Early the next morning, Little Frost left the house.
She didn’t bring her long spear or her javelin. She only wore a set of rough cloth clothes.
Her hair was casually tied back with a torn rag, and she had smeared some ash on her face.
She looked no different from the refugees in the town.
White Night asked her.
“Auntie Frost, what are you going to do?”
Little Frost only uttered two words.
“Just asking around.”
Mu Yingying also left the house, walking in the opposite direction from Little Frost, heading toward the slums in the south.
White Peace did not leave the house.
She pushed the bicycle, taking White Night for a slow stroll around the town. Calling it a stroll was more like a patrol.
Her eyes swept over every inch of the ground.
White Night floated above the basket, watching her.
“An’an, what are you looking for?”
“Looking at the soil.”
“Soil?”
“The soil around the forbidden area is black.”
White Peace’s voice was very soft. “It’s not the original yellow soil here. It was dyed black bit by bit by something.”
White Night glanced toward the forbidden area.
Across several streets, she could see the top of the black iron sheet fence.
The ground outside the fence was indeed darker than elsewhere.
White Peace pushed the bike to a nearby alley at the periphery of the forbidden area, stopped, and crouched down.
She pinched a pinch of soil with her fingertips and sniffed it lightly.
“Blood.”
Her voice had no inflection. “A lot of blood. Over the years, it has seeped into the soil, dyeing the entire ground this color.”
White Night’s soul body felt a chill. “Those missing people…”
“They are all underneath.”
White Peace stood up, patted the dirt off her hands.
“They aren’t buried. They were eaten by the flower, and the undigested residue was expelled, mixing into the soil. All under our feet.”
White Night looked down at the ground beneath her feet.
Where the bicycle wheels had rolled, the soil was loose and dark, with fine white powder mixed in.
She had always thought it was gravel.
“Over so many years.” White Peace’s voice came from above.
“Several hundred lives. That flower has grown very large.”
In her pure black pupils, fragmented images seemed to flash.
A city shrouded in shadow. In the sky hung a purple deformed moon.
The air was filled with a cloying scent of rotten petals and ozone.
A giant flower spanning the sky pulsed silently, sucking the silence of the entire city into its flesh.
“Bigger than any similar weirdness I’ve seen in other worlds.”
White Night was silent for a moment. “Can you deal with it?”
White Peace did not answer immediately.
She looked toward the forbidden area fence, cold light reflected in her eyes.
“I have to see its true form to know. But one thing is certain: it hasn’t bloomed yet. Once it blooms, not a single person in Hundred Flowers Town will survive.”
“Then we have to get to it before it blooms…”
“Yes, but Lao Xing won’t let us touch it. He has raised this flower for many years. He treats it like his own life. Anyone who tries to touch it, he’ll fight to the death.”
White Peace finished speaking and pushed the bike forward.
When she reached the edge of the trading zone square, she stopped at a stall selling weird crystal fragments.
The stall displayed several thumb-sized fragments, dark in color with rough edges, looking no different from ordinary mineral slag.
White Peace picked one up and turned it in her fingers.
The stall owner was a gaunt middle-aged man.
Seeing someone looking at his goods, he immediately squeezed out a wrinkled smile.
“Good eye, miss! These are all good stuff just exchanged. One fragment for two compressed biscuits, definitely worth it…”
“Where did you get this?” White Peace interrupted him.
The smile on the stall owner’s face froze. His eyes dodged.
“This… how can I remember? People come to exchange every day.”
White Peace stared at him for three seconds. Her pitch-black eyes fixed on him.
The stall owner felt a shiver run down his spine and instinctively shrank his neck.
White Peace put down the fragment and turned away.
White Night asked in a low voice from the basket. “Is there something wrong with that fragment?”
“It’s not a weird crystal condensed from inside a weirdness.” White Peace lowered her voice.
“It’s something formed from resentment and flesh after a person dies. It’s the same raw material as the weird stones used for detection in the town.”
White Night felt her soul body turn cold.
So the weird stones revered as life-saving tools and the weird crystal fragments used as hard currency were essentially the same thing—all refined from human lives.
Little Frost went to the trading zone.
The trading zone was in the west of the town, taking up three full streets.
Before the apocalypse, this was a farmer’s market.
Now, the ground was covered with stalls selling moldy compressed biscuits, rusty knives, blood-stained clothes, unidentified powders—everything.
But truly valuable items—clean drinking water, unexpired medicine, usable weapons—were never on the ground stalls. They were all in Fatty Zhou’s exchange hall.
The exchange hall was a two-story building at the deepest part of the market.
At the entrance stood two burly thugs with iron rods at their waists.
Anyone wanting to buy good things had to enter through this door and trade at the prices set by Fatty Zhou. And they had to give up thirty percent as commission—not a single cent less.
Little Frost did not enter the exchange hall.
She went to the farthest corner of the trading zone, to the tent where relief grain was distributed.
A long line stretched in front of the tent, all gaunt refugees.
Each person could only receive a small bag of moldy oatmeal.
When receiving, they had to sign their name and press a fingerprint in the register—not a single step could be omitted.
The grain distributor was a fierce-looking tough man with a foul attitude.
The refugees all kept their heads down, no one dared to speak, even coughing was suppressed as much as possible.
Little Frost stood at the end of the line, silently waiting. When it was her turn, the tough man glanced at her and asked gruffly.
“New here? Haven’t seen you before. What’s your name?”
“Chi San.”
The tough man scribbled two strokes in the register and threw her a bag of oatmeal. “Next.”
Little Frost took the oatmeal but didn’t leave.
She stood near the tent, pretending to open the bag, but her eyes were fixed on the register in the tough man’s hand.
The tough man wrote quickly, his strokes sloppy, but Little Frost’s eyesight far exceeded ordinary people.
In her previous life as an investor, she could read small print on documents from across the room.
The register was densely filled with names.
Every few names, one was crossed out in red. Behind the crossed-out names, the same character was written—”Forbidden.”
Little Frost slowly opened the oatmeal bag while quickly counting in her mind. In the past month, over twenty names had been crossed out in red.
During the tough man’s moment of turning to fetch a new batch of oatmeal, she quickly flipped forward a few pages.
In the earliest entries, names were crossed out rarely.
Later, it became more frequent, and recently, almost every few days, a new name was marked with a red cross.
The pace was accelerating wildly.
Little Frost tucked the oatmeal into her arms and turned to leave.
Outside the tent, she looked back at the long line.
At the front of the line was a woman holding a child. The child was as thin as a twig, lying motionless in her arms, not even having the strength to cry.
Little Frost averted her gaze and strode away.
At the same time, Mu Yingying entered the slums.
The slums were at the southern wall of the town, the most dilapidated area in all of Hundred Flowers Town.
The shacks were haphazardly built from broken boards, plastic sheets, and iron sheets, leaking wind and rain, housing the bottom-tier refugees who couldn’t pay contribution points.
The air was thick with the stench of feces and rotten food.
Mu Yingying pinched her nose and walked in, finding Lao Wu at the deepest row of shacks, the same man she had chatted with last time.
Lao Wu was over sixty, his left leg broken by a weirdness, surviving only by scavenging.
Last time, Mu Yingying used half a biscuit to get information from him about the rules of weird qi detection.
This time, she brought a whole compressed biscuit.
When Lao Wu saw the biscuit, his murky eyes lit up for a moment, then dimmed again. He looked around cautiously.
“Girl, you’re here again. What do you want to ask this time?”
Mu Yingying crouched down, shoved the biscuit into his hand, and lowered her voice to a whisper.
“Lao Wu, last time you said that people who test positive are driven out of town. I ask you, have you actually seen them being driven out?”
Lao Wu’s face changed instantly. The hand gripping the biscuit retracted, almost dropping it.
“Why are you asking this? Don’t you want to live?”
“I have a friend who tested positive last month. I want to know where he actually went.” Mu Yingying made up a reason, her tone earnest, her peach blossom eyes filled with just the right amount of anxiety, looking exactly like an ordinary woman searching for a missing friend.