At nine in the morning, the cafeteria counted the people inside.
“There are thirty-seven people now.”
From the moment the outside world began changing until nine that morning, the cafeteria had taken in more than ten students who had hurried down from the dormitory buildings. There were both men and women, most of them either brave, or left with no choice but to come downstairs in search of a chance to survive.
This dormitory area housed both male and female students.
A male sports student from Building A of the boys’ dormitory wiped the sweat from his forehead and endured the pain as he let someone beside him bandage his wound. While hissing in pain, he explained where the injury had come from.
“We kept a British Shorthair in our dorm. My roommates went travelling together to the neighbouring city two days ago, so feeding and looking after the cat was left to me. This morning, before I was even awake, I heard rustling from the litter box on the balcony.”
The sports student suddenly fell silent.
The wound on his arm was being pressed down with a sanitary pad given by a girl, then wrapped with transparent tape. A bitter smile spilled out.
“I didn’t take it seriously. I played games too late last night and only wanted to sleep.”
“And then?”
“Then…” Fear still lingered in the sports student’s eyes. “Not long after, the balcony glass door was smashed by the cat.”
The glass door of a dormitory balcony was naturally not made from the patented material used on the cafeteria exterior. It was only ordinary glass.
But even so, smashing a piece of ordinary glass was not an easy thing for an adult man.
That single sentence was enough for everyone to imagine how much strength a mutated house cat had gained.
He swallowed, lowered his face, and looked as if he did not know whether to cry or laugh.
“…In the end, I smashed the cat with a chair.”
The cafeteria fell into a brief silence.
Dou Qing noticed the tiny sound of Fang Yangyang’s breath beside him. He turned his head to look at her and saw a trace of pity in her clear, bright eyes.
He reached out and held her hand tightly.
Fang Yangyang seemed to come back to herself. She smiled at him and naturally interlaced her fingers with his.
…
The sports student was a full 1.9 metres tall, tall and muscular. He often went to the gym, and the muscles in his arms were firm and powerful.
After explaining the source of his injury, he lifted his face again. His eyes were a little red.
“I… sigh. We raised that cat in our dorm for almost two years. We’d agreed that after graduation next year, I’d take it home to raise.”
Regardless of whether keeping pets in a dormitory complied with school rules, no one said anything cold at a time like this.
Outside the cafeteria, stray cats and dogs watched the people inside like predators. The food waste bins and rubbish bins outside had already been taken away by the rubbish truck late at night, leaving only a few scraps inside.
After mutating, the animals seemed to have gained several times their previous strength and jumping ability. A white, short-mouthed stray dog suddenly pounced forward and actually knocked over a food waste bin with a cement-weighted bottom.
As the bin rolled, the remaining scraps and rotten matter inside slowly slid out.
The short-mouthed dog went forward, sniffed, lowered its head, and began gnawing.
Inside the cafeteria, no one made a sound.
Everyone had seen it.
Someone said in a trembling voice, “…Their bodies and strength have both grown.”
Someone answered dazedly, “What is this called? The apocalypse? No way. 2012 passed ages ago. Wasn’t the Mayan apocalypse theory already proven to be a rumour?”
Some of the more timid ones had already begun sobbing softly.
Communication could not be restored. Whether it was 5G, 4G, 3G, or even basic 2G, none of them could connect.
In modern society, losing contact with the outside world only required three things:
“No signal.”
“No internet.”
“No battery.”
The first day of the apocalypse.
From four in the morning, when the apocalypse descended, to six that evening, Jiangpu Cafeteria accepted a total of thirty-eight students who escaped in from outside.
Including those who had originally been inside the cafeteria, there were sixty-seven people in total.
Jiangpu Cafeteria.
In the original novel, this was the large group jointly led by the male lead and second male lead. Fang Yangyang still remembered that, in the plot, they led more than ten people into the cafeteria at seven o’clock that very night after the apocalypse began.
Among those dozen or so people were several important supporting characters from the future protagonist group, who would play indispensable roles in rebuilding the apocalypse base.
Her gaze turned towards the cafeteria door.
Beside her, Dou Qing gently supported her shoulder and asked patiently, “Are you tired?”
“I’m okay. Not very tired.”
No one could sleep.
Only those unlucky enough to have been injured by stray cats and dogs, their wounds exposed and with no way to treat them properly, drifted in and out of consciousness from pain and inflammation, leaning against the cafeteria tables.
“Are you hungry?”
A few hours earlier, the cafeteria auntie had counted the remaining food. Since the cafeteria had no cold storage and mostly relied on daily vegetable deliveries from the market, the remaining food, assuming it did not rot, would only be enough for fifty people to last a week.
After counting, the auntie and a few students who could cook made a large pot meal according to the number of people.
The cafeteria’s electricity came and went. In the end, the auntie had to use a gas stove to finish cooking the meal.
Everyone ate some, barely filling their stomachs.
As for the convenience store, unlike the cafeteria, it was not open twenty-four hours a day. The owner was not there, and the metal shutter was pulled down. Even if someone wanted to go in and buy something, there was nothing they could do.
Fang Yangyang still had a lot of dry food in her pink-blue backpack, but she said nothing and simply followed the crowd, eating the communal meal.
“I’m not hungry. I ate enough earlier,” she said softly.
Only then did Dou Qing’s heart relax.
That day, everyone was anxious and uneasy.
From inside the cafeteria, they could see students in the dormitory buildings looking outside. Some students from certain majors were homebodies and had stocked up on plenty of instant food in their dorm rooms, so they did not plan to come downstairs and gather with the cafeteria group. Some students remained in their dormitories, hoping that everything would soon return to normal. Their windows opened and closed, but in the end, they did not come downstairs.
There were also students like the sports student, who had kept pets in their dorm rooms… and in their unpreparedness, accidents happened.
Looking from the cafeteria towards the nearest dormitory building, Chun Ya Dormitory Building—Xichi’s single-room female dormitory, with an annual accommodation fee of eight thousand, a full two times higher than a four-person room—already had one floor’s glass windows and doors completely covered by lush green, wildly growing vines from the outside.
Dou Qing had not noticed at first.
It was only when he unintentionally lifted his face and looked towards that dormitory building that he suddenly realised Fang Yangyang’s dorm seemed to be in Chun Ya.
And it was on that very floor.
“Yangyang,” the male voice was gentle and clear, carrying relief. “Is that your dorm?”
Fang Yangyang absent-mindedly lifted her face.
Her phone was on power-saving mode. She had turned off all background apps. In her backpack, there were actually several fully charged power banks kept as backup.
Following his gaze, she looked over. Her face suddenly turned pale, and she stammered, “Yes… it’s mine.”
“Good thing you weren’t in the dorm.” Dou Qing’s brows furrowed lightly. His warm palm held her slightly trembling hand, pale and uneasy.
“…”
“Yes. Good thing I wasn’t in the dorm.”
There was a suspicious wet sheen in her eyes.
Dou Qing felt as if his heart had been pricked lightly by a needle.
For some reason, he actually felt a trace of wild joy at their current situation.
When the apocalypse arrived, Yangyang had not been in the dormitory.
And he happened to be beside her.
In such circumstances, they could rely on and support each other.
What a beautiful thing.
Dou Qing looked at her beautiful, delicate side profile in a daze. The hand gently holding hers did not tighten at all. Instead, he coaxed her with a reliable, jade-like warmth.
“Do you want to sleep for a while? I’m right beside you.”
“…” She looked at him with a faint, sorrowful gaze and said quietly, “I’m worried about my family. I can’t sleep.”
It was as if a cold snake crawled over Dou Qing’s spine.
He suddenly realised that Yangyang still had family.
Unlike him, who was alone and had nothing tying him down.
He regretted his carelessness. His expression remained calm.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” She looked at him in surprise. The pinkness of her nose and her trembling lashes all showed that her mood was extremely low.
“For not being able to help you.”
“…”
She said nothing.
She only squeezed her fingers into his palm and sighed very softly.
“It’s okay. Having you by my side is already the best thing.”
…..
When the apocalypse arrived, Yan Fengji hurried out of the laboratory building and looked outside with the people accompanying him.
In the medical school classroom, the mice squeaked wildly, their eyes red and teeth elongated. If he had not called out the senior brothers and sisters who were focused on experimental data inside, that group of mice might have already bitten through the wire cages, shot out, and attached themselves to people to injure them.
After their calls to their families failed to connect, the senior brothers and sisters fell into unease.
One senior brother, who was married and lived with his wife and child in the campus postgraduate and doctoral student dormitory area, was determined to return to the dormitory area.
In the car park downstairs from the laboratory building, this doctoral senior brother usually travelled by mountain bike. He refused to listen to advice and insisted on riding the mountain bike back.
At four or five in the morning, the streetlights were dim. The greenery on the road had grown wildly, and stray animals with red eyes darted past from time to time.
Yan Fengji failed to stop the senior brother. The group of senior brothers and sisters watched his back leave under the grey morning light, worried.
Yan Fengji vaguely felt that something was wrong.
As he watched the senior brother’s figure on the bicycle grow smaller and smaller, finally disappearing at the end of the road, he heard a bang.
It was extremely similar to the sound of two vehicles colliding in a car accident.
One senior sister covered her mouth, holding back a scream, her face pale and ugly.
“Old Yang, he…”
Another senior brother, Yu Zhi, could not hold back. He wanted to ride a bike over to that road and take a look. This time, no one allowed him.
“Old Yu, don’t go!”
“Something must have happened to Old Yang! I have to go and see!” As Yu Zhi spoke, he tried to unlock a shared bicycle with his phone.
His home was off campus, and he usually drove to school. His car was parked in a car park a hundred metres or so from the laboratory building. At this moment, he could only ride a shared bicycle.
But the shared bicycle QR code could not be scanned. The internet signal and everything else had disappeared.
Yu Zhi froze. In his panic and urgency, he only now realised, “Without signal, I can’t scan the code…”
The senior sister’s face was pale. She cursed, “Are you stupid? In this situation, you still dare go over there?”
She took a breath and was about to say something else, but the next moment, Yan Fengji said in a low voice, “At the very least, we have to wait until daybreak.”
At four in the morning, the mice startled them, and they sensed something was wrong.
At half past four, Senior Brother Yang had an accident.
At nine in the morning, the sky was still dark, but it was much better than at four.
Yan Fengji and the four senior brothers and sisters spent several hours closing all the rooms in the laboratory building that housed experimental animals, dismantling all equipment that might cause danger, and taking items from the lab that could be used for self-defence—flamethrowers, fire extinguishers, fruit knives, straight iron rods removed from iron-barred windows…
During this time, they ate some instant food people had kept in the laboratory, barely filling their stomachs.
At around three in the afternoon, they prepared to leave the laboratory building.
There had never been many stray cats and dogs near the laboratory building. Perhaps because there were chemical discharge pools nearby, wild animals rarely came this way.
Along the way, they only saw a few scattered cats and dogs.
Just by looking with the naked eye, they were already no ordinary cats and dogs. Their size and appearance no longer resembled the charming, clever, adorable little cats and dogs they had seen before.
Perhaps seeing that there were many people, including young adults, and that everyone in the group had weapons, those cats and dogs did not come forward. They only stared at them with blood-red eyes for a long time.
They did not see Senior Brother Yang.
But they did see his mountain bike, tangled in a tree branch that stretched across the road.
There was no blood. Only faint grey marks where the tyres had rubbed against the ground.
They walked past in silence.
Only after passing the mountain bike and walking several dozen metres did Yu Zhi say blankly, “Old Yang, he…”
A shrill cat cry pierced the air.
The rest of what he wanted to say was forcibly swallowed back.
After a long while, Yu Zhi finally came back to himself and wiped his eyes.
“Let’s go. We have to head to Jiangpu Cafeteria.”
Yan Fengji was highly capable of action and had unconsciously become the leader among them. He raised his wrist and glanced at his watch.
Halfway there, they happened to run into Meng Zizhao, who had come from another road.
Like him, Meng Zizhao also had several people behind him, both men and women.
The two groups merged. Yan Fengji and Meng Zizhao, as the leaders, exchanged a few words. In the end, their goal was the same: Jiangpu Cafeteria.
“You and your senior brothers and sisters stayed up doing data until dawn and didn’t go back to the dorm?”
“Mm,” Yan Fengji answered.
“I happened to be training with them in the morning.”
Students in the aviation major had to meet physical fitness standards. Rotating-wheel training and the like were all necessary. With a small assessment approaching, aside from Meng Zizhao, the others had all taken advantage of the empty morning field to train and increase their familiarity.
Yan Fengji and Meng Zizhao were both campus celebrities, one senior and one junior. They had seen each other and greeted each other on campus. In real-life social circles, they were also acquaintances.
One was a descendant of a powerful political family, a typical outstanding son from the upper circles, raised in a government compound, intelligent and capable.
The other was the heir to an aviation business. At eighteen, he had obtained a flight permit abroad, then entered an aviation major in China with excellent grades. He was good-looking, had an open and cheerful personality, and a wide social circle.
Their fathers had relatively close ties. Logically speaking, their relationship should not have been bad.
But in reality, the two of them could not be considered particularly able to chat.
“…”
Meng Zizhao was good at conversation, unlike Yan Fengji, who was taciturn. But at this moment, he also had no mind to speak. He only furrowed his brows and occasionally turned his head to check whether the classmates behind him were keeping up.
On the road, traces of blood could be seen, along with remains of flesh and blood, human clothing…
The road was difficult to walk. Even the concrete road they had originally thought would be passable had been lifted and broken apart by tree roots. The actual time spent on the journey gradually stretched from the few dozen minutes they had expected.
From the moment the two groups met in the afternoon, they walked over roads blocked by branches, avoided large groups of stray cats and dogs, and did not miss the horrifying sights visible to the naked eye.
The medical students were still somewhat all right. Because they had dissected animals and seen donated cadavers, they could more or less accept these scenes.
The aviation students walked towards the cafeteria while holding back nausea.
They knew the target was the cafeteria, but they did not know why they had to go there, until Yan Fengji gave them a simple explanation.
“Jiangpu Cafeteria has food reserves. There are two convenience stores nearby, and a campus clinic near the dormitory area.”
Xichi University covered thousands of mu and had a vast campus. Apart from student dormitory areas, there were also residential communities where faculty, staff, and their families lived.
The entire university was like a small society, with complete shopping, medical, and entertainment facilities outside the academic buildings.
“Also, the nearest music broadcast station is two hundred metres from Jiangpu Cafeteria.”
The campus music broadcast station was where students from the College of Arts and Sports majoring in broadcasting often carried out campus cultural and entertainment broadcasts. Daily campus notifications were also broadcast by the principal’s office, the music station, and other branch broadcasting equipment.
It could be said that Jiangpu Cafeteria was currently the most suitable place they could choose to temporarily settle down.
“Lastly, the cafeteria’s exterior glass walls are not easily destroyed.”
As they headed towards their destination, they counted people several times along the way.
Yan Fengji’s side had five people in total.
Meng Zizhao’s side had seven people in total.
When they saw Jiangpu Cafeteria, it was already 6:50 in the evening.
By the time they reached Jiangpu Cafeteria, it was exactly seven o’clock at night.
Food waste lay across the ground outside the cafeteria, the stench overwhelming.
The chandeliers in the cafeteria hall flickered in and out. Through the glass, they could see that in the cafeteria large enough to serve three hundred people, dozens of people were sitting, standing, or leaning around.
There were both men and women, wearing pyjamas or ordinary clothes, their faces pale and streaked with tears.
Yan Fengji’s gaze swept past Chun Ya Dormitory Building. His Adam’s apple moved. When he saw that particular floor covered by greenery, his pupils constricted.
The next moment, he suddenly heard Meng Zizhao beside him laugh in surprise.
“She seems to be the only one who hasn’t cried.”
He followed Meng Zizhao’s gaze.
Fang Yangyang was leaning against Dou Qing’s shoulder, silently staring at the cafeteria door. Her face was as beautiful and moving as peach and plum blossoms. Her eyes were moist and bright, but she did not seem to be crying.
“What was her name again? The department belle from the School of Foreign Languages. Fang Yangyang, right?”
Those bright, clear eyes swept towards their direction, carrying an unreadable emotion.
The next moment, she stood up.
The young man beside her frowned and looked towards them, then followed her to the cafeteria entrance and opened the door for them.
Leave a Reply