Three days later.
Standing before the front gate of their home, Xiao Yan wrapped one arm around Mu Li’s shoulder while holding Little Green, which had already shrunk down to the size of a normal potted plant, in his other hand. He spoke up, “Babe, the time is getting late. We should be going.”
“Alright. Big brother, do you think we will ever be able to come back here one day?” Mu Li looked at the small courtyard before them with a trace of melancholy. After all, this was where he and Xiao Yan had started, where the two of them had spent so many happy moments together. Now that they were leaving, they likely would never be able to return, so feeling a twinge of reluctance was inevitable.
When the apocalypse would end was something even Xiao Yan did not know. In his past life, the apocalypse had already been underway for six years by the time he died, meaning that in a few years, this house might no longer even exist. Naturally, however, Xiao Yan had no intention of dampening Mu Li’s spirits. Pulling him close into his embrace, he offered gentle comfort, “There will be such a day.”
Mu Li was merely expressing a momentary sentiment. Hearing those words, he lifted his head to gaze at Xiao Yan, offering a faint smile. “Not coming back does not matter either. Wherever big brother is, that place is my home.”
When the little fellow sweetened his tongue, he could be utterly bewitching. The older man felt his heartstrings flutter violently, and had the time and place not been utterly inappropriate, he would have loved nothing more than to pull the person into his arms and devour him right then and there.
“Let us go.”
Holding Mu Li’s hand, Xiao Yan led him into the SUV. It was a sturdy black off-road vehicle that he had instructed his assistant to purchase on the very second day after his rebirth. The windows had been specially reinforced so that they could withstand bullets, let alone the physical bodies of ordinary zombies.
Little Green was placed in the back seat. All the other items from the house had already been stored inside Xiao Yan’s spatial realm, including the rabbits and hamsters. Only Little Green had stubbornly refused to go inside, clinging desperately to Mu Li instead.
Fastening Mu Li’s seatbelt, the two of them took one final glance at the small courtyard. With a press of the accelerator, Xiao Yan steered the vehicle smoothly out of the narrow alley and onto the main road. Perhaps because the location was genuinely remote, the road was completely devoid of zombies and residential homes alike. Only their solitary vehicle sped onward in the direction of the highway.
Tall trees lined both sides of the road. After driving for a little over ten minutes, Xiao Yan began to spot two or three households scattered here and there, though their front gates were tightly shut, leaving it impossible to know if anyone still remained inside.
Xiao Yan continued driving straight down the main thoroughfare. Sitting in the passenger seat, Mu Li gazed out the window. The entire journey was eerily quiet, completely devoid of human life or passing traffic. They drove this way all the way to the highway. Just a few minutes after merging onto it, Mu Li was struck dumb with shock by the scene unfolding before his eyes. Ahead of them, several cars had clearly crashed into one another, sitting abandoned and wrecked across the roadway. The ground was stained with blackened, coagulated blood and fragments of unrecognizable debris. Inside one of the smashed vehicles, a woman with disheveled, unkempt hair was clawing at the window frame, staring directly in the direction of their approaching car. Her ashen, dim eyes were terrifyingly hollow, her complexion bruised and purplish, and her wide-open jaws revealed sharp fangs stained with unknown, disgusting fluids. Mu Li could distinctly read a sense of ravenous covetousness on her face, a primal hunger for living flesh.
A frown etched itself across Xiao Yan’s brow. Stepping hard on the accelerator to speed past, he did not forget to offer words of comfort, “Do not be afraid. Do not look.”
Mu Li’s face turned somewhat pale. Covering his mouth, a sickening wave of nausea welled up in his chest. He was not necessarily terrified of that female zombie; rather, as they had flashed past her position, he had caught sight of that pile of debris. It clearly belonged to human eyeball tissue, mixed haphazardly into a pool of whitish fluid. Without needing to think, he knew precisely what that fluid was.
That must have been what remained of a human being who had already been entirely devoured, leaving behind only a tiny fraction of brain matter and eyeballs.
Closing his eyes tightly, Mu Li forced himself to beat down that surging wave of revulsion, offering a forced, reassuring smile to Xiao Yan. “I am fine.”
Mu Li knew full well that a scene like this barely scratched the surface. He had already mentally prepared himself for horrors a thousand times more disgusting and terrifying than this, but encountering it abruptly in reality still made him feel somewhat unsettled.
“Be a good boy. Once we find a suitable place to stay, we will take a rest.” Xiao Yan kept his full focus on driving; pulling the car to a halt midway to comfort his little darling would only place them in even greater danger.
“Okay.” Mu Li looked straight ahead, but the moment the word left his mouth, his eyes widened in horror. Slamming his eyes shut once more as his stomach churned violently, he snatched up the pre-prepared waste bag and finally could not hold it back anymore, vomiting into it. Right by the side of the road ahead, a male zombie was squatting and gnawing voraciously on the severed lower half of a woman’s body. Mu Li possessed exceptionally sharp vision, and he clearly caught sight of stringy, blood-red meat fibers caught between the zombie’s teeth. Perhaps distracted by its meal, this particular zombie ignored them entirely this time, simply burying its head in its feast as it clutched the woman’s torso.
Heart aching for Mu Li, Xiao Yan knew that a delicate, pampered young master had never laid eyes on such a gruesome spectacle, yet he could not afford to stop the car. All he could do was increase their speed while offering a continuous stream of soothing words.
Tossing the bag out the window and rinsing his mouth with water, Mu Li finally began to feel slightly better. He was far from as fragile as Xiao Yan imagined. To keep Xiao Yan from splitting his focus, he managed to muster up the spirit to crack a joke, “So zombies really do look that ugly.”
“They certainly are quite ugly,” Xiao Yan replied. Zombies were transformed humans utterly devoid of sapient consciousness, driven solely by an instinctive, relentless urge to hunt down and consume living people. Their sole target of predation was humanity, while they remained completely indifferent to animals. The only method to truly eliminate them was to crush their skulls and destroy their central nervous systems; otherwise, even if a zombie’s head were completely severed from its body, the severed portion would remain animated.
Refusing to let Xiao Yan worry about him, Mu Li rallied his spirits and kept chatting. From the back seat, Little Green even extended a vine to bloom a massive, vibrant rose in an effort to cheer Mu Li up. Gradually, the color returned to Mu Li’s face, and the lingering sense of nausea in his chest slowly dissipated.
An hour later, the vehicle pulled into a service station. Xiao Yan steered the car inside, intending to take a short break here while skimming off some gasoline to store inside his spatial realm.