They had brought back many things, and clearly, the house could also sense the aura of closeness and long contact between those objects and Fu Erdie.
House: 【^-^】
It tried each item one by one, big and small: a fountain pen, a pencil case, the *Three Hundred Tang Poems* she had read as a child, a photo frame, an alarm clock, an old little stool…
It tried everything one by one. Almost every item they had brought back could become a container, but it did not stay in any of them for long before coming back out.
After trying everything once, none of them worked.
Sang Wenhao looked at Fu Erdie. “Could it be that we also need to go to your parents’ place and take something from there… Are you recording the time?”
“Mm…” Fu Erdie looked at the timer on her phone. “I recorded them in order. I think the basic direction of our selection is right: objects that have been used for a long time. The problem is size.”
She pointed at the smallest item in the pile, a ring. “For this one, the house stayed inside for half a second. It basically came out the instant it entered.”
Then she pointed at a cute display shelf she had liked very much as a child. It had long held all kinds of huge teddy bears, so the shelf itself was also large and pretty. The toys had been changed many times, but the shelf had never been replaced.
“The house stayed inside this one the longest. A full ten minutes.”
Fu Erdie showed Sang Wenhao the different time records on the timer. “The size of the item has a huge effect on how long the house can stay inside. Besides that, I also observed the influence of shape and weight.”
“This alarm clock and this pen holder are about the same size, but the pen holder is hollow while the alarm clock basically isn’t. So the house stayed inside the pen holder for one minute, but only half a minute inside the alarm clock.”
“And when the shape and size are roughly the same, this heavier fountain pen lasted longer than this very light watercolour pen.”
Fu Erdie took out paper and a pen and began making a table. “But how long the object has existed and accompanied me is also a factor. Wait a moment. Let me look for the pattern.”
It was now past midnight. Under the desk lamp, Fu Erdie earnestly took notes and summarised the patterns. Seeing Sang Wenhao watching her the whole time, Fu Erdie felt a little awkward.
“Why don’t you go back and sleep first?”
Sang Wenhao shook his head and sat beside her. “I’m not sleepy. I’ll keep you company.”
The ear on Fu Erdie’s side closest to Sang Wenhao reddened uncontrollably.
Her expression remained calm as she continued summarising.
Sang Wenhao looked at her serious side profile, feeling something hard to describe.
At first, he had only thought she was a girl who looked a little silly, someone who had not even known she had an ability after so long in the apocalypse.
After moving in, he had thought she was very kind-hearted, willing to take care of Grandma Zhang despite having no family connection to her.
Later, he felt that he needed this place that made him feel extremely safe. For that reason, he would do his best to act as her fighter and bodyguard. After all, she and Grandma Zhang both needed protection.
But as he understood her more day by day, Sang Wenhao felt that even without him, she could still live on very tenaciously.
Sang Wenhao considered himself calm, but after they had brought so many items home, his first thought had been curiosity about how the house would choose and whether it could stay long-term in this batch of items. As for recording, he had not thought that far yet.
But Fu Erdie had opened the timer on her phone at the very first moment. Although it was only a matter of tapping a few times, she had clearly been thinking continuously.
By the time he had finished watching the house try everything and was letting his thoughts branch out toward other methods, Fu Erdie had already made a basic judgement through the data on the timer.
In the end, under Sang Wenhao’s unusually serious gaze, Fu Erdie gave her conclusion: “The longer an item has been used, the larger its volume, the heavier its weight, and the more hollow its shape, the longer the house can stay inside.”
After saying that, Fu Erdie felt that this conclusion was almost like stating the obvious. “In other words, the more an object resembles a house, the longer the house can stay inside.”
The two looked at each other silently for two seconds.
They had gone out because they wanted to carry the house with them, not carry an actual house on their backs…
“Unless,” Fu Erdie said hesitantly, “we give up travelling by car and directly fly long-distance?”
Sang Wenhao tilted his head and looked at her.
Fu Erdie explained, “At the moment, the thing I can think of that fits the house’s requirements is the bed in my bedroom.”
The bed was an iron double bed. When she was little, she had slept on it with her grandmother. Later, when she grew up, her grandmother moved to another room, while she continued sleeping on that bed.
“As long as I’ve been alive, that bed has been with me. It’s large, heavy, and under your control, it can be turned into a hollow basket-like shape. It should be the item that currently fits the house’s requirements best.”
The house had been quiet all along, but after hearing Fu Erdie’s description, it instantly displayed a row of 【√√√√√】.
Fu Erdie: …
Alright, she was certain now. That bed really would work.
“I want to go to H City, fifteen hundred kilometres away, to rescue my parents. Originally, I planned to find an assault boat, then drive with the boat on the roof and the house in my pocket. But now, perhaps we need to change the plan. We can directly pull the bed, carry the house, and fly toward the destination. We won’t need the assault boat either. Once we find my parents, we can directly pull them onto the bed and take off again. If they have any injuries or illnesses, the house can treat them immediately.”
The more Fu Erdie thought about it, the more feasible it seemed.
She was somewhat grateful for the sudden arrival of that ability-user team. If not for their crystal cores, neither she nor Sang Wenhao could have doubled their abilities so suddenly. Forget travelling with a bed; even long-term flight with just the two of them would have been a problem.
But now, they had eaten the ability users’ crystal cores. Their abilities had increased, and their control over their abilities had become more refined. They would not waste ability energy anywhere they could avoid it, greatly increasing their already sufficient endurance.
“The things we brought back today, plus the iron cage and metal box, weighed a few dozen jin, and we made a round trip.” Fu Erdie squeezed her fist, assessing her ability consumption. “It consumed over ten percent of my ability.”
Fu Erdie wrote a series of data on the paper and calculated a rough result.
“Our combined body weight, plus miscellaneous items, is about three hundred jin. Our flying speed is around ten kilometres per hour, and each hour consumes three percent of our ability.”
“If we set off with the bed, assuming that adds two hundred jin, then each hour will consume about five percent of our ability. The flying speed will decrease, though I’m not sure by exactly how much. But assuming we still fly at ten kilometres per hour, flying ten hours a day will consume fifty percent of our ability and cover around one hundred kilometres. At that speed, reaching my parents would only take fifteen days.”
“And if my parents plus various luggage and supplies add up to three hundred jin, then each hour of flight would consume around eight percent of our ability. For safety on the return journey, our daily flying time would become shorter, and our speed would slow too. But no matter what, after picking them up, we can slowly make our way back home.”
Fu Erdie’s eyes grew brighter the more she spoke. “It’s feasible!”
Seeing her so animated, Sang Wenhao could not help smiling too. “It is indeed feasible.”
Fu Erdie paced back and forth in the room because of her excitement. “The ability energy consumed during travel can be constantly replenished through push-and-pull during rest, and then we can continue travelling at full strength the next day. Thinking about it this way, I feel like the two of us together can go anywhere!”
The gloom that had hung over her heart for many days finally dissolved because of this clear and feasible method.
“Thank you! I’ll be relying on you from now on!” Fu Erdie looked at Sang Wenhao with sparkling eyes.
Sang Wenhao’s eyes and brows held a smile. “Okay.”
She had good dreams that night.
Early the next morning, Fu Erdie did not even want to wait until night. She wanted to go find her grandmother, pick up Cen Xiyang, and after finding them, immediately set off to pick up her parents!
She was too excited. When she arrived at the business district, she wished she could use a loudspeaker outside and shout, “Cen Xiyang, I’m here to pick you up! Hurry to the rooftop, I’ll take you flying right now!”
That was what she thought, and that was exactly what she did.
Mainly because after arriving at the business district during the day, she quickly checked the surveillance footage from the previous night. There were no particularly strong ability users and no especially powerful ability zombies. The survivors all came out under cover of night to search for supplies, then returned before dawn, each one more cautious than the last.
Fu Erdie felt that there was no major danger here. Even if zombies or ability users saw them, they would not be able to hit them.
So she came to the air above a building that was full of zombies and clearly had no living people. Holding a megaphone, she began amplifying her voice.
“Cen Xiyang, are you still here? It’s me! If you’re still here, go to the rooftop of your building and wait for me. I’ll pick you up!”
“Cen Xiyang, are you still here? It’s me…”
The message played repeatedly, and the zombies were quickly attracted to the area around that building.
The buildings where survivors lived clearly began to stir as well.
They cautiously came to the windows and looked outside. There, in a strange metal box in the sky, stood two cleanly dressed people. They seemed to be looking for a friend and were completely unafraid of the zombies’ howls or the humans’ scrutiny.
At that moment, on the third floor of the office building, a woman with cracked lips and dim eyes, but whose overall spirit still seemed decent, suddenly raised her head and looked out the window in disbelief.
Fu Erdie?
Was that Fu Erdie’s voice?!
That damn butterfly still remembered to come find her!
Before even seeing the person, tears had already fallen. She quickly rushed to the window and looked up outside.
Fu Erdie had been paying attention to the third floor the whole time. Now, seeing Cen Xiyang, who was clearly familiar yet so wretched she was almost unrecognisable, she burst into tears on the spot and waved wildly.
The repeated loudspeaker recording was turned off and became a real-time shout.
“I see you! It’s me, it’s really me! Hurry to the rooftop! Oh no, any upper floor where the windows can open is fine! Wait by the window, I’ll come pick you up!”
Fu Erdie did not say how she would pick her up, but it was obvious. Since they could fly, they would naturally fly over to get her.
Cen Xiyang said “Okay,” but then realised Fu Erdie probably could not hear her, so she nodded and turned to leave.
But the moment she turned around, she was startled by the colleagues behind her, packed tightly together with gloomy faces.
A man’s voice was sharp. “You can’t leave! You few are the only ability users here! If you leave, what are we supposed to do?”
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