Chapter 87

Chapter 87

“…If…”

“…this is the end of the world…”

Darkness surrounded her, but it wasn’t an absolute void. Something warm was pressed tightly against her.

“Would you… be with me…?”

“I would.”

She heard her own voice, firm and resolute, as though the answer had long been engraved into the depths of her soul and required no thought at all.

The instant the words left her mouth, the warmth surrounding her abruptly tightened.

It was an embrace.

An embrace given with every last ounce of strength. Arms wound around her neck and shoulders, holding her so tightly it was as if they wanted to merge into each other’s flesh and bones, all to resist something.

Such sorrow.

An indescribable grief surged into her heart and spread through every inch of her body.

It was so crushingly heavy that she could barely breathe. Her eyes stung with unshed tears, yet she had no idea why.

Who was it?

Who was holding her?

She struggled, trying to turn her head and see the face buried against the crook of her neck.

All she could make out was a blurred silhouette and soft hair brushing against her cheek. She couldn’t see their features. No matter how hard she tried, they remained indistinct. All she felt was an overwhelming familiarity that made her heart spasm with pain.

Why?

Why did this person fill her with such unbearable sorrow? It felt as though she had lost her most precious treasure, as though she had watched something shatter before her very eyes without even having time to beg it to stay.

“Wait… Let me see you…”

She heard her own hoarse plea as she pressed both hands against the person’s shoulders, trying to loosen the suffocating embrace. Even the smallest gap would be enough, so long as she could see that face.

But they were holding her too tightly.

Those arms clung to her with the desperate tenacity of someone on the brink of death. She could even feel the faint tremors running through the other person’s body.

“Qingshui?! Qingshui!”

Another voice suddenly broke in from somewhere far away, piercing the darkness, thick and heavy with sorrow.

No… Don’t call me. Wait. Just give me a little more time. Just a little…

She fought the embrace even harder, her fingertips digging into the person’s shoulders. At last, under her persistent struggle, the warmth pressed against her loosened slightly.

Seizing the chance, she jerked her head back, desperately trying to focus her vision.

Just as the face was about to come into view, the warmth in her arms abruptly vanished.

It hadn’t let go. It had disappeared.

In an instant, the physical form dissolved into nothingness. All that remained was her empty embrace and the grief that threatened to tear her apart.

“No!”

……..

“Cough! Cough, cough, cough!”

Racking coughs tore Qingshui from the shattered remnants of her dream.

Her eyes flew open to a dim forest. Her stomach convulsed violently, and she couldn’t stop herself from turning her head and vomiting.

Frigid air flooded her lungs, making her cough even harder. Each cough pulled at wounds all over her aching body, sending her vision flickering into darkness.

“Qingshui! You’re awake! How do you feel?!” A hoarse, urgent voice rang beside her, filled with panic and relief.

It was Lin Hao.

Qingshui turned her head with difficulty and saw Lin Hao kneeling beside her. Scrapes and bruises covered his face and every patch of exposed skin, while his lips had turned purple from the cold.

His eyes were red and bloodshot. He held out a hand as though he wanted to pat her back, but he didn’t dare touch her. It hovered in midair, trembling faintly.

Qingshui dry-heaved several more times until there was nothing left to bring up. Then she planted her hands against the cold, slippery ground and tried to sit up. Lin Hao immediately reached out to support her.

“I’m… I’m fine.”

Qingshui waved him off to show she could manage. She drew several deep breaths of icy air, forcing her chaotic thoughts and the lingering pain of the dream down into the depths of her heart.

Now wasn’t the time to dwell on that sorrowful embrace.

Supporting each other, she and Lin Hao struggled all the way to their feet.

Looking around, they found themselves in an unfamiliar area. The bridge was nowhere in sight. Only the river remained, surging past not far away.

They had probably been swept downstream.

Both of them were soaked through. Their clothes clung to their bodies, saturated with water, heavy and freezing as they steadily leeched away their body heat. They shivered uncontrollably, their teeth chattering.

“We need to… wring out our clothes,” Qingshui said haltingly, her lips stiff with cold.

Lin Hao nodded. They walked over to a relatively flat boulder and began laboriously wringing the water from their clothes.

Even after working at it for some time, their clothes were still damp, but at least they had stopped dripping. Instead of being drenched and freezing against their skin, they were now merely clammy and cold.

Lin Hao stopped and looked at Qingshui. His voice was low, trembling despite his best efforts to keep it under control. “After the explosion sent me flying, I fell into the river. I don’t know how long the current carried me. When I woke up, I was lying on this stretch of riverbank. I… I followed the shore for a long time before I… before I saw you lying there.”

He fell silent for so long that Qingshui thought he had finished.

Then, even more quietly, he asked, “Qingshui… do you think they’re… still alive?”

It sounded like both a question and a plea.

Qingshui’s hands stilled around the hem of her shirt. She looked down at the backs of her hands, likewise covered in tiny cuts and grime, and remembered the terrible state their companions had been in.
After an explosion like that… after plunging from such a high bridge into the raging current…

The fact that she and Lin Hao had survived and washed ashore here was already a stroke of luck so improbable it bordered on a miracle.

As for the others…

Qingshui did not answer. She slowly lowered her hand, turned, and looked at Lin Hao. His eyes were even redder than before. Tears swirled in them, but he stubbornly refused to let them fall.

Qingshui averted her gaze and silently shook her head.

The light in Lin Hao’s eyes went out in an instant. He lowered his head and sniffed hard, then roughly scrubbed a hand across his face, violently wiping away both the unshed tears and the emotions he could barely contain.

“Let’s go.” Qingshui’s voice returned to its usual cold, hard tone. “We can’t stay here.”

Lin Hao nodded in silence.

Neither of them said anything more. They checked what little equipment they had left.

Qingshui’s handgun was gone, probably lost in the river. All she had left was her military dagger, while Lin Hao had only a knife.

Everything else, including their backpacks, had been swallowed by the river.

They left the riverbank and headed uphill into the forest. Every step was agonizing. The ground was cold and slippery, and their icy, sodden clothes rubbed against their wounds, sending unrelenting pain through them. Their strength was almost completely spent, and their vision blurred from time to time.

They trudged onward in silence. After an unknown length of time, the terrain gradually began to rise.

They followed an extremely narrow trail uphill. From the higher ground, they could just make out vague shapes below, though they could not tell whether they were villages, towns, or more forest.

Just as they were about to step onto a stretch of level road, a smell drifted from up ahead. The rich aroma of roasting fat mingled with an overpowering stench of blood, creating a nauseating odor.

Both of them froze.

There were “people” in the clearing ahead.

No. Madmen.

Seven or eight Madmen in tattered clothes sat around a small fire. A makeshift spit had been erected over the flames.

Two human bodies were roasting on it.

They had been bound in horribly contorted positions, their limbs bent backward and their heads hanging low. Smoke and flame had charred their skin black. Parts of it had already split open, exposing dark red muscle and yellow fat beneath.

The way they had been trussed up… made them look disturbingly like pigs that had been gutted and hung over a fire to roast.

One of the Madmen held a sharpened stick and grinned as it prodded a split in one of the charred bodies, watching the fat ooze out.

As for the other body…

Qingshui stopped breathing. Her blood seemed to freeze in her veins.

That body was clearly much smaller and thinner. Its skin had been peeled off in one piece and casually hung from a nearby shrub like a tattered red raincoat.

It swayed gently in the dim light and faint breeze.

That size. That outline…

It looked like…

A far more horrifying possibility leaped into Qingshui’s mind and sank its teeth into her nerves.

That timid girl who had always followed Lin Hao around, protected by him…

Lin Hao stood half a step ahead of her and to the side. Qingshui could clearly see his entire back tense and the veins bulge along his neck.

His eyes were stretched impossibly wide, almost bulging from their sockets as he stared fixedly at the flayed body.

The hope they had clung to shattered before this scene of unimaginable cruelty. Only despair remained, enveloping them completely.

A sharp pain stabbed through Qingshui’s heart. She gritted her teeth. Reason told her she could not keep looking.

Leave.

Leave now!

Summoning every last ounce of strength, Qingshui reached out with a cold, stiff hand and clamped it around Lin Hao’s trembling arm. Her nails dug deep into his flesh.

Lin Hao jerked, then turned to look at her. There was no anger in his eyes. No despair. Only the stillness of stagnant water, so profound it seemed capable of pulling her in.

“That’s not Pingping.”

“She’s really good at hide-and-seek. No one can find her.”

His voice was utterly flat, as though the man whose neck had been corded with bulging veins moments before had not been him at all.

As Qingshui looked at his face, a sudden chill raced up her spine.

Lin Hao seized Qingshui’s wrist with terrifying force, turned, and silently retreated. Practically dragging her behind him, he stumbled away in another direction.

Driven by despair and instinct, they fled aimlessly downhill, toward the gentler terrain.

They had no destination. Only one thought remained: get away.

Thorns tore their skin. Branches whipped across their faces. Whenever they fell, they scrambled back up. It was as though they could no longer feel pain. Only their hearts pounded heavily inside their hollow chests, reminding them they were still alive.

They lost count of how many times they fell and how long they had been forcing their way through the forest before the view suddenly opened up.

The dense woods ended, giving way to a gradually flattening slope. Farther ahead, the outlines of a long stretch of low buildings emerged beneath the paling sky.

It was a town.

Or rather, several small villages clustered close together.

Most of the houses were low and old-fashioned.

They stopped at the edge of the woods and took cover behind several large trees, warily observing the villages below.

Everything was deathly still. There were no lights and no voices. But the bloodstains everywhere served as a grim reminder of what had once happened here.