Chapter 81 White Sugar Yam
Thousands of miles away, Lu An and Yao Yuan were also eating around a campfire.
They passed through an abandoned village and, after checking around, chose a reasonably sturdy house to spend the night in. They preferred to spend the night in abandoned villages, as it provided shelter from the wind and rain, there might be some supplies in the village, and there was a high probability that there would be plenty of fruits and vegetables growing nearby.
Aside from the fact that the place has an atmosphere reminiscent of a Chinese horror film, everything else about it is perfect.
Yao Yuan found yams outside the village; the neglected yams looked like large vines sprawling on the ground. Lu An didn't recognize them. In fact, much of his agricultural knowledge came from the post-apocalyptic world, ninety percent of which came from Zhao Xuan's unreliable childhood memories. Their village didn't grow yams, and Lu An didn't even know that yams were grown in the northern part of the province.
It was the season for yams to ripen, so they found two rusty hoes in the village and started digging for yams.
Yams grow vertically in the soil, so they have to dig at least half a meter deep to dig out a complete section. Wild yams are small and thin, and it takes a lot of effort to dig out just a few.
That evening, they lit a campfire and roasted yams for dinner. Lu An broke off a yam, peeled off the skin, and ate it with fine salt. At that moment, Yao Yuan pushed over a box of white sugar and said, "It tastes even better dipped in this."
Lu An did as instructed and dipped the food in sugar, discovering that staple foods like these indeed go better with sugar, such as pumpkin pancakes, candied sweet potatoes, fries with a packet of ketchup, and yams dipped in white sugar.
“Eating white foods in autumn and winter, like lotus root and radish, is good for your health,” Yao Yuan said. “Your sister Xiao He told me this.”
Yams are very filling; after eating just a few, their stomachs felt heavy. They pulled out some firewood, tidied up the campfire, and prepared to spend the night there.
The two of them took turns keeping watch, one for the first half of the night and the other for the second half. They would rest when the sun set and set again when it was bright, so even with the rest time halved, it was still barely enough.
Lu An also said that it doesn't matter if they are sleep-deprived now. When they enter the saltworks market, they will be quarantined for three days. During those three days, they can't do anything but sleep. They can definitely make up for the sleep they are missing now.
After eating his fill, Lu An pulled out his sleeping bag and spread it out; it was time for Yao Yuan to stay up all night.
As they were tidying up, they heard Yao Yuan mutter, "Should we dig up some of these yams and take them back to plant?"
Lu An nodded and replied, "Sure, we'll dig them up when we get back." He should have brought two piglets with him when he returned, and he was worried about not having enough feed along the way. However, he figured the piglets couldn't eat the yams raw; it would be a bit of a hassle to cook them before feeding them.
Although Yao Yuan was older than Lu An, they discussed things amicably along the way. Lu An visited some friends Lao Dao had introduced him to. In just six months, some of these friends had passed away, others had moved, and Lu An delivered gifts to the remaining ones: tea, soy sauce in small bottles, and some long-lasting preserved sweets. Because of the fear of infection, many couldn't leave their camps to meet them, so Lu An could only hand over the gifts. His friends were very generous and would reciprocate with gifts, often including slips of paper detailing recent events or research on major diseases. This was crucial information; with communication completely cut off, information relied entirely on word of mouth, and Lu An and Yao Yuan were able to learn many important things during their journey.
Lu An inquired about Lao Dao's whereabouts from these people. One of them said that Lao Dao had been here a few months ago, but he seemed to have headed north, and he didn't know exactly where he went.
Lu An has completely lost contact with Lao Dao.
Lu An didn't think much of it. Old Dao's survival skills were a hundred times better than his own. As long as he wanted to live, he could live well anywhere.
Snuggled in his sleeping bag, the optimistic Lu An quickly fell asleep.
Yao Yuan turned his head and glanced at Lu An, who was no longer moving. He smiled slightly and sighed that young people were so healthy, able to eat and sleep well.
Ten years ago, he was just like Lu An. When he first started working, he would work overtime until midnight, then play games for three hours, sleep for three hours, and be able to squeeze into the morning rush hour with full energy. But after working like this for a few years, he felt that his body was obviously drained. Fortunately, a serious illness came, otherwise, in addition to darker dark circles under his eyes, there would be an increasingly shiny head.
Thinking of this, he actually smiled again, laughing at himself for being able to find joy even in hardship.
Like many others, he lost all his loved ones to a serious illness.
Yao Yuan, an ordinary name, and he also had an ordinary life. Even after the apocalypse, he was lucky enough to be among the small group of survivors, but he did not achieve anything remarkable. Like all the NPCs in apocalyptic novels, he was just an ordinary person.
He was actually quite pretty, even a bit effeminate. He was short as a child, so he was often teased for looking like a girl. His elders teased him for looking like a "little girl," and his peers teased him, forbidding him from entering the boys' restroom. As a child, he was quiet and reserved, without any friends. He hated the class's free team-building activities the most, because he was almost always the one left out.
Actually, many girls are quite friendly to him, after all, he's like a girl, but Xiao Yaoyuan is very stubborn. He feels that he should draw a clear line between himself and girls to avoid confirming the absurd fact that he is a girl. So even when facing kind-hearted girls, he keeps a cold face.
It's good to keep a straight face; not making expressions makes you look younger.
Although his childhood and adolescence were filled with unhappiness, he at least grew up peacefully and ordinarily—he chose software programming as his college major.
Writing software is great; you don't have to deal with people.
So after graduation, he entered an ordinary tech company and began a grueling workday, working from 5 am to 12 pm.
He rented a house, which was right across from Zhang Xiaohe's house.
Zhang Xiaohe's husband has a serious illness—this is something everyone in the building knows. This statement has a double meaning: the man has end-stage renal disease, and his family sold their house to pay for his kidney transplant, so they had no choice but to rent this old house. Only three years after the transplant, his kidney failed again, and after that, the man's personality changed drastically; he began to beat his wife.
He believes that his wife, who works at a hospital, failed to properly supervise him and ended up giving him a damaged kidney.
The old lady on the first floor said: Ah He's husband has a serious illness, including a serious mental illness.
He heard the sounds of fighting and cursing coming from across the street more than once. There were men cursing and women weakly begging for mercy. In the middle of the night, the piercing sounds could penetrate his brain through his headphones. The neighbors in the building had called the police more than once, but the police came and left, saying that it was a family matter and that the assailant had already admitted his mistake.
Then the old lady on the first floor said again: Unless Ah He is beaten to death, this matter will always be considered a "family matter"!
Later, Zhang Xiaohe's husband threatened in the building that if anyone dared to call the police again, he would stab that person's entire family to death.
The old lady on the first floor was terrified. She watched a lot of legal education programs, and she said that the man was mentally ill and wouldn't take responsibility for killing someone.
In the end, no one helped Zhang Xiaohe call the police anymore.
This whole affair, from its initial outbreak to its subsequent ignoring by everyone, only took a few months. Yao Yuan didn't understand why Zhang Xiaohe had to endure all of this. Perhaps she still loved her husband, perhaps it was for the sake of her child, or perhaps she was simply that kind of person—a gentle and kind Chinese woman who had grown up to be the kind of woman many elders or men expected of her. But once something happened, even if they were the victims, they would be condemned mercilessly. Their once-praised gentleness became weakness, and their kindness became foolishness.
But what does all this have to do with Yao Yuan? He's just an ordinary, unremarkable NPC.
To be fair, Zhang Xiaohe is a very nice neighbor. She is a nurse and is very busy, but she can cook a lot of delicious food, including cakes and pastries. Even though she is not well-off, she will generously share the pastries she makes with her neighbors, including Yao Yuan.
Yao Yuan took the still slightly warm cookies from Zhang Xiaohe and said to her somewhat embarrassedly, "Thank you, Sister Xiaohe."
Zhang Xiaohe is five years older than him and already has a child, so there's nothing wrong with him calling her "sister".
Yao Yuan found Zhang Xiaohe quite strange. Perhaps it was because he himself was a cold and aloof person; he didn't like socializing, so he couldn't understand why Zhang Xiaohe could get along well with all the neighbors. If she hadn't, none of the neighbors would have stood up for her and called the police multiple times when she was being abused.
Yao Yuan felt that many interactions between people were unnecessary. For example, Zhang Xiaohe giving him cookies was completely unnecessary. He wouldn't change his opinion of her because of a few cookies, nor would he help her in any way in the future.
—But these cookies are really well baked.
His last contact with Zhang Xiaohe was before the full-scale outbreak of the major disease. At that time, the major disease was not yet rampant in China, but foreign news reports indicated that small-scale infections of the major disease had already caused a large number of deaths in cities. This was a virus that did not seem to originate naturally. It was extremely contagious, yet its mortality rate was equally high. These two different characteristics should not exist in the same virus. However, the virus mutated very quickly. Therefore, while the major disease was still prevalent abroad, people in China were already in a state of panic.
At that time, many people were scrambling for supplies. Yao Yuan's parents lived in a small county in another province. They were old and didn't know how to shop online. They couldn't compete with others in supermarkets either. So Yao Yuan tried to buy goods online. The goods had already been inflated to high prices. Yao Yuan gritted his teeth and spent most of his savings to buy all kinds of daily necessities for his parents.
It was already late at night, but all sorts of true and false information were circulating online. Yao Yuan wrote a program to quickly sell medicines online. He was used to staying up late because it required a high level of concentration, and he was even a little excited.
In the dead of night, all around was quiet. Yao Yuan had successfully secured several orders for medicine and was very pleased with himself. He took off his headphones and prepared to make himself a bowl of instant noodles. Then, in the silence, he heard a child crying, faintly coming from outside the door.
Yao Yuan was not a coward. He knew this wasn't a ghost story and he roughly knew that Zhang Xiaohe and her son across the street had been beaten by their husbands again.
Zhang Xiaohe has a son. He has no idea what the corresponding age for a child's height is. He guesses that the child is about three or four years old. The child usually stays with Zhang Xiaohe. Because his father is unreliable, the child is very quiet. He rarely cries and his face rarely shows any expression.
Today is a bit unusual.
Yao Yuan sighed. Perhaps he still remembered that bag of delicious cookies, or perhaps he was in a good mood today. He opened the door and saw a mother and child huddled together in the hallway, shivering.
Yao Yuan let them into the house.
Zhang Xiaohe's husband was actually home the whole time, but he wouldn't open the door; he was probably already asleep. Zhang Xiaohe often brought her son to work; she was very busy. It was said that she would lock her son on a bed in the hospital's on-call room. Today, when she came home from work, she didn't have her key and knocked on the door for a long time, but her husband wouldn't open it.
She didn't have her ID card, and she didn't have much money in her bag. Under these circumstances, she couldn't even afford a small hotel. Her son was freezing cold and was crying softly. Zhang Xiaohe had no choice but to get up and take her son to a 24-hour convenience store to spend the night. Just then, the door across the street opened.
The unfamiliar neighbor tilted her head and said, "Come in and get out of the wind. I'll make your son a cup of hot milk."
The offer of hot milk kept Zhang Xiaohe there. She was about to refuse, but after looking at her son in her arms, she whispered her thanks and went inside.
The bachelor's apartment wasn't as dirty and messy as she had imagined; on the contrary, it was clean and simple, even too simple. There was only one table in the living room, which was his computer desk.
Zhang Xiaohe sat somewhat awkwardly in the only chair, holding her son.
Yao Yuan fiddled around in the kitchen for a few minutes and brought out a box of hot milk and a bowl of instant noodles.
"Eat up," he said, placing the food in the small empty space in front of his computer desk.
Zhang Xiaohe thanked her and then fed the child some milk.
Later, Yao Yuan gave the mother and child a mattress and a blanket, so they could make do in the living room for the night. Zhang Xiaohe probably didn't want to cause any unnecessary misunderstandings, so she left before dawn, neatly folding the bedding and placing it on a chair.
Then came the global outbreak of a major disease.
Despite thorough preparations, the serious disease still spread to the country without any doubt.
The virus, which has mutated countless times, is extremely aggressive, causing immediate death upon infection. The air is filled with germs that penetrate human conjunctiva, nasal mucosa, and broken skin tissue, rapidly turning the soft and warm human body into a container brimming with the virus. The dying infected are like balloons about to burst. The virus acts like a horsehair worm leading a praying mantis to water, causing the infected to be bewitched and drawn to crowded places before death. Even after years of decomposition, the bones of infected corpses can still spread the virus.
The hospitals were overcrowded and riddled with holes. Every hospital was a source of virus radiation. There were no police or government personnel. Even the doctors and nurses who continued to stay in the hospitals were working out of conscience.
With most of the communications cut off, Yao Yuan could no longer get through to his home by phone.
He hid in his rented room, frantically dialing his parents' numbers over and over again. Most of the time, he couldn't get through, but on the rare occasion when he did, he was so excited that he burst into tears, only to find that no one answered the phone.
A few days later, the phone went unanswered and was switched off.
He knew his parents were gone, and he couldn't get to them. Transportation was cut off, and he thought that if he tried to walk back, he would most likely die on the way.
Just then, Zhang Xiaohe's piercing screams echoed from across the hall again, and in that instant, his anger flared—that stupid man! In this day and age, his wife and son were still by his side, his family was still intact! He had such good fortune, and he didn't even cherish it?! And now he was still causing trouble, beating his wife?! Useless, stupid thing!
Yao Yuan threw down his phone, grabbed a kitchen knife from the kitchen, unlocked the door, and as soon as the door opened, he saw the man raising the knife and chopping off his wife's arm!
The floor was covered in blood, Zhang Xiaohe's hair was disheveled, and she was acting like a madwoman, completely ignoring her limp arms, tightly holding the child with her other hand.
The child's face was splattered with blood, and he cried out in despair.
Yao Yuan rushed forward and slashed the man in the back with his knife.
...
Then, a major disease spread throughout the country. Even with ample preparations, society collapsed. While the country struggled to stay afloat, many other countries had already disappeared.
When the domestic society completely lost its function, the government shut down hydroelectric power stations, nuclear power plants, and large factories, nipping all the subsequent major pollution in the bud. In the later stages of the outbreak of major diseases, the government began to broadcast various basic survival knowledge. At first, it was broadcast 24 hours a day, then 12 hours, 8 hours, 2 hours... until the government completely lost its ability.
Yao Yuan began to wander with Zhang Xiaohe and her son. He is now the "shield" of this strange family. He protects Zhang Xiaohe and her son with a life-or-death attitude. Gradually, Yao Yuan discovered that Zhang Xiaohe is very capable. She picks up herbs to treat his external injuries. She is good at cooking and has a thorough understanding of food. She can accurately pick out the edible food from a pile of smelly food so that the whole family can have enough to eat.
After they joined the camp, Zhang Xiaohe's good temper won the favor of those around him. When he went out to find supplies, the men in his group would often lend him a hand, simply because their wives would ask their husbands to keep an eye on Yao Yuan—because Zhang Xiaohe was a good person, and out of respect for her, they could look after her husband.
There were many temporary couples in the camp. Some had lost their husbands, and others had lost their wives. In order to survive, they lived together. There were also couples who recognized each other as relatives. Strong young men and experienced elderly people formed temporary fathers and sons. Couples who had lost their children adopted young orphans and formed new families.
At this point, a high level of morality isn't necessary; sticking together to survive is the top priority.
Everyone knew that he and Zhang Xiaohe were only temporarily married, because they were being overly polite to each other. Coincidentally, Zhang Xiaohe's husband also had the surname Yao, because her child was named Yao Yinuo, and his nickname was Gougou (Doggy).
Zhang Xiaohe said that her nickname was given to her by her great-grandmother in her hometown. Her great-grandmother came from a mountainous and coastal province in the south, where people like to give their children nicknames that resemble small animals because small animals are easy to raise.
When the camp was destroyed by a major disease again, Zhang Xiaohe suggested going to that southern province, where there are many mountains and it would be easy to hide. People could live off the mountains and wouldn't starve.
So Yao Yuan agreed, and they resumed their journey. The journey was extremely arduous. During this time, he suffered a severe injury and had a high fever for many days. He thought he was going to die and told Zhang Xiaohe to take their son and escape, but she did not.
Zhang Xiaohe placed Yao Yuan and her son on a cart, and with her remaining hand, led them to a temporary shelter. She then used her long hair to stitch up Yao Yuan's wounds. She went out to find herbs, some to make soup for him, others to apply to his wounds. She pulled Yao Yuan back from the brink of death, and the family continued south. When they were nearly starving, they would kill a sheep to sustain themselves for a while; when they couldn't hold on any longer, they would kill another sheep. Stumbling along like this, they finally reached their destination.
Yao Yuan's feelings for Zhang Xiaohe have always been complicated. He thought he was a person without much emotion, that saving her was an impulse, and that protecting her was to make up for the emotional void he felt after losing his loved ones. Strangely enough, they started as family, and then gradually, Yao Yuan found himself falling in love with Zhang Xiaohe.
His wandering heart, after many twists and turns, finally found its home.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
