Chapter 15: Big Brother Shen
A sharp, needle-like pain stabbed through Zhao Guang’s heart. His voice came out raw and raspy:
“Stop talking nonsense. Your Big Brother Shen is dead. The leader of this base is Wang Jiafu now.”
“I don’t believe it!” Zhao Yue shook her head like a rattle drum. “Big Brother Shen was so powerful, how could he possibly die… I won’t believe it unless you let me see his body with my own eyes!”
“The man is dead! Swallowed whole by the zombie horde! Where the hell am I supposed to find his corpse?!” Grasping his sister’s shoulders, Zhao Guang shook her violently, exasperated and heartbroken.
Back when Shen Chengyin saved him, Zhao Guang had watched with his own eyes as a mutated zombie’s claw ripped straight through the man’s chest. Hot blood had splattered across Zhao Guang’s face.
Taking a wound like that, how could anyone survive?
The instant Shen Chengyin shoved him into safety, the man was engulfed by the sea of infected. Zhao Guang had screamed in sheer breakdown, but no response ever came.
After that, Wang Jiafu led a detachment to rescue him and beat back the horde.
Hatred, agony, grievance, and bitter remorse.
A tangled storm of emotions churned in Zhao Guang’s chest.
He had been among the earliest batch of ability users to join Shen Chengyin at this site. When the base was founded, eighty percent of the stockpiled supplies were provided by Shen Chengyin, and the compound’s perimeter was chosen through collective deliberation.
Shen Chengyin had been handsome and immensely capable. When his sister developed a crush on him, Zhao Guang had been genuinely thrilled.
Now, the man was gone. What were romantic feelings worth in the apocalypse? A few stale crusts of bread?
Zhao Guang didn’t dare tell his sister that Wang Jiafu had leveraged her safety to force him into falsely framing Shen Chengyin; he was terrified she would loathe him for it.
So all he had ever told Zhao Yue was that Shen Chengyin died, the leadership changed hands, and nothing more.
“Doesn’t Big Brother Shen have a spatial dimension?! If he died, where did all those provisions come from?!”
Zhao Yue’s demeanor snapped. She locked her gaze squarely onto Zhao Guang’s eyes and demanded, “When a spatial user dies, everything bursts out into the open! With a pile of supplies that massive, how could not a single person have noticed during the siege?!”
Tears the girl had held back for so long finally broke free, cascading down her cheeks.
This time, Zhao Guang didn’t reach out to wipe them away.
He froze dead where he stood.
In the official public statement Wang Jiafu released after the siege, it explicitly claimed Shen Chengyin had died. Upon his death, a colossal mountain of provisions had reportedly burst out of his dimension, enough to fill an entire warehouse.
Wang Jiafu alleged that all those supplies were hoardings Shen Chengyin had privately squirreled away, unrecorded in the base’s public ledgers. Wang Jiafu had then threatened Zhao Guang into bearing false witness, manufacturing proof that Shen Chengyin was an utterly selfish, treacherous tyrant.
Wang Jiafu’s public reputation among the survivors was sterling. Bereft of Shen Chengyin as their pillar, not a single soul doubted his narrative.
Shen Chengyin was branded an oppressive despot, his name spat upon by thousands after his supposed demise.
Zhao Yue’s words hit him like a lightning strike.
If Shen Chengyin had perished the instant the horde engulfed him, every last crate in his dimension would have burst forth, scattering across the barren ground.
A stockpile of that magnitude could not have gone unseen by the retreating crowds.
Zhao Guang’s heart hammered against his ribs like a war drum.
Could it be… Shen Chengyin hadn’t actually died when the horde swept over him?
He had been dragged away and executed by Wang Jiafu afterward. That was the only explanation for why the spatial hoardings ended up neatly stacked and organized inside Wang Jiafu’s central storage depot.
As the puzzle pieces clicked together, Zhao Guang began to tremble violently.
His knees gave out completely, collapsing hard onto the floorboards before Zhao Yue.
Zhao Yue, who had been sobbing, abruptly swallowed her tears at the sight of her brother drenched in cold sweat.
She scrambled to the edge of the mattress to support him, a flicker of desperate hope shining in her red-rimmed eyes. “Brother… did you remember something?”
Zhao Guang uttered nothing, shaking his head in wild agitation.
When I turned my back on Shen Chengyin, he wasn’t even dead yet.
If Shen Chengyin had retained consciousness… if he could still hear what was happening around him…
What must have gone through his mind?
The very person he sacrificed his life to save had turned around and stabbed him in the back.
Gritting his teeth, Zhao Guang collapsed against the edge of the bed in sheer agony, a ragged, strangled roar tearing from his throat.
“Brother, what’s wrong? I’ll call someone—” Halfway through her sentence, Zhao Guang slapped a hand over her mouth.
“Zhao Yue, don’t you ever bring up Shen Chengyin in front of me again.”
Startled by the venomous edge in her brother’s tone, Zhao Yue stared at him wide-eyed, confirming he was dead serious.
Zhao Guang kept his head hung low, missing the crushing disappointment settling into his sister’s eyes.
“…Brother, but Big Brother Shen was our hero.”
“When a man dies, he’s dead! Why keep clinging to his ghost?!” Zhao Guang bellowed at his sister, teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Zhao Yue held his gaze stubbornly, her expression hardening with anger, doubt, and raw hostility.
“Brother, you know Big Brother Shen was a good person, a true leader! Why won’t you let me speak?! If Big Brother Shen is still alive somewhere, he must hate your guts!”
“Then I deserve it! I had it coming, alright?!”
Zhao Guang stumbled backward toward the doorway. “Zhao Yue, starting today, you aren’t setting a single foot outside this house. I’ll have someone bring your meals every day.”
“Brother!”
The wooden door slammed shut without mercy. Zhao Yue sat rigid on the mattress.
What A-Han said was true… My brother really did wrong Big Brother Shen.
It was the two of us who ruined Big Brother Shen.
Remembering the slip of paper Su Han had passed her, Zhao Yue quickly retrieved it from her sleeve and smoothed it out.
[If you wish to cooperate, leave this note outside your window.]
Another peaceful month drifted by within the compound. During the late hours, faint, muffled booms rumbled from the distant wilderness beyond the perimeter, but the noise was so muted that no one paid it any mind.
Only Wang Jiafu was scared nearly out of his wits by those rumbles. In the dead of night, he scrambled out of bed, rushed straight to Tang Qiao’s quarters, and hauled the man upright by his collar.
“The explosives we set back then—they were completely cleared, right? There’s no chance of a secondary detonation?”
Tang Qiao offered a slow yawn. “I personally led the team to clean up the site. I guarantee not a single trace was left behind.”
“Take your men out to look. I swear I heard the sound of demolition charges again.”
A prickling numbness washed over Wang Jiafu’s skin.
Ever since half the stockpile vanished into thin air from the central depot, a gnawing dread had taken root in his gut. A dark premonition whispered to him that Shen Chengyin had returned.
Not only had he returned, but he was hunting for vengeance.
Wang Jiafu felt as if he were being haunted by a vengeful ghost. He had never put stock in superstition before, but right now he desperately wished there were a temple where he could burn incense and pray.
Unfortunately, temples were nowhere to be found in the wasteland.
“Leader, your nerves are just frayed,” Tang Qiao comforted him, patting Wang Jiafu’s shoulder. “I didn’t hear any explosions at all.”
Still uneasy, Wang Jiafu summoned several sentries who had been on night watch. Every single one insisted they hadn’t heard a peep.
“Leader, have you been overworking yourself lately?”
In an era where heavy firearms were everywhere, what was there to be jumpy about?
Wang Jiafu didn’t dare admit that his guilty conscience was eating him alive. He resolved to personally inspect the demolition site the moment dawn broke.
As the first rays of morning light filtered through the haze, Wang Jiafu mobilized two elite squads and set off. Yet the moment they reached the main fortress gates, their path was blocked.
Roughly half the crowd waiting to exit the base today were “low-borns.” Ever since Wang Jiafu’s decree was instituted, the number of second-class survivors had plummeted, with more than half perishing out in the wastes.
Those who remained had no choice but to venture outside; staying within the walls meant slowly starving to death.
Over the past few days, several ordinary survivors had already died of starvation right in the gutters.
The crowd of “low-borns” lining up at the gate spotted Wang Jiafu at the front of the detachment in an instant.
“The Leader!”
“It’s Leader Wang!!”
From the very back of the line, an elderly man in his sixties broke ranks and charged forward without hesitation.
The guards flanking Wang Jiafu stepped up with weapons raised, but the old man didn’t cross the perimeter line. Several meters short of Wang Jiafu, he dropped heavily to his knees with a loud thud.
“Leader! I beg of you, give us a way to survive! Back when Leader Shen promised that ordinary folk could live with dignity in Hope Base, my two boys brought me all the way here!
Now both my sons are dead! They were just farmers, they didn’t know how to fight! To keep a useless old father like me fed, they were sent outside the walls to die!”
The old man threw his head against the packed dirt, kowtowing with sickening force twice in a row. Fresh crimson immediately smeared across his gaunt, weathered face.
The onlookers looked away, unable to bear the sight.
Those familiar with the old man knew he had fathered twin sons late in life. When the two boys were killed out in the wastes a few days prior, they were barely in their twenties.
They had managed to survive the harrowing chaos of the initial apocalypse, only to be ground down and discarded by a human-eating fortress disguised as a sanctuary.
With that first kowtow, a wave of people sank to their knees in unison.
A dense carpet of figures knelt in the dirt, almost exclusively the elderly.
The younger commoners had already been wiped out beyond the walls days ago.
Hearing Shen Chengyin’s name invoked, a vicious, venomous glint flickered across Wang Jiafu’s eyes.
He crouched down, making no move to help the old man up. “Old uncle, it’s not that I want to drive you all into the dirt. The base’s supplies are simply running too low—there is truly no other way…”
By the end of his sentence, Wang Jiafu wore an expression of profound, agonizing helplessness. Anyone unfamiliar with his true nature would have been completely taken in.
Offering a few empty words of consolation, Wang Jiafu signaled his men to skirt around the kneeling crowd and proceed through the gates.
Realizing that leaving today meant death, and staying behind meant the same, the old man lunged forward on his knees. Reaching out with a desperate sweep, his gnarled hands clamped tightly onto the hem of Wang Jiafu’s trousers.
Seeing him move, other survivors in the same dire straits surged forward to grab hold as well.
Wang Jiafu could no longer keep the disgust and revulsion from twisting his features. Kicking outward to wrench his legs free, he barked at his escort:
“Drag them away!”
The guards assigned to this escort were Wang Jiafu’s most ruthless confidants. The instant the order was issued, they raised their rifles without a shred of hesitation.
