"Rustle."
This sound wave seemed to set off a ripple in the air. In an instant, An Zhe realized that it did not rely on sight, but rather sound to determine locations.
Countless legs wriggled as it moved in their direction.
"Bang!"
A gunshot rang out in the night sky, and the wind blew past An Zhe. Lu Feng had climbed high up onto a rock at an unimaginable speed and fired his first shot.
The rustling ceased. The eyes on its body slowly turned, and it emitted a low and dull intermittent howling. Its windpipe must be full of pustules, An Zhe thought.
The second shot hit an eye in its upper right area.
The howling grew louder, and An Zhe's eyes flew wide open.
Blood.
Blackish-red blood was welling up from the wounded eye —not welling up, but spraying out instead.
Lu Feng fired several shots in a row. The opening gradually festered and increased in size, and blood burst out like a fountain. The monster's howls grew many times louder.
An Zhe looked up at Lu Feng and saw that his gaze was calm, as if everything was as he had expected.
He looked back at the monster. Its wings vibrated, but its body was too heavy to truly fly. It made a mad dash forward and squarely struck the rock where Lu Feng was. With a loud noise, the rock trembled, and dust and debrisfell. Although Lu Feng was standing on it, he did not move an inch—he looked down, observing the massive glob of flesh.
Hitting the rock made it bleed out even faster; it was like an open waterskin. As An Zhe looked at this unimaginable sight, he suspected that the monster's body was simply composed of myriad fluids.
After the tenth impact, the sound weakened, and itscolossal body slowly toppled over.
There was not only blood, for chunks of flesh and oddly shaped organs had also flowed out from the opening. The heart and lungs were fused together, a runny semi-solid mass, and an indescribable stench pervaded the entire area. Even the monsters of the Abyss did not have internal organs with such an indescribable structure.
"… Hm?"
There was a blank spot in An Zhe's knowledge. He looked up at Lu Feng, and Lu Feng's eyebrows lifted slightly before he jumped down and landed at An Zhe's side. "What is it?"
"… Just like that?" An Zhe asked.
"Just like that," Lu Feng said.
"It died so easily," An Zhe said.
"Mm-hm." Lu Feng put the gun away. In his cold white fingers, the gunstock gently spun in a circle before being tucked into the holster at his waist.
An Zhe was greatly confused, even beginning to wonder that if he were to be shot, what kind of circumstance it would be under. He felt a little afraid.
Lu Feng glanced at him, a slight smile in his eyes, and then turned and walked outward.
The monster's ugliness exceeded An Zhe's imaginings, and the speed at which it fell also exceeded them. There was no shortage of huge and ugly species in the Abyss, but the pile of ruined meat before their eyes clearly did not conform to the rule that within the Abyss, the uglier a monster was, the stronger it was.
Just like that, the monster's carcass fell onto the sand dunes, and black and red pus flowed out from beneath itsbody, dyeing that patch of soil a dark hue. The same pus had also moistened the nearby shrubbery. First, it gradually hung like a drop of dew, but a minute later, it contractedback and integrated into the shrub's foliage—it had been absorbed.
Lu Feng cast a glance at his watch. Thirty minutes after the monster was confirmed dead, he approached it, and An Zhe followed—although he was still limping a bit.
Its grotesque body shone with a strange metallic luster beneath the aurora. Although all of the body's parts came from various creatures, they were all firmly connected, growing from within the body. Upon recalling how it devoured the black bee, An Zhe realized that if it devoured a creature's genes, it would immediately grow the organ governed by that particular portion of its genes.
After observing the monster for a long time, Lu Feng said to An Zhe, "Let's go."
An Zhe asked, "Go where?"
"There may still be many of these kinds of things here," Lu Feng said. "We're going to find a safe place."
An Zhe looked around, but there was nothing in his field of vision save for a dusty desert. He asked, "Where are we going?"
"There are ruins up ahead," Lu Feng said.
An Zhe thought, How come I didn't see any ruins when I was flying in the sky?
But then he thought some more. He had been riding a bee, while the Colonel's means of transportation was an airplane, so of course the Colonel's field of vision would be wider than his.
He heard Lu Feng ask him, "Can you walk?"
"I can," An Zhe replied.
He actually was not a mushroom who feared pain.
Although he really was in a bit of pain.
The Colonel gave him a flat look and said, "Come here."
In the end, An Zhe went back to being carried. He hugged Lu Feng's neck, and with his head buried in Lu Feng's shoulder, he could feel Lu Feng's breathing along with the movements as he walked. In fact, the rolling hills were only suitable for four-legged reptiles to walk around on. When stepping upon it, the sandy ground would sinkslightly; it was not suited to the exertion of force by bones and muscles. It seemed that only footless snake-class creatures could be at home in this kind of environment. Many places in this world were unsuited for human activity. Walking here demanded a greater expenditure of strength, and carrying a person by piggyback demanded even more. But Lu Feng seemed to not be stingy with it. In An Zhe's limited recollections, apart from not liking to talk, the Colonel did not seem to be stingy with anything.
Amidst a stretch of silence, An Zhe looked behind himself. Beneath the boundless black sky, he saw a line of footsteps of varying depths in the snow-white sand, seeming like some sort of profound symbol.
He suddenly recalled that day in the Garden of Eden. That day, when he was passing through the spaciouscorridor, several white officers had gathered in an empty room and were reciting a beautiful verse, and the one leading them was holding a silver cross. Back then, the magnetic field had disappeared, the power supply had been cut off, and everyone was gripped in the chaotic throes of fear, but their expressions were very peaceful, as though they had received some sort of strength that could support them in their movement forward.
"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil." He repeated this tranquil verse for Lu Feng to hear. "For You are with me. Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me."
In the cold, Lu Feng's voice seemed to contain a hint of warmth. "Is there more?"
An Zhe strove to remember. "Certainly goodness and faithfulness will follow me all the days of my life.
"And my dwelling will be in the house of the Lord forever."
"They believed,"
An Zhe said. "In God?"
He remembered that in the manuscripts An Ze had written for the base, words like God or gods had appeared.
Lu Feng gave a flat "hmm" in response.
An Zhe asked, "Then what about you?"
Lu Feng did not reply.
He did not speak, and in the quiet night there was only the unnerving sound of the wind. An Zhe recited the poems he had memorized from the children's textbooks and other places to Lu Feng one line at a time, whether simple or complex, until he reached "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." After reciting them, he started from the beginning again. Neither he nor Lu Feng had much to say or any small talk to make. He wished to say something to make this still and deserted night a bit more lively, so he could only do this.
The wind was so strong that An Zhe's voice was quickly dispersed, but they were in such close proximity that he knew Lu Feng could hear.
By the time he repeated all the poems twice, they had walked for a very long while.
An Zhe did not know what kind of training the Colonel had undergone with the military, but he knew that this road and this night were both too long. So long that it seemed like they could walk for a lifetime and walk to the boundary of this world or the ends of their own lives. This process's consumption of physical energy also surpassed what the normal human body could hold.
He surreptitiously transformed part of his body into light mycelium, then feared that this slight change was trivial, so then he surreptitiously transformed some more.
At last, he heard Lu Feng ask, "Do you know why that monster died so easily?"
An Zhe did not know why Lu Feng would suddenly mention this. He stopped reciting the verse and said, "No."
"Low-level mutations are from genetic contamination, and high-level mutated monsters are divided into two types," Lu Feng said, "hybrid class and polymorphic class."
"After hybrid-class monsters consume genes, they will have a part of the original organism, and the genes and characteristics of many creatures can coexist in its body. But it has a buffer period." As Lu Feng walked forward, he continued talking. "There's a span of time in which the original genes and newly acquired genes conflict with each other. Within this time, its DNA strands are violently changing, conflicting with the original organs' functions, so the body's interior is a mess. Therefore, the intervals at which smart hybrid-class monsters consume genes are very long, for they need to establish stable genes. That one just now got greedy."
An Zhe asked, "What about the polymorphic-class ones?"
"The polymorphic-class ones are the highest-level mutations that have been observed for now, few in number and mainly concentrated within the Abyss. The way they mutate is not by genes coexisting, but rather freely changing. For example, changing from a bee to a type of plant… Sometimes they can also change partially."
"The gene sequences of polymorphic-class mutants are more stable than those of hybrid-class ones," Lu Feng said flatly. "But they also cannot take in too much at once, since it will affect their minds. The Trial Court once had a case in which an animal and plant polymorphic monster underwent an incomplete transformation, had fibrous tissue form in all its organs, and died on the spot."
Slightly afraid, An Zhe tightly hugged Lu Feng's neck in silence.
He always felt that the Colonel's words carried a deeper meaning.
———
On the road, they once again saw another hybrid-class monster.
It was different from the monster who fell to Lu Feng's gun. Skinny and dark gray, it was like a stick insect that had been magnified some tens of thousands of times. On its back were huge, thin wings that only butterflies had, and extending from its forehead were two slender antennae, but its eyes were not visible. Its whole body was five meters long, and it had six skinny feet. While they were climbing a high slope, it was consuming a two-meter-long lizard. Its glossy, chitin-covered body originally reflected the aurora's light, but as it ate, the chitin gradually turned into rough scales.
Its light and nimble body allowed it to move swiftly.
After eating the lizard's head, the stick insect leaned its torso down, then sprang forward, the remnants of the lizard's body dangling from its mouth as it flew away, wings flapping. It had not discovered Lu Feng and An Zhe.
Perhaps it was one of those smart hybrid monsters Lu Feng spoke of, understanding that it needed to first find a place to hide after obtaining genes where it could get through the chaotic phase.
As An Zhe looked at its snow-white wings, he said with sincerity, "It's so pretty."
He himself was also white, and he liked the color of his hyphae, but he didn't have such outstretched and beautiful wings. Even if he changed completely into his original form, he would only be a soft mass. Ever since that rainy season from his early life in which he was snapped in half by rainfall and gales, he had lost the shape that a mushroom ought to have and had even been defined as a
"xenogenic that had broken away from the basic form of its species," which made him feel ashamed.
He heard Lu Feng's cold voice. "You wish to eat it?"
An Zhe said nothing.
"That's not it," he finally said.
Lu Feng said, "Don't eat things willy-nilly."
An Zhe replied in a small voice, "It's not like I can beat them."
The corners of Lu Feng's mouth twitched upward slightly.
As a xenogenic, being prohibited from eating things willy-nilly by a human made An Zhe angry. He should have the right to eat freely.
Then his stomach gurgled.
Lu Feng asked, "Where are your things?"
An Zhe thought back to the amount of food, which was not enough for even a single meal. He said, "Wait."
After some thinking, he asked Lu Feng, "Are you hungry?"
Lu Feng said, "I'm all right."
An Zhe thought that this human was being stubborn. He easily dug out the remaining half a piece of hardtack from his backpack, broke off a piece, and fed it to Lu Feng.
The Colonel did not refuse it.
An Zhe continued to feed him. At the third piece, hethought of how the hardtack was excessively dry and ought to be eaten with water.
There was only half a bottle of water left as well. He took it out, but he did not know how he ought to feed it to the Colonel.
He could only say, "Stop for a while."
Thus, at daybreak, he and Lu Feng shared half of the remaining half bottle of water behind a large rock. Water was something that made mushrooms happy. An Zhe licked his lips, after which Lu Feng immediately stuffed a piece of hardtack into his mouth.
The cool fingers accidentally touched his lips. With the piece of hardtack in his mouth, An Zhe slowly swallowed it, unexpectedly feeling very at ease. They were clearly almost out of food and water, and he did not know how they would continue living tomorrow.
He said to Lu Feng, "You eat it, I'm not the one exerting
myself."
As a result, he did not need to eat much.
Saying nothing, Lu Feng rubbed An Zhe's head, and AnZhe looked up and met his gaze. He felt that in the pale early morning light, the Colonel's perpetually cold eyes had been colored with a hint of warmth.
At that moment, An Zhe suddenly felt the delusion that although he and Lu Feng were completely different, although the two of them lacked any common language— supposing the signals never returned, supposing there came a day when either Lu Feng and he were both xenogenics or he and Lu Feng were both human, supposing they were both still alive—if such a day truly came, perhaps he and Lu Feng could be very good friends.
Amongst humans, he himself was not a very outstanding individual, and could even be considered a worthless individual, but the Colonel was very good to him regardless. Therefore, if Lu Feng turned into a xenogenic, so long as he wasn't too ugly, An Zhe wouldn't dislike him.
However, such a possibility did not exist at all. Lu Feng was human, and he was unfortunately a mushroom. But supposing he had always been human, perhaps he would only have been an ordinary person of the Outer City and not known Lu Feng at all, so he then felt lucky that he was a mushroom.
They continued walking. An Zhe felt that after the night had gone by, his leg did not hurt so much anymore, so he wanted to walk on his own rather than be carried by Lu Feng. When he was put down, he saw Lu Feng frowning slightly while looking to one side.
Beneath a massive rock nearby, fragments of two human skeletons lay scattered. The skulls rested far from the broken spines, the hand bones were missing, and an ashen leg bone was stuck into the sand at an angle as though it were a flagpole or gravestone.
After they walked closer, Lu Feng bent down and wiped a thin layer of ash from the bones with his fingers.
"Fresh, within the last two days," he said.
With those words, An Zhe's gaze turned uncertain as he looked at the human bones. In this kind of circumstance, there should not be any humans who could move around in the wilderness, so there should not be any fresh human bones either.
He asked, "Is it one of your pilots?"
Lu Feng looked around. "There's no wreckage."
They carefully checked the bones again. There were traces of monster bites on the bones, and buried beneath the sand nearby was a raggedy piece of clothing that was dark gray and not the base's standard dress. Lu Feng had a thoughtful look on his face, for this was absolutely not normal.
However, without any other clues, they could only move on.
After another half hour, within the morning mist, something faintly loomed in the distance. A thread of gray spread across the horizon, seeming like the edge of some giant city.
"I think I see it," An Zhe said.
Those must be the city ruins Lu Feng spoke of.
Lu Feng said, "I see it as well."
An Zhe asked, "Is it possible to find water and food in the ruins?"
"Yes."
"Really?"
Lu Feng said impassively, "I often stay in ruins."
"… Oh."
Colonel Lu was a man who could come and go freely even in the Abyss.
However, to not be starved to death was still something worth being happy about. Even his footsteps became more springy, and he took one step ahead of Lu Feng.
Right at that moment, the ground beneath his feet suddenly softened!
Then it sagged.
He started falling.
"Ah!!"
His heart thumped violently. He was about to turn into hyphae form from fear, but in a flash, a heavy force traveled down his left arm—Lu Feng had firmly grasped his hand. Hanging in midair, An Zhe let out a sigh of relief, after which Lu Feng hauled him back up. Just as his leg recovered, his arm began to hurt sharply, and he softly inhaled. Lu Feng reached out and ran his hand all the way down from An Zhe's shoulder to his wrist, then said, "It's not broken."
An Zhe looked down.
It was a perilous three-meter-deep pit concealed with some brittle, thin planks that had been covered with sand. There was nothing visible to distinguish it from the surroundings, but so long as one stepped onto it, they would fall into the pit.
An Zhe thought it odd.
He saw that Lu Feng was frowning slightly as well.
"A pitfall trap, newly made by the looks of it," Lu Feng said.
In this place, first human bones appeared, and then a pitfall trap—both human-related things.
Could it be that there were people living out here in the wilderness?
Right at that moment, Lu Feng jerked his head up and looked in a particular direction. "Who is it?"
There was a dirt hump rising from the ground, looking completely ordinary in the hilly land. After Lu Feng spoke, there was no response whatsoever.
However, Lu Feng pulled out his gun and said grimly, "Come out."
There was no movement.
Ten seconds, twenty seconds, half a minute.
A rustling suddenly came from that direction, followedby a dull squeak, and An Zhe looked toward the source of the sounds. Soil rolled down the dirt hump's surface as something akin to a lid opened up, and a figure climbed out. He initially thought it was a groundhog, but upon a second look, it turned out to be a human, a living and seemingly non-mutated human clad in raggedy denim similar to the clothing next to the bones from earlier.
After standing up, the person was a scrawny boy. His complexion seemed especially pale due to lack of sunlight, but a few freckles were scattered across his cheeks.
He looked at them, seeming completely dumbfounded as he stared.
An Zhe silently returned the look.
Two full minutes passed before the boy stammered, "You… you two… Humans?"
The way he spoke was very unskilled and his pronunciations very strange, dissimilar to the common accent of the people of the base.
Lu Feng said, "Take us out of here first."
The boy stared at them, and his hands that were hanging at his sides trembled before he abruptly ran toward them. "Wait!"
He approached them by way of a circuitous route, then turned around to guide them, leading them around many twists and turns. As they walked, he stammered, "I… I'm sorry. We were afraid… afraid of monsters approaching, so we dug a lot… a lot of pitfall traps. So they couldn't come, and we… we could keep watch… I… I didn't think anyone would come back. Are… are you okay?"
Seeing him hang his head, the very picture of remorse and self-blame, An Zhe said, "I'm fine."
Next to the dirt hump, the boy pushed some manner of device, and with a creak, a heavy iron gate unsteadily opened to reveal a pitch-black cave mouth.
"You're… you're people from the outside?" Seeming to have suddenly realized something, the boy turned toward them, tongue-tied. He had first looked at Lu Feng, but he seemed to have been frightened by Lu Feng's expressionless face, so he stiffly turned toward An Zhe and posed the question.
"We are," An Zhe said.
"I…" The boy took a few breaths, and the flush of excitement rose in his cheeks. If not for the half-meter distance between them, An Zhe suspected that he would be able to hear the thump-thump-thump-thump of the boy's violent heartbeats.
He asked, "Are you okay?"
"I…" The boy seemed to have finally realized what had just happened, and it looked like he was unable to catch his breath.
But then Lu Feng spoke. "Hello," he said. "Northern Base, Trial Court. Do you need help?"
"We… we do need help." The boy's eyes shone with a light like that of the rising sun, and he turned and dove into the tunnel, shouting as he ran into its depths, "Grandfather!"
Following him, Lu Feng and An Zhe also walked into the quiet and winding tunnel. After closing the iron gate, this
place was cool and dark, but a weak flashing light was shining up ahead. The path underfoot was not clearly visible, so An Zhe carefully placed a hand along the wall. Lu Feng grabbed his wrist and pulled him forward.
This was a flight of steep stairs leading down, where it was very easy to fall. It wasn't until after another downhill stretch approximately a hundred meters long and around another bend that the space widened somewhat. Gas lamps cast their feeble white glow upon the walls, illuminating the cramped interior of the cave. Looking into the distance, it was so deep as to be endless, and the sound of footsteps set off unabating echoes.
Lu Feng asked, "Did you people dig this?"
"No." the boy said. "It's a mine from a very long time ago. Many of us hid in here."
"How many people?" Lu Feng asked. "How long have you lived here?"
"I don't know." The boy hung his head slightly. "I was born here, and afterward, many people… died. My uncle left, so now there's only my grandfather and me."
Before they reached the place where the "grandfather" the boy spoke of was, An Zhe first heard a harsh gasp for breath, like the sound a dying animal would make from its chest.
In a ten-square-meter niche, a bed of iron wire less than a meter across had been placed within it, and on the bed lay a grizzled old man. An Zhe walked closer and saw that he was covered with a grayish-yellow blanket, his cheeks were gaunt, his eyes were clouded, and he was trembling all over as though he was suffering some great pain. Even though they had arrived at his bedside, he did not react at all.
"He's sick," the boy said.
As he spoke, he sat by the bed, picked up his grandfather's hand, and said loudly, "Grandfather, people from the outside have come to find us! They said they came from the base! The base really exists!"
The old man's mind was no longer lucid. Rather than being affected by the joy and excitement in the boy's words, he frowned and turned his head, as if fleeing from the boy's clamor.
"We can go to a place with lots of people now!" Seemingly accustomed to it, the boy was not affected by the old man's negative attitude either. Instead, his tone of voice became more excited.
Right at that moment, the old man's wizened mouth moved as he spoke a few incoherent syllables.
His grandson said, "What?"
An Zhe listened carefully as well. The old man's lips moved, once again repeating those syllables.
"It's…" With his throat raspy and his mouth leaking air, his voice sounded like a decrepit wind. "It's… almost time."
The boy apologetically turned to Lu Feng and An Zhe. "Grandfather always says this. He thinks he's very sick and close to death."
After saying that, he told the old man, "We're going to the place where all the humans are. There will definitely be medicine there."
But the old man tossed and turned, still saying the same thing, so they could only give up. Up until they left, the old man was still mumbling "it's almost time." An Zhe thought this sentence sounded very familiar, but he could not recall where he had heard it before.
Then the boy took them to a slightly more spacious rectangular room. The room, connected to three pitchblack tunnels that forked off, was like a heartland that sprawled in all directions. Yellowing paper displaying a map of the mine and operating precautions had been pasted upon the rugged wall, and in the middle of the room was a small square table, next to which two old sofas had been placed. Excessive moisture had completely eroded the patent leather of the sofas.
Lu Feng was conversing with the boy.
The boy's name was Xi Bei, and according to him, when the unprecedented calamity had approached, the mine caved in. But because the radiation did not penetrate through the ground, some of the people within managed to survive and continued until now. They would go to the ruins of nearby small towns to gather daily necessities and would also be killed and devoured by the monsters outside. His mother gave birth to only him, and slowly, gradually, out of the original dozens of people, only he and his grandfather as well as a few older uncles were left.
"I just knew that there was no way everyone would have died. They must have built new homes somewhere, but we couldn't find you people. In the past, my grandfather said that when we found another exit and left the mine, the weather had changed and there was not a single living person."
"The radio couldn't receive any signals, there were monsters everywhere outside, and we couldn't go out. We could only stay here, but we knew there still must have been other people." Xi Bei's voice trembled with a thread of excitement, and from a cubbyhole in the wall he took out a few slim and worn-out books.
"Two years ago, we found a car outside. In addition to a dead person, these were inside it, so I knew there were still people outside. I've… always been waiting for you to come. Our… our fellow people must have always been searching in order to rescue us." He looked at Lu Feng, eyes shining, full of hope.
In a low voice, Lu Feng said, "The base welcomes you."
On the other hand, An Zhe reached out. Within that stack of slim volumes, the topmost one's cover was illuminated by the dim gas lamp. Its title was Base Monthly. The words jogged the scraps of memories stored in his head. This was a pamphlet that the base's Cultural Department distributed to the people.
In this manner, the pamphlet was produced by the distant human base, then taken along with pornographic novels and weapon handbooks by mercenaries or soldiers for a ride in an armored vehicle departing from the base. After a long journey, it had been abandoned forever in the wilderness. And after that, the survivors of the Desert Age took it out of the vehicle wreckage and passed it around day after day in the mine. They knew it represented distant human homes.
The title page, already yellowed, had the words "May we have a bright future" written in small font. After a turn of the page, the table of contents appeared.
The hand An Zhe was turning the pages with suddenly trembled, and his gaze stopped at a particular line in the table of contents consisting of two words that could be no simpler.
"Winter Day."
The ellipses extended all the way to the right edge of the paper, and at the end were two other words representing the writer's name.
An Ze.
An Zhe's breathing stopped for a brief moment. Then he glimpsed in his peripheral vision the line underneath "Winter Day," an essay titled "A Day in 2059."
2059 was a distant time in history, so this title indicated that it was a sophisticated historical essay.
Its writer was named Poet.
These two names silently lay side by side on the page.
An Zhe's fingers landed on the paper. His fingers had once held An Ze's shoulder in that vine-filled cave and once been squeezed by Poet in a pitch-black car. Now they brushed over the two men's names, and their figures once again became vivid in An Zhe's mind. He flipped to that page—those two side-by-side pages. "Winter Day" was a short poem written about the snowflakes falling upon the supply depot square that winter. An Ze had said that the fallen snow was as soft as the wings of snow-white doves.
An Zhe was able to recall all of the details in An Ze's voice, and it was like he was hearing An Ze personally describe it to him. In that fleeting moment, An Ze seemed to come back to life, and Poet likewise stood before him with a smile, insisting on telling An Zhe the base's history.
This world still contained the records they left behind.
An Zhe's vision went blurry. Clearly he had not thought of the two of them for a very long time already, but their figures nevertheless appeared vividly before him, as though they had met only yesterday.
In this manner, he reunited with them again, just like how this boy named Xi Bei suddenly encountered the visitors from the human base.
"Originally there were also two uncles here, but they went out to find things to eat. It's been more than a day and they haven't come back. I think…" Xi Bei hung his head. "I think… they may not be able to come back."
"My apologies," Lu Feng said. "I've arrived late."
"Not at all!" Xi Bei shook his head vigorously, then gave Lu Feng an awkward, close-lipped smile. His voice was a bit raspy as he said, "There are monsters everywhere outside, so it must have been very difficult for you too. Just the fact that you've come makes me very… very grateful already. In this world, there are still other humans, and we still have a home. It's… it's great."
The glow of the gas lamp reflected off of his black pupils, where bright sparks danced in excitement. The sparks combined with the subtle expression on Xi Bei's face, presenting a pure joy mingled with sorrow.
An Zhe silently looked at Xi Bei's face and knew that it was an emotion he would never understand. He lowered his head. On the magazine's yellowing pages, An Ze's voice and face appeared before him once again.
His eyes misted over. Merely a few hours ago, he had still been internally criticizing the stubborn efforts the humans were making to retain their will and imagining that the day Lu Feng also changed into a xenogenic, he wouldn't dislike him. But at this very moment, the idea wavered slightly.
Humans were humans after all, he thought.
He knew that the base had no medicine, and he knew that humankind had reached its end.
But they were also truly everlasting.