The cabin was warm by now. After heating a kettle of water and washing the two people, one big and one small, Shen Yu opened the window and called Canglang inside, intending to clean it up too.
Before the mutation, Canglang had been the size of an ordinary adult border collie. Afterward, it was nearly as big as a cow. There wasn’t enough room for it to move around, so Shen Yu had kept it outside for the time being.
He’d meant to call it in once he’d finished tidying up, but Canglang had already cleaned itself off with the snow. Not a trace of blood remained on its black-and-white fur.
It had also buried the blood around the area, in case it attracted other mutated animals if left there too long. Clever as ever, it only came back when Shen Yu called.
And when it returned, it had a bag of prey in its mouth. It must have caught the prey before the fight, and Yi Han had packed it away for Canglang. The bag had been buried too deep in the snow during the battle, so those people hadn’t found it.
Not all mutated beasts were safe to eat after the apocalypse. Many carried viruses, and eating them could be fatal. Only mutated livestock and poultry were safe.
Because of the kind of ability he had, Yi Han never hunted mutated beasts himself. Canglang, on the other hand, brought something home every few days.
“Woof, woof.” It was clearly looking for praise. It hadn’t just buried the blood and the poisonous prey. It had also found its own catch, driven those people far away, and cleaned itself up. It had been busy.
Shen Yu patted its head. “Good job. I’ll call you in to eat once the food’s ready.” Canglang could eat the poisonous mutated beasts, but never did.
Because they carried viruses, Shen Yu and Yi Han couldn’t help clean them up. And Canglang never ate raw meat, so the mutated beasts it hunted were all virus-free.
After the apocalypse, the most common mutated beasts weren’t wild animals from before, but livestock and poultry from farms. Most mutated beasts were descended from them, so there were plenty that were safe to eat.
When Canglang realized it’d get chicken stew, it barked happily twice, then obediently lay down on the rug Shen Yu had laid out for it by the window.
Even after mutating, Canglang still had a border collie’s black-and-white markings. With a child on its back, it was obviously someone’s pet. Anyone who wanted to kill a dog like that for meat had to be a truly despicable person.
That was why Shen Yu had dealt so harshly with the team of the protagonist bottom, Yuan Qing. The protagonist top’s team was no good either, but standing by while someone died and taking advantage of a crisis were, in the circumstances of the apocalypse, truly not crimes deserving of death.
Shen Yu hadn’t meant to kill them, either. But if they thought they could pay no price at all and still proclaim themselves the righteous ones, they were dreaming. Once he’d confirmed they weren’t leaving right away, he went back inside.
Inside, Shen Yu took things out of his spatial storage. First, he produced two energy potions and handed one to Yi Han and the other to Feng Qing. “You should replenish your energy.”
Feng Qing didn’t refuse. He did need it. “Thanks.” He’d never run into a situation like this before, so he hadn’t thought to prepare any.
Shen Yu shook his head. “I’m the one who should be thanking you.” Whether or not they’d made a deal, without Feng Qing and Yan Yun, he couldn’t have saved Zaizai and Canglang, let alone Yi Han.
Of course, even so, he still wasn’t going to tell Feng Qing about his sister just yet. He could be the bad guy for now. They had to see the vicious female supporting character for who she really was.
Shen Yu said no more and started cooking. He set a pot of soup to simmer. Everyone in the family needed nourishment, especially Yi Han, who was in the worst shape. Since the other team hadn’t left yet, Shen Yu had to get some food into them quickly. Otherwise, they might be left with lasting damage.
The mutated chicken Canglang had caught had frozen solid. It might have been a chicken, but apocalypse-era mutated chickens were far bigger than sheep. Shen Yu cut off one leg, skinned and cleaned it, then stewed it. He put the rest away in his spatial storage.
Feng Qing and Yan Yun didn’t ask about Feng Qing’s sister. They were impressively patient. It could even be taken as a sign of confidence, since they weren’t afraid Shen Yu was lying.
Neither of them had even considered that the person they were looking for might be among the people outside. They’d gotten a bad impression of that group and had instinctively never made the connection.
Shen Yu hadn’t lied, exactly. It was a verbal loophole: he was sure they’d meet the person, but if they didn’t recognize each other, that wasn’t his fault.
He wouldn’t let Feng Qing fail to recognize his sister, though. He understood how anxious Feng Qing was to find her, and would make sure they reunited. It just wasn’t the right time yet. He had to wait a little longer.
Feng Qing really was tired, and didn’t say anything else. The only sounds in the cabin were Shen Yu preparing food and the pot of jujube and brown sugar soup bubbling away.
Jujube and brown sugar soup might not have been the best thing for replenishing blood, but Shen Yu either didn’t know what else to use or lacked the ingredients. This was the only thing he could make.
Yi Han had been injured several times before, and this wasn’t the first time he’d lost a lot of blood. The same was true of Canglang, so Shen Yu had made this soup plenty of times.
After mutating, Canglang had the same tastes as a person. It liked things heavily salted or sweet, and was quite fond of this soup. But brown sugar was still scarce, and even someone as well supplied as Shen Yu wouldn’t use it carelessly.
The cabin was cramped, and Shen Yu kept bustling back and forth. Feng Qing and Yan Yun settled themselves on the little sofa in the corner. It was a tight fit, so Feng Qing simply reclined against Yan Yun to rest.
He was exhausted, but couldn’t sleep. He watched Shen Yu bustling about and was surprised. At first, he’d assumed Shen Yu was the pampered rich-boy type.
Now he knew he’d misjudged him. Shen Yu had briskly heated water to wash his husband and child, whipped up the soup with no trouble, and cleaned the mutated chicken with practiced ease. It was obvious he was used to doing this sort of work.
Jujube and brown sugar soup was easy enough to make, but without knowing the right proportions, it wasn’t something you could just throw together. At the very least, Shen Yu would have needed to ask him, a country doctor, how to make it. But Shen Yu was perfectly familiar with the recipe.
Since the apocalypse, Feng Qing had met all kinds of people, men and women, young and old. There were plenty more handsome than he was, and Shen Yu wasn’t the only one. But only Shen Yu had better skin than his or a more striking presence.
Shen Yu’s hands didn’t look like they’d ever done a day’s work. Even Feng Qing, who’d hardly ever done manual labor, had rougher hands. That showed just how smooth and delicate Shen Yu’s were.
Hands that smooth and delicate could not only use a gun to start a motorcycle, but also make excellent soup. He could handle everything at home and outside it. Something didn’t add up.
Feng Qing looked at Shen Yu, then at Shen Yu’s husband, then at the child asleep in bed. Thinking of the child’s eyes, he shot to his feet so suddenly that Yan Yun was taken aback.
“Are you the legendary first person to eat a life fruit?” Now that the world had ended, who would raise someone else’s child? They could only be raising their own, and the child was clearly being cared for with great devotion.
It was possible one of them had had a child with a woman. But whoever had fathered the child with a woman, the child couldn’t be related by blood to both of them. That was easy enough to tell.
There was no need to mention Shen Yu’s looks and bearing. His husband was handsome too, though the apocalypse had worn him down and left him rough around the edges. Those striking, flirtatious eyes, however, were unmistakable.
The child mostly took after Shen Yu, but his eyes were exactly like Yi Han’s. No one would believe they weren’t the child’s parents.
Shen Yu glanced back at him. “It’s no secret.” That was why he never disguised himself when he went out. Who in the north hadn’t heard about it?
The space ability user from Chenggong Base had accidentally eaten a kind of fruit and, to everyone’s astonishment, given birth to a child as a man. That was where the story of the life fruit had begun.
You might think news would travel slowly after the apocalypse, but that wasn’t the case. Once the life fruit’s existence had been proven, Shen Yu had become famous. A man giving birth was unheard of, and the news spread incredibly fast.
Because of it, over the past year or so, countless people had come to Chenggong Base hoping to trade for life fruit. Even in the apocalypse, people still longed for children.
Ordinary babies had a high chance of dying after birth. But a child born after someone ate a life fruit was guaranteed to survive. A child born with an ability already had a safeguard for life.
There was only one known life fruit tree, and no one knew when it would bear fruit. The crop was small, too. There weren’t enough to go around, even among the people inside Chenggong Base, let alone the other bases.
The life fruit tree was kept at Shen Yu’s home. Yi Han had rescued the little tree from a disaster, and it had taken root in a flowerpot at their place. They’d carried it with them as they fled from one place to another.
In a disaster, people and mutated animals could flee, but mutated plants could only wait to die. Many rare mutated plants had disappeared that way.
Shen Yu had always liked plants with a little spirit to them, so he’d rescued quite a few small ones along the way. Not many had survived, but nearly ten had, including the life fruit tree.
Not many people knew the life fruit tree was kept at his home. But once a second person knew, it was impossible for the secret to stay a secret. Someone had tried to get their hands on it, but something had happened, and no one else had coveted it since.
The reason Shen Yu called it the life fruit tree wasn’t that eating its fruit would let someone give birth to a child. It was because anyone who picked and ate its fruit without permission would die.
Life had two sides. It could bring life, or take it away. That was how the life fruit had gotten its name.
Yi Han had rescued the tree, and Shen Yu had raised it, so it only gave fruit to the two of them. Even Zaizai wasn’t allowed to pick its fruit. The tree had its principles.
When the life fruit’s effects were first confirmed, someone had relied on their unusual ability to sneak into Shen Yu’s home and steal fruit and branches. Everyone who ate the stolen fruit died.
Most mutated trees could be cultivated by plant-type ability users. The Tree of Life was different. The stolen branches hadn’t survived, and even when Shen Yu tried to propagate it himself, nothing took root.
After a few more experiments, once they’d figured out how the tree worked, no one from Chenggong Base tried stealing from it again. Neither did anyone from outside.
Truthfully, Shen Yu hadn’t wanted anyone to know about either his pregnancy or the life fruit. But the circumstances had been unusual, and he’d never expected things to turn out this way.
He hadn’t even known he was pregnant. It wasn’t until his stomach grew bigger and bigger, and something seemed increasingly wrong, that he went to get checked. That was when he was told he was probably pregnant.
Who would believe a man could get pregnant? They had no choice but to look for an explanation. They’d been told it was a pregnancy, but who knew if there really was a child in his belly, or how it had happened? In the end, they traced it back to the little fruit tree at home.
It hadn’t been hard to figure out. Shen Yu had eaten much the same things as everyone else. The only exception was the fruit from the tree they kept at home. There had only been a few ripe fruits, and Yi Han refused to eat them, so Shen Yu had eaten them all.
Things had been different then. The apocalypse had begun less than a year earlier, and plant-type ability users could only grow things like vegetables. Fruit had been extremely scarce.
Shen Yu had a space ability, but his spatial storage didn’t preserve food. Most fruit growing in the wild had mutated, and no one knew whether it was poisonous. Who would dare eat it?
This was no joke. Only hard lessons, paid for in blood, had taught people in the apocalypse so quickly that even fruit from the same kind of tree wasn’t necessarily safe. One tree’s fruit might be harmless, while another’s could be poisonous.
So even when people fleeing through the wilderness came across a fruit tree that didn’t attack, they rarely picked its fruit, even if they saw signs that mutated birds had eaten it or found insect holes in it.
What people had learned before the apocalypse no longer applied. After enough bloody lessons, everyone stopped picking wild fruit without good reason, unless they had an analyst with them who could tell whether it was poisonous.
Before eating the fruit the tree had given him, Shen Yu had also had someone check it. He’d made sure it wasn’t poisonous before he dared try it. He never expected that eating it would give him the temporary ability to carry a child.
At the time, they’d just fled from one place, and their route had happened to overlap with that of another base’s refugees. The people from their base weren’t the only ones who knew.
They’d lived together for several months. They only parted ways when another disaster struck, not long after Zaizai turned one month old, and so the story spread.