Chapter 34: Is It an Illusion, or a Demon?
Early in the morning, before the city bell had even tolled, people began gathering in twos and threes just inside the West Wall.
As the sky brightened, Long Qian’s crew soon arrived.
“Auntie Qian! Sister Ya! Brother Shi!”
Lina waved her arms happily in greeting.
“Jia Wen and Jia Si are here too.” Lilin tugged at Lina’s sleeve and pointed in another direction.
“Lina! Look, my brother carved another wooden trowel last night!”
Jia Si trotted over, eagerly showing off his brother’s handiwork from the night before.
In the apocalypse, everything cost money, making any surviving pre-apocalyptic furniture incredibly precious.
The brothers hardly had any decent furniture in their room. After discussing it for a long while, they had finally dismantled a small stool to carve the wooden trowels.
“Once we earn enough money, we’ll go trade for new furniture,” the brothers had agreed.
In the past, simply scraping by on full stomachs was a struggle, let alone saving spare cash to trade for clothes or furniture at the official city exchange points.
But things were different now.
With the Chinese Restaurant and that miraculous box, the brothers’ little treasury was filling up rapidly!
“That’s amazing! You can carve these?”
“Of course! My family used to do woodwork! My brother is really good at it!” Jia Si boasted proudly.
Things truly were different now.
Long Qian watched the children converse, their sheer, unadulterated joy impossible to hide.
Even the adults waiting around were whispering among themselves. Listening closely, the conversations were all variations of, “Hey, did you dig up mushrooms yesterday? Are they worth more than potatoes? Where did you find them?”
She still remembered what life had been like before the Chinese Restaurant appeared… just a few days ago.
These children were the most vulnerable group in the apocalypse—lacking combat ability, short on stamina, perpetually starving, with smiles completely absent from their faces.
Even when Long Qian’s crew occasionally lent a hand, it was often a drop in the bucket; they were exhausted just keeping themselves alive, so how much could they truly help?
Even able-bodied, combat-capable adults woke up every morning only to throw themselves back into the deadly peril outside the walls.
Anxiety, agony, and terror—these emotions had been ground down into numb apathy over years of suffering.
Acquaintances meeting in passing couldn’t muster a smile, offering only a brief nod before struggling on the edge of survival with hollow eyes.
This was the daily reality for the people living in the frontier cities.
“Hope” was a dream as distant as the horizon. Perhaps they could still entertain it in the first two years of the apocalypse.
But after so many years, only despair remained.
Simply existing numbly within that despair exhausted every ounce of their strength.
No one dared to imagine any sort of “turning point” anymore.
Yet, as abruptly as a dream, the boss of the “Chinese Restaurant” had simply appeared.
She not only offered delicious food but also provided them with a way to earn money.
Look at the people around her—though their faces were covered by cloths, the excitement in their eyes was unmistakable.
It was as if an anchor had been dropped into the void, and that anchor had brought “stability.”
A “stability” reminiscent of the world before the apocalypse.
Beside her, Long Shi and Long Ya were bickering again.
Perhaps owing to having full stomachs over the past two days, their arguments had grown far more spirited. Last night before bed, they had bickered so loudly through a closed door that it gave people a headache.
Now, they were betting on who would harvest more today, with ten City Coins on the line.
Old Hu had even joined in, placing his bet on Long Ya.
Long Qian chuckled softly, not bothering to intervene, and slipped her face cloth on.
Judging by the sky, the bell was about to toll.
She swept a glance around; roughly forty people had gathered here.
She had told everyone yesterday to assemble once the bell rang, so this was likely the full turnout for the morning wave.
—They had agreed yesterday that she would lead the morning group, Rhodes’s family of five would lead the mid-morning group, and a young man named Duncan, who claimed he couldn’t wake up early, would lead the noon group.
Duncan’s group consisted of eight or nine young people, looking much like former classmates or colleagues from before the apocalypse.
It should be fine.
Hm?
Long Qian spotted a somewhat familiar figure walking toward them from the residential district.
A frail silhouette, with one empty sleeve.
Vaughn.
He lived very close to them, in the row of wooden shacks just behind theirs.
He was a recluse, especially after leaving Scarface’s gang.
He was taciturn, and whenever he occasionally met someone’s gaze, his eyes were filled with nothing but guarded vigilance.
Long Shi, with his usual lack of tact, had once approached him to ask: Why did you leave Scarface’s gang? How did you lose an arm when you left? Hey, why are you hitting me?!
Though frail, Vaughn fought with a desperate, deadly ferocity, like a hyena locking onto its prey and refusing to let go.
By the time Qiu Jie and Old Hu finally managed to pull him off, Long Shi was beaten black and blue.
It was his own fault for running his mouth.
Vaughn reached the West Gate without speaking to anyone, choosing a spot on the outskirts of the crowd to stand alone.
Clang— Clang— Clang—
The plaza bell rang out.
Long Qian withdrew her gaze and simply announced, “Time’s up. Get ready, everyone. We’re moving out.”
“Let’s go!”
“Come on, come on, I can’t wait!”
The people at the gathering point were brimming with ambition, like arrows nocked and ready to fly.
Hearing the crowd’s enthusiasm, Vaughn didn’t feel reassured; instead, his vigilance deepened.
He had caught wind of the news last night.
Before the curfew inspection, the woman named Long Ya had knocked on the shack next to his.
The shacks had virtually no soundproofing, so he hadn’t even needed to press his ear to the door to hear what Long Ya told the mother and daughter inside.
“Starting tomorrow, we’re heading out to the West Wall together. Three departure times: early morning, mid-morning, and noon. Assemble inside the wall.”
“Because of Mad Dog’s crew?”
“Exactly. If we head out in a large group, and Mad Dog tries anything, we’ll beat them until they’re looking for their teeth on the ground!”
The voices carried clearly into his shack.
He had also heard other people running over to ask questions.
Living so close, Vaughn had naturally noticed what this group had been up to lately.
For the past two nights, the mother and daughter next door had returned talking about roasted potatoes, making money, and delicious food.
Piecing it together, it sounded like there was a place outside the West Wall where they could earn money and eat roasted potatoes.
But Vaughn didn’t believe it.
He didn’t believe that in an apocalypse that endlessly magnified the ugliness of the human heart, such a good thing could exist.
It was because he had once “believed” that he had listened to Scarface.
Telling him that joining the gang meant getting enough to eat—and what was the result?
Being exploited, beaten to the ground, and used as a meat shield the moment danger arose outside the walls.
After his arm was bitten, he had dragged himself back from the wasteland, half-walking, half-crawling.
Left to die alone, unable to afford medicine, unable to afford a doctor.
He had survived only because he had ruthlessly hacked off his own arm, tied a strip of cloth around the stump with every ounce of his strength, and endured a raging fever for nearly a week through sheer, agonizing willpower.
Otherwise, he would have long since become a corroded corpse.
From that moment on, Vaughn had stopped believing in anyone.
There were no gods in this world.
When he had been tortured into unconsciousness by the agonizing pain of his wound, he had heard no voices.
Only silence.
Yesterday morning, while fetching water to wash his face, he had noticed green veins creeping into his pupils.
He didn’t believe there were any roasted potatoes outside the West Wall.
He was only bewildered when he saw the emerald tint beginning to fade from the faces of the mother and daughter next door.
And so, Vaughn followed the main group, trudging heavily toward the wasteland beyond the West Wall.
He was just going to take a look.
To see whether what lay outside the wall was an illusion, or a demon.
