wei’an was dead.
Fleeing for their lives, struggling to survive, facing one crisis after another… They had been given no time to grieve, to confirm it, or even… to truly believe it.
It felt more like a vague piece of terrible news from somewhere far away, carrying an air of unreality.
As long as they did not touch upon it or speak of it, the Dorm Leader who always smiled so gently and took such good care of everyone had merely fallen behind for a while. Perhaps she would come running around the next corner, out of breath, complaining, “You guys ran too fast.”
But now, hearing Qingshui unconsciously call out for her in her sleep, An Xiaolin felt as though she had finally awakened from a dream.
Li Wei’an… was really dead.
Qingshui lowered her eyes. She did not respond to An Xiaolin, nor did she know how.
Instead, she instinctively raised her head and looked outside through the gaps in the sparse branches and leaves covering the cave entrance.
Day had fully broken.
Pale daylight filtered into the cave, bright enough to make out the branches near the entrance.
“Go?”
Lin Hao’s voice broke the silence.
“Go.”
With that one word, she rose first and headed toward the cave entrance where daylight streamed in.