Chapter 53: Her Heart Sank to Rock Bottom
“What else, you idiot! Do you see anyone else out here?!”
Seeing how completely clueless Hall was, one of Mad Dog’s lackeys sneered in a gruff, mocking bark, “Hey kid, did we scare your brains right out of your skull?”
“Hahahahaha—!” A chorus of cruel laughter erupted around him.
“Look at their eyes—green as mold! Every single one of ’em is a toxic stray with one foot in the grave!”
“Be smart about this. Hand over the loot like good little dogs, and maybe we’ll leave you half a roasted potato to choke on.”
“Hahahahahahaha—!”
Jeering and cackling rang out one after another, dripping with unearned swagger.
“Wait… You guys are an actual gang, right? Are you seriously that broke?” Turner asked, genuinely confused.
“Watch your damn mouth! Go ask around the walls who our boss is! Broke? The entire stretch outside the East Wall belongs to us now!”
“If you have money, why don’t you just go buy your own? Boss Ling’s food isn’t even expensive,” Hall said, scratching his head.
“You little punk—are you picking a fight?!”
“That damn shopkeeper doesn’t know what’s good for her! She blacklisted our whole crew! Don’t play dumb with us—why else would you toxic strays travel in packs if you weren’t terrified of us jumping you? Quit acting innocent!”
“The East Wall?” Zhou Xue spoke up, her voice cutting through the noise. “Rong Na?”
She had heard whispers of this.
After she and Heixi had successively awakened, Dark Star and the Red Flag Society had been recruited by Yves to work for the city administration.
Word was that Rong Na had subsequently absorbed Scarface’s old crew, throwing his weight around outside the East Wall and terrorizing unaffiliated scavengers.
“You dare say our boss’s name to our faces?!”
“What’s wrong with saying his name? People have names so other people can call them, right? Is he some shameful secret hiding under a rock? Rong Na, Rong Na, Rong Na, Rong Na,” Hall rattled off like a machine gun.
“Cocky little bastard. Got a spine, do you?”
Red-haired Aulier let out a cold snort. “I was going to be generous and give you an easy way out, but it looks like you need to be taught a lesson in blood.”
“Stay back. I’ll handle them,” Zhou Xue said quietly.
She stepped to the front, her hand coming to rest on the hilt of the blade across her back.
She had always despised Rong Na’s brand of scum.
Previously, she had been too occupied with critical duties to bother with them. Now that they had delivered themselves right to her doorstep, she didn’t mind loosening up her limbs.
Dealing with trash like this didn’t even warrant using her Awakened ability.
“Oh, listen to this bitch talk! Get ’em, boys!”
Enraged by her contempt, Aulier roared the order.
Shing—!
A cold arc of steel flashed through the air as the long blade cleared its sheath.
Zhou Xue pivoted with fluid grace, driving a high-kick straight into the jaw of the first attacker.
“Aaargh—!”
Without so much as turning her head, she heard the whistle of displaced air behind her. Raising her blade behind her shoulder, she cleanly parried an incoming lead pipe.
With a snap of her wrist, her forearm surged with coiled power, executing a textbook counter-slash.
“Aaaaagh—!”
Moments later, accompanied by a crisp, ringing clack, the long blade slid back into its scabbard.
All twenty-three thugs who had leaped out to rob them were on the dirt. Not a single one remained standing.
They were clutching their bellies, backs, legs, and faces, rolling in the dust and wailing in agony.
“…Blood Vine? Zhou… Zhou Xue?!”
Having caught a clear look at the crimson, vine-like fuller etched into her blade, Aulier screamed in sheer terror.
—Plenty of fighters inside the walls wielded long blades, but only one person carried a weapon adorned with the blood-vine pattern.
The leader of Dark Star: Zhou Xue.
Zhou Xue neither confirmed nor denied it.
She merely looked down at him with ice in her eyes. “If I ever see your faces near the Chinese Restaurant again, you won’t be walking away.”
“Did you hear her?!” Shelley barked.
“Y-yes! We heard you!”
Throwing whatever pride and swagger he had left to the winds, Aulier scrambled up alongside his battered goons, fleeing in sheer, humiliating panic.
They had arrived like ravenous tigers; they scurried off like sewer rats.
Damn it all—what kind of luck was this?! How had a living grim reaper like Zhou Xue ended up at the Chinese Restaurant?!
No, he had to get back and report this to the Big Boss immediately!
“Did you catch that?”
“Yeah. The woman with the blade… that has to be Zhou Xue.”
Earlier, when Zhou Xue and her squad were preparing to depart from the Chinese Restaurant, the area had been bustling with people inside and out.
Some were buying produce, some were hauling sacks, and others sat around the tables and benches, eating and chatting.
Buying a feast wasn’t unusual, but packing up a mountain of food to go certainly turned heads.
Some patrons marveled at how wealthy they were to drop that kind of coin all at once; others wondered why they weren’t dining on the spot and where they were heading.
A few noted how well-equipped the squad looked—with fitted combat gear and knee guards—speculating they might be high-tier scavengers from the inner districts.
Though Zhou Xue and her team were heavily bundled, keen eyes could still pick out their identities.
Long Qian and Qiu Jie had recognized her right away.
“The frame matches,” Long Qian murmured.
She had crossed paths with Zhou Xue before, back during an expedition beyond the East Wall.
At the time, they had encountered a newly mutated strip of landscaping holly. The mutation wasn’t severe, but the branches had begun whipping around on their own.
With plenty of people caught in the green belt, several scavengers had been snagged by the thorny boughs.
Long Qian had drawn her blade to hack away at the shrubbery while Long Shi, whose foot had been trapped, was howling his head off.
Zhou Xue’s squad had been nearby. Hearing the commotion, she had taken point, clearing the entangling branches in three clean strokes and freeing half a dozen trapped people in the process.
Both of them were blade wielders, so Long Qian had paid close attention.
Long Qian had picked up the blade only after the apocalypse began; before the cataclysm, she had owned a fitness center and worked as a trainer. She had the muscle mass and raw strength to handle heavy steel, and she had hacked her fair share of mutated pests to pieces within the safe zones.
Zhou Xue, however, was in a league of her own. Her footwork, stance, and blade control showed she was no amateur recruit.
Her technique was as lethal as it was precise.
Rumors floated around the city that Zhou Xue hailed from a martial arts lineage and had been the heir to a traditional swordsmanship school before the fall.
Long Qian respected the strong—especially those who didn’t use their strength to prey on the weak.
Because of that, Zhou Xue had left a profound impression on her.
“Packing up that much food… are they planning to carry it back inside the walls?” Qiu Jie guessed.
“Likely.”
“We’ve never seen them out here before. Today was their first time, right?”
“Yeah. Never seen them around the restaurant until now.”
Just moments ago, the crew had been discussing Long Ya’s sudden draft into labor service.
Gerry had mentioned that during his recent stint, the Black Fields had felt completely different from what Long Qian and Qiu Jie remembered from years ago.
The abnormal drop in temperature aside, laborers suffered from constant, inexplicable lapses in focus.
People became erratic and intensely irritable for no apparent reason.
His own injury had occurred because he zoned out in the middle of the field, failing to notice when the grotesque wheat stalks began writhing.
Had the overseers not opened fire in the nick of time, he would have ended up as fertilizer out there.
The strange thing was, every morning before work, the overseers would drill them endlessly: stay a hundred percent alert, report any anomaly immediately.
Before stepping into the mud, Gerry had repeated the warning to himself over and over.
Yet the moment he drew near the iron black wheat, it felt as though his focus was forcibly drained from his skull. His thoughts would drift uncontrollably, scattering into a fog.
“I was one of the lucky ones—I only got a chunk bitten out of my arm. The unlucky ones couldn’t dodge in time; the stalks clamped straight onto their throats. By the time the overseers ran over, they were already corpses.”
Gerry’s grim account had only hardened Long Qian’s resolve to smuggle food to Long Ya.
“If Zhou Xue’s crew is hauling food back, does that mean these dishes can actually pass through the city gates?” Long Shi rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“We don’t know where they’re taking it yet,” Old Hu pointed out.
“Regardless of where they’re headed, we have to get food inside,” Qiu Jie said firmly. “The unscheduled lottery, Gerry’s close call… it all points to one thing: the Black Fields have become a death trap.”
“Gerry said people lose control of their minds out there. That has to be an effect of the mutated black wheat.”
Long Qian looked back toward the storefront. “Mental corruption. The one-pot stew Boss Ling sells specifically lists an increase in mental resistance among its attributes, not to mention stabilizing body temperature.”
“Buying it is the easy part. How do we get it past the gate?” Old Hu was sick with worry.
“We stick to our original plan. When we head back this afternoon, I’ll stash it in my rucksack and make the run,” Long Qian said, her brow furrowing.
She had a strange gut feeling.
Zhou Xue’s crew shared a similar objective.
The food from Boss Ling’s kitchen might just pass the gate scanners without a hitch.
The Black Fields.
Clad in a heavy protective suit, Long Ya pressed her lips into a tight, white line.
Looking down at the jagged laceration on her thigh—where both the protective suit and her inner clothes had been torn through by gnashing teeth—her heart sank to rock bottom.
