Chapter 34: First Encounter with the Cheng Family
Su Han was hauled along the street over Shen Chengyin’s shoulder the entire way. With people bustling back and forth, he didn’t have the face to scream and make a scene, so he simply shut his eyes and played dead.
Once they were back inside their quarters, Su Han was dumped unceremoniously onto the mattress. The rock-hard bedframe nearly cracked his tailbone in half.
Well aware of the male lead’s terrifying strength, he genuinely feared the man might snap his neck in a fit of rage. Throwing up both hands to shield his face, he scrambled backward: “Wait, wait, wait! Hear me out! There’s a reason I did what I did!”
Shen Chengyin clenched his jaw tight, his dark eyes boring into Su Han without blinking. “Fine. Let’s hear your explanation.”
“Cheng Ruoyan wants to use you,” Su Han said, deliberately pitching his voice low to sound utterly solemn.
“Cheng Yibin is the leader of Revival Base and a metal-element user. But Cheng Ruoyan, despite being his daughter, hasn’t awakened any ability at all—she’s just a normal human.
In the opening days of the apocalypse, an ordinary person helping run things didn’t matter much. But as time drags on, those powerful metahumans will only grow more rebellious and resentful.”
Su Han’s mind raced through pure static, frantically stringing words together at lightspeed.
System 111 couldn’t help but marvel: [This is undeniably the finest piece of bullshit you’ve ever concocted in your entire life.]
“That’s why Cheng Ruoyan has her sights set on you! She wants to marry you and use your status as a rare ability user to secure her own position!
We’re newcomers here and totally vulnerable. If she decides to force the issue, I wouldn’t be able to stop her… That’s why I had to resort to this kind of dirty trick!”
Su Han hunched his shoulders with an air of deep grievance.
“I know for a fact you don’t care for her. Everything I did was for your own good!”
None of this was entirely made up out of thin air; it was a deduction he had drawn from analyzing the original novel.
It was just a pity that before he could verify any of it, Shen Chengyin had cornered him in broad daylight, forcing his hand.
Shen Chengyin paused for a fraction of a second. “How do you know all this?”
“I overheard a few rumors between you two earlier. Any idiot with half a brain could put two and two together.”
Cheng Ruoyan had indeed shown great favor toward Shen Chengyin, but outwardly, it had never crossed the line into creating open romantic rumors.
No one could have simply guessed all this. Su Han had no idea whether Shen Chengyin would buy such a tall tale.
Before he could gauge the man’s reaction, a sharp knock rattled the door.
Cheng Ruoyan’s sweet, melodious voice drifted in from the corridor: “Mr. Shen, are you in?”
Shen Chengyin cast a glance at Su Han, then turned on his heel to pull open the door.
Cheng Ruoyan hadn’t expected to see Su Han sitting on the edge of the bed. After lingering her gaze on him for a beat, she smiled gracefully:
“My father invited several prominent ability users over for a meeting tonight. Well, they call it a meeting, but it’s really just sharing some tea and chatting. The future of our base requires the joint efforts of all our metahumans. Do you have some time right now?”
Su Han was thoroughly snubbed, clearly excluded from the guest list.
“I’ll head over right away,” Shen Chengyin replied.
Seeing him agree, Cheng Ruoyan breathed an inward sigh of relief.
Her father had strictly instructed her to reel in this life-element healer at all costs. Even if Shen Chengyin had hesitated, she would have dragged him along tonight by any means necessary.
Cheng Ruoyan turned to lead the way, and Shen Chengyin followed right on her heels.
Before Su Han could even exhale in relief, a broad hand suddenly reached out from behind, clamping hard onto the nape of his neck.
A treacherous parting strike before walking out the door—not even a ghost could have anticipated it.
Shen Chengyin’s left middle finger brushed deliberately over the faint scar behind Su Han’s ear. Leaning down, he pitched his voice into a hushed, dangerous whisper:
“We still have a score to settle. Wait for me right here.”
The heart Su Han had just set down leaped right back into his throat.
Did that entire speech he just spun work or not?! Why the hell was Shen Chengyin still refusing to let him off the hook?!
Once Shen Chengyin was gone, Su Han collapsed flat onto the mattress, wanting to cry but lacking the tears.
If he had known the plot was this impossible to derail, he should have snuck into Revival Base beforehand and put a bullet clean through Cheng Ruoyan’s skull.
[Don’t get too worked up. We’re meddling in the timeline now, and with the butterfly effect in play, Shen Chengyin might not get framed the same way the book described,] the system reasoned smoothly.
[Eliminating the root causes of the male lead being betrayed and abused is the ultimate key to preventing his blackening.]
Lying flat on the bed, Su Han nodded. “Makes sense. Tomorrow I’ll find a way to assassinate Cheng Yibin.”
System: […]
That’s tackling the root a bit too literally!
Trading snarky jabs back and forth in his mind, Su Han eventually drifted off to sleep without Shen Chengyin ever returning.
When he woke the next morning, he was still sprawled in the exact same position as the night before, without even a sheet pulled over him.
The room was dead silent. Shen Chengyin hadn’t come back at all.
A sinister premonition suddenly gnawed at Su Han’s gut.
He and Shen Chengyin had only been at Revival Base for a little over a week. In the original novel, the granary heist and the framing of Shen Chengyin didn’t happen until the mid-apocalypse—two full years after he joined the base.
What could have gone wrong this early?
Cheng Ruoyan couldn’t have actually drugged Shen Chengyin last night, could she?!
At that thought, Su Han rolled out of bed, skipped washing up, and hurried out the door.
As the pampered princess of Revival Base, Cheng Ruoyan wasn’t someone he could simply walk up and see. To fish for news, he had to take a detour.
Su Han originally planned to check around the supply submission depot, but as he neared the sector, he found the streets choked with dense rings of onlookers.
“What happened?” Su Han squeezed forward, grabbing a passing bystander by the sleeve.
“The central granary got hit last night!” the man stammered, his voice trembling violently. “A hundred thousand tons of grain, vanished into thin air!”
A hundred thousand tons—enough to feed the entire settlement for four to five years.
“A hundred thousand tons?!” Su Han gasped, shocked to the core.
The bedrock of Revival Base, aside from the deep pockets backing it, was the colossal reserve depot at its center, spanning an area as large as two full football fields.
When the world ended, the depot held over a hundred thousand tons of food, plenty to sustain tens of thousands of mouths for years.
In the original novel, even after the granary was raided, only half the supplies were taken. Now, two-thirds of the stockpile had vanished overnight. Revival Base was thrown from comfortable abundance straight to the brink of mass famine.
Was Cheng Gaolang really this ruthless? Leaving zero lifeline for his own flesh and blood…
“Goddamn thieves! Who the hell could haul off that much food in a single night?!” The crowd was in an absolute uproar.
“Shh… As if you need to ask! It had to be that person from the Cheng family.”
“Aren’t they running the show? If one of their own took it, why raise such a massive stink claiming the granary was burglarized? Summoning every metahuman in the city at the crack of dawn…”
“Are you dense? That just proves Cheng Gaolang wasn’t the one who took it!”
“He’s the only spatial user I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. Who’s to say the Chengs aren’t just robbing their own house to—mph! Mmmph!”
A companion clamped a hand over the man’s mouth at lightning speed, cutting off the suicidal slip of the tongue.
“Shut your fucking mouth, I’m begging you!”
With a grim expression, Su Han pushed past the murmuring crowd until he reached the very front, where a sea of ability users stood assembled.
Many of them had run missions with him over the past couple of days; spotting Su Han, they offered polite nods.
Su Han scanned the gathered faces, but found no trace of Shen Chengyin.
“Where’s Shen Chengyin?” he asked one of the metahumans.
“He…” The man hesitated, his gaze lingering on Su Han with a complicated expression. “There was a citywide meeting of ability users last night. You didn’t show?”
Su Han shook his head. “Nobody notified me. What happened?”
“You really don’t know? Shen Chengyin has a spatial ability. He was taken away for interrogation hours ago.”
Apocalypse: Becoming The White Moonlight Of A Possessive Mad Dog
