Chapter 80
Chapter 80
The six of them stood on the highway’s frigid shoulder, facing a wall of steel that stretched beyond sight.
Behind them lay dozens of kilometers of road.
They had no choice.
“Let’s go. Into the woods,” Qingshui said, breaking the silence. She settled the rifle across her back and attached several grenades where she could reach them most easily. “Follow the highway. Don’t go too deep, and keep the road in sight. Watch above and below.”
The group set out once more. In silence, they climbed over the guardrail and entered the pitch-black woods beside the highway.
The ground beneath their feet was soft, swallowing nearly every sound they made, but its treacherous give left them uneasy. They kept as close to the edge of the woods as possible so they could still see the road, yet their gazes kept straying toward the enormous vehicle graveyard beside them.
Through the warped windows, they could glimpse what remained inside some of the vehicles.
There were bodies crushed beyond recognition and embedded in twisted car doors, with half an arm dangling from a window. Other cars had been flattened into metal pancakes, their roofs completely caved in, leaving only spreading bloodstains visible.
There was nothing alive. At least, nothing that moved.
Still, fear clung to them. They dreaded that their passing might disturb something.
Lin Hao supported Chen Yuhui, choosing the flattest ground he could find with each step. Zhou Yaping followed close behind him, clutching the hem of his shirt as her eyes drifted toward the underside of a nearby car.
A pair of lifeless eyes belonging to a child stared back at her.
The little girl lay curled quietly in a pool of blood, her long-faded eyes meeting Zhou Yaping’s gaze.
Zhou Yaping immediately looked away and tightened her grip on Lin Hao’s shirt.
An Xiaolin and Ji Feifan guarded opposite sides at the front and rear of the group, their muzzles trained in different directions as they moved with slow, careful steps.
After about half an hour, they finally reached the end of the seemingly endless traffic jam.
At its head, a shipping container truck more than ten meters long lay overturned, its container badly deformed.
Qingshui looked away and continued leading the others forward.
Up ahead, the mountain forest ended abruptly at another valley.
“Back to the highway.”
Qingshui was the first to climb over the guardrail. The others followed close behind.
Without the cover of the trees, they felt like cicadas stripped of their shells, utterly exposed beneath the vast, empty sky. The highway ahead remained impossibly long, stretching all the way to the horizon.
They seemed as tiny as ants, condemned to crawl endlessly along the sprawling road.
Walking became dull and numbing once again. Their feet rose and fell mechanically.
Pain, exhaustion, hunger, thirst. Every sensation gradually dulled until only one hazy thought remained:
Forward.
Forward.
Forward.
At some point, the black sky began to pale, turning a murky leaden gray.
Clouds blanketed the sky, shrouding the entire world in gloom.
“Rest.”
Qingshui finally spoke, her voice hoarse. The group reentered the woods and found a hollow in the ground.
An Xiaolin immediately took first watch. Everyone else practically collapsed where they stood, silently taking out water and sipping it in tiny mouthfuls as they chewed on hard, cold compressed rations.
Chen Yuhui carefully rolled up her pant leg and expertly bandaged her wound.
An hour passed amid tense rest and rotating watches. The daylight grew a little brighter, but no one relaxed.
“Move.”
The group set out again.
More walking. Endless walking.
The woods beside them gradually thinned, replaced by tall gray-brown hills. Road signs appeared from time to time, bearing unfamiliar, faraway place names. The distances listed beneath them seemed to have lost all meaning.
Their sense of time blurred completely.
Two hours?
Three?
Only the growing weight of each step and the searing pain in their throats felt real.
Another road sign passed overhead. Chen Yuhui finally couldn’t hold back any longer. Exhaustion weighed heavily on her voice. “How much… farther?”
Lin Hao stopped and stared blankly at the nearly identical hills and highway surrounding them. He licked his cracked, bleeding lips and answered in an equally parched voice, “Maybe… more than a hundred kilometers.”
Despair rose around them like an icy tide.
Just then, Qingshui, who was leading the group, stopped without warning.
She raised her head and looked up at the sky.
Everyone instinctively followed her gaze.
And then they saw it.
At some point, a rift had opened in the suffocating blanket of clouds that had loomed over them all this time.
Brilliant, almost blinding golden-red light poured through the opening in a mighty torrent, setting every cloud around it ablaze in an instant.
The gloom was ruthlessly swept away. The sky became a vast canvas splashed with the most dazzling colors imaginable.
Fiery orange, rosy violet, and molten gold bled into one another. Those glorious colors shone in everyone’s vacant eyes, casting an unreal glow over their filthy, exhausted faces.
It was breathtakingly beautiful. Beautiful… and utterly out of place.
An Xiaolin simply stood there with her head tilted back, staring in a daze.
Even the rifle in her hands seemed to grow lighter.
For one fleeting moment, the shrill alarms in her mind vanished completely. Her nose was no longer filled with the stench of blood and fear, but with the crisp, clean air of the mountains at dawn.
The deathly silence and howling wind faded from her ears, replaced by the sounds of an ordinary spring day.
It almost felt as though… she wasn’t fleeing for her life down a road into the unknown, but taking a grueling yet joyful hike with her friends.
There would be laughter and happiness waiting at the end, not more madness and death.
The thought was so unexpected that it caught even her off guard.
It had been a long time since she had felt anything resembling hope. Ever since childhood, her world had revolved around calculation and competition.
In a large family that valued sons over daughters, her parents’ attention and their limited resources were prizes to be fought over.
She couldn’t wheedle and throw tantrums like her siblings, nor would she waste time on something as pointless and unrewarding as “playing.”
Instead, she learned to read the room, took on the most exhausting chores, and earned the best grades.
Whenever relatives came to visit and said, “Xiaolin is such a sensible girl. She’s bound to make something of herself, earn lots of money, and take good care of you two someday,” the calculating approval on her parents’ faces was the trophy she had won.
And she had indeed won.
She got into a prestigious high school, then a good university, leaving far behind the siblings who knew only how to take.
Her parents also became far more generous with their “investment” in her.
But once she entered university and escaped that suffocating home, she discovered that she had long since lost both the ability and the desire to have fun.
Her time still wasn’t her own.
Studying, working part-time, earning certifications, cultivating “useful” connections.
Everything she did had a clear objective.
She hated the insecurity that came with poverty, so she desperately grasped at anything she could convert into money or an advantage.
Her parents were selfish, and it seemed she had inherited that trait from them.
She habitually wore a mask of sweet, sensible obedience around everyone. Aside from the handful of “friends” who offered tangible benefits, she cared about no one.
No one except Qingshui.
She remembered how, from a position of condescension, she had occasionally bestowed a little “kindness” on her. She would remind Qingshui to bring her textbooks or teach her how to use an app on her phone. Back then, she had thought Qingshui slow and troublesome, yet strangely difficult to dislike.
Because around her, An Xiaolin could experience a rare sense of superiority and satisfaction.
But now…
An Xiaolin slowly lowered her gaze from the dazzling, almost unreal sky to the figure ahead.
That figure was already moving.
The magnificent morning light gilded her dust-streaked hair, and her back was as straight as ever. It was as though she had never known fear and would never know defeat.
This was the same girl An Xiaolin had once instinctively pitied and helped. Yet in this hellish apocalypse, Qingshui had dragged them back from the brink of death time and again with her nearly ruthless decisiveness and unbelievable skill.
Without a word, she shouldered the heaviest burden and faced the greatest dangers, yet never once considered leaving them behind.
Fate truly was… the cruelest joke of all.
An Xiaolin had fought desperately to escape the mire of her family, but the “success” and “freedom” she had yearned for had crumbled to dust the instant the apocalypse arrived.
Meanwhile, the sunrises she had once been too busy to see and the simple friendship she had never bothered to nurture had entered her life in the most profound way possible, here on this desperate road of flight.
A storm of indescribably complicated emotions welled up in An Xiaolin’s chest.
Silently, she looked away, tightened her grip on her rifle, and followed the figure ahead.
The group began moving once more.