Chapter 109: Will the World Return?
Chapter 109: Will the World Return?
Anran sits alone on the ground, her face swollen, her nose bruised. She stares at Wang Xin, whose body has stopped twitching, life gradually fading from his eyes. She lowers her head in disbelief and looks at her hands.
At some point, the knife she had been holding has fallen to the ground, still stained with bright red blood.
Unlike Liu Yuan, Anran doesn’t tremble. On the contrary, her heartbeat is fast, pounding in her chest. The initial shock has worn off, and she begins to accept the harsh reality—she has killed someone.
But this death feels different from the ones she has caused before. When she has killed zombies, their bodies immediately soften and turn to corpses as soon as the knife pierces their skulls. People don’t die like that. People, in their final moments, experience twitching and struggling, as if they are unwilling to die.
Anran watches Wang Xin, a living being, become a corpse. She stares at him, her mind numb with a dull ache, a pain that seems to echo in her skull.
In the nursery, Liu Yuan comforts Hengheng, urging him to stay inside and watch the little sister, not to come out again.
Then, with a sense of urgency, she hurries back out and pulls Anran up from the ground. It surprises Anran that Liu Yuan, who is so small, is able to lift her so easily.
Liu Yuan, who once worked as a caregiver in a nursing home, attributes her newfound strength to her previous job. After giving birth, she left that work, but the strength she built up remains.
Nursing homes are full of elderly people with limited mobility, so she and her colleagues often have to help lift them, which builds strength over time.
She effortlessly drags Anran to the sofa. Though Liu Yuan is shaking with fear, there have been so many traumatic situations recently that she quickly manages to calm herself down.
She squats in front of Anran, tears streaming down her face as she cries, "RAnran, when the world gets better, I’ll go with you to surrender. I’m the one who killed him, and you’re the accomplice."
Anran, still sitting on the sofa, takes a deep breath and slowly exhales. She closes her eyes, then stands up. She picks up her ex-husband’s bloody knife from the ground, holding it tightly in her hand. Shaking her head, she turns around and looks at Liu Yuan, who is still kneeling on the floor. A bitter, sarcastic laugh escapes her lips.
"Sister Yuan, do you think the world will return to what it once was? It’s been 25 days."
In truth, Anran has long since lost track of how many days have passed since the world fell apart. Sometimes it feels like it has been a long time, but when she looks at Doll, who is growing slowly every day, with the same red face it had when it was first born, she realizes not much time has actually passed.
But Anran has died and come back to life so many times, seen so many things, that she understands things far more clearly than Liu Yuan.
Looking at Liu Yuan’s tear-streaked face, Anran’s expression seems almost numb, stiff, indifferent. Her voice is a mix of confusion and defiance as she speaks.
"Sister Yuan, we have no choice. If I hadn’t killed Wang Xin today, maybe tomorrow he would’ve killed you and raped me. The world is already in chaos. As women, if we want to survive and not be oppressed, sometimes we have to take extreme measures."
Anran isn’t sure if the world can ever return to normal. Ever since escaping the hospital, her personality hasn’t changed radically, but it has shifted in ways that feel irreversible. For her, killing has become something inevitable—a necessity in this new world.