Chapter 52 Chapter 52 A crystal teardrop flashed before my eyes...
"My dear... I'm thirsty." The old man's voice was turbid, and the weak breathing ups and downs made Si Qi hold his breath carefully to hear clearly.
"Grandma, water... is for you." The child should be only eight or nine years old, not very old, and may not even have gone through the voice change period. Si Qi was not sure of the gender.
After a while, the old lady cried out in a weak voice that she was hungry again. The child was silent for a while, and then there was the sound of a stool being dragged and standing up.
"Grandma, wait for me. I'll be back with something to eat in a bit."
People outside could not see the space isolated by Si Qi, so Si Qi just stood there. She saw a child walking out. He was very small, almost skin-deep, with sunken cheeks, dull eyes, and very long hair that looked like it had not been taken care of for a long time.
She followed the child to the nearby woods. As far as she could see, the bark of the trees in the shallow circle of the forest had all been stripped off, and even the grass was very sparse, showing signs of having been stripped away by someone.
The child walked around and dug under a tree. Finally, he dug out a bag wrapped in paper. There was blood on the bag and it was crawling with some unknown insects.
The child picked off the bugs and buried the bloody paper again.
Si Qi had a vague feeling that the piece of paper must contain the bones and fur of the missing puppy.
The child put the insects into a plastic bottle and went to a deeper place to pull weeds and peel bark.
There are no people from the base guarding this forest, probably because there are no traces of strange beasts, and the 30,000 people with special abilities who were killed in the massacre have caused heavy damage to all the bases, and they are already short of manpower.
Si Qi lowered his eyes and noticed something moving in the grass again. A snake as thick as an arm slowly crawled towards the child who was squatting there pulling weeds.
Humans have no food, and neither do animals, so the probability of these ordinary, non-mutated animals attacking humans is increasing.
Si Ruxu saw the snake, but she did not attack. The meat of the creature hit by her lightning ability could no longer be eaten, so she turned her head and looked at Si Qi who had not moved.
The old lady in the room just now looked very ill and was about to die. The child was still young and had no ability to survive independently. Moreover, it seemed that the two of them were not taken care of by the base and were independent of the crowd.
This is different from what you might imagine. Stealing dogs is not about having food but being unsatisfied and wanting to eat the dog meat. It is a helpless act due to hunger.
How will Si Qi deal with this completely different and divisive development of things?
Si Ruxu was a little curious.
But Si Qi still did not move until the snake opened its bloody mouth and its fangs were about to touch the child. At that moment, the line connected by the spatial ability cut it into pieces.
Blood splashed onto the back of the child's neck from behind. He widened his eyes and turned his head quickly. The snake's head, still with its mouth open, fell from his hand and hit the grass.
His eyes were numb and dull as he moved upwards and saw Si Qi and Si Ruxu standing there.
Si Qi pursed her lips and looked at the child who was completely frightened. She felt a little helpless. She had no experience in coaxing children.
The child's eyes were in a panic. He glanced at the small house next to him from time to time, then quickly looked away.
"Are you alone?" Si Qi asked for the sake of conversation.
"I'm alone! I don't have a grandmother!" The child answered quickly, obviously afraid that the two of them would hurt him and his grandmother. After all, the two of them dealt with such a big snake in one go, they must be supernatural beings.
Si Qi froze in place, looking at Si Ruxu for help. She really didn't know how to deal with this.
Si Ruxu curled her lips. She looked more approachable than Si Qi to begin with, and when she smiled, she looked even more gentle and amiable.
"Little friend, we are from outside and accidentally walked into this forest. Do you live here permanently?"
As he spoke, Si Ruxu handed the child a candy. After all, the child was only seven or eight years old. When he saw the candy, his eyes lit up. He was a little timid, but still took the candy carefully and quickly lowered his head to take a look at the snake meat on the ground.
"Sister, I live here. If you keep going along the road ahead, you will see the base. Can you give me the snake meat on the ground? I haven't eaten in days."
The child's body was still shaking, and he seemed to be trying to overcome his fear. Si Qi stood by and watched carefully.
He is afraid of people? Why?
"But we haven't eaten in days... We wanted to go to the woods to see if we could find some game, and we finally found a snake like this. What should we do?"
Si Ruxu lowered her eyes, looking depressed and as if she was really in trouble.
Si Qi hid the half piece of pancake that Si Ruxu had given him in his arms a little deeper.
"How about this, we have some seasoning here. Do you know where there's a pot? Let's find a place to cook it and eat it together, okay?"
When the child heard about seasoning, his expression changed. He hadn't eaten anything flavorful for a long time. Even the puppy he stole from the grandma's house outside was cooked directly with tree bark and grass roots.
He nodded hesitantly: "I know where the pot is, just follow me."
After saying that, the three of them each picked up a piece of meat and walked towards the child's home.
As soon as I entered the door, I could hear a loud noise coming from the bed. The child looked panicked, put the meat on the table outside and rushed in.
"grandmother!"
Si Qi turned his head to look at his boss Ruxu's complicated eyes. There was a strong smell of blood in the air. The old lady must have been in trouble.
Maybe being hungry means sending the child out.
As they walked in, they bumped into a child rushing out. Si Ruxu supported the unsteady child and asked, "What happened to your grandma?"
The child completely forgot what he had just said, that he lived here alone.
"Don't be impatient, let us take a look first, okay?" Si Ruxu said gently. Looking inside, the light was dim, but one could faintly see the blood flowing from the old woman's wrist, which had accumulated into a small pool under the bed.
This kind of scene happened every day in the two years before his superpowers were awakened, and many people could not survive and had to end their own lives.
Here, human life is even cheaper than grass and trees.
Si Ruxu looked back at Si Qi, and felt the uneasiness in her lifeless eyes. She gently pulled Si Qi's hand.
"It's okay, I have a solution."
She is a high-level healing psychic.
Although the healing abilities of the apocalypse had little effect, the old lady was not very strong and her wound was not deep. If no intervention was made, she would become weak from excessive blood loss, and the old lady would die due to her poor physical condition.
Cutting her wrists would not be the direct cause of her death.
As Si Ruxu walked forward, she instructed Si Qi, "Go make a fire, okay? Cook the meat outside first, mince some of it, and make some minced meat porridge. This will help replenish the old lady's energy when she wakes up."
"By the way, just add a little seasoning, don't make it too strong, they might not be able to handle it."
Si Qi knew that people who had been eating light food for a long time could not eat very salty food all of a sudden, otherwise they would feel very thirsty.
Si Qi's uneasy eyes fell on the old lady lying on the bed with weak breathing, and finally focused on his fingertips. After a long time, he nodded gently.
She walked out. The child was still suffering and the old man's groans were very weak, but she seemed to be unable to hear anything.
She seemed to be back there.
The other her in sight, the younger one without so many scars, ran home holding a dirty steamed bun, but only saw her mother lying cold on the bed.
Tears welled up in her eyes, she could hardly stop shaking, and fell to her knees on the ground exhausted.
Her mother was not nice to her at all.
She had never seen her father. The man's existence was a taboo in the family. She only remembered that when other children went to kindergarten, they were taken home by their parents. So she asked her mother why she didn't have a father.
That was the first time my mother lost control. She looked up and saw the young woman's face, half imprinted in the darkness, with a paranoid and crazy look in her eyes: "You don't have a father!"
She never went to kindergarten because her mother could not afford the tens of thousands of dollars in annual expenses for a kindergarten, but her mother taught her to write her name and do math stroke by stroke.
This kind of life only lasted for a short period of time, and it was the time when she and her mother got along the closest. After that, she went to elementary school, and probably because she had never attended kindergarten, she was a little out of touch with other children.
Children without support grow up very quickly. By the time she was in junior high school, she always had a gentle smile on her face. She was close to everyone, but she was not anyone's first choice.
When I grew up a little and went to high school, my mother started not coming home at night, just occasionally leaving some change on the table. She would drink and come home drunk, lying like a puddle on the sofa.
At that time, Si Qi always felt that his home was very dark and heavy, as if once the door was closed, he would be isolated from the outside world. The sunlight could not shine into the house, and the house did not need sunlight.
It's too hot and will melt the discolored furniture, the mother who is drunk on the sofa, and her passive sociability.
High school students began to be divided into groups and categories. People like her who often took leave from evening self-study to work part-time became the outliers. Children aged sixteen or seventeen had weak legal awareness and were at the age of being competitive.
So sometimes she would fight with classmates who came to cause trouble and go home with injuries.
Until one day, she opened the door and saw her mother sitting on the sofa and a bottle of wine on the table.
The woman was not so drunk that she could not think. There was an extinguished cheap cigarette on the table. She squinted her eyes and finally saw the injuries on Si Qi's face clearly.
"How did it happen?" the woman asked in a hoarse voice.
"I fell." Si Qi turned her head away. She didn't want her mother to know that she was working part-time.
There was no response in the room for a long time. Si Qi looked up quietly, and a crystal teardrop shook in front of his eyes.
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The author has something to say: Don’t worry, don’t worry [dog’s head holding a rose][dog’s head holding a rose][dog’s head holding a rose]
Si Qi's growth experience and some small fragments of his school days with Si Ruxu may be inserted later or in the extra chapters.
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