Her bones and flesh felt as though they were being pulled apart and reassembled, every drop of blood in her body roaring to burst free at once. Bone-deep cold and scorching heat chased each other through the very grain of her skin.
When pain reaches its absolute peak, a person can’t even make a sound.
Bai Long curled up into a ball, her already pale face turning ghastlier still, drained of all color.
Her breathing was so faint it seemed it might scatter into nothing the very next second.
She had no idea how much time passed. It wasn’t until a noisy clamor reached her ears that Bai Long felt the consciousness pain had torn loose finally settle back into her body.
Everything before her eyes was dim.
A reek of blood kept needling at her nerves, wave after wave.
Bai Long’s limply drooping fingers twitched. Her lips felt dry and cracked, and a sweet, bloody tang welled up in her throat.
Water…
The thought had barely formed when she felt something cool brush across her fingertips, and a moment later half her palm registered a flowing chill.
Forcing her exhausted eyes open, Bai Long saw a small pool of clear, transparent liquid beneath her right hand.
Before she could puzzle out what it was, a shaft of bright light suddenly poured down from overhead.
“There’s still someone alive in here!”
“Don’t be rash…”
Three figures stood in the doorway, fully armed, backlit, each holding a long blade that was obviously finely crafted.
They didn’t look like residents of the garbage planet.
Bai Long had no strength left. Lifting her head was about the most she could manage now.
She could only watch as one of the three, a man with a square, blocky face, pressed something that looked like a pistol-shaped device against the spot between her brows.
“Beep!”
A cold, mechanical tone sounded from the device.
“She’s a normal human.” The man’s tightly knitted brows eased, and his grip on the long blade loosened a little.
The girl in front of him was far too thin and small, and looked utterly harmless. Now that he’d confirmed she hadn’t mutated, his wariness naturally dropped a good deal.
“No one else here.” The other two armed men finished a sweep of the shop.
“There’s an old man. Dead.” The shorter of them tapped a finger to his own forehead, his gaze landing on Bai Long for an instant. “Probably snuck in here to hide…”
They didn’t think a girl as thin as a sheet of paper could have handled the old man on her own.
Old as he was, Old Tower had been all corded muscle, easily twice as broad as Bai Long.
An old man who could own his own shop on the garbage planet was bound to be no slouch in a fight.
The square-faced man paused before leaving, and said without turning around, “If you can still walk, get to the shelter on the east side of the city district.”
With that, he strode off.
The other two waiting outside gave Bai Long a careless glance, not the look you’d give someone gravely wounded, but more the look you’d give a heap of junk abandoned by the roadside.
“Saint of mercy over here, we don’t have time to care whether they live or die. Hurry up and finish this so we can head back.”
“This garbage planet is really no place for a human being. The air’s nothing but trash. I can’t stand one more second of it.”
Their words dripped with disgust.
The square-faced man said nothing more and quickly left with them.
“What’s the point of wasting words on her? She’s not going anywhere anyway…”
Bai Long lay where she was for a long while before she felt a little strength return to her body.
She propped herself up and looked out at the desolation outside.
To call it a hell on earth [1]“人間煉獄”, a living purgatory, a scene of unspeakable horror jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611438_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611438_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); would not have been an exaggeration.
The district’s buildings were splashed all over with deep-red blood, and here and there you could even see flecks of flesh stuck among the stains. Severed arms and broken limbs lay scattered everywhere [2]“七零八落”, strewn about in utter disarray jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611438_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611438_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, the blood long since congealed, the wounds as vivid as those left by a beast tearing into its prey.
She took a deep breath, and her mouth and nose were instantly flooded with the stench of blood. She wrinkled her nose, struggling against it.
Too strong…
This body of hers seemed to have very keen senses.
Bai Long picked up the medicine bottle that had fallen to the floor, her gaze settling on Old Tower’s twisted face.
His eyes bulged, fixed in death on a patch of ground in front of him, and the wound at his temple had crusted over into a deep-red scab.
Old Tower had been the only person on the garbage planet who ever spoke to the original owner of this body.
He… had been a good man.
Bai Long rubbed her fingers together, then dragged Old Tower’s already half-stiff, cold body behind the counter and tidied his clothes for him.
Having been alone since childhood, she could adapt quickly to any environment.
“Thud!” A muffled sound, and then Bai Long felt something lightly bump the tip of her foot.
A slim, pure-black bracelet, the star-ring Old Tower had been holding earlier.
The screen still rested on the last interface he’d been looking at: a rectangular, ticket-like object floating quietly in the air.
The star-ring could project a three-dimensional hologram.
The ticket looked perfectly ordinary, completely black except for a single emblem marked on its front.
The strange thing was that the star-ring hadn’t locked itself after leaving its owner. It was almost as if it had never had an owner at all.
This wasn’t Old Tower’s star-ring.
Bai Long realized it in a flash.
She thought for a moment, then slipped this star-ring onto her left wrist and Ximeng’s star-ring onto her right, covering both with her sleeve.
The electronic ticket hovering in the air vanished the instant it touched the fabric.
Bai Long tried to close Old Tower’s furiously staring eyes, but even using considerable force she couldn’t get them shut, if anything, she only risked damaging the body further.
She had no choice but to give up.
Once she’d recovered a little of her strength, Bai Long closed the door of Old Tower’s shop, sealing him in together with the business he’d run his whole life.
She gave the shop one last long look, bowed her head in silent mourning, then turned and ran out of the alley.
The city was in chaos now, so no one paid Bai Long any mind.
Her head was still foggy and heavy, and the scene before her eyes seemed veiled in a thin mist she couldn’t see clearly through.
Bai Long still remembered the shelter the square-faced man had mentioned, and forced herself alert enough to move eastward.
The din around her was constant. Here and there she could make out words like “sudden death,” “mutation,” “eating people.”
First Ximeng, then Old Tower…
Bai Long kept feeling there was something she’d overlooked, but her brain was a pile of mush and she couldn’t think of it.
She raised a hand to feel her forehead. It was scalding to the touch.
She had a fever.
Her whole body ached with a discomfort she couldn’t put into words.
The whole way along, severed limbs and broken arms lay everywhere, along with grotesque corpses, she couldn’t even tell whether they had been humans or monsters.
Although squads of armed men were clearing the monsters out of the district, people mutated after being bitten faster than the squads could clear them.
A “person” came staggering toward Bai Long.
Bare skin gone bruise-purple and bloody, eyeballs bulging and gone white, and a chewing sound that set her teeth on edge.
Although she couldn’t see clearly, Bai Long still recognized the figure as someone who had once shunned her as if she were a venomous snake.
This sour, mean-spirited middle-aged woman now stood with her mouth hanging open, mindless, sticky bloody drool dangling between her jagged teeth, a soaring stench pouring out of her mouth.
One of the woman’s hands was twisted at an unnatural angle, but she didn’t seem to notice at all, lunging at Bai Long at a speed that didn’t match her bloated frame.
Bai Long gritted her teeth and, forcing herself, twisted aside to dodge the lunge.
Missing once, the woman immediately wheeled around and charged at Bai Long again, swinging arms that hung loose and slack like rotting meat.
Waves of heat surged inside Bai Long’s body, only for currents of cold to rise up in turn.
It was as if some unknown force were ramming wildly through her body, searching for an exit it couldn’t find.
Bai Long tightened her grip on the blood-smeared dagger and thrust it up, jamming it hard against the woman’s gaping mouth.
Those beast-like, ferocious teeth were no more than a finger’s width from her.
Seeing that she’d failed to bite her prey, the woman let out a furious roar and swung both hands down at Bai Long.
The pitch-black nails were nearly half a palm long, nothing at all like a human hand.
The dagger sliced open a gash in the woman’s mouth, and the blood from the wound dripped onto Bai Long’s hand.
The blood was cold.
The half-congealed blood was more like the leftover blood remaining in a monster’s body from when it had been human, stripped of the warmth a human should have, nothing but a sticky smear.
The soft flesh of her mouth was cut open, yet the woman seemed to feel no pain, her assault not letting up in the slightest, fixing on Bai Long with all four limbs.
Bai Long had no strength left in her. Fending off that one blow had already drained most of what she had.
A few more rounds of this and she’d have nothing to do but wait to die.
She twisted around, dragging her injured leg as she struggled through the rubble, trying to put distance between herself and the woman using the stones and corpse-flesh on the ground.
The rasping, panting sound at her ear drew closer and closer, the stench almost enough to smother her.
The woman’s fangs were right at hand, and Bai Long instinctively reached out to block.
Just a little more…
Cold sweat dripped from Bai Long’s brow. She figured she probably wasn’t going to escape this one.
But in the next second, she watched the monster, no more than a hair’s breadth from her body, plant face-first into the ground, falling flat on its face hard [3]“狗吃屎”, literally “a dog eating shit,” to fall flat on one’s face jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611438_1_3').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611438_1_3', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
Bai Long: …
The monster: …
Bai Long didn’t dare linger even a moment. Her gaze flicked across the ground at the monster’s feet, and she dimly made out a patch of clear, bright liquid on the soft, rotted corpse-flesh, come from who knew where.
…where did the water come from?
She had no time to dwell on it, and pressed on toward the main road without stopping.
There were wary armed squads along the way.
Although it was only a few hundred meters, it took her a long time to get there.
They called it a shelter, but it was really nothing more than a square space thrown together from a few steel plates.
The space, twenty or thirty square meters, was crammed full of people, there wasn’t a foothold to be seen.
Each of the shelter’s steel plates was stamped with a mark. Bai Long glanced at it and thought it looked very familiar, though for the moment she couldn’t recall where she’d seen it.
A man at the entrance stared blankly at a single inch of ground in front of him, his face caked with blood, his whole body trembling, his clothes in tatters.
He wasn’t the only one. The vast majority of people in the shelter were just like him.
Bai Long’s face was still smeared with the blood and grime from grappling with the Old Tower monster, a tiny, scrawny thing, no different from those monsters.
So the moment she reached the entrance, she set off a chorus of screams from the people nearby.
“A monster! A monster’s coming!”
The numb, deadened crowd scattered like startled birds [4]“驚弓之鳥”, a bird startled by the mere twang of a bow, so frightened that the slightest thing sends it fleeing jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611438_1_4').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611438_1_4', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, bolting several yards from the entrance in the blink of an eye, forcibly packing themselves into a knot in the already crowded shelter.
They shoved and jostled, trying to get away from Bai Long, some of them even pushing small, frail children out of the crowd to buy themselves room to survive.
Bai Long only glanced at the trembling child, then pressed her lips together and walked to a corner of the shelter, leaning her scalding body against the cold steel plate, which sent a shiver through her.
Now the people finally caught on that Bai Long wasn’t a monster, and slowly drifted apart again in twos and threes.
“…did you manage to get a starship ticket?”
“As if it’s that easy… everyone’s scrambling for tickets now… even the ones to District 19 are gone…”
“Then what do we do?! Without a ticket, those Star Alliance people won’t care one bit whether we live or die! I don’t want to turn into a monster like that!”
“All right, stop yelling!” The speaker dropped his voice a little. “Keep it down… if it really comes to it, then…”
Drifting in and out of awareness, Bai Long faintly heard the voices around her rise and fall.
She frowned and rolled over, curling herself up even smaller.
Suddenly a piercing scream rang out right beside her, almost bursting her eardrums.
Bai Long’s nose twitched, and she instinctively snapped her eyes open and threw herself to the side.
In the spot she’d just left, a person had collapsed limp to the floor, the gash in their neck spurting blood like a fountain.
Most of the blood sprayed onto Bai Long’s feet, which had nowhere to hide.
“Someone’s been bitten!”
In the panic, someone screamed it at the top of their lungs, but the cry was quickly swallowed up by the people scattering in terror.
Bai Long’s mind still wasn’t clear, and she was swept along by the crowd, carried off to who knew where.
She forced her eyes open, trying to make her way toward the corner by the entrance.
Getting crushed in here was a dead end.
She didn’t want to die.
As she neared the entrance, a gunshot rang out overhead.
Thunder out of a clear sky, the crowd saw only that the raving monster had been shot dead with a single round. Several armed personnel stood at the entrance, their expressions cold and severe.
“Dispose of it.” The one who fired ran a cold eye over the panic-stricken crowd, his disgust plain to see.
Two or three of the armed men carried the device Bai Long had seen before, and ran a check over everyone in the shelter.
The rest of the armed men all stood outside the shelter, not setting one foot inside, as though it held some kind of garbage.
The armed men left, taking the rotted-meat monster on the ground and the dead with them.
“The starship’s a few hours out. Pack up and get ready to pull out.”
“Finally getting off this lousy rock…”
“…the brass up top just do whatever pops into their heads, and in the end it’s us who suffer for it. We’ve searched all this time and still barely turned up any espers…”
The armed men’s voices grew fainter as they moved off.
Bai Long was still wondering what those espers they’d mentioned were, when she suddenly felt a tight grip clamp on her left hand.
She raised her head to see a man with a ferocious face seizing her wrist in a death grip.
“Give it to me…”
“Give me the ticket!”
References[+]