Chapter 38: Past Events
A faint scent of acrid, hot gunpowder smoke permeated the air.
With a heavy *thud*, a person leaped down from the trunk of the last off-road vehicle—it was Kevin.
He tottered, looking for all the world as if he were drunk, tossing the gun in his hand onto the ground at random before sliding slowly down against the car body. Sitting on the ground, he tilted his head up and stared blankly for two seconds, whereupon he broke into near-frantic laughter.
Fang Yue and Chi Xiaoxian found this scene extraordinarily eerie.
Fang Yue stepped forward, kicked the gun away from Kevin with one swift foot, and bent down to scoop it up quickly. Throughout this entire process, Kevin didn’t cast a single glance at him, focusing solely on laughing madly and deliriously, his voice raspy and grating, completely different from when he sang.
Holding the handgun, Fang Yue walked slowly around to the trunk of the off-road vehicle—the exact spot Kevin had emerged from.
Although he had prepared himself mentally, the scene inside still made his scalp tingle with numbness.
Horizontal within the trunk rested a long freezer chest. The freezer was still plugged in, white cold air streaming out continuously like clouds of mist.
Lying inside the freezer was a man, his face turned blue-green, one eye wide open, a dull, grayish-white decaying pupil floating within the socket, while his other eye had been blasted into a mangled mess by bullets. Under the destruction of the bullets, his cheekbones and forehead had also lost their original cranial shape, black hair clinging to his face like mush, filthy and sickening.
Because he was frozen, only a few fragments of flesh and blood residue adhered to the inner wall of the freezer, without fresh blood spraying out.
This was a terrifying, hideous zombie, unknown why it had been frozen inside a military vehicle, or why Kevin had been provoked into firing a barrage of gunshots at it.
Averting his gaze from that sight too ghastly to behold, Fang Yue discovered he wore a camouflage military uniform with alternating dark black and gray lines.
This differed in color from the uniforms worn by the wave of soldiers they had encountered two days prior, yet matched the attire worn by the military spokesperson on the news on the day the zombie outbreak erupted.
Chi Xiaoxian leaned over as well. Taking a single glance, he sucked in a breath of cold air and took a silent step back.
Fang Yue closed the freezer chest and walked back to Kevin.
Kevin had stopped laughing wildly, sitting blankly as if drained of all strength, his shoulders slumped, his gaze hollow as he stared at the concrete pavement, as if transfixed by some patch of empty space.
Nudging him with his foot, Fang Yue asked calmly, “Do you know that zombie?”
It was as though it required considerable effort for Kevin to focus his gaze onto Fang Yue.
“My dream has been fulfilled.”
Fang Yue knit his brows, failing to comprehend the meaning behind his words.
“My dream has been fulfilled, hahahahaha—” Kevin broke into loud laughter once more. He even stood up, grabbed Fang Yue’s collar, stared at him, and said word for word, “It’s so great that the zombies came, so fucking great, or else I wouldn’t have had the chance to kill him.”
Fang Yue drew the gun with a reverse hand, pressing the icy barrel against Kevin’s forehead. Kevin’s laughter came to a abrupt halt, his hands loosening as he released Fang Yue’s collar.
“Calmer now?” Fang Yue said flatly.
Kevin swallowed hard instinctively.
That was a gun he had scavenged from inside the car moments ago. He couldn’t recall how many rounds he had fired, nor did he know if there were any bullets left inside, so if Fang Yue accidentally misfired…
Fang Yue asked him once more if he had sobered up.
Kevin nodded repeatedly.
Fang Yue stowed the gun away.
“You’re just going to put it in your pocket like that?” Kevin broke into a frantic sweat. “It’ll misfire.”
“The magazine is empty.”
“…You bluffed me.”
“Talk. Who was he?” Fang Yue said. “Why shoot a dead man?”
Over the next few minutes, Kevin recounted a story, marking the very first time he unveiled his background before Chi Xiaoxian and Fang Yue.
—
Very few people could determine their lifelong ambition in their youth and actually achieve it upon growing up, yet Kevin was one of those rare few.
To him, singing felt like a mission branded into his soul the moment he was born.
He grew up in a renowned Nordic musical dynasty. His grandfather and father were both pianists, his mother was a soprano, and he predictably inherited their musical genes. The world he inhabited seemed to naturally come with grand operatic background music, the heavenly melodies flowing from the theater soaking and nourishing him like a jar of honey.
After graduating from a top music academy, he entered a prestigious grand theater at the age of nineteen, becoming a baritone in the opera company. Though specialized in his field, he was not inferior in the slightest when it came to tenor or bass ranges. In terms of music, he was practically an all-around genius, possessing an inexhaustible reservoir of talent.
A happy and peaceful life was like cool water laced with a touch of honey, capable of being refilled infinitely, until the arrival of a single person spiked that flavor to the pinnacle of sweetness, granting him an experience he had never known before.
After the old director of their opera company retired, a man merely twenty-five years old assumed his position. His name was Andrew. Despite his youth, he had long gained acclaim across the music world for his superb vocal talent and stunning, handsome looks; not a single person in the entire company failed to envy his early rise to fame.
Andrew possessed pale golden hair, dark blue eyes shimmering like seawater beneath the sun, a slender frame with broad shoulders and a narrow waist—standing in a crowd even from afar, one could spot him in a single glance.
His personality was also extraordinarily outgoing and cheerful, coming with natural humor, witty without losing elegance. Unsurprisingly, he became the shining pearl of the theater, his spotlight at times even eclipsing Kevin and another highly respected senior performer.
Yet no one harbored envy, including Kevin. He was delighted to see more and more people visiting the theater, delighted to spread music further, and even more delighted to—
He could never resist sneaking glances at that young director: when he sang, when he chatted and joked normally, even when he occasionally dazed off nonchalantly… His clear, translucent high notes stirred up terrifying, roaring waves in the sea of his heart, capsizing the small boat at the bottom of his soul head-over-heels, leaving him with nowhere to hide.
He had long known he possessed an ordinary face, yet it was the very first time in his life he felt a sense of inferiority when contrasted against another person.
Unexpectedly, however, Andrew appreciated him immensely, intentionally drawing close to him. He even frequently invited him to his house for meals. Kevin had always wanted to attempt opera composition, so Andrew shared everything he had learned without reservation, encouraging him to explore new paths, even praising his talent.
Conversing to their heart’s content, Andrew would lie directly across the bed, using a pencil to sketch and draw on paper, discussing compositional details with him, his legs dangling over the edge of the bed, swaying gently along with his humming. This carefree casualness allowed Kevin to glimpse a youthful, naive side to him distinct from his elegance. In truth, Andrew was five years older than him.
At times, Kevin couldn’t help thinking to himself—*was he the only one who had ever seen this side of him?*
Kevin made an agreement with him: the moment he composed his very first song, he would show him the sheet music right away and let him become its very first listener.
That period was practically the final stretch of peaceful time before the cataclysm.
Two months later, the Arctic glaciers melted completely, and the Earth’s temperature plummeted sharply within a single day, plunging into a second Ice Age. The entire Northern Hemisphere was engulfed in tornadoes, torrential rains, blizzards, tsunamis, and various disasters within an extremely short span, while Europe experienced the largest human population migration in history.
When the disaster erupted, Kevin and Andrew happened to be on a global tour in Australia. Ultimately, a small portion of Europeans, including them, fled to lower latitudes in the Western Hemisphere—the very place where the Northern United Highlands sat today. The majority of the remaining populace, lacking time to prepare, was tragically buried beneath the bone-chilling, icy snowstorms.
Natural disasters did not end within a short month as some optimistic scholars had fantasized, but persisted for a full half-year. Even more severely, they destroyed the majority of surface nuclear power facilities, triggering the most terrifying nuclear leakage pollution event in history.
In an instant, climate and environmental issues became the global focal point. Before this issue further escalated into a war for human survival, heads of state held countless meetings, proposing various solutions that primarily fell into two categories:
One was the Conservative Faction: maintaining existing administrative divisions of each nation unchanged, building new cities two hundred meters underground to cope with severe climate change, while nations unsuitable for underground city construction would migrate to other countries in batches. Naturally, this required the consent of the receiving nations.
The other was the Radical Faction: its theoretical foundation posited that as disasters persisted long-term, artificial pollution would inevitably extend underground alongside groundwater; concurrently, qualitative shifts in disaster volume would trigger tectonic plate movements, hanging the Damocles’ sword of earthquakes permanently over the heads of underground cities. Therefore, it was necessary to strictly select regions suitable for human habitation, dissolve and reorganize existing national administrative divisions, and establish the United Highlands.
The former consumed far greater resources than the latter, and the construction difficulty of underground cities exceeded the infrastructure capabilities of most non-developed nations, with no precedent to follow regarding how to configure corresponding ecosystems. Its advantage lay in avoiding further destruction to surface ecology while preserving former homelands and nationalities.
The advantage of the latter lay in improving quality of life, aligning people’s living standards with the Old World rather than scuttling underground like rats and cockroaches in sewers.
Its drawbacks were equally glaring, however: dissolving and reorganizing nations would inevitably trigger massive political and cultural conflicts, even inciting riots. This posed a monumental challenge to the capabilities of rulers. Furthermore, regions selected for Highland reconstruction were generally inland areas with relatively good ecology—often forests, hills, or wetlands—meaning the destruction of already scarce, precious ecological havens, leading to further extinction of other species.
Ultimately, amidst fierce debate and demonstration, the United Highlands plan prevailed. Upon its announcement, it sparked immense public dissatisfaction, with marching protesters and demonstrations visible everywhere on the streets.
*Song of the Homeland* gained popularity during that precise era, sung loudly by marching protesters. The lyrics vented condemnation against the further destruction of natural ecology and protested against reluctance to join the new political entity. And the secret composer behind it was none other than Andrew. Kevin had also participated in the demonstrations; on one hand, he had always attached importance to environmental protection, and on the other, he wished to follow closely in Andrew’s footsteps.
*”The hell of others is the new homeland of our kind.”*
This line of lyrics was painted across every street and alley in bright red paint.
Kevin’s and Andrew’s nation was among those that voted in favor of the Highlands. They lacked the funds and capability to build underground cities, yet possessed ample military force to maintain order and manage frantic crowds. Following a massive demonstration, the two were hauled away by fully armed guards and detained in a temporarily established holding facility.
After a day without food or water, Kevin faced his very first interrogation.
He had heard other seasoned protesters describe their interrogations before—simply confessing truthfully, getting locked up for eight to ten days, writing a repentance letter, and one could walk out. If one’s family had money to bribe the guards, one could be released the very next day.
The first day’s interrogation was as routine as he had imagined, merely asking whether he had participated in the demonstration and having him sign his name to confirm the record.
Kevin offered no resistance; they were people caught in the act, and flatly denying it would only cause them to be locked up longer.
On the second day, however, another interrogation officer arrived. She was a middle-aged woman wearing a black turtleneck sweater beneath her camouflage uniform, the sweater collar pulled tight up to her jaw, her hair styled in a immaculate bun, bearing a face as proud, cold, and unfeeling as ice, wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses.
Before she entered, he heard the guards at the door greet her with utmost deference.
He guessed her status was likely higher than the interrogator from yesterday.
To his surprise, she did not continue yesterday’s line of questioning, her very first sentence asking: “You worked in an opera company before?”
Kevin nodded.
“Heard of *Song of the Homeland*?” Through the cold light reflecting off her glasses, she cast a sharp gaze at Kevin, the tip of her pen tapping lightly against the record before her.
Kevin said neither humbly nor servilely: “Naturally. Everyone can sing it.”
“It seems you haven’t quite understood my question.” The woman pushed her glasses up. “Let me ask directly—”
“Why did you write this song?”
Kevin froze.
“I didn’t—” Just as he was about to flatly deny it, he cut his voice off mid-sentence.
He knew clearly whose hands this song had originated from; only that person’s talent could make this song shine with such brilliance, becoming the anthem of marching protesters.
The woman detected his pause with sharpness.
“You didn’t write it?”
“It seems you know the inside story.” With a click, the woman uncapped her fountain pen, the nib dropping lightly onto the paper, bleeding a small black dot.
Without a trace of emotion in her voice, she said, “Please tell me who the creator of this song is.”
“I don’t know either,” Kevin shook his head. “I just know how to sing this song.”
He detected the importance the guards attached to this song. The song was so widely circulated and held such massive influence that if the creator’s identity were exposed, the outcome would certainly not be as simple as an eight-to-ten-day detention. Thus, he resolved to protect Andrew no matter what.
“Do you really just know how to sing it?” The woman stared at him, cold interrogative sentences squeezed out word by word through her teeth.
Kevin knit his brows: “What do you mean by that?”
The woman suddenly let out a faint smile, yet the smile contained zero warmth, laced with a bitter, sarcastic chill. Bending down, she lifted a black leather case from beside her feet and placed it onto the table.
Kevin held his breath abruptly, as if someone had choked his neck with force.
That was his briefcase.
The woman’s finger tapped lightly against a metal nameplate on the surface of the leather case, saying breezy-like, “This is your name on here, isn’t it?”
Kevin’s brain began going blank.
This type of leather case was custom-made uniformly by the opera company. To distinguish them, copper nameplates engraved with their names were embedded into the surface of the cases. After the disaster erupted, their group had damaged Andrew’s leather case during their eastward and westward migrations, so Andrew had temporarily stored a stack of important compositional drafts inside Kevin’s case.
“Please tell me the combination,” the woman said flatly.
A tiny combination lock was attached to the leather case; his case hadn’t been forcibly opened by them yet.
Yet the reason behind this behavior was not to protect privacy, but to force him to state the combination personally so as to record his crime on the spot.
Kevin remained rigid, like a wooden figure without any response.
“Please tell me the combination,” the woman repeated her words. She possessed immense patience, staring at Kevin with a gaze like a predator eying prey about to be secured, as if Kevin were already a object in the palm of her hand.
Yet her voice grew distant in Kevin’s ears. Kevin nearly sank into his own world.
How did they find this case, and how did they know what was stored inside it?
Why did they assume right off the bat that he had composed *Song of the Homeland*?
An answer gradually surfaced, yet Kevin was unwilling to believe it.
The woman repeated her words for the third time. Right as Kevin’s soul was floating out of his body, the door was slammed open from the outside, and several armed soldiers wielding guns rushed in, their pitch-black gun barrels pointed at him.
Turning her head, the woman waved her hand at them, signaling them to step out first. In a tone that carried zero apology, she said, “Pardon them; they always like to complicate matters. I hope you can understand. However, we simply wish to resolve this matter early; dragging it out serves no benefit to anyone.”
A moment later, practically in a daze, Kevin murmured the combination to the leather case…
—
“Why did he treat you like that?” Chi Xiaoxian began feeling sad for him.
A delicate, thin touch-thread extended from the hairball in his pocket, burrowing out to touch Kevin’s face gently. Kevin reached out, wanting to pinch it, yet it dodged him with agility once more, skimming past Kevin’s fingertips to burrow back into Chi Xiaoxian’s pocket.
Kevin fell silent for a moment before saying, “There aren’t so many whys. Things like this couldn’t be more common.”
“When facing a collective crisis, everyone unites on the surface, but the moment the crisis falls upon an individual, unity crumbles to pieces. Betrayal becomes second nature. I was simply too naive back then, assuming that if our relationship were close enough and we were comrades standing shoulder-to-shoulder, such things wouldn’t happen.”
“Self-preservation is human instinct,” Fang Yue said.
Kevin nodded.
Chi Xiaoxian raised his head to cast a glance toward the trunk, asking, “The person inside there… is he the Andrew you mentioned?”
Kevin hadn’t heard that name from someone else’s mouth in a very long time. It left him dazed for two seconds, whereupon he shook his head.
The man whose head he had blasted into mush with a handgun was a high-ranking Highland military officer named Brad. He was originally in charge of security management at the psychiatric hospital where Kevin resided.
As for why a psychiatric hospital required dual management from both the military and medical departments, that traced back to the inception of the Highlands as well.
Not long after that interrogation, Kevin was sentenced in court for the crime of violating social order, receiving a one-year prison sentence. On the day he returned from court to the detention facility, two soldiers escorted him up the stairs, only to run head-on into Andrew walking downstairs. He wore zero shackles, clearly having just been released.
Following behind him was a tall military officer smoking a cigar—Brad.
Four eyes met, and both Kevin and Andrew froze. Immediately after, Andrew averted his gaze quickly, his eyes turning to a cold indifference Kevin had never seen before. The officer behind him let out a seemingly impatient grunt, and Andrew hurriedly picked up his pace, brushing past him as if he didn’t know him at all.
That was also the very last time he saw Andrew.
Kevin stayed numbly in prison. In his longest stretch, he didn’t utter a single word for three whole months, until an officer from the prison walked up to him.
He was astonished to discover that person was the very officer who had escorted Andrew out earlier.
Brad got straight to the point, expressing his wish for him to sing a song at the prison’s Christmas gala.
Kevin naturally refused, not even bothering to explain his reasoning, which also enraged that officer.
Just one month before his release from prison, the prison doctor diagnosed him with schizophrenia. Because the Northern Highlands’ psychiatric hospital had not been fully constructed yet, he was shipped thousands of miles away to the Southern Highlands.
Later, he learned another reason from idle chats with fellow patients—
An invisible agreement existed among the three Highland governments. For specific convicts who possessed existing social influence, to prevent them from returning to society and continuing to disrupt public thought, the Highland government would fabricate a disease diagnosis, exchanging and transferring them to psychiatric hospitals in other Highlands.
This way, even if these convicts walked out into society, they would remain completely ignorant of the other Highland’s environment, drastically reducing their societal hazard.
Who knew he would run into Brad once more at the Southern Highlands’ psychiatric hospital.
He called him into his office, unexpectedly inviting him to sit on a lambskin sofa, then switched on a black-lacquered, gold-rimmed audio speaker that appeared extraordinarily expensive.
An all-too-familiar piece of music flowed out from the speaker, yet the lyrics were utterly foreign.
“Heard it?” Brad lit a cigar, took a puff, and blew the smoke onto Kevin’s face.
Kevin sprang up from the sofa with a start—this was the very song he had promised to write and sing for Andrew first. He had poured his heart and soul into it, yet it had also drained his spirit dry.
“Everyone in the Northern Highlands has heard this song now,” without waiting for Kevin to answer, Brad said on his own. “Do you know why?”
Kevin felt as though he were standing in an ice cellar, as if returning to the time of his very first interrogation. Clenching his jaw, he said word by word: “Why?”
“You never slept with Andrew?” Brad narrowed his eyes to scrutinize him carefully, saying, “I heard you two were very close back in the opera company—did he never seduce you?”
Kevin’s head exploded with a loud roar, and he raised his fist to fly at that officer.
The man dodged easily, kicking Kevin directly in the stomach. Kevin fell onto the ground, clutching his stomach in pain, curling into a ball.
“Andrew got drunk once and told me the Northern United Anthem wasn’t written by him,” Brad wore a trace of mockery, observing Kevin squirming in pain on the ground with ridicule.
“I thought he was pathetic at that moment—turned out to be a mere plagiarist, so I kicked him out without even letting him put his clothes on.”
Kevin’s lips trembled violently, his gaze locked onto that man with a death grip.
“Come sing for me,” the man stepped on Kevin’s hair with his leather shoe, squatted down, blew his final puff of smoke onto his face, and whispered like a demon, “I’ve heard your voice; it sounds better than his.”
—
Kevin’s story came to an end, yet he didn’t know why this man’s corpse was frozen inside the trunk of an off-road vehicle.
Running into him out in the open was purely God favoring him. Kevin spat fiercely on the ground.
Fang Yue, however, fell into deep thought.
If a high-ranking military officer turned into a zombie, subordinate personnel indeed wouldn’t dare execute him on the spot, so they chose to constrain and freeze him, transporting him back to the Security Department or Medical Center for processing.
However, taking such elaborate measures when a zombie outbreak had already erupted was extraordinarily strange. More than one high-ranking officer had surely been infected; if every single one were processed like this, it would drastically consume humanity’s vital strength in resisting zombies.
Unless…
Unless this zombie was extremely important—so important that it had to be transported as a frozen specimen over long distances to a specific location via the military—such as him being Patient Zero!
“Fang Yue!” Chi Xiaoxian called out to him out of nowhere, telling him to come inside the car.
He was far too exhausted to stand, wanting to sit for a bit, so he climbed inside the car, subsequently beginning to search through the vehicle.
Before long, he located a stack of medical record sheets in the car’s drawer, recording various physiological data and metrics. Flipping through them, Chi Xiaoxian couldn’t understand them, so he handed them over to Fang Yue.
Kevin leaned over as well. Catching sight of the patient’s name written on the medical record sheet, he couldn’t help saying, “It’s this guy, no mistake about it.”
Fang Yue was all too familiar with such data. He flipped through the sheets rapidly page by page until reaching a blood test report, his brows knitting gradually.
“What’s wrong?” Chi Xiaoxian asked in confusion. “Is there something on this sheet?”
“The values for white blood cells and neutrophils are extremely high, and C-reactive protein exceeds two thousand.”
“What does that mean?”
Fang Yue set the test report down, a rare trace of perplexity appearing in his eyes for the first time.
After a long moment, he said in a low voice: “This indicates he was not infected with a virus.”
“?!”
“Generally, viral infections do not trigger the proportion of white blood cells and neutrophils in a blood routine test, and C-reactive protein only elevates slightly, rarely exceeding 50 milligrams. Bacterial infections are the exact opposite—all three will elevate. His metrics appear far more consistent with a bacterial infection.”
“So it shouldn’t be called a zombie virus, but a zombie bacterium?” Chi Xiaoxian said.
“Do you know why many film works and science fiction settings specify a zombie virus rather than a zombie bacterium?” Fang Yue posed a new question.
Thinking about it, Chi Xiaoxian realized it was true indeed. Being a non-biology major, however, how could he think of these details? So he shook his head.
“First, viruses can directly alter a cell’s genetic information at the molecular level, allowing organisms to mutate rapidly; bacteria can only parasitize, poison, or induce pathological changes in a host, lacking the means to make an organism mutate within a given period. The zombies we’ve seen along the way have all undergone external physical mutations to varying degrees, and their hearing and sense of smell far exceed those of humans.”
“Second, bacteria are far easier to control than viruses. Humanity developed efficient and diverse means to combat bacterial infections in a mere few decades—such as various antibiotics, common ones including penicillin, cephalosporins, tetracyclines, and so on. For viruses, however, specific targeted drugs are often required, and vaccine development requires a prolonged process.”
Chi Xiaoxian asked in confusion: “Then since it’s a zombie bacterium, wouldn’t it be easier to treat?”
“The problem lies right here,” Fang Yue’s voice lowered. “Half a month has passed since the zombie outbreak erupted, with zero signs of a cure. On the contrary, its infection rate and transmissibility even surpass the vast majority of viruses. If simple antibiotics could cure it, things could not possibly have developed to this stage.”
The three fell silent for a short while, all sensing the severity of the situation.
They intended to speed up their actions, rapidly searching through all the vehicles. Chi Xiaoxian scavenged two Type 92 military handguns and a package of 9mm ammunition, counting them roughly to find fewer than twenty rounds.
Guns were banned in the Highlands, making these two handguns extraordinarily precious—at the very least allowing them to deal with zombies from a distance. Yet Chi Xiaoxian wasn’t very skilled with firearms, so he gave one to Fang Yue and one to Kevin.
Fang Yue retrieved a small tissue sample from the zombie in the trunk of the vehicle, placed it into an empty nutritional liquid bottle, sealed it tightly with two layers of plastic bags, and finally dumped the freezer chest off the off-road vehicle—the fuel remaining in the tank couldn’t supply the continuous power consumption of this freezer chest. If the freezer lost power, the contents inside would undoubtedly emit a foul stench.
They intended to ride in this vehicle to District Six—because only this car still had its key inserted in the ignition.
Chi Xiaoxian didn’t sit in the passenger seat this time, burrowing into the rear seat instead. He was far too exhausted, the journey along the way having drained his stamina almost entirely, so he lay straight down on the rear seat, closing both eyes to take a sleep.
Groggy and preparing to enter dreamland, he felt the item in his pocket move slightly. That small hairball nudged the pocket open slowly, burrowing out on its own. Chi Xiaoxian forced his eyelids open to take a glance, discovering it had returned to a pure white color.
His wrist began itching slightly once more. Dazed for a moment, Chi Xiaoxian realized gauze was wrapped over his wound. Wanting to burrow back inside, the little creature tickled the skin on his wrist with its touch-threads.
Chi Xiaoxian unraveled the gauze; the blood at the wound had already congealed.
The small hairball transformed into a thin cloud of mist, covering the wound, vanishing after a short while.
It appeared this thing needed to enter and exit through a break in his skin.
Chi Xiaoxian vaguely recalled that the spot where he was attacked by a zombie initially seemed to be his head.
Why didn’t this thread burrow out from his head, then?
He imagined the feeling of touch-threads extending from his head…
*Mm, a bit bizarre—didn’t look as cool as burrowing out from his wrist.*
Once the white silk had burrowed inside completely, a grounded sense of satisfaction surged into Chi Xiaoxian’s heart, as if a piece of his body had run away from home and gone missing for a period, and had now returned.
Fang Yue looked into the rearview mirror, discovering Chi Xiaoxian had fallen asleep lying down. Pulling the bedsheet out from his bag, he reached over the front seat to drape it over him, then gently lifted his head to pad a backpack underneath.
Retracing his steps to the driver’s seat, just as he was about to start the vehicle, he suddenly noticed Kevin examining himself and Chi Xiaoxian back and forth continuously.
“What are you looking at?” Fang Yue turned his head slightly, lowering his voice, fearing he might wake Chi Xiaoxian.
Kevin smiled, speaking in an equally quiet voice: “What if I am?”
“.”
Fang Yue didn’t bother to pay him any mind, yet saw Kevin slowly grin wide, mouthing a sentence silently with an exaggerated mouth movement, as if deeply afraid he wouldn’t understand.
Fang Yue read it instantly.
What Kevin asked was—
“Do you like him?”
