January 20
Canned pork was delicious. Bread was delicious. Ye Ling was practically in tears.
At last, she was eating real food again.
Sitting in the vehicle, she tore into breakfast meat from a can with bread, devouring it with all the focus of someone who had spent days living on fox meat, rats, pine nuts, wild greens, and whatever else she could scrounge up. Life had been brutally hard. Her stomach had growled so often it felt like a permanent part of her existence. At nearly two meters tall, she no longer looked merely gaunt—she looked genuinely underfed.
And yet, the moment she joined Kyoko's convoy, she was already eating normal food.
It was wonderful.
The raw meat she had kept in her pack had been thrown away before she got into the vehicle. At first, Ye Ling had not believed Kyoko when she said they had no shortage of food or drink. Then she saw the cargo packed into the vehicle—shelves' worth of supplies, as if they had looted an entire supermarket.
Good grief. Had these people really robbed a whole store? How else could they have amassed this much stuff?
Kyoko had told her that as long as she obeyed orders and cooperated with the team, food would never be a problem.
After all the hardship she had endured, Ye Ling naturally agreed without the slightest hesitation.
At noon, Kyoko and the others did not stop. They ate some quick rations in the vehicle and then continued on.
All around them were the same endless, uninspired hills. More accurately, low mountain ranges. There was not a single peak over two thousand meters in sight. Adatara, Takamori, Azuma, Onimen, Tetsu—compared with the mountain ranges Ye Ling knew back in the East, these were nothing much at all.
The convoy was moving through a bend in the road shaped almost like a folded hook. Beyond this stretch lay another fork. Kyoko had deliberately chosen the side roads. If they kept taking the main roads, they would end up passing through another densely populated town. Better to avoid fighting whenever possible. Until they found a stable place to stay, any major losses would be unacceptable.
As they passed through a mountain valley, a fierce gust of wind swept up, sending snow slamming against the hull. It was as if the storm itself wanted to drive the cold straight into the vehicle. Compared with the killing wind outside, the interior—with the heat running—had grown so warm that it felt stuffy, making people want to loosen their collars.
There was not much room for passengers inside. The people not up front were wedged in among the supplies piled throughout the compartment. And with Ye Ling's two-meter height, she had to be especially careful or she would bang her head on the ceiling.
A dull journey could only be made bearable by idle chatter, and even Kyoko, sitting in the driver's position, ended up joining in.
After all, the team had just taken in a foreigner—and one with animal ears at that. How could no one be curious?
The only problem was the language barrier. Ye Ling spoke no Japanese and only knew a few scattered words of Italian, so she could not communicate directly with Huaxiu or Dorothy at all. Those two knew no Chinese either. That left Kyoko as their living translator.
"Miss Ye," Huaxiu asked, "you came to Japan as a tourist, right? Then why did you end up in a place like this, out in the middle of nowhere?"
Kyoko relayed the question in Chinese.
Ye Ling thought for a moment, then answered with a slightly dazed expression, "A friend from the community invited me out here to visit. Then this happened."
"What happened to you after that?" Dorothy asked. "You didn't just stay out in the mountains this whole time, did you?"
Kyoko first translated Dorothy's question into Chinese, then leaned back to listen.
"At the beginning, I was up near one of the open-air hot springs on the mountain," Ye Ling said. "There were three or four commercial buildings there. We cleared out a few infected—very few, really—and hid inside. At first, things weren't too bad.
"There were seven of us altogether. We each took one room and planned to wait until the situation became clearer and the snow stopped before coming down the mountain.
"On the first day, everyone's phones were still receiving all kinds of messages. That was when people really started to panic. But the truly frightening part came at noon on the second day, when Tokyo fell and all mobile signal disappeared. Everyone started losing their minds.
"Then, on the morning of the third day, an old man died. He'd tried to drive down the mountain in secret, but the mountain road was treacherous and his car slid off. Then that same night, with the snow still falling hard, a child froze to death.
"At that point, there were five people left—two men and three women. Since I was always on my own and couldn't understand Japanese, I ended up getting excluded by the others.
"To avoid giving them any excuse to turn on me, I took my things and moved to another place about a hundred meters away. After that they more or less left me alone. I hardly saw them come looking for me again."
"So what happened next?" Huaxiu and Dorothy asked at once, both caught up in the story.
Ye Ling was already parched from talking so much, and Kyoko was getting thirsty too, so the conversation paused there for a short break.
Kyoko reached to the side and took a sip from the thermos bottle by her seat.
Behind her, Huaxiu passed a cup of water to Ye Ling with one hand, while the other remained half-hidden in her sleeve.
"Here," Huaxiu said. "Drink."
She spoke in Japanese, which Ye Ling could not understand, but the gesture was clear enough.
"Thank you. I really appreciate it."
Ye Ling hurriedly took the cup and drank deeply.
"Hah…"
The cool water slid down her throat, soothing it at once. She had not had the chance to drink freely like that in a long time. After wiping her mouth, she handed the cup back. Huaxiu accepted it with one hand, while the other remained in that same guarded position, as if she had never relaxed for a moment.
Then the story resumed.
"After that?" Huaxiu prompted.
"After that, things got ugly." Ye Ling let out a breath. "Basically, the four people over there ended up killing each other. I found the note left behind by the last one. And that's how it all ended. Afterward… it was just me, scraping by, hunting and scavenging, until your convoy came."
"I see," said Huaxiu.
Dorothy looked disgusted. "That man was revolting."
Kyoko did not visibly react. She had already seen worse. Still, the memory of the underground torture room from before may well have stirred beneath the surface again.
As it turned out, the child who had died on the third day had been the child of one of the women in the group. She had spent all her time blaming her powerless husband.
That created an opening.
The other man took advantage of it and wormed his way in. In less than a few days, he had won the grieving woman over. But by then food was running short, and together the pair murdered the woman's husband.
If that had been the end of it, it would have been ugly enough—an affair, betrayal, murder.
But then a fourth player entered.
The remaining young woman was the killer man's original girlfriend.
Forced into a degrading arrangement and made to witness the murder of another man, she had snapped. During what was supposed to have been another debauched night, she took a claw hammer to the two of them.
After that, she left behind what amounted to a suicide note and vanished.
Until Ye Ling later found her frozen body lower down the mountain.
She had apparently tried to leave, carrying a great deal of supplies, and likely died after slipping somewhere on the descent.
Just as the story concluded, the vehicle suddenly jolted violently. The tires screeched against the slick road, and the only person not wearing a seatbelt—Ye Ling—went crashing backward, knocking into the seat behind Kyoko.
"Hold on! We're taking the downhill mountain road now!"
Kyoko's warning came a little too late.
Fortunately, Ye Ling was strong enough to haul herself upright again almost immediately. Huaxiu had begun to rise to help, but quietly let the folding knife concealed in her sleeve slip back into place instead before fastening her own seatbelt again.
Ye Ling, of course, had no idea that the same girl who had been asking her questions so warmly all this time had kept a blade hidden and ready the whole while.
Huaxiu had never once lowered her guard.
Even if that had been an accident, what if Ye Ling had chosen that exact moment to lunge for Kyoko in the driver's seat?
Better to be prepared.
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 178)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 139)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League ( 126 )
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter110)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter171)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter100)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter184)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 77
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 168
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 156
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass 105
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 185
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 65
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 76
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 65
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 160
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 150
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player 76
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 97
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 66
Uma Musume: From Beginner 116
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 75
Uma Musume: I Want All 93
I Can Copy Unique Skills 79
Summoning an Evil God, but the 55
Supernatural Multiverse 75
My Harem Is Indescribable 68
Jujutsu Kaisen: Heroic Spirit 70
"I'm just a Valkyrie passing through." 66
Uma Musume: Today Is Another Romantic Battlefield 69
Still playing traditional Honk 49
The Most Filial Son Under Heav 53
What Should I Do After Switchi 42
Reincarnated as a Demon, Skill 50
Hell-Difficulty Dungeon? 38
Transmigrated as Sukuna 35
Checking In in Demon Slayer 40
The Reincarnating Trainer of Tracen Academy 55
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