Chapter 14: Thank You for Saving Us
Since what Zhao Guang cared about most was his sister—so much so that he was willing to betray his savior’s reputation for her sake—then Su Han would strike right where it hurt him most.
The four kneeling men lifted their heads, a spark of life gradually flickering back into their dead, hollow eyes.
They had already despaired, resigned to waiting for their deaths.
Yet now, someone had actually stepped forward to speak on their behalf.
At this very moment, Su Han was nothing short of a divine savior in their eyes.
The surrounding crowd had heard Su Han’s words clearly, and the ability users among them were already buzzing with whispers.
Su Han had a great reputation around the base, and they were more than inclined to trust the boy’s claims.
Tang Qiao furrowed his brows and summoned several squad leaders from the guard corps to question them. Sure enough, one squad had indeed run into Su Han that night, and every detail aligned perfectly with what he had just recounted.
The only thing was, back then, they had clearly seen the runner wearing the guard corps’ black tactical uniform. Assuming it was one of their own carrying out a clandestine assignment, they had intentionally cut him some slack and let him slip away.
Hearing this, the corner of Tang Qiao’s mouth twitched violently. He came within a hair of electrocuting these complete idiots on the spot.
“Useless trash! Who told you that anyone in a black uniform is on our side?! If a zombie puts on a black uniform, is it your brother too?!”
A bunch of incompetent fools!
Su Han had spoken at the top of his lungs, and every eye in the square was pinned on the scene. Tang Qiao knew there was no way he could execute these men now; he signaled his subordinates to untie their ropes.
“The higher-ups will conduct a re-investigation into this matter. We will certainly give Mr. Zhao Guang and all of you a proper explanation… For now, return to your quarters.”
The surrounding survivors watched the sudden reversal unfold before their very eyes. Those who had just been loudly praising the Leader’s righteous wisdom were struck dumb.
If Su Han hadn’t stepped forward to stop this today, wouldn’t these four men have been wrongly butchered…?
Those were four living human lives—guardians who protected the base, no less. If they had died with such an injustice hanging over their heads… and the survivors had loudly applauded the executioner…
The mere thought sent a cold, prickling dread across their scalps!
A wave of lingering terror washed over the crowd.
This Leader Wang was truly something else, ordering men executed without even bothering to get the facts straight. If Zhao Guang’s sister had truly been assaulted by four burly, muscular men at once, she probably wouldn’t have had a breath left in her lungs, let alone the strength to run weeping to her brother to pour her heart out.
What kind of ridiculous farce was this?
Unbeknownst to Su Han, he had already ascended to the status of a sacred messiah in the eyes of the crowd.
Before he could react, one of the four burly men grabbed him and hauled him into a bone-crushing embrace, the wall of muscle on the man’s broad chest nearly suffocating him on the spot.
“A-Han, you saved my life! I owe you my life from now on—whatever you ask of me in the future, I’ll do it without question!”
Su Han offered a sheepish smile, scratching the back of his head with feigned awkwardness. “I was just telling the truth. Still, it’s really strange… I clearly told the patrol guards that very night, yet they still arrested you all anyway.”
The speaker had dropped a calculated seed, and the listeners picked it up loud and clear.
As the four men gradually calmed their racing hearts, the fiery zeal in their chests cooled by half.
They had heard every word Wang Jiafu said. Their own leader hadn’t bothered to investigate a single detail before sentencing them to death.
This wasn’t feudal antiquity, and they weren’t Wang Jiafu’s indentured slaves.
What right did Wang Jiafu have to dictate whether they lived or died?
One of the men stared blankly for a moment, stunned, before tears suddenly welled in his eyes and broke free.
Choking on his sobs, he choked out, “What right does he have to put us in front of a firing squad?! Back when I joined the guard corps, the only reason I was willing to work like a dog for the leadership was because Leader Shen was strong! Who the fuck does Wang Jiafu think he is?!”
The moment he said that, memories came rushing back to the others.
When the base was first founded, the band of ability users and veteran soldiers refused to yield to anyone.
To earn their respect, Shen Chengyin had stepped up and fought virtually every single man in the guard corps hand-to-hand. The man’s martial prowess was undisputed; he truly had the power to command submission.
Because Shen Chengyin was overwhelmingly strong, they accepted their defeat with grace and loyally did his bidding.
And now?
The one who had replaced Leader Shen was Wang Jiafu—a useless parasite who hadn’t even scraped the threshold of a primary-tier ability, spending his days lounging lazily in the arms of women.
Forget brawling his way through the entire guard unit; even the youngest rookie recruit could probably flatten Wang Jiafu with a single punch.
The crowd had not yet dispersed, and many members of the guard corps lingered among them.
The newer recruits who had joined after the transfer of power only knew Leader Wang, and they couldn’t comprehend why their veteran seniors were wearing such lost, grief-stricken expressions.
An inexplicable sense of sorrow began to spread through the hearts of the crowd.
A name they had long buried was once again unearthed from the depths of their memories.
Every person who had stood upon this soil since the base’s inception began reminiscing over that very same name.
Standing at the center of the crowd, Su Han watched it all unfold in silence, the faintest, gentlest smile tugging at the corners of his lips.
After Su Han blew the whole situation wide open in public, Wang Jiafu was driven near the brink of madness.
Did he have some kind of cosmic curse with this kid? Why did the brat keep ruining his plans time and time again?
The worst part was that Su Han always presented a completely valid reason, leaving Wang Jiafu temporarily unable to tell whether the boy was doing it on purpose or if it was sheer, dumb coincidence.
The problem facing him now was disastrous: he couldn’t execute those four men, nor could he catch the mysterious figure in black Su Han had described. He had no explanation to offer the base survivors, and even less of an accounting to give Zhao Guang.
He was caught between a rock and a hard place.
Within just two days, the mounting stress caused several massive, inflamed blisters to break out along the corners of Wang Jiafu’s mouth.
There were moments when he genuinely wanted to slit Su Han’s throat and be done with it, but the boy went around laughing and smiling all day long, never appearing to oppose him with malicious intent.
Most crucially, Su Han had no logical reason to cross him.
On top of that, the crystal cores Su Han turned in daily were double the amount scavenged by any other ability user; Wang Jiafu simply couldn’t bring himself to discard such a golden goose.
After weighing it back and forth, Wang Jiafu stayed his hand, choosing instead to have Tang Qiao’s men tighten their surveillance on the boy.
The second the order came down from Wang Jiafu, Su Han noticed Li Tiangan acting out of sorts.
The man would knock on his door at the drop of a hat for no reason at all, sometimes dropping by in the dead of night just to stir up trivial banter.
Su Han easily deduced that Wang Jiafu had issued fresh directives, meaning Li Tiangan needed material to file in his daily reports.
To make life easier for Li Tiangan, Su Han started cooking up all sorts of bizarre antics.
As a result, the daily surveillance logs Li Tiangan submitted to Wang Jiafu ended up looking like this:
[A-Han brought back a severed zombie head, set it on the exchange counter, and claimed he was selling it as a ‘blind box’ for crystal cores, nearly giving Uncle Wang at the exchange a stroke on the spot.]
[A-Han returned to his bedroom and slept the entire time.]
[A-Han returned to his bedroom and slept the entire time.]
[A-Han brought back one primary-tier zombie crystal core today.]
[A-Han returned to his bedroom and slept the entire time.]
[A-Han returned to his bedroom and slept the entire time.]
…
There were so many entries about sleeping that Wang Jiafu eventually couldn’t even be bothered to read them, completely waiving Li Tiangan’s daily reporting duties.
Like undercover comrades operating in the shadows, Su Han and Li Tiangan coexisted under a tacit understanding for nearly a full month.
Li Tiangan would occasionally shadow Su Han, and on a few instances, he even caught the boy pulling discreet little stunts—including, but not limited to, subtly swaying ordinary survivors, quietly undermining Wang Jiafu’s image, and even feeding negative rumors to Know-It-All to spread throughout the streets.
They were all minor, seemingly insignificant moves on their own, but an ant colony could cause a massive dyke to collapse; Wang Jiafu’s prestige in the eyes of the survivors was eroding away bit by bit.
And Li Tiangan hadn’t reported a single word of it.
Su Han found himself increasingly unable to read this “roommate” of his.
Li Tiangan had shown plenty of sincerity, yet Su Han still didn’t dare place blind trust in one of Wang Jiafu’s subordinates.
He had requisitioned a miniature listening device from Shen Chengyin to plant on Li Tiangan, only resting easy after confirming time and again that the man hadn’t pulled any double-crosses.
For that, he had wound up owing Shen Chengyin yet another favor.
During this period, by squeezing the survivors in the Lower Sector dry, Wang Jiafu had managed to stockpile a sizable cache of supplies in the storehouses.
At the very least, if another insolent troublemaker like Zhang Qiang popped up to challenge him, he wouldn’t be caught entirely empty-handed.
It was just a pity that he still hadn’t found a single trace of where that vanished chunk of supplies had gone.
Once his stockpiles stabilized, Wang Jiafu didn’t allocate a single scrap of the surplus to the “low-borns.” Instead, he increased the welfare rations distributed to the “high-borns.”
His goal was to buy their loyalty and drown out the grumblings of the underclass.
Worthless weaklings without combat strength ought to have been purged from the apocalypse long ago anyway.
Ever since the incident where his sister was supposedly defiled, Zhao Guang had adamantly demanded to move her back under his own roof, threatening to cut off the base’s drinking water entirely if his terms weren’t met.
Caught in the wrong, Wang Jiafu had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill and agree.
Now the siblings lived together. Though they remained under the watchful eyes of Wang Jiafu’s spies, it was vastly better than being kept in separate quarters.
Every evening upon returning home, the first thing Zhao Guang did was head straight to his sister’s bedroom.
Today, Zhao Yue’s condition remained just as dreadful. She curled motionless in the far corner of the bed, her vacant eyes staring blankly at nothing.
Ever since he brought her back, Zhao Guang was greeted every day by a hollow wooden doll of a sister who never initiated a single word.
“Zhao Yue, eat something.”
Zhao Guang had long lost count of how many times he had pleaded with her to take a bite.
Taking the compressed ration biscuit her brother handed her, Zhao Yue’s eyes were so dry they couldn’t squeeze out another tear.
Her voice was raspy, laced with a heartbreaking, inconsolable grief.
“…Brother, I’m tainted now. I’m not worthy of Big Brother Shen anymore.”
