Ch101 - Hot Blood Turns Cold (1)

Translator: transcendentwings

When all the comrades in the Wusheng class were being hunted down by the zombies pouring out of the sun room, Fu Xiyuan, who had been bringing up the rear, was knocked over by the swiftest zombie.

The noise wasn’t small, but the footsteps of the zombies stampeding after them were heavier, completely covering it up. Only Ma Weisen, who had sharp ears, felt something was off and turned back subconsciously.

The moment he glanced back, he was overtaken by He Zhiwen, who had been second to last. When he realized that Fu Xiyuan had been ambushed and instinctively rushed forward to rescue him, the main force had already pulled far away without any indication.

However, at the time, the two of them didn’t notice it at all. One was trying his best to stage a rescue, while the other fought bravely. When they eventually got rid of the zombies that attacked Fu Xiyuan, they didn’t even have time to eliminate them thoroughly before they had no choice but to run away.

Unfortunately, they were already one step too late.

The zombies surged and were about to overwhelm them, only then did they come the revelation that their teammates had disappeared into the vast night and that their surroundings were bereft of tall trees as well as low buildings, only the six-story Houde building was within their vicinity. However, the shadow left by the Zhiyuan building was thick and this nearly identical practically cave dark teaching building took on a spooky countenance no matter how they size it up.

Ultimately, the two of them gritted their teeth and sprinted from the back of the building to the front and tried their luck at forcing their way into the Houde building. Yet as soon as the two of them reached the front side of the building, a large wave of zombies swarmed out of it, thus having not been able to defeat the ones of old from the Zhiyuan building and the sunroom while welcoming the new ones from the Houde building, their fragile hearts felt exhausted.

Fortunately, Fu Xiyuan was experienced in combat and under his lead, he and Ma Weisen slaughtered their way out of the pincer attack back to back. Finally, relying on the tactics of the Wusheng class in dominating the track field, driving off one sheep was still one less and letting two go was still decreasing their numbers, thus they ended up herding this huge horde of zombies after their merger around the Houde building in one entire lap. Then when they had looped to the rear of the building for a second time, they captured the right timing and boosted themselves up using the green mailbox at the door of the sun room that hadn’t been used for a hundred years, but still stood tall and strong as a step stool to clamber onto the roof of the glass room.

Ma Weisen had no experience, but he had a good eye and copied it perfectly, his movements neater than Fu Xiyuan’s.

The zombies gathered around the sun room. Some howled excitedly and tried to climb the mailbox, fortunately very few succeeded and those that did all perished beneath Fu Xiyuan’s boning knife or Ma Weisen’s dagger as they attempted to scale the glass roof.

After several rounds, the zombie horde gradually began to calm down.

After more than ten minutes, following the first zombie entering the sun room, most of the other zombies also squeezed in one after another until, in the end, the sun room was packed full. Some were even crowded down the stairs and into the garage, only a few of them were too obsessed and still lingered on the periphery where the cold wind blew, eyeing their prey, unwilling to turn their eyes away even after a long time.

Ma Weisen took a deep breath and plopped down onto the roof.

Soon, an ice cold sensation penetrated the material of his pants and froze his buttocks until it was numb and even after shuffling around a few times, Ma Weisen was unable to warm up. Left with no other choice, he could only squat instead of sit.

Fu Xiyuan wasn’t as relaxed as he was, still able to split his attention into pondering which posture was better, instead, he started to cast his gaze around the moment he reached the rooftop. Even if he was preoccupied with using his blade to fend off the zombies scrabbling up the mailbox, he would only limit it to prodding them once before he went back to squinting into the distance as if the familiar figures of his comrades would appear somewhere in the next moment.

Yet the greater the hope, the more bitter the disappointment.

“Don’t waste your energy, they ran off a long while ago.” Ma Weisen knew what Fu Xiyuan was thinking, but felt as if what hopes the other was harboring was merely wishful thinking and that it would be better for the other to just join him in squatting down, drawing some idle circles atop the glass itself, then maybe even triggering some kind of curse effect.

Fu Xiyuan was already anxious and wanted to kick the other after hearing such sarcastic words, but reason also told him that this great ancestor was his savior and that one mustn’t repay kindness with enmity. In the end, with his insides all twisted and knotted, he could only stiffly point out in a depressed manner: “They wouldn’t abandon us.”

When he declared as such, Fu Xiyuan was still searching around stubbornly, but the wind was cold and the night was dark. There was no one around and everything was quiet. There wasn’t even a shadow of a person in sight, thus when those words left his mouth, it wasn’t very confident.

Ma Weisen picked up on the uncertainty instantly and immediately curled his lip: “Chanting slogans is useless. You can deceive yourself, but you can’t change reality.”

Fu Xiyuan was so infuriated that he gnashed his teeth, his foot almost punting Ma Weisen in the ass when he stopped abruptly and his eyes lit up: “F*ck, this is the entrance to the underground garageah, whether or not they are willing to come back, they have to return!”

“Only imbeciles would turn back!” Ma Weisen pointed at the densely packed hoard of zombie noggins below and motioned Fu Xiyuan to take a closer look.

Fu Xiyuan certainly knew that there were zombies everywhere, but: “If they don’t, how are they supposed to enter the underground lot to drive the car out?”

“The Academic Affairs buildingah!” Ma Weisen suspected that Fu Xiyuan had entered the university through the backdoor, either by cheating in the college entrance examination or by giving money to the admissions officer, otherwise he really couldn’t explain this miraculous IQ, “Even I know that there are two entrances to the underground garage. Didn’t you analyze it when you were planning your tactics before?”

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Fu Xiyuan was shaken in his heart, but he still didn’t want to give up on an emotional level, instinctively refusing to just lay low and except the negativity from a pessimist who wouldn’t deliver coal during a time of need and just loves to add fuel to the fire: “I don’t care how you demean yourself, don’t lump me in with you. When I was fighting with them at my back, you were still shivering in your dorm bedne!”

“You’re dreamingba,” Ma Weisen sneered as he looked up at Fu Xiyuan because the latter was too tall and half of his face was hidden in the shadows, he put in a lot of effort to meet those shifty eyes to deliver a fatal blow, “I’ve already noticed long ago that no one paid attention to you along the way. You’re just a dispensable person in this class and your presence is not even as important as a walkie-talkie. . .Aiyouholy f*ck!”

Ma Weisen rolled forward and if it weren’t for the backpack on his back that made him less rounded and irregularly shaped, than he might have fallen off.

“What did you kick me for—”

Fu Xiyuan withdrew his long legs without any guilt and in the midst of his pal in hard times’ grimace and grumbling, he felt refreshed, his heart was fully illuminated as he answered in a leisurely tone: “If I were a girl, I would also like Qiao Siqi.”

As the saying goes, when you strike someone, don’t hit their face, and when you expose someone, don’t reveal their weakness, but if you really want to unleash your deadliest move, then this really works the best.

Ma Weisen’s eyes, nose, and mouth instantly scrunched up together, his handsome face wrinkled like an unripe pea, every fold was filled with tears of grievance: “What are you doingya, right now I’m the only one with you, you aren’t saying you’ll love and protect me, instead, you’re pushing me towards a sure endah. . .”

Fu Xiyuan was soft-hearted and couldn’t hold out against this. His chest rose and fell flat in pants for a long time, finally, he sighed helplessly and muttered darkly as if to vent: “Who told you to pass the walkie-talkie to Qi Yan!”

“. . . Didn’t you swear on your conscience that the walkie-talkie could only be maximized in the hands of Qi Yan and Song Fei so you forced me to hand it over!!!”

Fu Xiyuan: “. . .”

Ma Weisen: “I’m really going to be meet my demise because of you all, I might as well have run away by myself in the basketball gymne,awu—”

Wilson howled with feeling, making Fu Xiyuan anxious from hearing it. Gazing into the distance from the height they were at, there were no classmates within a hundred meters, looking down, the sun room was full of zombies. No matter how smooth and crystal clear their temporary safe haven was, even if you could pick the sun, moons and stars by standing on tiptoe, it still couldn’t withstand the piercing glacial winds.

In the second half of the night, isolated and helpless, there were only two paths before them, either fight or die.

“Stop howling!”

Fu Xiyuan roared once, while Ma Weisen trembled three times.

The world was silenced in an instant.

“Do you still want to live?” Fu Xiyuan questioned.

Ma Weisen shot to his feet: “Of course!”

Fu Xiyuan pondered for a moment, his eyes sparkling: “Then think about how to escape when there are only the two of us.”

He took two pieces of dried meat from his bag and gave one to Ma Weisen. The latter also had some stock, but since his comrade-in-arms provided him some from his own stash, there was no reason to refuse, so he accepted it with pleasure.

“Can we do it with just the two of us?” Ma Weisen smelled the aroma of dried meat and felt that his tired body and mind were slightly comforted.

Fu Xiyuan: “We have to make it work even if it doesn’t! Let’s stick to the original plan and find a car to drive out!”

Ma Weisen: “But I can’t drive. . .”

Fu Xiyuan: “It’s okay, I also don’t know how.”

Ma Weisen: “How is that okayahhhh!!!”

Fu Xiyuan: “Automatic transmission, even an idiot can drive it.”

Ma Weisen: “But the fool doesn’t have a key!”

Fu Xiyuan: “We’ve already. . .achoo—”

He opened his mouth too wide when speaking, swallowing a mouthful of frigid air which choked him. Fu Xiyuan turned around quickly, pulling Ma Weisen to squat down again, their heads pulled close together in order to study their “two-man battle”—

“We have long since thought about this problem. . .”

“You guys?”

“Just our former classmatesla. . .”

“You’ve certainly changed your identity really quickly.”

“Thanks to you, I finally realized my embarrassing status as ’empty space’, so now I don’t recognize them anymore and want to initiate ‘retaliation as empty air’!”

“Why does that sound so weak. . .”

With a slap against the back of the head, Ma Weisen finally quieted down.

Fu Xiyuan decided not to flap his gums if he could just use his fists in the future.

“Before we found the key at the basketball hall, we only had Qiao Siqi’s car. At that time, we thought about what to do after we got to the garage. The plan we had decided on after our discussion was toblock our retreat and just go for it.”

“You’re referring to the zombies in the garage?”

“En, we analyzed that the zombies in the garage are more likely to have their car keys hanging from their bodies. The most smooth and successful situation is to lure a few zombies who look most like car owners to a secluded place, take them down, and search them.”

Ma Weisen swallowed hard, always feeling that the point wasn’t in the half that Fu Xiyuan already explained to him, but in the half that he didn’t: “What if it was the worst situation. . .”

“The underground garage was full of zombies and there was no secluded place for us to lure the enemy.”

“And then?”

“Improvisebei.”

“. . . Is this a tactic that a human would f*cking take!!!”

Fu Xiyuan wiped off the saliva that was sprayed on his face: “Then if you’re so capable, why don’t you come up with a strategy!”

Ma Weisen was depressed.

Fu Xiyuan wanted to take advantage of this victory and say a few more words to make him feel even better, but seeing Ma Weisen’s drooping and down on luck look, once the words reached the edge of his lips, he swished them around three times, before deciding to swallow them back down after all.

When this guy was angering others, he could make people vomit blood, but when he was pitiful, it was really hard to do anything to him. What’s more terrible was that he could switch between those two states repeatedly. It wasn’t clear whether he, himself was happy or not, but as a passerby, Fu Xiyuan felt a sour sort of happiness like that of after a good work out, helpless and powerless at the same time.

Such as now.

He clearly wanted to argue, but still swallowed his words back, even exchanging them for words of comfort: “Think about it optimistically. Although it is difficult for us to go to the underground garage, we might be able to reconvene with the main force therene!”

Ma Weisen gave him a sideways glance and from his expression, his heart was not shaken at all: “You aren’t thinking about it in a positive way, but fantasizing.”

“. . .”

Fu Xiyuan wanted to kick him again, but Ma Weisen’s next words stunned him—

“If you were Qi Yan, would you take more than a dozen lives and wait for two classmates whose location was unknown, who knew when they would show up, or even whether they were dead or alive?”

Fu Xiyuan was unable to answer this question.

This wasn’t a problem of emotional closeness, nor a game of morality versus emotion, but the most direct and simple question of “value”.

For the sake of two lives that were “possibly living”, was it worth putting the other fourteen lives in danger of “possible death at any time”?

Who knows what the situation in the underground garage was like now. It would take momentous effort to get into a vehicle smoothly. Wouldn’t they want to drive away as soon as possible after entering the car, rather wait for two classmates who might be far away for an unknown amount of time?

“It was like this when I first got together with those classmates from the Sports department,” Ma Weisen looked up at the sky, as if some fragments of the past were flashing across it, “There will always be people who fall behind, get separated, or die while escaping while the rest can only continue to flee onwards, no one will look back. It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.”

Ma Weisen’s words were unprecedentedly bereft of complaints and even held a hint of resignation.

Fu Xiyuan remembered that when he escaped, he was also with many classmates, but in the end, there were only six of them left in the canteen that was part of the original Wusheng Class 2. Just like Ma Weisen stated, watching as classmates got attacked and consumed by zombies, weren’t they just as sad, didn’t they want to save them as well? Of course they wanted to, but in that situation, they couldn’t even save themselves, who would still be able to take care of others.

Gazing at the sky with his fellow companion, suffering together, Fu Xiyuan suddenly smiled with gradually fading hope as he frivolously commented: “My class leader is a peerless hero, one day he will come save me on aseven-colored cloud. . .”

“Just give upba,” Ma Weisen continued happily, “Unless it was the three of us who lost contact, Song Fei with us, maybe we can wait still for Qi Yan’s cloud.”

“You know about the two of them?” Fu Xiyuan searched through the memories of the past few hours, but didn’t find any indication of their class leader coming out to the new classmate.

Ma Weisen was speechless: “They are sostickywith one another that they’re about to need mosaics, do you think I am blind?”

Fu Xiyuan glanced at the transfer student and felt that he could no longer look at the other with the same set of eyes: “You have good observation skillsah. You’re really something, except for annoying people with your words, everything else is not bad.”

Ma Weisen raised his eyebrows in dissatisfaction: “Not bad?Flowing water has no form, drifting winds can’t find any traces, any evidence of adultery comes from the heart. Luo Geng is crushing on Lin Dilei, Zhao He has a good impression of Huang Mo, Zhou Yilu and Qiao Siqi’s relationship is unclear, Qi Yan and Song Fei will love each other until they die, and the only one who sees through the truth is a person who looks like avaseon the outside, but is more intelligent than ordinary people. . .F*ck, why’d you kick me!!!”

A patch of clouds floated over and covered the moon.

However the cloud was very thin, so the moonlight was still vaguely visible, only that it was very light and faint.

The two talked a lot, and it was unknown when they trailed off. Silence allowed depression and melancholy an opportunity to take advantage, and when it finally overtook them, Fu Xiyuan and Ma Weisen were no longer able to resist.

Author’s Chapter Summary: The moon has set, crows cry, the sky is covered in frost, a pair of perilous brothers sleep upon worries exhaust

The translator has something to say: MWS is sooooo sharp and yet so pessimistic at the same time, he can read in between the lines, but is unable to place his hopes on others, he gives up far too easily and has a lack of self-worth, but sometimes what he says is so meaningful and insightful, this was a good talk and hopefully with this he’ll integrate better

Sorry for the delayed updates, my boss went on vacation and asked if I could pick up more shifts while he was away and then somehow they have become MY shifts now, Imma talk to him, because while I enjoyed the extra money, I don’t appreciate working like that long term and second, the anniversary event in a game I play, took me a lot longer to complete than I expected (mainly because I am a dumb perfectionist who is unsatisfied with my own work no matter what, which, by the way, even after being sooooo careful, I still spotted a glaring mistake that will haunt me forever now), anyways rant over, sorry no extra chapters this week to make up for my delay, I’m still catching up