Chapter 73

The next day Lin Tantan went to see the mixed-blood youth again, his name was Ruther, a name with an exotic ring to it.
Ruther had been forced to drink barrel after barrel of sugarcane juice; his body gave off a strong sweet scent. He had recovered somewhat, but Lin Tantan worried he might develop diabetes.
Lin Tantan had come mainly to help Lu Jianping pick suitable ingredients. The balding, square-faced man gave a helpless look. "The cane field was ruined and we only brought back a few stalks. See if any of them have wood-type ability… That institute still hasn't managed to finish its ability-testing device after all this time, really sorry to trouble you."
Lin Tantan sifted through them; only one stalk had wood-type ability, the rest were ordinary mutant cane. While she sorted, she asked, "Who destroyed the cane field?"
"No idea, they said it had only half a head. Maybe it was a zombie. Do zombies eat sugarcane?" Lu Jianping said in a somewhat comical tone. He seemed easygoing in private, though Lin Tantan wasn't sure whether he was putting on that affability for her benefit.
Lin Tantan was taken aback. Zombies only eat raw flesh and blood, right? She'd never heard of one that liked gnawing sugarcane.
"Maybe they saw it wrong?"
"Maybe."
Fortunately, though the cane field had been destroyed, someone found a patch of water bamboo and dug up several mutant shoots. One of them had water-type ability; mashed into juice and given to Ruther, it had a very good effect.
Lin Tantan later told Ye Xiao about it. "I didn't expect Lu Jianping to value his subordinates' lives so much. Those three mutant plants must have cost quite a lot, right?"
Ye Xiao, however, was a little dazed. Lin Tantan gave him a glance, she was channeling energy into him to help his ribs knit together, and it was the first time she’d seen him drift off during a treatment.
Ye Xiao snapped back: “You mean someone with only half a head?”
“Yes. Do you know anyone like that, or have you ever seen a zombie like that?”
Ye Xiao said nothing, though a face flashed into his mind and he immediately dismissed it. That person must already be dead; once dead, even being bitten by a zombie wouldn’t turn them into one.
Still, it nagged at him. He swallowed the unease without a ripple and told Lin Tantan, “Ruther is a child adopted by Lu Jianping. Of course he cares.”
“Ah, I see.”
“They say he was the result of one of his old friend’s affairs abroad. That friend later died in an accident, and Lu Jianping couldn’t stand the thought of him leaving no descendants. When he learned about the child he went overseas himself, after many twists and turns found him in an orphanage, and went to great lengths to bring him back.”
“So Lu Jianping really took it to heart, raising his friend’s child as his own.”
Ye Xiao’s expression stiffened for a moment, then smoothed out; Lin Tantan didn’t notice.
Once his injuries improved he left the base again and started looking for the person with only half a head. He hadn’t found that target yet, but he did come across several corpses.
All of them, without exception, had been killed by fire-type ability users. There were no signs of a struggle, only a charred hole in the chest, and the eyes remained cloudy and unfocused after death.
Such a familiar wound. Ye Xiao rose from the latest body, scanned the sunlit ruins of the city, and his face went hard and cold.
Zhou Yan wasn’t dead. Putting aside why someone could have half their head hacked away and still be alive, the method of killing, was it venting anger? Making a statement? Or practicing?
The earlier victims had been solitary civilians; later they were ability users. This time there were two of them. Could he make two people’s minds go to pieces at once?
Lin Tantan still knew nothing about any of this. She kept going to the shantytown, but cut it back to half a day, and after a few days to only two or three hours a visit.
The number of flu patients was already shrinking day by day, and because mutated animals had become part of people’s diets, it was obvious more people were eating meat now. Even when the mutated beasts had no abilities, their meat proved nourishing; some folks who were still sick would eat meat for a few days and gradually get better on their own.
The free clinics were slowly winding down.
But Lin Tantan’s clinic remained crowded, another consequence of the mutated diet.
Some people were just unlucky and had no way to test what they’d eaten and wound up poisoned; some were too frail to be nourished; some suffered indigestion from excessively tough mutated meat; some had allergic reactions; and a large number were injured fighting mutated animals.
In short, doctors never worried about a lack of business.
But because the patient population had shifted, many wood-type ability users struggled to adapt, and their treatment efficiency was particularly poor.
Lin Tantan took some time to organize a number of cases, then called the wood-type users together for a meeting upstairs at the clinic.
“…Using abilities to treat patients is actually the same as ordinary medicine: first locate the lesion, then apply your limited power to treat that lesion. With the flu, lesions were mainly in the respiratory system; this time it’s the digestive system. If some toxins are absorbed into the bloodstream and spread throughout the body, then your energy must be distributed through the patient’s entire system…”
“These are a few representative cases I’ve compiled, including my treatment approach and steps, have a look.” Lin Tantan spoke plainly. After the photocopies were passed around, she turned to Ming Ze, who was sitting to one side. “Later you can teach them how to tell from the patient’s complaints whether it’s indigestion or food poisoning or something else, you’re better at that.”
“Yes.” Ming Ze answered promptly. He had, by now, effectively become Lin’s assistant and apprentice. In medical knowledge he, as a trained physician, knew more than Lin Tantan did, but in the use of abilities he still had a lot to learn from her.
In fact he’d improved a great deal, he could infer how to proceed from a patient’s chief complaint. Most wood-type ability users had no prior medical background: a patient says “my nose is blocked” and they send power to the nose; someone says “I feel like vomiting” and they treat the stomach. If a person was naturally sensitive to abilities, that helped, but most were slow and couldn’t perform effective treatments at first.
It had been the same with flu patients. Lin Tantan recorded many typical cases and held several meetings during downtime until she’d trained the wood-type users to handle cases on their own.
“If there’s anything you don’t understand, come ask me.” Lin Tantan finished and was about to leave the makeshift meeting room when someone raised a hand: “Doctor Lin, may I join you?”
Lin Tantan stopped and looked at the young man who had stood up. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, looked under thirty, and when he smiled there was a refined, genteel quality about him that easily won people over.
Lin Tantan had a vague impression of him, he was a regular at the free clinic, competent, and each day earned a fair bit of rations from her. Before the end of the world he’d been a doctor too, apparently from the same hospital as Ming Ze.
She glanced at Ming Ze; as expected, his face had darkened.
The bespectacled young man asked again, “May I join your team? I promise my loyalty, I won’t have any ulterior motives and will follow every order.”
By “your team” he meant joining the group led by Ye Xiao. In that modest meeting room there was a long table; those who could sit at it were the “insiders,” people whose identity, character, and abilities had been repeatedly vetted by Bai Cheng. After all this time they’d only scraped together a little over ten of them. The rest were hired hands working under Lin Tantan for wages; they had to bring stools to sit around the edges or simply stand.
Lin Tantan had said before that if anyone didn’t understand something they could come ask her, and everyone tacitly accepted that only their own people could bother her. You’re a mercenary whose allegiance no one even knows, don’t get your hopes up. The fact that Lin Tantan was willing to take them on and teach them how to use their abilities without charging tuition was already something to smile about in secret.
Lin Tantan said, “That kind of thing isn’t my responsibility. You can go ask Bai Cheng.”
“Okay, got it.” The young man smiled, not discouraged in the least.
Ming Ze glanced at him, then said to Lin Tantan, “Miss Lin, you go handle your business. Leave this to me.”
“All right.” Lin Tantan left the conference room. Once the door shut she could hear Ming Ze’s voice from inside, colder by at least a couple of degrees: “Now I’ll talk to you about some of the major diseases and manifestations of the digestive system…”
Hm. Ming Ze was fine in every way, just a bit too chilly.
Something stirred in her pocket. A chestnut-colored dwarf hamster climbed out, clambered up onto her shoulder, and nudged her cheek. She tilted her head to nuzzle the little bodyguard, then suddenly felt a strong gaze fall on her. She turned and saw a man crouched on the floor, teasing a comically plump gray rat. Both man and rat looked up; the man’s eyes were calm while the rat wore an almost mournful expression, apparently intent on climbing up.
“No, you can’t, you're too heavy. Don’t jump on me!” Lin Tantan warned quickly.
The gray rat halted, glared at the hamster perched on her shoulder, twisted its bulky body and climbed away down the stairs, its long tail trailing behind it, looking very put out.
Lin Tantan couldn’t be bothered to soothe the big fellow, he’d been moody ever since she started carrying the little hamster around. She turned to the man still crouched on the floor. “What are you doing here?” She checked the time; it was indeed lunch break.
Ye Xiao stood up; his tall, lean frame became unmistakable. Where she had been looking down at him a moment ago, she now had to look up. He smiled and said, “Came to see you.”
It was March and still cool, but Ye Xiao had already shed his winter layers, wearing only a couple of thin pieces, his winter coat wasn’t especially thick to begin with.
In short, his clothes showed off his good figure perfectly. Lin Tantan couldn’t help sneaking a glance at his chest, yes, nicely proportioned, firm and full, though probably padded.
“…” Ye Xiao was helpless. What was that look supposed to mean?
“Finished the meeting?”
“Mm. Let’s go downstairs.”
Downstairs was the clinic’s main hall. It was lunch break, but the hall was still fairly crowded. When the huge rat made its appearance, most people flinched and moved aside in alarm; a few, used to it, didn’t react, knowing the mutant rat belonged to Lin Tantan.
At the foot of the stairs, a young man holding a sword leaned against the wall. Seeing the two of them come down, he straightened up.
Lin Tantan was surprised. “Xu Li? You came too?”
Ye Xiao said, “We’ll talk in your consulting room.”
Once inside Lin Tantan’s room, he said, “From now on, Xu Li will follow you.”
“Huh? What?” Lin Tantan was taken aback. Ye Xiao had mentioned replacing some of her bodyguards; it wasn’t that ability users were unsuitable, but that Jiang Zhongyi among the ability users seemed insufficiently steady. None of the others they found felt entirely trustworthy, and in a dangerous situation their abilities might not even reach half of hers.
So nothing had been finalized yet, but this Xu Li suggestion still came as a shock.
Ye Xiao had his own reasons. Xu Li didn’t have an ability, but he was stronger than most of the ability users. Because he lacked an ability, he had to fight up close, which made him very risky against zombies. Now that manpower was increasing, Ye Xiao didn’t want to keep sending Xu Li out on dangerous missions. But left inside the base, Xu Li was too introverted, he hated socializing and could sit in a corner day after day doing nothing unless given a task. Assigning him to protect Lin Tantan solved that.
He’d hesitated before, but after learning Zhou Yan was still alive and only growing stronger, he made the decision. Don’t let Xu Li’s obedient, soft demeanor fool you, he’d trained in martial arts since childhood and had ironclad resolve that was not easily shaken.
Lin Tantan looked between Ye Xiao and Xu Li. “Did something happen?”
Ye Xiao told her about Zhou Yan, about how he’d killed him once, but the man had somehow come back to life.
“Is he a dual-type? How could that be? No, that’s not the point, you’re saying you couldn’t kill him? Are you sure he stopped breathing?”
“I cut off half his skull,” Ye Xiao said.
Yes, that should have been undeniably fatal. And yet he’d survived. Lin Tantan sat on the chair, idly fussing with the little hamster in her hand. Was it possible that because Zhou Yan was destined to be the future president, fate protected him from death? Please, that was absurd.
If Zhou Yan really ended up as the president of the new era, what would Ye Xiao do? If that man rose to power, even if Ye Xiao lived, Zhou Yan would inevitably move against him. In history, Ye Xiao had died and that lunatic had erased every trace of him. He was the kind of man who could never tolerate anyone stronger than himself.
Ye Xiao could tell from her reaction that she had no clue how Zhou Yan’s ability worked or why he could come back from the dead.
He said, “He’s outside the base right now. Entry checks are strict, he shouldn’t be able to slip in. Having Xu Li follow you is just a precaution. Xu Li’s will is steady; he shouldn’t be easily affected by Zhou Yan’s power. I’ll assign you a few more people, never be alone with fewer than four around you.”
Lin Tantan nodded. She knew how serious this was, but looking at Xu Li she couldn’t help asking, “Isn’t assigning Xu Li to me a bit of overkill?”
Xu Li gave her a shy smile. “Not at all. This is exactly what I’m suited for.”
Lin Tantan thought: I know you’re excellent at protection, but the thing is, you’re Bai Cheng’s personal bodyguard!
In the original timeline, Xu Li never awakened any ability, yet he’d always been Bai Cheng’s last and strongest line of defense. Bai Cheng, as the real manager of the Zhengyang base, supposedly controlled a mysterious, extremely large storage space full of supplies that outsiders couldn’t discern. Because of that he’d long been a target for assassination by various factions. Xu Li had protected him through many crises, right up until the final time when they suffered disaster together.
How did this person end up being her protector? She certainly didn't think she measured up to Bai Cheng in importance.