Chapter 113-I Clean Up Garbage in a Wasteland World
Chapter 113 The Forsaken Village (XVII)
"Didn't you want my body?" Zhu Ning said.
In that instant, it felt a moment of disorientation—as if the person standing before it wasn't Zhu Ning but Shengxin. Shengxin had been the first human to try to kill it.
The great fire blazed, illuminating the old woman's face. Shengxin's face was covered in wrinkles. Some people feared aging—many found the very idea of growing old terrifying.
Shengxin had lived a lifetime. She'd experienced many events that later generations would call "history." She'd witnessed the so-called Great Radiation. She'd watched as humanity moved into the Survivor Base.
Shengxin had made it this far. She gazed at the colossal creature before her as it finally revealed its true form.
Shengxin's face was dyed blood-red by the blaze. Heatwaves rolled toward her. She stared, dumbfounded. The torch slipped from her hands. Her face was streaked with tears.
She'd given everything she had. She'd done everything within her power. After her desperate last stand, she'd found there was nothing she could do.
She was in despair—not over her own imminent death, but over how insignificant humanity was before Contaminants.
In the final moments before death, the human mind was extraordinarily complex. The worm couldn't comprehend it, so it lumped all such feelings together under one word: despair.
It pressed against Shengxin's forehead and browsed through an entire lifetime of memories. Watched her smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and hunt.
Watched her scale a snowy mountain and plant her flag at the peak.
In that moment, it had been deeply puzzled by Shengxin's choice—unable to understand her motivation for trying to kill it.
Hunters spent their lives in danger. They made their own assessments of prey. When faced with large game they couldn't bring down, knowing when to retreat was a hunter's basic instinct.
So it likewise couldn't understand Shengxin's last words. Before her individual consciousness dissolved, the final words she left behind were:
"Shengxin. My name is Shengxin."
She spoke her own name. A human being had only one name to prove who they were.
All this time, it had treated those words as a dying declaration—like the meaningless howl of prey in its final moments.
It had never understood that Shengxin was planting a flag.
Just as a mountaineer plants a flag at the summit—humans climb mountains to leave their mark, to prove the peak was conquered by a human being—Shengxin's counterattack served the same purpose.
Seventy years ago, she had marked the farthest point humanity had reached in the fight against Contaminants.
The torch of human spirit would never die. What she couldn't accomplish today, someday a successor would.
The battle against Contaminants was a long relay race. Passing the baton from one person to the next—sooner or later, someone would kill it.
Could a worm understand that? It seemed to, now.
Zhu Ning's silhouette merged with Shengxin's. Back then, Shengxin had given everything to reach this point—she'd fallen just one step short.
Now Zhu Ning had taken up that invisible torch. She was taking the final step.
Worms evolved. Humans evolved too.
Seventy years later, evolved humanity returned to the battlefield.
This wasn't a contest between Shengxin and the worm, nor between Zhu Ning and it. This was a contest between humanity and contamination.
Only now did it realize how laughable it was. From a worm crawling on the ground to a being with intelligence and understanding of human emotion, it had always been an outsider. It used human identities to survive but never participated.
It was alone. It had countless offspring, yet not a single trusted companion.
It had believed itself closest to the gods that humans depicted. Gods only toyed with mortals and never felt fear. Now it was feeling that fear for itself.
It had taken the worm seventy years to complete a human-like evolution. Regression took only one second.
The instant it touched Zhu Ning's mind, it encountered something it should never have touched—like a pair of eyes opening in the abyss.
She looked down on it.
It had thought Zhu Ning was a ripe, tempting apple, sitting obediently and waiting to be parasitized. But she was the oriole.
Before her, it was a true worm—unable to resist, unable to struggle. It shouldn't even have harbored the faintest thought.
The moment her gaze fell upon it, it felt as though countless needles were piercing its skin. The hairs on the back of its neck stood on end. It couldn't help but shudder.
Zhu Ning stripped it of its human shell, stripped away its excess emotions, stripped away everything—until only pure fear remained.
Then she extended a single finger. Such a simple gesture, yet it loomed over it like a mountain.
Fear. It involuntarily felt fear—utterly unfamiliar, even bizarre. So it, too, could be this terrified.
The Xenomorph fed on fear. It let out a cry before the feast.
Rustle, rustle, rustle, rustle—
It could hear its own fear. Instinctively, it wanted to hold its breath.
Black slime flowed, swarming upward in dense masses. Wherever it passed, that rustling sound followed. A sealed space had formed here.
By the time it realized what was happening, it was already surrounded by black slime pressing in from all directions, constricting tighter and tighter. It could feel the infinite pressure.
Slime on all sides. Nowhere to run. Fear blanketed everything, crashing in wave after wave.
"I'm hungry," Zhu Ning said, expressionless. It sounded like a death sentence.
Squelch—
It was crushed. Squeezed. Devoured.
It was dying. It opened its mouth wide, wanting to cry out something, just as Shengxin had in her dying moments. But it couldn't. The instant it tried to speak, it realized it had nothing to say.
Those were feelings only humans possessed. It had nothing—not even a name.
......
Countdown: 59 seconds.
The final minute. The digits inside the helmet plummeted. Humans could not stop the flow of time.
In the second world, Li Nianchuan and Xu Meng's oxygen was critically low. They'd reached their limit.
Li Nianchuan tried to stay calm but couldn't manage it no matter how hard he tried. Both his body and mind were screaming that he was on the brink of death.
His heart pounded wildly—harder than ever before. He was about to give out.
Silhouettes appeared in the fog—the charred corpses of villagers, maintaining human forms, slowly closing in on Xu Meng and Li Nianchuan.
Li Nianchuan stared blankly. His sanity was crumbling. With only thirty seconds left, he didn't even want to resist anymore.
Watching the charred figures approach—already within arm's reach—Li Nianchuan didn't move a muscle.
Suddenly, a flash of steel appeared before his eyes. A blade cut through the air in a sharp, gleaming line, cleaving the corpse before him clean in half.
Xu Meng grabbed the back of Li Nianchuan's neck. Her voice came through gritted teeth: "What are you standing around for!"
Li Nianchuan's helmet was drenched in sweat. Surrounded by fire, he couldn't breathe. Xu Meng had to be in the same state—yet she was still fighting.
Xu Meng roared: "Pick up your gun and get back to opening that fish restaurant!"
Li Nianchuan blinked. He thought he might be crying. He'd never seen the gentle captain lose her temper like this.
Getting yelled at didn't feel bad at all. In fact, he was almost happy.
In that moment, Xu Meng seemed to have torn off her own mask, revealing a sliver of her true nature.
Pick up the gun. Get out of here. Hadn't they said they'd trust Zhu Ning? Then trust her to the very end.
As long as you weren't dead, you could resist. As long as you were alive, you could fight—even with just twenty seconds left on the clock.
Stay alive within the time Zhu Ning had promised. Make sure you're still breathing when her plan comes through.
The first world.
The main road through the forsaken village was in chaos. People writhed on the ground as countless worms burrowed through Protective Suits. Cleaners thrashed and convulsed on the ground.
The Cleaners were besieged by villagers. Squirming insects littered the ground. Three team members had already been taken over.
The forsaken village had descended into a living hell. Screams of anguish rang out without end.
Boom—
Someone activated a flame device. Fire swept forward in an instant.
"Use fire!" a Cleaner screamed through the chaos. "Use fire! Kill them!"
Demon Hunters had always looked down on Cleaners. They thought the Cleaners' work was safe—that these people had no fighting spirit.
The Garrison Troops looked down on them too, thinking those inside the wall lived pampered lives and knew nothing of real danger.
All along, whenever Cleaners encountered danger, the protocol was to stay put and wait for rescue. It was written in the employee handbook—they could only sit in the seat of those waiting to be saved.
They huddled on the village's main road, barred from searching for the Contamination Source. The most crucial task assigned to them was to preserve their sanity and not turn on each other.
But the lunging villagers ignited something primal in them. They'd been trained. They'd passed evaluations. They'd sparred against Demon Hunters in the ring—though most had lost.
But they were the ones selected as best suited for missions beyond the wall.
Forget whether they believed in Zhu Ning—in that moment, nobody was even thinking about it. Survive. On the edge of death, that was the only thought in anyone's head.
Fire surged like a dragon. Burning Contaminants rolled on the ground. Flames leapt from every corner of the forsaken village.
The Cleaners fought back with everything they had. They didn't know where the finish line was—but they were alive, so they fought.
If they were destined to die in a Contamination Zone, they refused to go down doing nothing.
They couldn't heap all the pressure on Zhu Ning alone. They had to fight. As long as they still drew breath, they would fight.
The great fire blazed. Tongues of flame consumed the entire village, roaring with fury.
Thick smoke rolled. Soon, they couldn't see a thing. The Protective Suits' oxygen systems kicked in automatically, urging them to evacuate immediately.
A dead end. They were about to break here.
Then—
One person stopped. Through the smoke, he spotted a tiny speck of blood-red light—minuscule, like a firefly, glowing with a crimson hue.
Was that... a Contamination Spore?
At first there was only one. Then thousands upon thousands of Contamination Spores began to swirl. The spores seemed alive, sweeping in like a tidal wave.
Li Nianchuan and Xu Meng had reached their absolute limit. Xu Meng's blade cleaved through a Contaminant—this time there was no hard bone to resist.
Her blade sliced through like cutting tofu. The Contaminant was absurdly soft—nothing but a mass of rotting flesh.
Only six seconds remained.
Xu Meng looked down. On the ground was a puddle of decayed meat. Contamination Spores were being released from the rot.
Contamination Spores. Rotting flesh. In an instant, Xu Meng understood what had happened. The Contamination Zone... had been cleared?
Zhu Ning had actually killed the Contamination Source?
Xu Meng had never blindly trusted anyone like this before—yet Zhu Ning had actually done it. She hadn't betrayed that trust.
The surrounding environment transformed in a heartbeat. Three worlds collapsed and merged into one. The attacking Contaminants crumbled instantly, disintegrating into chunks of rotting flesh.
"It's... purified?" someone said.
"Did we win?"
Li Nianchuan's ears twitched. Before, there had been some kind of barrier between them and Jin Tao's group. He could hear sounds from the other side, but they'd been muffled—like someone shouting through a gag.
Now that barrier seemed to have been removed. Clear voices flooded in. He could genuinely hear activity from Jin Tao's side.
"We won," someone said.
They weren't far away—only a few hundred meters.
The fog was clearing. They stood on the same village road. Li Nianchuan could see the main Cleaner group in the distance.
The mist dispersed, revealing the village's true face.
The forsaken village had once endured a great fire. The houses were burned down to their skeletons, swaying in the wind. They'd been standing on ruins the entire time.
The village was strewn with vast patches of rotting flesh. Contamination Spores danced through the air.
This was a purified Contamination Zone—textbook standard. They were Cleaners; they'd seen this countless times.
The sunset overhead was dissolving. The clouds that had hung frozen in place seemed to have been unpaused, drifting once more.
In an instant, it was as if the stars had shifted. The sky transitioned from dusk to night, as though an invisible hand had reached out and turned back the clock.
"The... the clock moved," someone said.
Since getting lost, their time had been frozen at 5:59. Now the display read 7:46.
"Did we really make it out?" someone asked uncertainly.
Nerves wound to the breaking point couldn't simply relax. They didn't even know how to react. The first feeling after surviving wasn't joy—it was bewilderment.
And the lingering aftertaste of fear. Everyone's heart was still racing. They looked around in a daze.
They couldn't scream. They didn't want to cry. Everyone was just... stunned.
Contamination Spores drifted all around them. Rotting flesh littered the ground. Standing in the forsaken village, they looked like the village's true inhabitants.
Xu Meng asked: "Where's Zhu Ning?"
She was the first to snap back. The Contamination Zone was purified—where was Zhu Ning?
Li Nianchuan jolted awake. "Right—where's Zhu Ning?"
Jin Tao quickly did a headcount. "She's not on our end."
Xu Meng: "Head to the village entrance."
The road wasn't straight. The houses were all burned husks. They had to walk a bit before they could see the great locust tree at the entrance.
Xu Meng and Li Nianchuan were more anxious. Zhu Ning was their teammate. While the others were still dazed, they were already running toward the locust tree.
Li Nianchuan's legs were shaking—numb to the point where even walking was a struggle. No matter how desperately he wanted to keep up with Xu Meng, his body wouldn't let him.
It took Li Nianchuan ten minutes to catch up with Xu Meng. When he finally reached her and saw Zhu Ning, he'd been about to call out—but froze in his tracks.
Xu Meng wore the same expression. The two of them stood rooted to the spot.
The great locust tree at the village entrance had toppled—it had probably burned until it snapped on its own.
Behind the fallen tree, the real exit was now visible. But Xu Meng didn't even glance at it. Her brow was furrowed, her gaze fixed on what lay before her.
A mountain of rotting flesh had piled up in front of the locust tree. Xu Meng was a Cleaner—she'd seen the aftermath of countless Contamination Zones, seen endless rotting flesh and Contamination Spores. But she'd never seen anything like this.
The heap was so massive that its original shape was unrecognizable. Zhu Ning was half-buried in it. The Contamination Spores surrounding her were denser than anywhere else.
Blood-red Contamination Spores floated around her as if drawn to her presence.
She wasn't wearing her helmet. Her head was exposed. Her hair hung loose, disheveled strands dancing in the air. Her face was deathly pale.
She was looking up at the sky, motionless as a statue.
Zhu Ning must have been gazing at something else before—but now, hearing the noise, she turned her head and looked their way in silence.
Because she was elevated, her gaze was a downward one. Her eyes were stark black and white, her stare ice-cold, devoid of any warmth.
In that moment, Zhu Ning didn't look human. She looked more like... a god.
Author's Note:
A well-fed Ning-bao~
Comments
Post a Comment