Chapter Forty-One: Death and Mutation

This was the first time Liu Chang had ever seen Li Qingshui act so emotionally, speaking with such intensity. In the past, Li Qingshui had always lived up to his name—calm as a gentle breeze, tranquil as still water. The fervor in his voice now made Liu Chang feel that these words weren’t merely for others to hear, but more like a kind of emotional self-hypnosis.

“It seems he’s also bearing the weight of moral pressure,” Liu Chang sighed, tossed away the cigarette butt, and returned to the dormitory.

He opened the door, walked through the corridor, and sat back on his bed. He had barely rested a moment when the dormitory door opened again—this time, two soldiers entered, accompanied by Xiaoyong’s mother.

She strode in and pointed at the bed beside Liu Chang, exclaiming, “There! It’s right there! She’s been dead for more than two hours already, the stench is unbearable, and no one’s done a thing! I told her to bury the body, but she refused. Tell me, how can you not bury the dead? The smell is choking, and what if some infectious disease starts spreading? Who could bear to live here then?”

Hearing her shouting, Liu Chang lifted his head and glanced at the young woman nearby. The woman trembled at the words, and finally spoke.

“I just wanted to spend a bit more time with my mother,” she said, casting another glance at the corpse, which had already started to blister.

“Miss,” one of the soldiers sighed, “we truly understand your wish to be with your loved one a while longer, but right now, we can’t afford such sentiment. Please, let us handle the body. You must know, after a great disaster, plague often follows. Storing corpses like this can easily spark an epidemic.”

“We’ve received orders from above, given all the recent deaths in the camp. All bodies must be cremated without exception—we hope you’ll understand.” The two soldiers looked at the young woman, waiting for her to act.

But after nearly two minutes, when she showed no sign of moving, one soldier stepped forward, gently but firmly moving her aside, while the other began dragging her mother’s corpse.

The girl didn’t struggle in the soldier’s arms, but began to sob—a low, muffled sound—tears streaming down her hollow cheeks.

The other soldier didn’t look at her for long or say much. He stepped forward, hands gloved in rubber, and gripped the corpse by the ankles. With practiced efficiency, he slid the body to the edge of the bed. Clearly, he had dealt with many such cases lately.

But just as he was about to lift the corpse away, the elderly man on the other side suddenly stirred.

His body jerked, and he turned to look at the soldier trying to move his wife’s body. His eyes shifted, fixing on the corpse, and tears welled up. After a moment, his mouth opened wide, and from his throat came a long, resounding “Ah—” The sound was loud and drawn out.

At that moment, Liu Chang knew the old man was dying too—this was the last breath of the dying, that final exhalation before death.

Indeed, as the old man’s breath faded, he hiccupped, his head slumped to the side, and he was gone.

The two soldiers stared, stunned for several seconds. Then the one holding the young woman set her gently on the bed, stepped forward to check the old man’s pulse, and shook his head at the woman. Together, the two soldiers carried the bodies out, one after the other.

“So this is the end of the world?” Watching all this, Liu Chang couldn’t help thinking of his own parents. He dared not look at the young woman’s face, afraid to see in her expression a reflection of his own future. Given the world’s state, he knew the chances his parents had survived were slim. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to accept it, and so he refused to look at the woman’s grief.

But human imagination is a curious thing—the more you try not to think of something, the more persistently it invades your mind, appearing in all manner of strange forms to torment you. With his eyes closed, Liu Chang’s thoughts wandered from the death of her parents to the death of his own, from death to corpses, and from corpses to zombies.

He’d read many zombie novels before, and sometimes wondered why people feared zombies so much. Now, in this moment, he finally understood what had always puzzled him—people fear zombies more than tigers, perhaps simply because everyone dreads seeing what they themselves might become after death.

Carrying these chaotic thoughts, Liu Chang drifted into sleep at some unknown hour. Another day—confused, tumultuous, and perilous—had passed.

In this single day, he’d felt hunger, searched for food, nearly died, cried, laughed, eaten his fill, suffered—this one apocalyptic day seemed to encompass all the emotions of the past ten years. Never before had he realized how fiercely emotions could burn when facing death.

And in the days that followed, these intense feelings did not subside.

Over the next several days, Liu Chang went out hunting by day, returning each night to see more bodies hauled to the large, makeshift crematorium in the courtyard of the military camp. In just a few days, more than half the people in the camp had died—hunger and disease had finally claimed a massive toll.

In the first two days, it was the elderly and children who fell first—the former weakened by age, the latter lacking the resilience of adults. Nearly all the elderly and children perished within days, their withered or tiny bodies consigned to the flames amid the weeping of their kin.

In the next three or four days, after the old and young had been claimed, death turned to the adults and the youth. Many of the less robust adults also died in succession. Those who survived gradually adapted, developing new abilities—most notably, their digestive systems improved dramatically. Plants that had previously been inedible, those with mild toxins, those too tough to chew or hard to digest, could now be handled by their strengthened stomachs.

Thus, though the survivors remained hungry, they had managed to struggle free from the brink of death.

Alongside the digestive system, their immune systems evolved as well—few survivors fell ill, and the risk of wound infection dropped to nearly zero. By the last day in the camp, disease was no longer causing mass casualties.

Under the harsh law of natural selection, the dead vanished swiftly, and the survivors became astonishingly robust—a new breed of beings shaped by nature itself.

Everyone’s body had evolved to some extent—bones hardened, muscles strengthened, and a select few even developed unique abilities due to mutations.

During this nearly week-long “death mutation” period, Liu Chang’s body evolved alongside the others, becoming sturdier, his sensory abilities taking another slight leap. Still, in almost a week of daily hunting, he had caught prey only twice. The first was a large water snake from the fields. The second, just now, was a chicken—yes, a chicken, the kind once kept in backyard coops, though now it was nearly half the size of a person.

Carrying this chicken, Liu Chang headed for the kitchen, looking for the military’s food supervisor—Mao Yixuan.