Chapter 1569: Qiao Yuansi
After the sound of his voice dissipated, Sh.o.r.eis did not move for a long time.
He lay at the edge of the bathtub, one arm dangling inside, his head tilted and resting on his arm. That messy black hair, now seen to be stained with blood, s.h.i.+mmered with wet, curling dark light under the incandescent lamp.
Qiao Yuansi stared blankly at his drooping eyelashes, waiting for the next slight tremor. As she waited, his previous narration replayed in her mind over and over, subconsciously trying to digest its content.
It was hard to imagine that Sh.o.r.eis had only been gone for a short ten or so days, yet he had done so much and been to so many places. When he spoke, his tone was calm and articulate, as if telling someone else"s story. If one closed their eyes and ignored the scent of blood, it was as if he was not injured at all.
In contrast was his gradually sinking body.
His body felt like a piece of solid ice, falling toward the dark and profound depths of the sea, becoming heavier, quieter, and colder, less and less like a living person. Only the occasional trembling of his eyelashes reminded one that this was not a plaster statue.
"It"s quite ridiculous, isn"t it?" he said after a silence, his eyes closed. "Losing my life without saving you. Even knowing you weren"t here anymore, I still crawled back here to die."
Before falling completely silent, he chuckled hoa.r.s.ely one last time. "I wonder if, many years from now... you will still remember me."
After those words, Qiao Yuansi waited a full ten minutes, but there were no more words, not a single tremor of an eyelash.
She raised her hand, hesitated several times, and finally touched Sh.o.r.eis" cheek. It was cold, whether from the temperature drained by the night and the tiles or something else.
His lips were tinged with blue-white, making a faint rustling sound as her fingers pa.s.sed over them. If there were a tomorrow, stubble would grow here.
Qiao Yuansi whispered, "Sa... Sh.o.r.eis?"
The name hung in the still, frozen air, pressing on her ears for a long time. She lowered her head, listening for his response, but heard no breath.
Even outside, the silence was terrifying. Perhaps something went wrong with Sh.o.r.eis" actions, leaving her alone in this world.
"Are you still alive?" she asked.
"Can you hear me speaking?
"I"m so hungry. Is there anything to eat at home?
"h.e.l.lo?"
He must have fainted.
Qiao Yuansi propped herself up on the other side of the bathtub and slowly climbed out. Weak and careful not to touch Sh.o.r.eis lying in the bathtub, the simple act of climbing over exhausted her.
She leaned against the wall, intending to walk to the bathroom, but her bare feet slipped on the cold, slick, blood-red tiles. She fell heavily into Sh.o.r.eis" pool of blood.
Qiao Yuansi wiped her face with blood-soaked hands. When she climbed up again, the bathroom mirror reflected a face crossed with bloodstains, as if infected again. It didn"t hurt much; she was just hungry and a bit cold.
The front door was wide open, and the cold night air filled the house like a plunge into an ice cellar. The blood on the floor outside had almost dried, dark purple and black, soaking into the wooden texture.
She finally made her way into the kitchen. There was half a box of expired biscuits in the cupboard, and she ate even the crumbs. Having not eaten for several days, her stomach ached heavily at the touch of food; Qiao Yuansi sat silently on the floor for a while, waiting for the pain to pa.s.s and her strength to return, before standing up again.
How ridiculous.
She walked barefoot into the living room, numbly thinking. From start to finish, Sh.o.r.eis was feverishly talking to himself about saving her, even if she didn"t need to be saved at all. He went off on his own and returned at the brink of death, talking to himself, thinking he had failed—it was all too ridiculous.
In his account, he returned to the small town of Jide, spending seven or eight days to find Patient Zero. He was the first person in the world to have completed the entire transformation process and was still alive. Then, he followed the clues he had obtained, risking his life for something he didn"t need at all.
As she pa.s.sed the bathroom, Qiao Yuansi stopped, thought for a moment, and then went back in.
She knew she should immediately call the police, have Sh.o.r.eis taken away, and call the school to try to keep her job...
However, those things could wait a bit.
She would indulge him for now, doing as he wished... After all, she had nothing to lose.
Qiao Yuansi approached Sh.o.r.eis, lifting his hand that dangled in the bathtub. The hand was chillingly white, and the joints were becoming stiff; she tried a few times before finally slipping off the silver ring from his index finger.
After entering the living room, she glanced back at the bathroom.
Under the buzzing of the incandescent light, the bathroom was washed in a ghostly white, with only the dark-clothed, motionless figure in the bathtub bearing down. His exposed skin, emerging from the collar and beneath his dark hair, was almost blending with the tub and white walls; the floor tiles were pierced with patches of blood—the entire bathroom was reduced to three colors: snow white, pitch black, and blood red.
Qiao Yuansi felt that inexplicable sensation rise again.
She felt like doing three things simultaneously: one was to call the police and return to normal life; the second was to go into the kitchen and stab herself in the abdomen; the third was to follow Sh.o.r.eis" example and twist open the silver ring.
The first could wait, and the second option puzzled her, so she only ended up doing the third.
After all, she"s not a posthuman, and she wasn"t quite adept with the details. A pile of various items clattered from her hand to the floor, nearly hurting her toes. Among them was a gun, fortunately not going off as it fell.
She tucked the gun into her waistband, knelt on the floor, and searched for something based on Sh.o.r.eis" description.
[Time Rewind] resembled a number dial taken from an old-fas.h.i.+oned phone, accompanied by a set of yellowing instructions that seemed to have existed for a long time.
"Dial 888-9242-000 to use it?"
It seemed unnecessary to dial each number individually, but Qiao Yuansi, afraid of making a mistake, looked at the instructions twice and decided to dial them one by one.
Could this item really take her back to any point in time?
It was too amazing.
Qiao Yuansi had reached her car before she realized she wasn"t wearing shoes. She had no intention of going back for them and stepped barefoot onto the concrete, bending over to look into the back seat.
Until this moment, Patient Zero was still alive—alive but tightly bound all over, lying unconscious in the back seat of her car, eyes tightly closed.
Qiao Yuansi opened the car door, dragged the man out, letting him thud to the ground; Patient Zero"s head bounced on the ground a few times, like something out of a cartoon.
A nearby room"s light turned on, and a shadow walked up from behind the curtain, quietly looking in her direction—Qiao Yuansi knew it was a neighbor, and she paid no attention to it.
"The user can pick a target person (either another person or oneself) and, using their timeline as a reference, return to a specific point in the past. The duration is only one minute," the instructions stated. "Note that if the time baseline belongs to someone else, the user must grab hold of the target person to go back in time with them to their past. This requires that the user must be in the same world as the target person at that time for the artifact to be effective. Otherwise, the user will return to their own world at that time during that minute, wasting this precious minute."
That must be the reason.
Sh.o.r.eis" intentions were clear to her: kill Patient Zero, and everything would revert to normal. But Sh.o.r.eis couldn"t go back to the point before the end of the world to make a change—because he wasn"t in this world then.
He had said that he risked his life to obtain the item, only to find a slight discrepancy that rendered it useless, even apologizing to her for "being played by fate." Sh.o.r.eis was foolish, wasn"t he?
He indeed wasn"t in this world at the time, but she was.
To exclude her so thoughtlessly from his plans was ridiculous.
Before dialing, Qiao Yuansi looked at Patient Zero"s face. So, this ordinary-looking middle-aged man was the origin of everything.
She gripped Patient Zero"s shoulder, dialing one number at a time. The flapping sound rang in the night sky, but she didn"t look up; the bird was annoying, often flying around, and she had gotten used to it.
[Time Rewind] did indeed take effect. Night receded into day, day into night, scenery alternated, and the world seemed like a wheel wound backward. Qiao Yuansi almost numbly realized that her vision had quickly become all blurry.
She imagined her home, Sh.o.r.eis standing up again, his blood returning to his body, going back to another world, where he didn"t even know who Qiao Yuansi was.
Once the world returned to normal, the apocalypse would be as if it had never happened. All the posthumans who came here because of the apocalypse wouldn"t arrive; the living and continuing-to-live Sh.o.r.eis would from then on become parallel lines in reality and memory with the one in the bathroom.
As for her and Patient Zero, they were like hamsters in a wheel, running in place no matter how much they ran; when the wheel stopped, they were still in the same place.
The chosen time point was before Patient Zero"s transformation, so [Time Reversal] took Qiao Yuansi to where he was a year ago—the ropes on the man were gone, consciousness restored, he had just hung up the phone at his office desk, and looked up. It seemed to be his office, with a world map hanging on the wall.
Only a minute, she thought.
"Who are you?!" the man exclaimed, his face contorting slightly.
Really, she didn"t know why she was doing this.
Qiao Yuansi raised the gun, and the bullet found its way into his forehead.