“Give me the starship ticket!”
Bai Long’s wrist was wrenched backward.
The ferocious-faced man clamped down on the star-ring at her wrist, gripping so hard he nearly snapped the bone.
In the earlier chaos he’d seen it, the star-ring that had flashed for an instant inside Bai Long’s sleeve, and the starship ticket on it.
Bai Long hadn’t yet registered the star-ring as hers, so for now it was no different from an ordinary bracelet, hanging loose and slack on her wrist, unable to fit and lock itself automatically.
The man’s shouting drew the attention of several people nearby, and, as if some switch in their brains had been flipped, they all came swarming over at once [1]“一窩蜂”, like a swarm of bees, everyone rushing in together in a disorderly crowd jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611440_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611440_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
“Get lost! The starship ticket is mine!”
“Pin her down! Don’t let her get away!”
The news of a starship ticket dropped like a bomb. The shelter’s people, deathly still a moment ago, seemed to seize on it like the last straw, shoving and scrambling over one another to charge in Bai Long’s direction.
“…as long as I have a starship ticket, I can survive…”
“I have to get on the starship that’s leaving…”
Someone murmured it half-consciously, gaze locked onto Bai Long’s wrist, then pounced like a ravenous wolf.
The man who’d grabbed Bai Long first was thin and slight, but his will to survive let him erupt with tremendous strength, forcibly wedging himself into the very center of the encircling crowd.
Amid the shoving, someone had long since recognized that the person with the starship ticket was Bai Long, that little monster they’d once trampled underfoot.
“You sickly little wretch, you’re not going to last much longer anyway, so why not hand the chance over to me!”
Bai Long knew full well that if this kept up she’d be beaten to death, or else crushed to death. She made up her mind on the spot, snapped her wrist to catch the star-ring in her palm, and without the slightest hesitation hurled it away.
The star-ring carved an arc through the air like a frisbee, sailing over the surging sea of heads below, heads writhing about like a tangle of loaches, and flew off into the distance.
The people who’d been crowding around Bai Long instantly whipped their heads around and surged after the frisbee… the star-ring.
“Phew…” Bai Long let out a long breath. While they were busy fighting over the star-ring and paying her no attention, she slipped out of the shelter from the corner.
Those people had no idea at all that she’d already left the shelter, their every bit of attention was fixed on that pitiable star-ring.
The smell of blood gradually spread through the shelter, and the muffled thudding of flesh against flesh didn’t slowly subside until long afterward.
The person who finally succeeded in grabbing the star-ring spat out a mouthful of blood, a tooth rolling out onto the ground with it, the thick reek of blood spreading across the floor.
That man, his face battered and swollen and bleeding, opened the star-ring, and at the sight of the starship ticket inside he broke into a bloody, sinister grin through the gap in his teeth.
He lifted his head, meaning to teach Bai Long a lesson, only to find she had long since vanished without a trace.
“Damned sickly wretch…” The man panted heavily. He thought about going out to find her, but then remembered those monsters, and could only sit back down in the shelter, seething, waiting for a later chance to catch her.
At his feet, the person too badly hurt to rise lay collapsed on the ground, dead or alive no one could say.
A pair of armed men switching shifts near the shelter noticed the carnage inside, and once they understood the situation, sneered.
“True to form for the garbage planet… they didn’t get eaten by zombies, but they turned on each other first…”
“The apocalypse is here… even with starship tickets, not one of these people is going to make it out alive…”
…
Bai Long braced herself against the shelter’s outer wall and edged her way out, inch by inch.
Her whole body felt as if it were steeped in boiling water, hot and heavy.
She made it around to the rear of the shelter and finally, in a corner crevice between the steel plate and the wall, couldn’t hold on any longer and passed out.
Her body was so hot, so miserable.
Curled in the shadow of the crevice, Bai Long still didn’t dare relax completely.
Drifting in and out of awareness, she felt as if she were wrapped inside a ball of water, yet with no sense of suffocation at all.
The water, which should have been freezing cold, felt to her… like a warm nest, granting her a moment’s peace.
Within the liquid, Bai Long faintly sensed that something about her body was off, but she couldn’t quite place it.
Outside there was noise and confusion, the footsteps of passing people mingling with the snarls of monsters.
The sound of monsters tearing into flesh carried on the wind, the smell of blood washing over in surge after surge like rolling waves.
It all seemed very far away from Bai Long.
A streak of golden light flashed across her mind, blazing and dazzling.
Before Bai Long could see what lay behind that light, a fresh breeze brushed past and she opened her eyes.
Darkness lay before her. Only after a few breaths did she slowly adjust to it and register where she was.
The moon had climbed to the treetops, it was already deep night.
Bai Long was just about to get up when she suddenly froze halfway.
It seemed… something somewhere wasn’t right…?
She sat dazed for a few seconds, then turned her head, bit by bit, to look behind her.
A soft, yellow, long thing barged stiffly straight into her line of sight.
Expressionless, Bai Long stared at the thing sprouting from her own tailbone. Her mind went blank for a moment, she even wondered whether she still wasn’t fully awake and was simply dreaming.
What was this thing?
Before she could reach out to grab it, the tail-like thing moved on its own to her front, the tip flicking and tracing a little circle.
As if it could understand what she meant.
This tail wasn’t a bright yellow but rather a dingy, grayish yellow, looking like it belonged to some mongrel beast, a good match, actually, for the grimy clothes on her body.
It dawned on Bai Long, belatedly, that the original owner of this body…
might not have been human.
It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t recognized it right away. Bai Long had lived all those years as a thoroughly, genuinely human being, she’d never imagined she’d transmigrate and get to experience a nonhuman body firsthand.
The original owner’s memories arrived, fashionably late.
She really wasn’t human.
To be precise, she was a beastwoman.
In this world, people were divided into pure humans and beastkin.
A beastman’s extraordinary ___ physique was what had kept the original owner alive at these people’s hands all these years, but it was also her status as a beastman orphan that had made her suffer over a decade of inhuman treatment.
A frail, sickly beastman was, without question, the perfect outlet for these people to vent their feelings on.
But nothing in the original owner’s memories said what breed she was.
The original owner had even, at one point, suspected she was some kind of ape or monkey beastkin.
Bai Long stared at the tail for a long while, then slowly reached out a hand.
At a single stirring of her mind, a thread of water trickled out from between her fingers.
Like a tap running dry, the water that trickled out vanished in a blink, just a tiny dribble.
How to put it…
It was pretty hilarious.
Bai Long’s sense of her own species went from unidentified ape to unidentified water-snake.
Based on her many years of experience…
she was, possibly… a little snake spirit.
Bai Long did some experimenting and found that all five of her fingers could trickle out water, but only to the degree of a little squirt gun, enough to dampen just under half a corner of her clothes.
Setting aside this joke of a beast-transformation and her baffling finger squirt-guns, Bai Long took a look at her surroundings, then wound the restless tail behind her tightly around her waist and tucked it away, hiding it under the loose hem of her clothes so it didn’t stand out.
Gripping the dagger, she edged out of the corner.
A wan moon hung in the sky, its light falling on the ground with an inexplicable chill.
All that remained in the shelter were cold corpses, the people beaten to death just now in the scramble for the star-ring.
Apart from them, every other living person was gone.
Bai Long didn’t find the star-ring, and realized they must have gone to board the starship.
The bloody footprints on the ground nearby were still fresh, the shelter’s people must have only just left.
She had no starship, but Bai Long had once seen, from a distance, that enormous thing descend onto the garbage planet.
Starships were what other people called the privilege of upper-class folk, and they rarely appeared on the garbage planet, so the original owner remembered it vividly.
Once she’d thought it through, Bai Long quickly knew which way to go.
There was only one place on the garbage planet with the conditions to dock a starship—
, the huge open lot beside the dump.
But to get there, she’d have to cross most of the city district and climb over any number of garbage mountains.
There was no telling how many monsters still lay in wait.
The one consolation was that her injured leg, for some reason, had healed completely since she’d woken, at the very least, moving around was no longer a problem.
Bai Long pressed a hand to her chest and started walking.
Throughout the district, miserably mangled corpses could be seen everywhere, most of them already torn apart. The ground and walls were covered in dark, dried bloodstains, with no sign at all of anything living.
Bai Long kept close to a wall as she advanced, most of her attention on the open side, on guard against any monster that might suddenly come rushing out.
There weren’t many monsters left in the district, she guessed the armed men must have cleared them out.
But she didn’t dare let her guard down the whole way along.
Near the district exit, a small child in a dainty little suit was wandering about, already bitten and turned into a monster.
Probably because it was so small that it lacked any real attacking power, the armed men had overlooked it.
Bai Long dealt with the child-monster with her dagger, paused a moment, then left the district.
The district, where neon lights used to flash at night, was now silent and dim, with only the whoosh of the wind sweeping past.
She felt no attachment to it, and ran resolutely off in a certain direction.
…
At the starship’s landing site, a silver, streamlined starship, easily half the size of a sports field, sat quietly on the open lot.
In front of the starship the crowd had separated into several clearly demarcated groups [2]“泾渭分明”, distinct as the clear Jing and the muddy Wei rivers, sharply divided jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611440_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611440_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
Four or five armed men stood gun in hand at the boarding hatch, their muzzles trained on the long line stretching out before it.
“Those with tickets, line up one by one for inspection.”
Luo Yan, the one who had shot the mutated monster dead earlier at the shelter, said coldly.
He wore sharp, trim combat gear, the collar at his throat hanging slightly open.
The dark muzzle of his gun slid over the bodies of the people in line, making everyone it passed over flinch instinctively and bow their heads, not daring to move.
Just a short while before, someone without a ticket had tried to force their way onto the starship, and Luo Yan had put a bullet in him without a moment’s hesitation.
At the sight of that head crushed beneath his boot, eyes still staring in death, refusing to close [3]“死不瞑目”, to die with one’s eyes open, unable to rest in peace over some unfinished business or injustice jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611440_1_3').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611440_1_3', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, no one dared make any reckless move to storm the ship again.
Stay alive and there were options, die and you had nothing.
A man in lavish clothes flashed the star-ring on his hand. Although his dark-patterned suit was smudged with grime, it was still clearly worth a fortune.
The armed man holding the pistol-shaped device checked his starship ticket, then pointed at one of the two other lines off to the side. “Go wait over there.”
The wealthy man frowned, displeased. “Why can’t I board the starship first? I’ve already had my ticket checked.”
The armed man shot him a glance, took up his gun with his other hand, and lightly tapped it against the ground.
The threat needed no spelling out.
However displeased the wealthy man was, he didn’t dare pit his slab of fat against a bullet, and could only swallow his anger and line up in the queue the man had indicated.
He glanced at the line ahead of him, which was plainly a stretch longer than the one beside it, and clicked his tongue impatiently.
There were three lines in all in front of the starship.
The longest was for the inspection of bodies, checking for wounds, and starship tickets. Those who passed both inspection and ticket check were further split into two lines standing beside the starship.
The people in the two lines were dressed all sorts of ways, some rich and some poor, with no discernible pattern.
It seemed not to matter which line you stood in.
Luo Yan glanced at the time on his star-ring and gave the man beside him a look.
The man caught the signal, walked up to the shorter line that was closer to the boarding hatch, and said, “You can board now.”
He pointed to the starship behind him.
The wealthy man watched the people in the line beside his all enter the starship, and assumed his own line would be next, but after waiting a good while, no armed man ever opened his mouth to let them in.
The wealthy man, who until now had lorded it over everyone on the garbage planet [4]“作威作福”, to throw one’s weight around, abusing power to bully others jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611440_1_4').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611440_1_4', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, had never been treated with such contempt. Unable to bear it any longer, he charged up to the armed man.
“On what grounds do they get to board with tickets? I have a ticket too, and I want to board the starship right now!” The wealthy man’s voice was very loud, clearly beside himself with anger.
Having witnessed people eating people with his own eyes, he was desperate to get out of this hellish place.
His overpowering desire even made him forget, for an instant, the gulf in status between himself and the armed men, who came from the mid-to-upper districts.
To his surprise, the armed man only gave him a featherlight glance and asked, with unexpected calm, “You want to board the ship?”
For a moment the wealthy man hadn’t caught his breath, and blurted out heedlessly, “Obviously! I passed inspection too, and I’m getting on right now!”
The armed man exchanged a look with Luo Yan and broke into an unreadable smile. “Then board from over here.”
He pointed to a different boarding hatch from the one that earlier line had used, one closer to the tail of the starship.
The starship was very large, and the wealthy man simply assumed there were different sections for different seating.
Only now did he come around, reining in his temper. He said nothing more and boarded the starship directly.
“Do the rest of you want to board too?” The armed man swept a measured glance over the others left in that line.
Seeing that even the wealthy man had made such a scene and still boarded, the people who hadn’t dared make a sound before all nodded.
Surely they had to, since they could get on, of course they would, staying here was a dead end.
The armed man said nothing, only let them board through the same hatch the wealthy man had gone in by.
Among them was the man who had snatched Bai Long’s ticket.
With a gun trained on him earlier, he hadn’t dared make any rash move either.
The night was very quiet.
By the time Bai Long arrived, the line for inspection and ticket-checking in front of the starship was nearly at its end.
The ticketless were ruthlessly held back outside by long blades and long guns, watching in futile helplessness as the ticketed boarded in batches.
And those with tickets were mostly the once-prominent figures of the garbage planet, people with the connections and the money to pay for the exorbitant inter-district starship tickets.
Bai Long jogged up to the inspection point and, meeting the shocked stares of the others, held out the star-ring on her right hand.
There, plain as day, was an all-black starship ticket.
References[+]