The refugee zone had almost no public toilets, so people's daily business ended up scattered wherever, smeared across walls and alleys alike. A small handful of people relieved themselves right near their own homes, but most chose somewhere a little further off, at the very least someone else's doorstep.
Along this street, only the courtyard where Ning Zhe lived stayed relatively clean. No one wanted to risk offending this notorious plague god over a pile of shit.
Right now, having just gone out to relieve himself, Ning Zhe was walking back through the alley outside his house. Even from a distance, he could already hear a man's ragged breathing coming from a house up ahead, along with Zhao Yi's moans. Outside her window, a few half-grown boys crouched together, listening intently to the sounds from inside, whispering among themselves.
"Get lost, all of you." Spotting the shadowy figures, Ning Zhe snapped coldly.
"Who the hell's yelling at..." One of the boys spun around, ready to curse, but the moment he recognized Ning Zhe, he and his friends clutched at their crotches and scurried off in a hurry.
Perhaps recognizing Ning Zhe's voice, Zhao Yi fell silent inside the house. This girl had always carried feelings for Ning Zhe, and even though shame had long since become a luxury in the refugee zone, in front of the man she cared for, she still wanted to hold onto some scrap of dignity.
But even with her staying quiet, the sound of bodies moving still carried out into the alley.
The houses in the refugee zone offered no soundproofing whatsoever, even a loud fart could travel a fair distance. Ning Zhe had once suffered through countless sleepless nights because of a neighbor's snoring, and only found peaceful sleep again after that neighbor died from an infection following a burst hemorrhoid.
When Ning Zhe got back to the house, he found only Lin Xun inside, and asked with a frown, "Where's the fat guy?"
"Out catching rats. He said it's quiet at night, so the rats are more willing to come out, better odds for hunting." Lin Xun finished brushing his teeth with a twig, then popped a dried mint leaf into his mouth to chew. Water was so scarce in the refugee zone that most people didn't brush their teeth at all, instead chewing the end of a soft-fibered twig into a brush-like frizz, then cleaning their mouths with mint leaves afterward.
"Starting tonight, the two of us take turns keeping watch. You take the first half of the night, I'll take the second." Ning Zhe sat down at the table and untied the waterskin from his waist. Since they didn't work at any of the factories, they couldn't even guarantee the basic liter of drinking water allotted per day, and buying water outright cost twenty yuan a liter.
Water in the settlement was strictly rationed. Even the water smuggled and sold on the side amounted to barely a drop in the bucket. Whatever water people managed to buy was almost always scraped together from what refugees had already denied their own mouths, which meant buying water was a real struggle for Ning Zhe and the others. More often than not, drinking wasn't about quenching thirst at all, just barely enough to keep the body functioning.
"There's no game in the house right now. We still need to stand watch?" Lin Xun made a sour face at this. Keeping watch was exhausting work, and even though Ning Zhe had claimed the harder second half of the night for himself, Lin Xun still felt reluctant about it.
"We killed some Black Banner men today. There's a decent chance they'll come looking for payback. Better to stay alert." Ning Zhe handed over the sharp steel knife he'd taken off Xiao Meng to Lin Xun. "Stay sharp."
"Brother, there's three of us in the house now. Shouldn't the fat guy take a watch shift too?" Lin Xun figured having one more person on watch would ease the load on everyone. As for the Black Banner Gang, he wasn't particularly afraid, maybe because they'd both gotten used to fighting for their lives, or maybe because with winter coming, there was no surviving anywhere else if they left the settlement.
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With no way to retreat, what was there left to fear?
Hearing this, Ning Zhe refused flatly. "No."
"Why not? You don't trust him?" Lin Xun made a face. Earning Ning Zhe's trust really was no small feat.
"He's a decent guy, but he's too timid, no real sense of danger. If I put him on watch, I'm worried he'd fall asleep without meaning to." Ning Zhe wet his throat with some water, then cinched the waterskin shut again. He meant every word of it. The chubby young man had a good heart and knew how to share, buying bedding for Ning Zhe and Lin Xun out of his own meager savings after moving in. As the brother of an old friend, Ning Zhe held no particular suspicion toward him, but trusting the man with his own life? That was a different matter entirely.
"Brother, remember that column of guard troops that left the city earlier? I heard they wiped out an entire refugee village to the west!" Lin Xun changed the subject.
"An entire village?" Ning Zhe froze for a moment.
"Yeah! While you were out using the bathroom, I talked with old Zhao next door for a bit. He said two of his coworkers were from that village. After the guards went in, nobody was left, they killed everyone!" Lin Xun nodded. "Those bastards, they don't hold back when it comes to us refugees."
Hearing this, Ning Zhe fell into thought.
Those fully armed soldiers leaving the city earlier had clearly been after that captured refugee, but why would they go and wipe out an entire village?
Had those refugees tried to resist?
No, that couldn't be it. To refugees, the powerful figures inside the city were like gods holding their fate in hand. Even an ordinary stronghold citizen was enough to make refugees give way. Faced with fully armed soldiers, no one in that village would have had the nerve to fight back.
Ruling that out, the reason the soldiers had wiped out the village had to be to silence witnesses, to bury the truth of whatever had happened, completely and permanently.
Killing an entire village just to erase every trace of taking a single man, what exactly had that captured man done?
Ning Zhe couldn't puzzle it out no matter how he turned it over.
At the Black Banner brothel.
Xiao Qi stared at the young man who'd come back to report, his face darkening in a way that was genuinely frightening. "You're telling me Ning Zhe is the one who killed my brother?"
"That's right! We asked around the alley where Xiao Meng was found, and two people saw Ning Zhe there. We didn't see him actually do the killing, but with how skilled Xiao Meng was, there aren't many people around the east gate who could've taken him down." The young man nodded with full confidence.
"Damn it! I never went looking for trouble with him, and he comes looking for trouble with me instead!" Xiao Qi slammed his fist on the table again. "Go! Bring him back to me!"
"Brother Qi, who should we send? From what I hear, that Ning Zhe's got a real killing streak in him." A knot tightened in the young man's stomach at the thought. Throughout the settlement, Ning Zhe and his band of hunter brothers had a well-earned reputation as absolute monsters.
"Didn't we have a group come looking to join us this afternoon? The one leading them said they used to be bandits, killed people before too. Send him and his men. Might as well test what they're actually capable of while we're at it." Xiao Qi thought it over for a moment and settled on the right man for the job.
At that same moment, a few hundred meters from where Ning Zhe lived, out on an open stretch of ground, the chubby young man crouched at the edge of some ruins, staring intently at a scattering of rubble ahead. Despite the cold night air, fine beads of sweat had broken out across his face, his gaze fixed with unusual intensity.
"Skitter!"
A few seconds later, a rat slowly emerged from among the rubble, then, as though it had lost all control of its own body, began walking stiffly toward the chubby young man.
Seeing this, his heart leapt with excitement, but at that exact moment, the rat suddenly bolted and vanished into a pile of brick and stone.
"Ugh..."
The chubby young man let out a sigh of disappointment at this, then composed himself and turned his gaze back toward the rubble, resuming his watch through the darkness, completely unaware that a hundred meters behind him, two figures were watching him closely.
The pair was a young man and woman. The man was tall and powerfully built, his muscles straining against his clothes, while the girl beside him had a fiery figure of her own. Even in loose refugee clothing, her curves were impossible to hide entirely, and with her finely sculpted face, she would have been a prize worth fighting tooth and nail over, had she ever ended up in one of the Black Banner's brothels.
Watching the way the chubby young man drew the rat toward him, the man's expression suddenly turned grave. "That fat kid up ahead, looks like he might be a Mutant Seed."