"Let's find a place to rest," Xu Shang-Chi said, exhaling. The existence of his energy made his body far from tired, but his spirit was exhausted to the extreme.
Studying that sticky substance was definitely not easy. Ultimately, Xu Shang-Chi had the impression that it had crawled up his body, making him feel completely sticky. Combined with the corpses and the stench in the street, Xu had an increasing urge to vomit.
Caressing his chest and continuously pressing his hand downward to soothe himself, he always felt as though something was about to surge upward. He thought it was his stomach disease playing up, a feeling of nausea, hence he kept swallowing his saliva.
During their journey, they found a few weapons. Most of them were cold weapons, because the guns they were able to find were basically out of bullets.
Riley, who was robust, took a fireman's axe. Jarvis, with his automatic aiming program, took a harpoon gun. Xu Shang-Chi selected a fruit knife from a shop, which he found most comfortable to use.
In the end, they decided to rest in a relatively clean civilian house. It seemed as though the owner had left beforehand. The house had not been ravaged by monsters; the bedding and daily necessities were available, making it a good place for a temporary rest.
However, they didn't plan on sleeping in separate rooms. Instead, they planned on sleeping together in the living room. Xu Shang-Chi flung his body onto the soft sofa and let out a long awaited sigh.
He was so tired yet unable to sleep. He could always hear his own heartbeat, "thump, thump, thump…."
The more he listened, the more annoyed Xu Shang-Chi became. He was forced to sit up from the sofa, took a few deep breaths, and started to recite his Clear Heart Mantra.
Throughout the day when he was investigating, he had recited the Clear Heart Mantra countless times to deal with the nauseating scenes. Now reciting it again, it felt incredibly smooth and fluent.
But the moment he opened his mouth to recite the first sentence, Wanda who was sitting on the opposite sofa and had just unlaced the cloth from her eyes, suddenly lifted her head.
Those eyes, now only two black holes, stared directly at Xu Shang-Chi. As he looked back at her, Wanda said in surprise,
"What you recited just now was... different from what you did during the day…."
Xu Shang-Chi was taken aback.
"I …" Just after Xu Shang-Chi uttered the first syllable, he froze, and then his expression changed to one of extreme horror.
He realized that he was not speaking Chinese, nor any other language he understood.
At that moment, Riley, who was sitting on a side sofa, suddenly turned his head towards Xu Shang-Chi. Their eyes met.
There was a sudden sadness in Riley's eyes. With tearful eyes, he turned towards Xu Shang-Chi and said,
"I just heard you talk."
Tremors began to run through Xu Shang-Chi's face, which soon spread throughout his body. His urge to vomit grew stronger.
But when his throat tightened, and a sour taste spread up his esophagus, it was not food that burst out but a sequence of a language he had never heard before.
The terrifying gibberish filled the room in an instant, Riley, in agony, covered his ears, falling to the ground and letting out a horrific scream. The Scarlet Witch began panting heavily, as if something was choking her.
Xu Shang-Chi made every effort to cover his mouth, but his stomach felt like it was being squeezed by a giant hand, pushing out the mysterious and ancient language. Desperate, Xu banged his head on the coffee table, but the pain did nothing to clear his senses.
Through tear-blurred vision, Xu Shang-Chi watched as the last rays of the sunset faded through the curtains in the house, heralding the arrival of night.
The terrified screams of Wanda and Riley echoed around the room, their agonized faces imprinted in Xu's eyes.
They were his favorite characters, around whom he'd spent countless hours engaged with their on-screen stories, moved to tears time and time again.
Not even Thanos had tormented Spider-Man this much.
The moment this thought appeared in his mind, a boundless rage scorched through his soul.
The last thread of sanity snapped in Xu's mind. He dove towards the sofa, trembling as he searched the gap where he'd left the fruit knife.
An expression of fear beneath trembling lips, the sharp knife reflecting desperate eyes.
In an instant, blood splattered everywhere. A severe nerve reflex rendered a severed tongue twitching on the ground, like a fish thrown ashore.
In the silent aftermath of the whispering, Xu Shang-Chi, his mouth filled with blood for the first time, noticed the pungent smell of blood lingering between his lips and nostrils.
Then he discovered that he didn't detest the taste of blood after all. In fact, after losing his sense of taste, he could distinguish a hint of sweetness.
Xu Shang-Chi draped himself weakly over the coffee table, straining to lift his head and swallow what should have been vomit, the taste of blood. The tears blurring his vision stopped flowing, allowing him to gaze through the gap in the curtains at the stars high up in the night sky.
Amidst his gasping breaths, Xu Shang-Chi realized that it wasn't the taste of blood that was sweet, but the taste of victory.
In the darkness of the room, a trembling quill wrote down a sentence in a black notebook—
"If I'm writing about the apocalypse, I can't just write about the apocalypse. I have to write about the idiots who bumbled their way into surviving, the smart ones whose strategies were countered at the last move, and the good people who were forced into madness, along with selfless villains.
I have to write about the inherently great heroes singing praises of courage, but also about the ordinary people, as insignificant as dust, who, despite their despair and bloodshed, find it bittersweet."