“Impossible! Her ticket was clearly snatched away by Lusen! How could a broke, sickly, dying wretch like her have two tickets?!”
The onlooker who had the inside scoop, held back at the outer perimeter, couldn’t believe Bai Long had actually managed to pay the steep ticket price, and for two tickets, no less.
The armed man ignored him. He simply scanned Bai Long’s starship ticket by the book, checked her over to confirm she had no suspicious wounds, and then waved her through.
“Go line up over there,” the armed man said, pointing at the long queue. Then his scanner swept over her again and he spoke to stop her: “Wait.”
He stared at the faint, tiny red dot on the device’s screen, scrutinized it carefully, then shot her a curious look and corrected himself: “Go to that shorter line.”
Bai Long had just boarded the starship with the queue when it sounded like a commotion broke out outside, but it was quickly silenced by a single gunshot.
What had happened needed no spelling out.
There were no seats inside the cabin. The portholes all around were sealed shut, and the cabin walls were ringed with sandbags.
The people who’d boarded earlier sat scattered against the sandbags, all keeping a cautious distance from one another.
Bai Long found a spot in the corner and, without leaving a trace, surveyed the place in a slow circle.
The people here ranged from old to young, rich to poor, all together no more than two handfuls of them. Notably, none of the rich folk who were actual names on the garbage planet were present.
Unless they were dead, there was no way those rich people could have failed to get tickets aboard the starship.
Thinking of the two queues outside the starship, Bai Long lowered her eyes and said nothing.
While she didn’t have to worry about being attacked by monsters for the moment, she calmly opened the star-ring on her wrist.
The net was just as chaotic as reality.
Posts containing keywords like “mutation,” “people-eating,” and “zombie” filled every single board, clear proof of just how panicked everyone was [1]人心惶惶, public alarm, everyone on edge jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611441_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611441_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
The top post by comment count had a headline that read, in bold:
【The End Times Are Here!】
Looking at those posts, with all their assorted mosaic-censored zombies, Bai Long felt, frankly, completely at peace.
Before she transmigrated, she’d worked at a funeral parlor.
She’d seen the live, in-person version.
Lying, sitting, curled up, dry, wet, half-dry-half-wet, intact, not intact…
Every style, every pattern, take your pick.
Bai Long: Professionally relevant, isn’t it.
She browsed a few more posts and noticed that, compared to the carnage on the garbage planet, although the other zones had zombie attacks too, the Star Alliance had stepped in so quickly that the casualties came nowhere near the bloodbath on the garbage planet.
The interstellar authorities resolved things far faster than the world she’d come from.
An hour later, Bai Long got her first real grasp of roughly what the Star Alliance was.
Anywhere in the universe with people in it was under the Star Alliance’s control.
The Star Alliance was made up of pure-blooded humans and beastmen, split into three layers, upper, middle, and lower. Each layer was further divided into different districts.
And District 30, Zone 130, where she currently was, the garbage planet, was the very bottom of the Lower Layer districts, the lowest-status, least-privileged class of people in the whole Star Alliance.
The star-ring she was using right now was Ximeng’s, and the range it could access covered only part of the Lower Layer information.
The Lower Layer was split into Districts 11 through 30, twenty districts in all.
But Ximeng’s star-ring could only browse content published by Districts 21 through 30.
There were several grayed-out areas on the star-ring’s screen: Upper and Middle Layer information, content they had no right to access.
This was the gap between the layer-and-district classes.
The people of the Upper Layer could understand the world with a flick of a finger, while those of the Lower Layer were only fit to struggle bitterly over limited resources [2]苦苦掙紮, to scrape and claw just to get by jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611441_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611441_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
Sure enough, no matter where you went the class divide existed, even transmigration couldn’t escape it.
Bai Long’s face was expressionless, she was honestly half-tempted to sneer.
Ximeng’s star-ring was an unregistered “black” device, with no owner information logged in.
The original owner of this body had never had a star-ring, so naturally there were no memories of the registration process either.
Bai Long couldn’t be bothered to dig into it, it didn’t affect anything anyway.
She opened the other star-ring on her right hand, the same one she’d flashed her starship ticket from earlier.
She’d thrown away the star-ring she’d gotten from Old Tower, this one she’d taken off the body of that child zombie at the edge of the city district.
Before mutating, the kid had probably been the child of some wealthy family, and would now never get to leave, never having used the starship ticket inside the star-ring.
Once the kid turned into a zombie, it lost all vital signs, so the star-ring automatically released its owner-lock and became an ownerless thing.
The kid’s star-ring clearly had higher access privileges than Ximeng’s or Old Tower’s star-rings, it could browse all the content from Districts 11 through 30 of the Lower Layer.
Plenty of rich people on the garbage planet would pull strings to buy star-rings with higher privileges, but even those were limited to the Lower Layer districts.
Upper and Middle Layer star-rings were something the Lower Layer couldn’t get hold of no matter how much money they had, they required Upper- or Middle-Layer identity verification to use.
The information on the kid’s star-ring was clearly more extensive than on Ximeng’s.
The starship hadn’t launched yet, so Bai Long kept filling in the gaps in her knowledge.
The Star-Linked Intelligence connected the various districts at high speed, and information about this zombie outbreak had already spread throughout the Lower Layer.
Ximeng and Old Tower included, the large batch of people who’d dropped dead in a sensation not long ago [3]沸沸揚揚, the talk of the town, a huge stir jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611441_1_3').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611441_1_3', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); had, in fact, been the warning signs of zombie mutation.
Regarding this sudden disaster, the Star Alliance had issued an emergency evacuation notice and dispatched armed forces to the affected areas to provide aid.
Bai Long searched for a long while but found no explanation for the cause of the mutation, only baseless guesses from netizens, not worth much.
After waiting on the starship for a while, some people couldn’t keep their unease in check and started quietly exchanging information with those around them.
“Where’s this starship even headed?” a dark-skinned man murmured.
Bai Long had sharp ears, she heard it clearly enough.
“I heard District 19, there’s a large shelter the Star Alliance built there,” a man wearing glasses answered.
“And where do we go after that?”
“No idea. The end times are here, let’s just survive first and figure it out later…”
“Bro, aren’t you curious why they split us off from the other batch of people?” The dark-skinned man lowered his voice, his meaning loaded: “Have you noticed you’re a little different than you were before?”
The bespectacled man froze, hesitated for a moment, then held out his hand. “You mean this?”
His five fingers spread open, and where his fingers should have been was a length of razor-sharp dagger.
The dagger joined naturally with the flesh of his knuckles, as if it had always been meant to be that way.
But neither pure humans nor beastmen would ever have dagger-fingers.
In an instant Bai Long realized that her own ability to make water seep from her fingers was very likely related to this.
The dark-skinned man turned and reached out to press a hand against a sandbag. His hand didn’t move, yet the sandbag caved in on its own, forming a hollow.
They had special abilities too.
Bai Long glanced at the others.
Quite a few people were secretly letting their abilities show as well.
She thought it over briefly and guessed that everyone in this particular cabin probably had some kind of special ability.
Could she really be the fabled chosen one [4]天選之子, the heaven-chosen child, the destined protagonist jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611441_1_4').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611441_1_4', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });?
The chatter was cut off as the armed men all filed into the starship.
Ignoring the crowd outside, who were begging and throwing fits, the cabin door closed mercilessly.
The armed men paid this lot no mind, walking straight past them into a cabin further in.
The square-faced man was among their ranks too. The moment he entered the cabin he spotted Bai Long huddled in the corner.
The square-faced man, that is, Chen Xiao, paused, and the person beside him noticed.
That armed man teased, “Oh ho, what a coincidence.”
They knew Chen Xiao had a daughter about Bai Long’s age, so his reaction to Bai Long just now came as no surprise to them [5]見怪不怪, seen it before, so it’s nothing strange jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2611441_1_5').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2611441_1_5', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
“She got lucky and survived, but her esper power is too weak, no different from an ordinary person.” The armed man shrugged. “The folks upstairs won’t want her.”
Chen Xiao said nothing and followed the group into the cabin ahead.
It was only out of longing for his daughter that he’d paid Bai Long a bit of extra attention, but it was just a few extra glances, nothing more.
They hadn’t bothered to keep their voices down, and Bai Long caught the word they used: “esper power.”
So these people were all espers, perhaps that very “esper” she’d heard them mention before she’d passed out.
The instant the starship was about to launch, the tip of Bai Long’s nose twitched.
There seemed to be some kind of smell…
She frowned and looked in the direction the smell was growing stronger.
It was the smell of blood.
Bai Long rose to her feet, gripped the dagger hidden in her wide sleeve, and walked toward the source of the smell.
Following the bloody scent, she found the passage leading down to the bottom of the starship.
There was a brief lurch as the starship left the ground. Bai Long lost her footing, and her gaze caught a swaying blue-green humanoid figure outside a porthole, along with vivid red spraying everywhere.
For those left behind on the garbage planet, there was only one road, and it led to death.
Bai Long didn’t look at the gruesome scene outside again, the bloody smell wasn’t coming from out there.
She sniffed carefully and confirmed it was inside the starship.
And the bottom of the starship… if she wasn’t mistaken, that should be exactly where the other group of people had gone in.
Bai Long had noticed the other boarding hatch on the outside of the starship, the place that other queue had entered through.
She followed the passage down, the smell of blood growing thicker and thicker.
Those armed men were unwilling to have any unnecessary contact with garbage-planet folk like them, so naturally no one bothered to watch what they were doing.
They also didn’t think anyone would dare wander around the starship on their own.
In fact, everyone but Bai Long really didn’t dare wander, they were terrified of displeasing the armed men from the upper layers and getting thrown off the starship.
The cabin at the bottom of the starship was unguarded. A metal door sealed off the space beyond. The door was divided into upper and lower halves: the upper half was made of fence-like metal bars, the lower half a solid door.
The smell of blood had grown so overpowering that Bai Long could barely stand it.
The lower level was steeped in gloom, she couldn’t make out what lay behind the door.
It was very quiet all around. For a moment Bai Long could hear only her own breathing, and an unidentifiable hissing sound.
She held her breath and focused, and seemed to hear something else too, like something was chewing.
The next second, a face slammed against the door bars.
The blue-purple skin was smeared with reddish-brown bloodstains. One eyeball dangled outside its socket, and the lower half of the face beneath the eye socket was gone, exposing the stark white skull beneath. The slab of flesh on the other half of the face was squashed out of shape by the bars, looking like it would slough off any second.
Silence stretched between the one human and the one corpse.
Bai Long, expressionless, met the zombie’s gaze through the door.
Oh, hey, nice to meet you, new coworker.
She thought this zombie looked a bit familiar.
After she spotted the dark-patterned suit on the zombie, it dawned on Bai Long that this zombie seemed to be one of the garbage planet’s wealthy merchants.
A flash of light glinted past in the gloom, oddly familiar.
Bai Long’s senses were sharp. She skirted around the zombie blocking her way and saw the source of that light behind it—
—A star-ring.
It was the star-ring she’d thrown away earlier. Because it couldn’t lock its screen, that starship ticket was still hovering in the air, and the person wearing the star-ring was obviously a zombie too.
A zombie wouldn’t put on a star-ring of its own accord. Either this person had boarded the starship after being bitten, or else…
it had been bitten only after boarding the starship.
If it had been bitten beforehand, there was no way the armed men’s inspection would have let it slip through in front of everyone’s eyes.
…But then how could there be a zombie biting people aboard the starship?
Bai Long’s brows knitted together.
Suddenly, her nose twitched, catching another scent.
Someone was coming this way.
…
Chen Xiao looked at the small, thin figure huddled at the corner and frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“Going to the bathroom,” Bai Long said matter-of-factly.
“The bathroom’s over there.” Chen Xiao pointed back the way she’d come, his gaze lingering for a moment on her frail frame before he said, in an unreadable tone: “It’s the end times. Don’t go sticking your nose into other people’s business.”
He seemed not to care about Bai Long’s answer, his expression eased a little. “We’re about to land, hurry back.”
He thought of his own girl, about her age too, and how long it had been since he’d seen his daughter, out on assignment for so long.
The longing inevitably softened him a little.
Bai Long nodded and jogged back to the cabin ahead.
Chen Xiao glanced at the shadowy spot behind the corner, a trace of revulsion surfacing in his eyes, then turned and left, following behind her.
By the time Bai Long got back to the cabin, the others were gathering their things, getting ready to disembark.
“Weren’t we supposed to be going to District 19? How’d we end up at District 20?”
“Why District 20?”
Seeing that the landing site was different from what they’d expected, the crowd’s panicked, startled voices spread all through the starship.
This time the armed men didn’t resort to outright violent threats.
Luo Yan said evenly, “District 20 first, as a transfer point.”
Having gotten that light, noncommittal explanation, the crowd, however dissatisfied, didn’t keep kicking up a fuss.
After all, the armed forces were still there, they shouldn’t run into any trouble.
That was what everyone figured.
Amid the chaos, Bai Long hid herself in the crowd, and when Chen Xiao came back he could no longer find her.
She wedged herself into the throng, nimbly slipping past the armed men’s eyes and ears like a fish taking to water, sneaking off in the exact opposite direction from the main group.
Although she didn’t understand where the zombie aboard the starship had come from, she couldn’t go on staying silent and following along with the armed forces.
She’d borrowed the starship to leave the garbage planet, from here on, Bai Long would walk her own road.
References[+]