Inside the blood-soaked wooden cabin in the canyon.
Lin Xun looked at Ning Zhe, the man he'd grown up beside every day since childhood, and suddenly felt a strange distance between them. "Brother Zhe, you really don't remember any of it? Not even what you just did?"
"Cough, cough!"
Before Ning Zhe could answer, Li Dongbao, lying some distance away, suddenly coughed twice and weakly opened his eyes. "Zhe... Brother Zhe..."
"Dongbao!" Ning Zhe closed the distance in two strides, and at the sight of him, his heart clenched.
Li Dongbao had taken a bullet to the lung; dark brownish blood was already seeping from the corner of his mouth.
On this wasteland, even the simplest wound or a common cold was enough to kill a refugee, and a serious injury was as good as a death sentence.
"Brother Zhe... I'm sorry... it's my fault, I got everyone hurt... but... but that was never what I meant to happen..." Li Dongbao had lost so much blood his vision had already gone dark, his empty gaze fixed on some direction where no one stood.
"Don't blame yourself. I know you're not a bad man." Ning Zhe took hold of Li Dongbao's hand, the last comfort he could offer him.
"Brother Zhe! If... if it's at all... possible... please look after my little brother... his name is Li Dongfa... at the settlement by... the north gate of the stronghold... don't let... our family line end here..." Li Dongbao spent the last of his strength forcing out those words, and his body went slack.
"I promise you!"
Facing Li Dongbao's death, Ning Zhe felt a heavy weight settle over him, but he showed no great grief or rage. Refugees like them, who'd walked every step of their lives through blood and tears, had long since gone numb to death.
If you didn't die, you had to keep living; and dying wasn't necessarily anything but a kind of release.
After a long moment, Ning Zhe took out the piece of roasted meat he'd been carrying and tucked it into Li Dongbao's pocket. Seeing this, Lin Xun did the same with his own.
Not becoming a starving ghost, that was the best blessing a refugee could give the dead.
Life was hard enough for the living, who could still go on searching for food, but this final ration, at least, meant a dead friend or family member wouldn't have to travel the road to the underworld on an empty stomach. It was a small comfort they could give their own hearts in an otherwise hopeless life.
"Owoooo!"
A deep, mournful wolf's howl rang out like a thunderclap from a clear sky, sending a chill crawling up their scalps.
"Damn it! The smell of blood's drawn a wolf pack!" Lin Xun's eyes went wide in an instant.
"Let's go!" Ning Zhe's eyes swept over the money pouch at Big Beard's waist; he yanked it free, then ran out of the cabin together with Lin Xun.
Half an hour later, Ning Zhe and Lin Xun walked homeward through the night.
Ning Zhe got lucky. Inside Big Beard's money pouch, along with a few hundred in cash, were several antibiotic pills, which could keep his wound from getting infected. After listening to Lin Xun's account of what happened, a flicker of shock crossed his eyes. "You're telling me Dongbao died taking a bullet meant for me, and that I'm the one who killed everyone in that cabin?"
"That's right! Once our people ate that roasted meat, they all collapsed, the bandits who came through the door killed them, and then you turned around and killed them right back!" Lin Xun nodded. "Brother Zhe, you really don't remember any of what just happened?"
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Ning Zhe thought it over for a moment; his head throbbed with a splitting pain, yet his mind stayed completely blank, as though Lin Xun were describing something that had happened to someone else entirely.
"I saw your eyes back there! It was exactly like when your strange illness flares up! But this time you didn't collapse, you went berserk instead!" Lin Xun looked just as bewildered, and just remembering how terrifying Ning Zhe had looked still left him shaken.
"Whatever happened tonight, you bury it and never breathe a word of it to anyone, understand?" Ning Zhe took a deep breath, his expression turning serious as he looked at Lin Xun. He had no idea why he'd turned into that thing, but he knew perfectly well that if word of this ever got out, it would only spell trouble for him.
"Don't worry! I won't tell a soul!" Lin Xun, thinking back to the origin of Ning Zhe's strange illness, couldn't help asking again. "Brother Zhe, how did you really kill that bear, all those years ago?"
"Don't ask." At the mention of it, Ning Zhe fell tight-lipped and evasive; the memory of that night flickered through his mind for an instant before he deliberately forced it back down.
Lin Xun, a little put out, dropped the subject. "So what do we do now?"
"Go home and sleep." Ning Zhe paused for a moment. "Once we wake up, we get our revenge."
Even the closest strongholds across the Federation stood several hundred kilometers apart, and the roads between them were treacherous beyond measure. Aside from the great companies and financial powers that controlled the strongholds, who could travel freely, the vast majority of refugees spent their entire lives confined to the area around a single stronghold.
The wind howled on. Under the moonlight, the sprawling shanties of the refugees, seen from a distance, looked like a low, unbroken sea of graves. Refugees too far from a stronghold couldn't afford brick-and-tile housing; theirs were all squat, ramshackle hovels, surrounded everywhere by waste and refuse, giving off wave after wave of foul stench.
Though the refugee zone was one vast, boundless wilderness, it wasn't the sort of place where you could simply settle down anywhere. The first priority was to cluster together, at least that way, when beasts came, a group could look out for one another.
There were no beasts in the refugee villages, but more often than not, people were more vicious than any beast. In this place, robbery and murder over something as small as a single cigarette or a flask of water were far from rare.
Ning Zhe and Qin Xiaoyu, who'd since been taken into the city, had both been orphans, and both had been raised by Lin Xun's father. Old Man Lin, one of the settlement's rare educated men, had originally meant to pass his knowledge down to the three of them and make them all teachers. But later, Qin Xiaoyu was taken back into the city by a man who claimed to be a household steward, while the restless Ning Zhe and Lin Xun became hunters instead, not as stable a life as teaching, but one of the rare trades in the refugee zone where you could actually get real meat to eat.
Thanks to Old Man Lin's special standing while he'd been alive, they didn't have to live in one of the run-down refugee clusters. They could live instead in the relatively safer settlement.
After two hours on foot, Ning Zhe and Lin Xun passed through countless shantytowns and made it back to the settlement outside the stronghold.
What was called the "settlement" was the ring of land closest to the stronghold's outer wall. It served as the commercial heart of the refugee zone.
Looking up, the stronghold's wall, over a hundred meters tall, loomed like a mountain range, and behind it, smokestacks taller still belched smoke without pause. Staring at it too long left a heavy, suffocating weight settling over the heart.
Just beyond that single wall lay the legendary paradise, though what that paradise actually looked like, probably no one in the refugee zone could say, since they had no right to enter the city, and the towering wall had cut off even their imagination.
The shops lining the settlement's streets were built of brick, tile, and mud-brick, a rare sight in the northern wasteland, row upon row of buildings packed tightly together beneath the stronghold wall.
Most of the people who could run a business in the settlement were merchants with some small connection inside the stronghold. Among refugees, they counted as the wealthiest upper class. They might not make a great deal of money, but at the very least, they never had to worry about where their next meal was coming from.
The settlement outside Stronghold 87 was a sprawling place, home to nearly thirty thousand people. By day it teemed with crowds, bustling and lively, but once the sun sank below the horizon, pedestrians grew scarce; after all, the darkness here hid far too many dangers.
The moment the two of them entered the settlement, they sensed something was wrong.
Unlike the usual dead silence, the settlement tonight was ablaze with torchlight, and there were more than a few armed mercenaries mounted on tall, powerful horses.
These were men who rarely even left the stronghold during the day, let alone at night. This was the first time Ning Zhe had ever seen them turn out in such numbers in the refugee zone after dark.