“Will you give me that chance?”
Fu Erdie’s heart raced.
He wanted to stay, and she needed his abilities. If they could come to an agreement, it would be perfect!
“I’ll try to trust you.” Meeting Sang Wenhao’s earnest gaze, Fu Erdie spoke her true thoughts. “I hope we can be long-term partners.”
Sang Wenhao said with certainty, “We will.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Fu Erdie’s lips as she extended her hand. “Here’s to a good partnership.”
After dinner, Fu Erdie washed up and returned to 15-1 to sleep.
It was late November, with temperatures hovering around the twenties (Celsius). Wearing long-sleeved pajamas and covered with a thin blanket, she was able to sleep comfortably.
That night, Fu Erdie didn’t need to distract herself by watching the dog or the pothos plant, she drifted off easily.
The next morning, she got up early, set aside the seeds she had been carrying all night, and went on her usual patrol up and down the stairs.
After finishing her rounds at 5:30, with the sky still dark outside, Fu Erdie went to examine the seeds.
The pothos plant checked each one and confirmed that the seeds in the experimental group showed no change.
But two of the control group seeds, the ones left within the house’s domain on the 16th floor, had mutated.
One was rice. Once it grew and produced grain, they would have the rice she so eagerly looked forward to eating!
The other was bamboo seeds.
Fu Erdie thought she could plant them in the neighborhood garden.
After the apocalypse, the soil had been contaminated. Half the plants had withered and died, and the remaining half looked sickly. Planting bamboo would make the neighborhood feel less desolate, and they could occasionally harvest bamboo shoots to eat.
With that, the experiment to determine whether the seeds mutated due to the house or Fu Erdie had a preliminary conclusion, it was the house.
Fu Erdie didn’t stop the experiment immediately. The weather was still in the twenties, and wearing a hoodie with long sleeves and carrying a packet of seeds in her pocket wasn’t an inconvenience. She planned to continue for a while, just making sure not to bring the seeds upstairs when she washed up, ate, or returned to the 16th floor.
At seven o’clock, Zhang Dongxuan got up to make breakfast. Fu Erdie handed the rice over to her, along with the responsibility of planting it later.
Since they were going out, Sang Wenhao was also awake early, waiting for daylight.
There were two roads next to Senyu Compound. One was a main city road leading to the city center in one direction and the university town in the other. That was the road Sang Wenhao had taken to get here.
The other road was a long uphill branch route. After passing through a relatively empty and desolate uphill stretch, it led to a larger residential area halfway up the mountain: Qingfan Town.
There were housing complexes, restaurants, hotels, supermarkets, and shops, everything available down the mountain was also there. There was also a villa area, not the overly extravagant, massive kind, but modest standalone villas.
Many of the farmers from Senyu Compound, like Zhang Dongxuan, had planted crops on the continuous uphill stretch of wasteland between the neighborhood and Qingfan Town after losing their farmland.
Fu Erdie decided to start by checking the fields on the uphill side of the neighborhood.
November 21st, after six months, she finally left the neighborhood for the first time.
The air felt similar to inside the neighborhood, but her mind played tricks on her, making it seem pungent and unpleasant, as if she were back in the early days of the apocalypse, forced to look at rotting corpses.
Expressionless, she walked forward until her wrist was grabbed.
Turning her head, she saw Sang Wenhao pick up a large piece of scrap metal from the ground. In no time, the metal melted, deformed, and reformed into a long ribbon with smooth, rounded edges.
One end he wrapped around his own wrist; the other end he wrapped around Fu Erdie’s, like two linked bracers.
“Keep walking. If there’s danger, I’ll pull you back.”
Fu Erdie nodded, and somehow, the tense nerve inside her relaxed.
There weren’t many people on the wasteland. The few zombies that had once been farmers were taken care of by Sang Wenhao’s flying metal before they could get close.
Feeling the subtle tug of the metal ribbon on her wrist, Fu Erdie headed toward where she remembered chickens, ducks, and geese used to be.
After walking for ten minutes, they passed two chicken coops, no chickens in sight.
They continued forward, arriving at a bend halfway up the mountain.
From this spot, they could see the main road. There were many zombies, wandering aimlessly like old men with nowhere to go.
In the distance were buildings of varying heights and factories.
Further beyond was the Li River, a waterway familiar to everyone in C City.
…Wait, the water level of the Li River had risen this much?!
Fu Erdie pulled out her binoculars for a closer look. Comparing the buildings she remembered with what she saw now, she suddenly realized that the small teahouses and restaurants where she used to hang out by the river now had only their rooftops visible!
Sang Wenhao: “The water has indeed risen. When I was at the university town, I would go to the river every so often to get water. Every time I went, the water level had risen significantly higher up the banks.”
Fu Erdie: …
She knew that with the prolonged high temperatures in summer, melting ice and rising sea levels were inevitable. But at home, within the neighborhood, her view had been blocked, so she had no direct sense of it.
Only now, seeing the dramatic rise in the river, did she realize the gravity of the situation.
C City was mountainous. The river might not look as wide as it would downstream, but it was deep and carried a massive volume of water.
Under these circumstances, every meter the water level rose represented an enormous surge, and meant severe flooding downstream.
Fu Erdie’s brows furrowed deeply.
Her parents were in H City. It wasn’t downstream of the Li River, but it was downstream of the Ning River!
Flooding wouldn’t only affect the Li River, the Ning River was just as dangerous.
Fu Erdie felt unsteady on her feet.
She had always believed that her family had made it out safely, that her parents were in the safest possible place. But while she had been at home, indulging in comfort, daydreaming about farming and raising chickens, her parents might have already…!
Calm down. Calm down…
Fu Erdie took a deep breath.
What could she do now?
If her parents encountered flooding, would they think to come to her?
No, the villa they rented might be submerged, and they certainly wouldn’t have the energy or time to travel this far.
The nearest high ground to the plain where they lived was Tingshan Mountain. But Tingshan was a tourist spot, crowded, surely turned into a zombie nest. Her parents wouldn’t go there.
Aside from Tingshan, there were some hills of varying sizes nearby, but they were all too small. She couldn’t gamble on whether those low hills would remain above water after the ice fully melted.
Did her parents have kayaks? Inflatable boats? If they did, and they managed to get ashore from the flood zone, would they be able to find a car?
Fu Erdie’s arms prickled with goosebumps.
Right, the map!
In the early days of the apocalypse, when communication had briefly been restored, her mother had told her to save the route to their small villa in H City on her phone and tablet, and to print a backup. And they had saved the exact same route!
Maybe her parents were somewhere on that road, on one of the hills!