Chapter 14: The Print Shop
As the farce came to an end, Chi Xiaoxian lay back on the bed to continue playing his game.
Gu-Ji had been walking in the forest for a long time and was getting a bit hungry. Licking its paws, it asked Chi Xiaoxian an absurd question: “Can I eat ‘Gu-Ji’s Son’? It’s a hamster, after all.”
Chi Xiaoxian: “…Why don’t you listen to what you just said.”
“Is it because I named it ‘Gu-Ji’s Son’ that I can’t eat it?” Gu-Ji tilted its head. “Is it really my son?”
Although it was just a game, the chat module was designed with surprising realism.
Chi Xiaoxian: “Obviously not, but it is your friend.”
“Meow~~ I get it now~~”
A person, a cat, and a hamster walked together through the forest. Looking at Zhang Wensheng’s pet, Chi Xiaoxian felt an illusion that he was still right by his side.
Before they could even exit the forest, a drizzle began to fall from the sky, while the surrounding environment remained an endless, hazy dark green.
The cat’s paws stepped over broken branches and scattered leaves on the ground, coming to a halt before a tiny, gently trickling stream. It lowered its head to take a lick, sensing an icy, profound flavor.
*Was the Old World truly this beautiful?*
Chi Xiaoxian had never seen the Old World. Ever since he was born, his family had been constantly moving, following the crowds in an endless search for places free of pollution and extreme climate disasters.
He had also never seen a real forest with his own eyes—that green spirit that had lushly covered the Earth a few centuries ago had long since turned into a thick handful of dust on the ground, kicked up and settling down with the start of massive construction machinery.
Chi Xiaoxian felt that the developer of this game was likely someone born in the Old World to recreate it with such raw authenticity—
Though he had never seen it, he naturally felt that a real forest probably carried this exact vibe. Humans were born with an inherent connection to nature, but this attribute had gradually faded as their integration into city life grew deeper.
Another series of knocks on the door interrupted his train of thought, though this time the tapping was polite and light.
Chi Xiaoxian and Fang Yue knit their brows almost simultaneously.
Walking over to the door to look outside, they saw the person was Yuan Chengmin, the student living in the room directly across from Chi Xiaoxian’s old dorm.
Fang Yue asked cautiously nonetheless, “Is something the matter?”
“I’m really sorry to disturb, but I wanted to ask if you guys have any food left.” Yuan Chengmin rubbed a bruise on the corner of his forehead, saying bitterly, “I originally had a bit left, but I got mugged. I hope you guys haven’t been mugged yet.”
Fang Yue and Chi Xiaoxian exchanged glances.
“Maybe we should give him a little bit,” Chi Xiaoxian blinked. “I know him, he’s a pretty decent guy.”
“Apologies, we don’t have much food left either. We can only give you a bit of protein powder and multivitamins.”
“That’s fantastic! Having even these is already wonderful.”
“Please step back down the stairs and return to your own dorm first,” Fang Yue said cautiously. “We will place the food outside the door in a moment. Once we close the door, you can come up and get it.”
“Sure, sure, thank you both so much.”
Yuan Chengmin guessed they might have just experienced harassment from that same gang, so he retreated down the stairs.
He waited for quite a while before hearing the door upstairs open and close, whereupon he went upstairs to retrieve the food.
Before taking it, Yuan Chengmin placed a bottle of Coke at the doorway, then sent Chi Xiaoxian a message: *This is the only bottle of Coke I had left that didn’t get scavenged by them. I’m giving it to you guys as a thank-you gift!*
Seeing the Coke, Chi Xiaoxian felt his mood brighten slightly.
“Shall we split it?”
“I don’t drink carbonated beverages.”
Chi Xiaoxian stood on no ceremony with Fang Yue. Pulling the tab open, he drank it all in tiny, deeply cherished gulps, before letting out a satisfying, dizzying, soda-flavored burp.
“When we came out, there were only two people left in the print shop,” Fang Yue suddenly remembered something. “We need to find a way to get them some food.”
“We don’t have much left either, though. We can only split a bit of protein powder with them.”
“Yeah, let’s ask about the situation first.”
There were originally six people in the print shop. Excluding the three who returned to the dorms and the security guard uncle, only the owner and Feng Bing remained inside the shop.
Fang Yue called the owner, but the owner didn’t pick up. So he called Feng Bing next, only for the call to be hung up by her instantly.
Then he received a message sent by Feng Bing on Rome.
*I’m currently hiding in the storage room on the second floor and can’t talk. There are zombies outside the door, save me!!!*
Both Fang Yue and Chi Xiaoxian were startled.
*How could there be zombies in the print shop?* Fang Yue quickly typed a query.
*I don’t know. The owner and I have been staying inside the shop without going out, and the doors and windows were locked tight.*
*I went to sleep early last night after the food ran out, but in the middle of the night, I was startled awake by a noise. Opening my eyes, a zombie had already walked right up to my bed, staring straight at me! I was so terrified I ran out immediately and hid in the storage room!*
*You did well. Whatever you do, don’t make a sound. How is the owner doing?*
*I don’t know.*
Just as Feng Bing typed out those three words, she suddenly heard the footsteps outside the storage room getting closer and closer.
Her pupils dilated abruptly. Clutching her phone, she didn’t dare move a muscle, instinctively holding her breath.
Those sounds had clearly gone downstairs just now—how could they have come back up?!
*Did it notice something?!*
Listening closely through the sound of her fiercely thumping heart, an icy chill suddenly surged through every limb and bone—
Those were not the footsteps of a single person.
The owner had been infected as well! She was facing two zombies!
Although this outcome hadn’t been entirely beyond her expectations, the horror of reality still caused her heart rate to spike wildly.
There was no one to save her at a time like this! Only herself!
While listening to the movements outside, she messaged Fang Yue.
*I’m going to have to make a run for it in a bit; the zombies can smell me.*
*If I can get out smoothly, I’ll head back to the dorms, so please trouble yourself to help open the main entrance downstairs for me.*
*If I can’t make it back, there’s a small anti-wolf stun gun in my room that I’ll give to you guys. I live in 302.*
Feng Bing felt a pang of regret for not breaking out with Fang Yue’s group earlier.
As it turned out, in an environment like this, taking risks was the best protection, while hiding merely delayed the arrival of despair.
Chi Xiaoxian suddenly thought of something and asked Fang Yue, “When you saved them earlier, didn’t you throw that antique phone outside to attract the zombies’ attention?”
“What about it?”
“That antique phone has a super long battery life, so those two alarms you set earlier might still be active. Do you remember what times the alarms were set for?”
“Nine-thirty and nine-thirty-two.” Fang Yue had an exceptionally strong memory for numbers.
“Tell her quick! When the alarm rings outside on the street at nine-thirty, the zombies inside the shop will have their attention drawn away, and she can take the opportunity to escape through that back door of the print shop,” Chi Xiaoxian said urgently.
Fang Yue messaged Feng Bing in real time.
He realized that Chi Xiaoxian only appeared to be a slacker on the surface; his mind was remarkably agile, often stepping outside the framework of conventional thinking to come up with unexpected solutions.
The moment nine-thirty arrived, Feng Bing indeed heard an alarm ringing out on the street outside.
Clear *Jingle Bells* sounded, and only then did she recall hearing it last night as well—she just hadn’t paid much attention to it back then.
The footsteps of the zombies approaching her outside stalled for a few seconds, then headed toward the front-right direction.
Directly facing her front-right was the bedroom she had slept in earlier, and right outside that bedroom was the street where the alarm phone lay. Everything went exactly as Chi Xiaoxian had anticipated.
Waiting until the footsteps drifted further and further from the storage room, she gently pushed the door open.
There was no living creature in the hallway, with only slight footstep movements coming from the bedroom on the right.
She felt fortunate that she wasn’t wearing shoes; her socks made no sound on the floor. Passing swiftly by the room on the right, she caught sight of the zombie inside with a single glance.
One of the zombies possessed remarkably sharp reactions, turning its head almost instantly. Feng Bing’s reaction was faster still—she slammed the bedroom door shut and ran downstairs without delaying for even a fraction of a second.
The lock on the back door was somewhat rusted, taking her a long while to twist it open. The moment she pushed the door open, a bead of sweat from her forehead finally gathered the courage to drip down.
Outside was an overgrown patch of weeds, with the school’s high perimeter wall not far off. Beneath the cool white moonlight, she caught sight of a white mass amidst the grass to the side. Looking closer, it turned out to be a wad of gauze, stained with blood spots that had already turned black.
An ominous feeling crept into her heart, her throat tightening instinctively.
Just then, a warm sensation spread from the soles of her feet. Looking down, her sock-clad foot had been sliced open by something sharp at an unknown moment, staining a small patch of the white sock red.
…
Chi Xiaoxian and Fang Yue waited for a long time, yet they still couldn’t get any update from Feng Bing.
Both realized that she likely wasn’t coming back.
The walk from the print shop to the dorm took fifteen minutes at the slowest, yet forty minutes had already passed.
Chi Xiaoxian cast his gaze out the window. Beyond the glass lay a vast, boundless nightscape, hiding who knew how many things in the corners untouched by moonlight.
“Why did Feng Bing say she suddenly saw a zombie in the room?” Chi Xiaoxian knit his brows, recalling the message content from earlier. “Did it force its way in? But that rolling shutter was very sturdy.”
“If it forced its way in, it should have made a massive commotion, yet Feng Bing didn’t notice a thing.”
Chi Xiaoxian grew even more perplexed: “It couldn’t have just appeared out of thin air, right?! Is this magic?”
Those words sparked an idea in Fang Yue’s mind.
Fang Yue had been contemplating this issue as well. He had been wondering how a zombie could silently breach the print shop, and Chi Xiaoxian’s remark gave him a different inspiration.
“Feng Bing was shocked by the zombie that suddenly appeared at her bedside, and she stated that she didn’t know the owner’s status,” Fang Yue analyzed. “Which means this zombie couldn’t be the owner. That eliminates the scenario where the owner got infected first.”
“Second, the second floor is over six meters above the ground, and no climbing zombies have been discovered so far. Feng Bing also didn’t hear the sound of shattering glass, so it could only have come up via the stairs on the first floor.”
“But appearing out of thin air on the first floor doesn’t make sense either?”
“The phrase ‘out of thin air’ isn’t quite accurate,” Fang Yue said. “Is there a possibility that a zombie had been hidden inside the print shop all along, but for some reason, we failed to notice it?”
Chi Xiaoxian felt a chill run down his spine.
“…Where could it hide?”
Fang Yue pondered for a moment, saying cautiously, “It’s possible the print shop has a basement structure as well. The campus street uses a symmetrical design. Opposite the print shop is a bookstore that closed two years ago. When I visited during my freshman year, I saw the bookstore owner storing inventory books in a basement.”
Hearing him mention this, Chi Xiaoxian remembered as well. Back when he first enrolled, he missed the collective textbook order, so he bought past course materials from the owner—who had climbed down a ladder to find them for him back then.
Fang Yue recalled another detail.
“If this zombie was indeed hidden in a basement or somewhere else as I deduced, the owner must have known about it. I have a very strong memory for numbers. Back then, the food wasn’t consumed according to my plan, and Zheng Yikai mentioned he only stole a portion. So it’s extremely likely the owner took the rest himself. I couldn’t have miscalculated.”
If Zheng Yikai stole food, he stole it openly; given his personality, it was unlikely he would conceal a portion of it.
“You mean the owner took that portion of food to feed a zombie?” Chi Xiaoxian found it unbelievable.
“There’s another supporting point.” Fang Yue retrieved the survival guide on the desk. “Li Tong might have originally asked the owner to print only one copy of this book, but knowing there was an infected person in his own shop, the owner made an extra copy to keep for himself.”
“Right! Assuming he hid a zombie, the book might have also been used by him to block the zombie from biting him, leaving behind a massive amount of virus-laden saliva on it, which then infected Li Tong when he scratched his hand.”
The clues connected instantly.
“It’s possible,” Fang Yue mused. “Though these deductions do sound a bit unbelievable.”
“How did he run into that zombie in the first place, though? And why would he hide a zombie at home? Isn’t that asking for trouble?” Chi Xiaoxian fired off questions in rapid succession.
Fang Yue shook his head.
They knew far too little right now. However, he suddenly recalled that when he worked late on the first floor of the print shop before, the owner kept coming downstairs to use the restroom, repeatedly urging him to go to sleep. Could that have been a sign of a guilty conscience?
While pondering, someone suddenly began hammering frantically on the door with a loud rumble.
Pounding on the door at dead of night like this carried an even greater malice than the incident earlier in the day.
Fang Yue and Chi Xiaoxian exchanged a tacit glance, both guessing who was outside the door.
