The danger was over.
Fu Erdie took the air-filled leaf bundle, opened a slit, and tried to inhale through the opening.
One second passed.
Two seconds passed.
Nothing happened…
All she got was the fresh, grassy scent of the pothos.
She sucked for a long time, feeling like even an oxygen tank would have run dry by now. Finally, she opened the bundle. Inside was empty, clean and devoid of anything. She had no idea whether the energy had been absorbed or simply vanished.
Fu Erdie and the pothos stared at each other, her eyes meeting its… lack of eyes, in silence.
“Forget it,” she finally said, resigned.
She sat down in the hallway, leaning against the door of Unit 16-1. The pain from the bites and scratches on her left shoulder and body finally began to set in.
As far as she could tell, the only remaining ways to gain abilities were to be scratched by a mutated zombie or to eat a crystal core.
She hadn’t tried the latter, but she could still test the former.
Worried that the mutation virus might be neutralized by her apartment’s healing abilities before it could take effect, she chose not to go inside for treatment. Instead, she sat by the door, waiting. If the zombie virus took hold, she would endure it.
If she really couldn’t hold on and was about to turn into a zombie, she would go back inside at the last moment.
Large pothos leaves covered Fu Erdie’s still-bleeding wounds, applying pressure to stop the blood.
The dog lay beside her, keeping her company. Nearby, the millet from Unit 16-7 extended its roots with visible effort.
They surrounded her, watching, quietly supporting her.
Fu Erdie smiled. She noticed that her blood, still flowing, was turning into specks of white light, merging into the apartment and being absorbed.
Before, the white light would circle around and return to heal her wounds. Now, with her refusal, the flow was one-way, she was bleeding, giving energy instead.
She raised a hand and weakly touched the snow-white wall. “Think of it as a little snack for you, okay?”
The white light on the apartment flickered faintly, a silent response.
Fu Erdie rested her head against the wall and murmured, “I just don’t understand. If only you could talk.”
Her eyelids felt unbearably heavy. She could drift off at any moment.
Forcing herself to stay awake, she rambled on, talking to the dog, the apartment, the pothos, and the leaves before her, now too blurry to tell whether they belonged to the orchid or the gardenia.
She didn’t feel like she was mutating. There was no fever, no burning urge to devour humans. She just felt exhausted, in pain, and desperately sleepy.
She pinched herself, trying to stay alert. But compared to the wounds on her body, the pinch was nothing, barely a tickle.
The door to Unit 16-1 was left ajar. Fu Erdie’s hand rested against it; with just a light push, it would open.
But stepping inside now would mean giving up on becoming an ability user.
In novels, some people took a night to evolve, others several days. What if she was the type who needed days?
If she missed this chance, she would have to hunt another mutated zombie, fight for her life again, and retrieve another intact crystal core…
No. She had made up her mind. This was the last time.
She was too exhausted to move anymore.
Caught between tormenting thoughts, Fu Erdie’s body finally gave in to the blood loss. She lost consciousness.
In her final moment of awareness, instead of pushing open the door to Unit 16-1, she slammed it shut.
The white light on the apartment’s walls pulsed faintly.
The door shifted slightly outward, as if wanting to open, but it respected Fu Erdie’s will and did not force its way.
Her wounds were many, but none were life-threatening. The pothos had already stopped the worst of the bleeding through physical pressure.
For now, she would be fine.
She fell into a dream, a long, long dream.
In her dream, she became a little child, happily chasing after a butterfly, though everything around her was pitch black.
But the butterfly flew very fast, much faster than her short, stubby legs.
At first, the butterfly teased her, fluttering just within reach, stirring her curiosity, playing with her nerves.
Later, when she truly began to chase, it flew higher and higher, farther and farther away.
She ran desperately, her foot twisting beneath her, causing her to stumble and fall.
Then, the butterfly would pause high above, watching her from a distance, as if waiting.
She mustered her courage, got back up, ran and chased, and fell again…
Until finally, there was no more glow from the butterfly’s wings left in her world.
In the darkness, she finally understood, the butterfly was never meant to be hers.
But if it didn’t belong to her, why did it dangle itself in front of her? How annoying, wasn’t it?
In the hallway, Fu Erdie lay crumpled on the ground, her unconscious face streaked with a single tear.
September’s weather was much better than August’s.
At least for humans, 37 degrees was far more bearable than temperatures above 40.
But Fu Erdie’s little notebook would forever remain on August 31st.
—The day after she killed the speed-type zombie, the day when “nothing happened.”
Well, “nothing happened” only applied to Fu Erdie herself.
Aside from her, Building 7 had undergone some significant changes.
When she woke up later that day, she went straight to Zhang Dongxuan and had her move into Unit 16-1. The condition was that she water the mutated plants on different floors of Building 7 every day.
The pothos had grown. Its leaves had expanded, its main body had grown larger, and its roots and branches could now stretch much farther.
After some thought, it extended its roots into the empty Unit 16-2, claiming the entire space in one go.
When Fu Erdie learned about this, she guessed that the pothos had unconsciously absorbed the crystal core’s energy.
Consuming one ability core was far more effective than eating an entire floor’s worth of zombies. It made sense that it had claimed a new apartment.
As temperatures dropped, zombies became more active, and so did the mutated plants.
The mutated plants outside Unit 16-1 saw a noticeable increase in yield. The millet in Unit 16-7, in particular, grew like a weed, becoming a small tree that filled the room, its heavy seed heads hanging in clusters. Zhang Dongxuan had to haul back loads of them every day.
The spider plant would grind and process the millet heads into grains, and the stockpile kept growing, far more than the two of them and the dog could ever eat.
Kumquats, peaches, cherries, sweet potatoes, potatoes, cabbage, cucumbers, and tomatoes were also harvesting in abundance.
Potatoes and sweet potatoes could be stored for a long time, but the fruits had to be eaten quickly before they spoiled.
Fu Erdie spent her days drinking millet porridge, eating some fruit, and then retreating to her bedroom, shutting the door, and lying motionless.
To keep the extra fruit from going bad, Zhang Dongxuan and the dog did their best to eat as much as possible. When they couldn’t eat any more, they fed the leftovers to the mutated plants.
It was fascinating to see which fruits each plant preferred, it revealed their relationships and grudges.
The most obvious were the cucumber and tomato.
These two old rivals had originally been planted together on the balcony of Unit 16-1. But because they kept fighting, Fu Erdie had moved them outside.
The longer a plant stayed in Unit 16-1, the more vigorous its intelligent mutation became. They didn’t even need soil, placed against a wall, they would eagerly spread out and fill the room on their own.
Fu Erdie had moved the cucumber to Unit 16-5 and the tomato to Unit 16-10, diagonally opposite ends of the floor, as far apart as possible.
Yet somehow, they seemed to sense each other’s location and insisted on creeping toward each other’s territory. For now, their roots and vines had just begun to crawl out of their respective rooms, but given a year or two, they would surely reach each other, and likely clash.
Zhang Dongxuan didn’t understand.
At first, she thought the two plants were just close and had been forcibly separated by Fu Erdie.
But later, when the plants started eating fruit to deal with the surplus, the cucumber and tomato would always choose each other’s fruits.
Normal plant feeding, secret corrosive fluid, wrap up the food, digest it slowly.
Cucumber and tomato feeding, stab, shred, tear apart, stage a crime scene, then secrete corrosive fluid to digest the remains.
The tomato eating the cucumber wasn’t too shocking.
But the cucumber eating the tomato, the room splattered in “blood”, nearly gave Zhang Dongxuan a heart attack.
The dog, however, remained well-behaved. Most of its time was spent patrolling Building 7. If a zombie made its way up, the dog would kill it and drag the body to the succulent’s extended roots to be consumed.
With its hearing and sense of smell growing sharper, the dog could detect movement from several floors below. After making its rounds, it would return to Unit 16-1, skillfully stand on its hind legs, push the door open with its front paws, and enter Fu Erdie’s bedroom. It would shake off its fur and paws, already cleaned by the spider plant, then jump onto the bed and lie down beside Fu Erdie.
What was Fu Erdie doing?
She was listening to the radio.
When the signal briefly returned early in the apocalypse, the government had provided a frequency for broadcasts.
But now, there was no sound, only crackling static.
Fu Erdie didn’t turn it off. She let the static play as white noise while she stared at the ceiling.
Effort doesn’t guarantee success, but giving up is easy.
Now, she stayed at home, eating fruit and enjoying the air conditioning. The dog handled the ordinary zombies. If a powerful zombie appeared, she could just lie down and wait for death. That was fine.
If a dangerous ability user came, killed her, or drove her out of her home, well, there was nothing she could do about that either.
Other than resigning herself to idleness, there was nothing left to do.
After a while, she stood up from the bed and walked to the window, looking down.
In this chaotic apocalypse, there were already too many corpses. One more probably wouldn’t matter.
She pushed at the window, intending to lean out and see if she could spot any familiar corpses or zombies out of sheer boredom.
But the window wouldn’t budge, it was as if it had been welded shut.
Fu Erdie glanced at the faintly flickering light on the wall and gave a faint smile. “I’m not going to kill myself. Why would I do that?”
The apartment didn’t respond.
Helpless, she gave up on the view and went back to lying on the bed.
In mid-September, it rained in City C.
Before, the dog would spend a few hours with Fu Erdie each day. But over the past couple of days, it either didn’t come back at all or returned covered in wounds, healing with the apartment’s help.
Fu Erdie belatedly realized that this rainstorm had lasted a long time, the temperature must have dropped again.
She checked the outdoor thermometer. The temperature, previously around 37 or 38 degrees, had fallen below 35.
This was the temperature range where zombies became extremely active in the early days of the apocalypse.