Chapter 72

After treating Ye Xiao for a long time, Lin Tantan went back to her room, snatched a quick sleep, and then ran back to check. Ye Xiao's chest was still a glaring red, and the new flesh that had barely started to grow showed signs of charring.
She frowned. "How can this be?"
She thought for a moment, then realized: this was an ability-inflicted wound, different from ordinary injuries. Fire-type energy still lingered in Ye Xiao's wound; unless that energy was completely expelled, the wound would hardly heal.
Fire abilities, naturally, are best countered and driven out with water-type ability.
She looked up and met Ye Xiao's eyes for a moment.
Dawn was approaching but not yet arrived. The light in the room was on. Ye Xiao lay obediently on the bed, if it weren't for the grotesquely exposed wound on his chest, he hardly looked like a patient.
Ye Xiao wasn't overly worried about his injury; he knew it wouldn't damage his core, at worst it would be troublesome and painful.
"Is there a problem? Or is it untreatable?"
Lin Tantan pressed her lips together. "Close your eyes."
Ye Xiao blinked, a hint of curiosity in his eyes, then slowly shut them.
Before long, he felt the wound wrapped by something icy. The sensation differed from the wood-type energy Lin Tantan used; wood energy was warm and gentle, comforting. This time it was very cold, yet it precisely eased the constant burning heat that clung to his chest, until it was completely driven away.
Daylight slowly crept in.
Outside came the sound of others stirring.
Lin Tantan insisted she couldn't let anyone know she'd been in his room. She slipped across the balcony, changed her clothes, then put on an act and came out of her own room. When she went downstairs, Ye Xiao was already there, faster than she was.
She couldn't help glancing at Ye Xiao's collar; his clothes were neat, showing no sign of injury.
She was so curious, how had he managed that?
Then Ye Xiao announced he wouldn't go out today. He handed out tasks to the others; no one objected, except Mei Baisheng, who smirked and winked at Lin Tantan. Before they left he even came over to whisper to her, "The boss won't go out either, just to keep you company while you recover. How touching."
He'd gotten scolded yesterday and finally realized there was something going on between the two of them. Lin Tantan had once said she liked someone, but who could possibly be better than their boss? He patted her on the shoulder: "I'm rooting for you!"
Support, my foot!
Lin Tantan wanted to kick him. After everyone left and the villa was down to just her and Ye Xiao, she said to him, "Do they all think you're staying only to keep me company? That's so unfair."
Ye Xiao glanced at her. In a way, that was true, but he still had to soothe her. "Besides Meimei, no one else is that nosy. Don't mind him."
That made sense, she supposed. At least Bai Cheng knew Ye Xiao had been hurt, she just hoped Bai Cheng wouldn't misunderstand. But Lin Tantan felt something odd: Ye Xiao was injured, so why didn't Bai Cheng seem worried?
Her attention soon turned back to Ye Xiao. "What did you pad your clothes with? Why is it impossible to tell?"
Ye Xiao played the patient, calmly undoing his shirt in front of the doctor, revealing a still-bright red chest. He said, "I just used my ability to prop up the contours."
Lin Tantan brightened with understanding. "That's what I thought. Even if you wrapped it, at least one side would look bigger than the other. But you can't see any difference at all."
Ye Xiao: "..." There really was nothing to say to that.
Lin Tantan spent another two hours treating him, finally getting most of the muscle and skin to heal. But with some of the pectoral muscle still not recovered, his chest remained noticeably asymmetrical. She couldn't help peeking, glancing back and forth as she compared, then earnestly warned, "I'll treat you again this afternoon to help the tissue grow faster. Once your ribs are healed, you'll need to work on the left pectoral yourself, keeping in shape is important."
Ye Xiao wasn't overly muscular, but his chest was nicely shaped and looked great in clothes. Now half of it was gone, what a pity.
Ye Xiao made a wry face and looked down at himself. Fine, he conceded, he really should start training properly.
It was a bright, sunny day. Seeing the big sun, Lin Tantan couldn't resist washing clothes and airing the quilts. She set to work, threw the laundry into the washing machine, turned it on, and clear water rushed in.
There probably weren't many people left who could afford to use a washing machine so freely. The rooftop water tank certainly had enough, but she still thoughtfully added a bit more water herself.
When the wash started, she bundled up the quilt from her bed, tied it with a cloth strap, hoisted it on her shoulder, and headed up to the rooftop. She ran into Ye Xiao coming out of his room carrying his quilt as well.
Ye Xiao: "Heading upstairs?"
"Mm."
He freed a hand and took the quilt from her.
"Your injury..."
"It's fine. I won't touch it."
A few minutes later on the villa's rooftop, Lin Tantan's quilt flapped in the breeze, bathed in golden sunlight; Ye Xiao's, however, was scorched, the bloodstains had burned it.
He went downstairs to the storage room on the first floor, grabbed a fresh quilt, and spread it out next to hers.
Looking at the two quilts so close together, one a warm yellow, the other a cool blue-gray, Lin Tantan glanced left and right, feeling strangely off, as if they were living together.
Eh, they were already living under the same roof, after all.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
One by one, the mutated rats climbed up and circled Lin Tantan. She scratched her cheek. "Looks like they need a bath, last time was three days ago."
Ye Xiao looked at the dirty little creatures and said, "I'll do it."
Then he brought up a big basin, soap, a brush, and towels, filled them with water straight from the tank, and began washing each mutated rat in turn.
The rats squeaked protests at Lin Tantan, she figured they were complaining that Ye Xiao was too rough and the water too cold. There was no fireball drying service afterwards; they were dried by wind ability, each one left with its fur rumpled and trembling like something sifted through a sieve.
"You should be grateful for a bath, stop being picky," Lin Tantan said, placing the freshly-cleaned rats on a chair to sun themselves. A rootlike creature poked its head over the rooftop edge; Lin Tantan spotted it and waved, "You want a bath too?"
It hesitated slightly, but then cheerfully scrambled over, its short whiskers twitching.
Ye Xiao looked at the mud all over it and the clump of soil stuck to its swollen part, but in the end he gave it a perfunctory wipe.
He wiped up a basin of muddy water.
When he went downstairs to put the basin away, he found a call on the walkie-talkie left in the room. It was Lu Jianping. He called back; Lu Jianping said awkwardly, "Ye Xiao, headquarters in the capital has given me orders. They want me to persuade you to come back, bring Xiao Lin with you. They already know Xiao Lin is a three-type ability user."
Ye Xiao: "I understand."
"I've delivered the message. I did try to persuade you, at least."
Ye Xiao put down the walkie-talkie, his expression unchanged, and turned to head back upstairs.
Lin Tantan was lying in a deck chair with her eyes closed, basking in the sun. A ring of mutated rats, big and small, clustered around her, and a snake-like mutated plant coiled at her feet, its rhizome draped across her calf. The whole scene was a little eerie, yet strangely harmonious. He watched for a while and said, "From now on, take them with you wherever you go."
"Hm?" Lin Tantan opened her eyes.
Ye Xiao walked over and lifted the gray rat, now fat as a basin, which kept kicking its limbs and writhing. It was the same mutated rat that had first bumped into Lin Tantan’s hand, the leader of the rat pack. Where there had once been only a small tuft of golden fur on its crown, a large mane had grown; it was probably related to its gold-type ability strengthening.
He said, "A bit dumb, but still useful. I plan to replace the people protecting you with ability users, but humans can be less reliable than animals sometimes. Let them stay by your side at all times."
"Have the rats spread out and watch for the slightest movement. This one will lie low underground..." Ye Xiao said, then felt that aside from burrowing quickly through soil, the mutated plant didn't seem to have many other uses. As if sensing his disapproval, the plant whipped its two severed limbs and looked a bit indignant.
After a while, those two severed limbs had already healed and were slowly growing longer. The first time they'd clashed with something they'd twisted a car into a heap of scrap, proof enough of how formidable those two limbs were in combat.
Ye Xiao said, "Alright, then hurry up and grow."
Lin Tantan agreed to his suggestion. She would rather be surrounded by plants and animals than by people. She stroked the top of the mutated plant's rhizome and said, "Let's give it a name. Calling it ‘this root’ all the time isn't great."
"What do you think we should call it?"
Lin Tantan thought for a long moment. "Three-Root?"
"..." What a strange name.
"Look, it has three rhizomes and it can even show the Arabic numeral three, isn't that fitting?" she argued confidently. "The mutated rats need names too. You can be Big Gray," she said to the gray rat Ye Xiao had picked up, then pointed to a smaller white mutated rat and continued, "This is Big White, this is Little White, this is Big Brown, this one will be Second Brown, and this is Third Brown..."
Ye Xiao looked at the bewildered mutated creatures, felt a half-second of silent sympathy, then insincerely praised, "Very fitting and easy to remember."
In any case, the morning passed leisurely. After another treatment in the afternoon, the two of them couldn't stay in the villa any longer and went out to the construction site.
The ground that was expected to take two days to fill had already been finished yesterday by the people's efforts. The whole plot was piled a little higher than the parking lot over there, so there was no longer any worry about flooding. Today construction officially began; when they arrived, workers were laying underground drainage pipes.
Those pipes had also been brought in from outside yesterday. Pipes of all sizes were being laid and buried underground with professional skill. In other places they were pouring foundations and setting up rebar, they were starting to build houses.
Beside the site two more operations had sprung up: brick kilns and cement mixing. Everywhere was bustling with activity.
Lin Tantan was more interested in the sheep pen. When she went over, there were hardly any sheep left. They said some had been given out as wages and some had been sold. Transactions were by barter or by paying with crystal cores, one first-level crystal core for a jin of meat.
Lin Tantan did the math: one sheep would cost several hundred first-level crystal cores? A complete rip-off.
Mutated sheep were still in desperate demand, so the military bought up a lot at once. After the zombie siege of more than half a month, countless crystal cores had been left behind, and the military had amassed the most, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say they were piled like a mountain. Besides, a system using crystal cores as currency hadn't fully developed yet; Lin Tantan remembered that at first, crystal cores didn't buy much.
By the afternoon, before the base gates closed, wave after wave of people returned, most with substantial hauls. Some had captured mutated sheep or chickens, others mutated fish or rats, and there were odd and wonderful creatures too, snakes with two heads, abnormally large mutated toads. People had also brought back corn cobs bigger than mallets, lettuce half a person tall, and stalks that looked like sugarcane as thick as a person's waist.
In short, with ideas unlocked, people scoured the area for all sorts of strange things. The collective effort yielded plenty: a great variety of new species were hauled back to the base. Whether any of it was edible... that was another question.
That night Lin Tantan was urgently summoned. The poisoned man was one of Lu Jianping's trusted subordinates. It was evident that ordinary potions and wood-type ability users couldn't save him, so Lu Jianping had to swallow his pride and beg Lin Tantan for help. She remembered he had once spoken up for her, so she went without hesitation.
Ye Xiao naturally went with her.
When they arrived, the motionless figure slumped on the bed was a familiar face, the mixed-blood youth who had once stood watch at the base gate. His handsome mixed features were already mottled purple; the poisoning was clearly severe.
"What happened?" Lin Tantan asked, startled. He was an ability user too; had he poisoned himself by taking something extremely toxic?
Lu Jianping looked embarrassed. "He ate two snake gallbladders."
"The two-headed snake?" Lin Tantan had heard of its reputation: a grand serpent whose scales were ink-dark with emerald highlights, its body jade-like, and both heads unusually spirited, it was said to be a highly tonic snake.
The snake had been caught by a squad of ability users; ordinary people couldn't have captured it.
Ye Xiao asked, "Wasn't it tested and declared edible?"
"Yes. We had Liu Jian look at it, and those scientists tested it too; they all said it was safe. We ate the snake meat and were fine; only after he swallowed the gallbladders did he end up like this."
Lin Tantan had already started examining him. The poor poisoned man's mouth was rotted away. She emitted a visible thread of energy into his body, and her expression grew serious. Then she actually laid hands on him, feeling from his chest down to his abdomen. Ye Xiao watched, his eye twitching, she almost never touched patients directly when treating them.
Having confirmed things, Lin Tantan sighed and asked, "Is that snake still there?"
Lu Jianping looked even more embarrassed. "They've all been shared around and eaten… oh, only the skin's left." He had eaten some of the meat too and was worried he might end up like the subordinate on the bed, but so far, luckily, he was all right.
"Forget the skin." You can't tell anything from just the hide.
She said, "If I'm not mistaken, that snake had an ability, similar to Meimei's, and it stores that power in its gallbladder. He ate the gall, and now the worst damage is to his stomach; his esophagus and intestines are badly corroded too. That corrosive energy has gotten into his bloodstream and spread through his body. Before long, the whole person will likely be eaten away."
Lu Jianping and the others listened in terror. Lu Jianping hurriedly asked, "Can he be saved?"
Lin Tantan shook her head. "My ability right now only helps with ordinary injuries. It's not very effective against wounds caused by other abilities."
She herself had been struck by lightning-type abilities and could only manage with trembling hands; Ye Xiao had been burned by fire, and if she hadn't happened to have water-type power, that would have been difficult as well.
She could probably have treated this youth even if he'd swallowed a bottle of sulfuric acid, but he was poisoned by food containing dark-type energy, that she couldn't fix.
"But I can keep him alive for a while. He got like this because he ate food with corrosive ability. If we can give him food that has restorative, nourishing powers, there might still be hope."
"Simply put: foods with wood-, water-, or earth-type abilities."
In later times there were many precious, ability-infused medicinal herbs and ingredients. Among restorative types, the main ones are these three: wood represents the sprouting of life and boosts vitality; water stands for continuous energy flow and generally clears and revitalizes the body; earth is the source of life, used to consolidate the base and strengthen one's roots. Though all are tonics, their effects differ subtly and cannot be treated as the same.
Lin Tantan knew something about this, but not a great deal. If one of her patients needed medicinal treatment, a professional apothecary would assist her.
But in the end-times people weren't so picky about herbs and ingredients, the materials themselves probably didn't come with such fine-grained effect classifications. If it helped the body, they'd just eat it.
Lu Jianping understood and hurriedly ordered people to collect as many of the mutated plants and animals that had entered the base that day as possible.
The first thing brought in was a plant almost as thick as a person's waist, seven or eight meters long, with sugarcane characteristics. The Academy had confirmed it: it was indeed mutant sugarcane.
Lin Tantan discovered that this sugarcane possessed wood-type ability and exclaimed with pleasure, "Press this into juice and get him to drink it."
They pressed out several large barrels of juice. They fed the mixed-blood youth again and again, worked at it for a long while, and at last his corrosion eased somewhat, though a full recovery would be difficult.
When they left they brought a bottle of the sugarcane juice back and everyone tasted a bit. It was very sweet with a delicate fragrance beyond ordinary cane juice. The supremely gentle wood energy it contained was also very beneficial to the body. Mei Baisheng suggested, "Shall we try to get more of this mutant sugarcane tomorrow? Pity we don't know where it is."
Mei Baisheng didn't know, but Lu Jianping had already had his people scent it out. Before dawn, as soon as the base gates opened, his men set off straight for the place where the mutant sugarcane had been found.
It had originally been a sugarcane grove. A heavy rain had killed many canes, but many remained, and there was more than just that one mutant stalk there, it was simply the thickest.
But when the team arrived, the cane field had almost been ravaged. The stout mutant stalks lay fallen, gnawed into a mess, and a figure crouched deep within the field, continuously chewing and swallowing juice.
"Who is there?" the commanding officer barked. In the gray dawn a silhouette lurched out of the cane field and ran off at top speed.
"Looks like a person, but with only half a head, probably a zombie," a subordinate said.
"Do zombies eat sugarcane?" the officer frowned. "Never mind. See if there are any intact stalks left and dig them up, roots and all."