Chapter 129.2 - Raising a Big Cat in the Apocalypse (8.2)
Chapter 129.2 – Raising a Big Cat in the Apocalypse (8.2)
Chi Xiaochi decided to stay there for a day, and established this rest area as his first base. If he left his parents and Wanwan here, it would be easier for him to go out to collect supplies and gather the original members of Ding Qiuyun’s team.
Besides, after running all night, it was about time for everyone to get something to eat.
Chi Xiaochi went out and pretended to mess with the trunk of the car for a while. He pulled out an entire fresh lamb out of his storage, grabbed a huge soup pot, and woke up his parents, telling them to go inside the house to rest.
Having rested for a while, Father Ding had recovered a lot of his strength. He accompanied Chi Xiaochi to the area next to the rest area, breaking off a lot of withered tree branches for kindling.
Father Ding also asked after the origin of the lamb and the pot. Chi Xiaochi used the same excuse he had used when he bought them, saying that he’d originally been planning on going on a wilderness survival game with his friends, and other than the pot and bowls, he’d even stored a lot of rice and water, as well as all kinds of oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar.
Besides, with how cold it was outside, storing them in the trunk of his parents’ car, was equivalent to putting them in a freezer.
There was a restaurant in the rest area. The cooking robot inside had already thoroughly gone on strike, and was kicked to the side by Chi Xiaochi.
He removed all the electronic cooking facilities and put the iron pot on the stove. Turning on the fire, he found that there wasn’t much gas left, but still wasn’t miserly. He deboned the lamb, first stewing the bones to make lamb soup. As the milky white soup bubbled, the bones, still with chunks of meat on them, bobbed up and down.
Chi Xiaochi kept watch over the fire, while the little baby leopard lay on his shoulders, keeping watch over him, using its warm little mouth to suck on the tip of Chi Xiaochi’s ear, nibbling gently. It didn’t hurt; it was obviously just acting spoiled.
Chi Xiaochi pulled the little baby leopard into his arms. Checking it over, he found that it was a little bigger than it had been yesterday.
The little baby leopard pecked at his fingertip.
Chi Xiaochi held up the little baby leopard, asking, “Do I look like meat?”
The little baby leopard, “Aowuwu.”
After asking, Chi Xiaochi felt like that question was unbelievably dumb. He laughed.
The little baby leopard cocked its head to the side. It gently held his finger in its mouth, its grey-blue eyes, holding within them only Chi Xiaochi’s reflection.
Chi Xiaochi began to seriously consider, for his own personal safety, whether to get the little baby leopard accustomed to eating cooked meat.
The bones in the pot gradually softened, and cooked bone marrow dissolved into the soup. After adding some salt, ginger and garlic, the taste became even better. Wafts of fragrant steam moistened his eyelashes.
When the soup was perfectly cooked, he picked up the entire steaming pot, and brought it straight to the breakroom.
The employee breakroom was still a distance away from the gas station, so as long as he closed the door, there was no problem with lighting an open fire.
A washbasin was filled with firewood, making the fire burn bright, making the slightly damp firewood crackle.
This primitive heating method was sufficiently effective, warming up the entire breakroom.
After entering, Chi Xiaochi placed the iron pot right onto the washbasin, making it into a hotpot, even adding in a handful of shredded sweet potato noodles and bringing out several large porcelain bowls. He gathered the entire family around the pot, let them fill their bowls with noodles and soup, and have some steaming hot lamb soup.
Lamb was a heaty food and Jing Yiming had just recovered from a high fever. He couldn’t eat it. So, Chi Xiaochi used some boiling water to make a portion of laba congee for the child to eat his fill.
The fragrance of lamb soup wafted into the bone-chillingly cold convenience store.
He grabbed an open bottle of drinking water and poured it down his throat, freezing his gums and making him spit out a mouthful of water.
He placed a hand to his cheek and cursed violently.
……All of you, just you fucking wait for laozi.
Just now, through the back window, he’d heard that surnamed Ding talking to his father. He said that their family was going to stay there temporarily, while surnamed Ding went out to look for supplies and allies.
Surnamed Ding was a full 1.8 metres, and just looking at him, he could tell that the man was a practiced fighter. Xiao Han was scared of him, and had even been afraid that he’d come to snatch the convenience store from him by force. Now, hearing that he was going to be leaving, other than feeling happy, Xiao Han had a few new ideas.
This weather was truly too strange, and all the AIs had stopped working. From the looks of it, something big had happened.
If surname Ding left, there would only be the weak and elderly left in the rest area. He could take this opportunity, to collect some protection fees.
He’d lusted over Jing-jie’s appearance for a long time now, and that little girl with the bell on her wrist, she was a little feisty, but she was sufficiently good-looking……
Lost in his fantasies, Xiao Han took another bite of his bread, but found that the parts that had his saliva on it had already frozen solid.
After the meal, Chi Xiaochi planned out a path, heading south along the highway to the next city, to find the Sun brothers who had been in the original team.
As for his current mission target, Chi Xiaochi paid him no mind whatsoever.
He’d already approximately set up the trap, now he just needed to wait for the person to fall in.
……
After decapitating a new human, Gu Xinzhi sat down next to his corpse, wiping off the blood on his hands onto his clothes. He planned to rest for a while before dragging the corpse away and throwing it out the back door.
This was the second new human who had broken into the supermarket to rob and abduct old humans.
Gu Xinzhi had nothing against them abducting people. It was just that after they abducted person after person, inevitably, the next one to be abducted would be him.
He was tired of being disturbed, so he’d decided to make a move first.
The old human girl who had almost been pulled away walked up to him, sobbing. Even as she thanked him, the fear on her face couldn’t be concealed.
……After all, her saviour looked even more ferocious than her assailant.
Gu Xinzhi ignored her, resting an elbow against his knee and holding the sniper rifle he’d brought out of the training grounds before the disaster happened, as he closed his eyes to rest.
He had always been a very logical man.
Both of Ding Qiuyun’s homes were empty, and his parents’ neighbourhood was crawling with man-eating Boston ivy. From the looks of it, there was a high chance that Qiuyun had already left with his parents.
The world was so vast, where should he go to look for him?
He didn’t dare to bet on his luck, because his luck had never been good.
When Gu Xinzhi’s mother brought him into her second marriage, she’d once told him, now that you have a father, you have another person to love you.
In the end, his stepfather was a drunkard, and when he got drunk, he would even beat his mother and him.
At that time, Gu Xinzhi had thought, at least he still had his mother.
Later, his mother also learned to drink. After being beaten by his stepfather, she would turn around to beat and scold Gu Xinzhi.
Gu Xinzhi thought, his mother had probably been corrupted by his stepfather.
Hence, the 15 year old him changed the wiring of the originally perfectly fine light, making it so that the moment it was turned on it would short-circuit, and thus designed a gas leak accident.
After drinking, his stepfather staggered into the house. Smelling something strange, he reached for the light switch.
After his stepfather died, he thought everything would get better.
But then, his mother fell even deeper into drinking, and developed cancer at a young age.
Because of this, Gu Xinzhi had never been willing to rely on his luck.
He didn’t want to go all over the place to search for him, he just wanted to wait.
To him, the latter held more hope than the former.
He took out his communication device, now without any signal. The screen saver was a picture of him and Ding Qiuyun.
After looking at it for a while, Gu Xinzhi gradually became tired. Leaning against the wall with his gun in his arms, he fell asleep.
Soon after he fell asleep, he heard a series of familiar footsteps sound by his ear.
Gu Xinzhi’s eyes immediately shot open. The person that entered his vision made his mind race, hardly able to believe that he’d gotten so lucky.
Ding Qiuyun looked much more hardened, a gun slung over his shoulder. Hearing a noise, he looked up. After a long period of dazedness, without a word, he rushed over and hugged him.
That warm, real touch made Gu Xinzhi’s eyes burn. He dug his hand into the other’s hair, gripping it tight. Hugging that person so tightly that he couldn’t breathe, he kissed him.
That night, they slept together.
Two burning yet ice-cold bodies warmed each other up by the fire. Those vivid, realistic sensations, made Gu Xinzhi feel as if he had the world. He held Ding Qiuyun’s face in his hands as he kissed him over and over, as if confirming that he existed.
He joined Ding Qiuyun’s group, wandering the world with him, going everywhere together to gather supplies.
Bu Gu Xinzhi gradually began to realise that something wasn’t quite right.
Ding Qiuyun’s small team, which had originally been developing fairly well, was becoming smaller and smaller.
The first one to die was a girl by the name of Yan Lanlan, who was eaten alive by hyenas. After her, people died one after another, like a series of lamps being snuffed out.
As Gu Xinzhi saw Ding Qiuyun in agony, even as his heart hurt for him, he secretly felt a little happy.
He really hated Ding Qiuyun’s team.
To be precise, he hated anyone who was too close to Ding Qiuyun.
It wasn’t until Ding Qiuyun was forced to scatter his troops and flee, and Gu Xinzhi was surrounded by a group of respectful new humans, did he finally realise that the situation seemed to have spiralled out of his control.
He was swept up by the crowd of people, pushed along a heavy flow of human traffic, towards a circular scaffold.
When he was pushed to the very front, he broke out in a cold sweat.
Ding Qiuyun, bound in rope, was kneeling in the centre of the scaffold, looking at the him who stood amongst the new humans in shock.
Gu Xinzhi frantically tried to explain himself, but his tongue was stiff, making him unable to utter a single word.
In the next moment, his vision blurred.
When he was able to see once more, he was standing inside a room. Strewn across the floor were fallen guards, a broken chair, scattered hemp ropes, an open window, and a broken window pane.
That window seemed to have some mystical power. Even though Gu Xinzhi didn’t want to get close, his legs stiffly moved him towards the window.
Through the window, he first saw a pool of blood, then Ding Qiuyun, lying limp on the ground.
The blood-stained hair plastered to his temples, had been accidentally cut by him just a week ago.
At that time, Ding Qiuyun had even complained, saying that he wouldn’t allow him to cut his hair from then on.
Who knew, his words would become prophecy. He really didn’t have any chance to cut it again.
Gu Xinzhi woke up from his dream covered in cold sweat.
It was as if he’d lived through half a year in his dream, but when he checked his watch, he found that only three minutes had passed.
He let out a violent sigh of relief.
……Thankfully, it was just a dream.