Chapter 69

Xiao Shengyun stayed in that pool for three days, but it felt like he had lived there for three years. He was very bored.

His daily routine consists of eating, sleeping, and swimming from one end of the pool to the other.

On his second day here, Zhou Zhi brought a bunch of bags, each containing 30 units of blood. He labeled the bags with dates, as if preparing cat food for a cat.

“I might be quite busy during this time, you can drink these.” Zhou Zhi squatted by the pool.

Then he was swept into the water again.

Xiao Shengyun kissed his lips, just like last time.

The little monster had no sense of shame; to him, this action was a way of communicating feelings, especially since the other party hadn't objected.

A minute later, the two surfaced.

Zhou Zhi gasped for air. As a human being, he experienced suffocation with every kiss, a very strange experience.

Maybe I'm going crazy too, he thought.

The bloodless face grew even paler, and Xiao Shengyun sensed something, his tail slipping off the other's waist.

“I don’t need your blood, and I’ll recover quickly and be able to eat other things,” he said menacingly.

Like a kitten in a rage, its paw pads lightly but firmly slap your face.

“The energy in saliva is only one-fifth that of blood. Also, you can’t just drag me down like that next time. I can’t come out of the water in wet clothes every time.” Zhou Zhi threw a bag of blood over.

"Moreover, the source material is not suitable for the human body, and I need this method to expel it."

"Okay." Xiao Shengyun was convinced by his food.

So he followed the dates on the bag and drank a bag of blood plasma every day.

Zhou Zhi was probably really busy, because he didn't show up during this time.

On the seventh day, Xiao Shengyun finally regained his human form.

However, an even more serious problem arose—he had no clothes.

The place was completely empty, with no cloth to cover myself.

His phone was also taken away, leaving him unable to contact the outside world, so he had no choice but to transform back into his feathered serpent form.

If Zhou Zhi doesn't show up again, then go find him like this.

Fortunately, the person he was secretly cursing arrived on the eighth day.

"I'm sorry." It was already late at night, and Zhou Zhi looked very tired.

Using the list obtained from the hotel, a large number of polluting organizations were seized, keeping the operations department very busy.

Moreover, monitoring data from the lighthouse shows that traces of large pollutants have recently appeared in various areas.

He went to City B for three days of meetings and processed some samples before he finally got a chance to catch his breath.

"I'm not angry." Looking at that face, Xiao Shengyun's anger dissipated by more than half. Moreover, although he didn't go out, he could hear the noise from upstairs and downstairs. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, which meant that the situation was getting worse.

"I brought you a gift." Zhou Zhi took out an exquisitely packaged box containing a matcha cake. The cake was a little dry, probably because it had been out of the oven for a while.

The two of them took a bite of the cake each, and then Xiao Shengyun belatedly realized that he seemed to have forgotten the important matter: "Get me a set of clothes."

"You can become human now?" Zhou Zhi raised an eyebrow.

“Of course.” Xiao Shengyun folded his wings, and the scales on his body disappeared, leaving only his snake tail.

Zhou Zhi took the extra clothes from his room.

The two had similar builds, and the clothes fit them well. When he came out, he transformed back into a human.

"I'm going home," Xiao Shengyun said solemnly.

"Oh." Zhou Zhi nodded, indicating that he understood.

That's it? He's a contaminant now. Such a big contaminant, and you just let him go home like that?

Xiao Shengyun didn't understand humans very well, but he knew that a normal human should never have this expression.

They would scream, they would be terrified, instead of being as nonchalant as he just said, "Have you eaten today?"

"Shall we go back together? Your car isn't here." Zhou Zhi thought for a moment; he had just finished his work and was also going home anyway.

Xiao Shengyun: "..."

Is this the key point?

So the two of them got into the car together. The cool night breeze seemed the same as before, yet something seemed different.

“You moved to my neighborhood back then because…” Looking at the familiar road, Zhou Zhi suddenly realized something.

"Foraging. My heart is inside your heart, what's wrong with letting me have a couple of bites?" someone said matter-of-factly.

Zhou Zhi felt a little uncomfortable being treated like food.

"So you want to kill me? If I die, you can take back the source core, you won't have to go hungry every day, and you won't have so many restrictions." He said softly, gazing at the flickering lights in the distance.

There is a certain allure in language.

Pollutants were the first to realize that humans are sick.

In their world, all creatures strive to survive; it's a dog-eat-dog world where the strong eat the weak and live by eating the corpses of their own kind.

The concept of "suicide" was not in anyone's mind.

What kind of creature would want to die?

"Maybe." Xiao Shengyun was too lazy to think about what this person was thinking and focused on driving.

This car is self-driving. He only needs to pay attention when there are traffic lights or turns. He doesn't need to be so careful when driving his own car. But Dean Zhou has many enemies, and the car might have been tampered with at any time.

The car fell silent for a moment, and Xiao Shengyun could hear the soft breathing of the person beside him. His heart suddenly calmed down.

We were accomplices.

He thought.

"The road ahead is blocked. Please take an alternate route." The mechanical voice of the car navigation system broke the silence. Xiao Shengyun pulled up the navigation map and saw that the road ahead was indeed in red, indicating that it was under repair.

He turned the steering wheel and onto another route recommended by the navigation. The road ahead was pitch black, as if he were heading into some unknown territory.

...

After driving for about ten minutes, the smooth and empty asphalt road suddenly became muddy. The bright moon hung high, and its light cast the shadows of the trees on both sides of the road onto the car window.

There was no end in sight, only pitch blackness.

Xiao Shengyun occasionally travels this road, so it shouldn't have taken him ten minutes to get there. He wondered to himself.

"Have we gone to the wrong place? Do you know where we are?"

Zhou Zhi was almost asleep when he heard this and looked up. There wasn't a single car on the road, only the rustling sound of the wind blowing through the grass in the green belt.

"If you don't know the way, just follow the navigation. If the navigation is correct, then you're not wrong either."

The two brought up the navigation map, but there was no signal and the page was blank.

"I hope I haven't gotten infected again."

Xiao Shengyun took out his phone again, and sure enough, there was no signal, just like last time at the hotel.

You can either drive forward or turn back, but even if you turn back, you probably won't find an exit; it's like being lost in a maze.

"Let's keep going and see what the people behind this are up to," Zhou Zhi said calmly.

The car drove for another twenty minutes, a process that was extremely boring. The rows of trees on the side of the road moved backward, and the scenery in front was exactly the same, as if they had been standing still.

Thirty minutes.

One hour.

...

A figure rushed towards us from the front.

The car suddenly stopped, but the person in front was still hit with a "bang," the metal shell collided with flesh and blood, and was thrown four or five meters.

Someone died?

Just as Xiao Shengyun was about to get out of the car, Zhou Zhi stopped him, then opened the glove compartment and took out two silver pistols and two half-meter-long short knives, giving him a set.

"Here you go, what you bump into might not be a person."

Xiao Shengyun took it, and when he touched the other person's fingertips with the knife, they were ice cold.

They opened the car door, and Xiao Shengyun quickly walked to the man's side.

"Ouch! Where did that car come from? It smashed my bones!" The humanoid creature writhed on the ground, making a cracking sound with every movement of his bones.

The bones were indeed broken, because this thing didn't have human internal organs, muscles, or skin. The skeletal structure was wrapped in a black membrane, and now that membrane had broken, the white bones inside were in close contact with the rough ground.

Since the creature showed no intention of attacking, Xiao Shengyun refrained from making a move and watched it lie on the ground for several minutes.

"What are you looking at? You hit someone, why don't you help me up?"

I couldn't lift it up because the pants were so soft, and it seemed like the thigh bone of that thing had been knocked off.

"Where are my bones? Where are my bones?!"

The skeleton screamed, so Xiao Shengyun and Zhou Zhi groped in the dark and found all the bones that had been knocked away.

The skeleton pulled up its pants and, with a "snap," assembled the bones like building blocks.

"I have to go, or I'll miss my chance." The skeleton ignored the two humans and hurriedly ran ahead.

The two followed behind, turned a corner, and saw a long line in the night, with figures flashing in the hazy darkness.

It's not the pollutants, it's the people—the polluted people.

Xiao Shengyun could sense that the pollution had permeated their bodies; their eyes were vacant, and they looked like walking corpses.

They barely maintained their basic physical form, and of course, they also had other things growing on their bodies.

In the distance stands a tall city wall, probably tens of meters high, like the kind of ancient city wall built to defend against enemies. In this era of various firearms, ancient city walls have basically disappeared, with only a few ruins remaining for visitors.

In front of the city gate were two polluters dressed in black uniforms. One of them was like a snail, with a long, transparent tentacle extending from deep within his face, and his eyes at the tip of the tentacle.

They were holding devices that looked like detectors and were checking the people at the front of the line.

The man at the head of the group was swollen, like a small mountain. When he took two steps forward, you could see his skin trembling even through the fabric.

Should we check the contamination levels?

Xiao Shengyun thought that if the standards hadn't changed, then probably no one in this team would be able to get in.

Then he saw the snail-man finish his inspection, wave his hand, and put the person inside.

The next one was a young man with black exposed skin and another head growing from his neck.

"Where did you come from?" the snail-man frowned and asked in a cold voice.

“City XX, sir,” the head on the neck replied.

The snail-man scanned him again with the instrument, raised his hand and made a gesture. A bunch of people in black uniforms appeared out of nowhere and knocked the young man to the ground.

"Why are you arresting me?"

"I'm innocent!"

The young man shouted at the same time from both heads.

Then the snail man grabbed the head on the neck and yanked it off.

"The circuit is damaged—"

"The circuit is damaged—"

The head was fake; the young man was an uncorrupted human.