Chapter 317 - 245: Vast Sky, Boundless Wilds, the Banshee Becomes a Little Girl (Part 2)

Chapter 317: Chapter 245: Vast Sky, Boundless Wilds, the Banshee Becomes a Little Girl (Part 2)

She set the plate on the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

"Mhm!" Yiyi, sitting beside her, had already been taken to the RV by Su Qing to be washed until she was sparkling clean. She’d also been changed into a new pink outfit that was a little too big, and her hair was tied into two neat little pigtails.

She looked exceptionally well-behaved. She gave a serious nod and, ignoring the war between the two older girls beside her, lifted her bowl, stuffed a big mouthful of meat into her mouth, and began to chew enthusiastically.

Su Qing shook her head, picked up her chopsticks, and calmly swished a slice of meat in the pot.

There was still a lot of meat in the pot—some leftover from yesterday, kept in the RV’s fridge, and some freshly sliced. For some reason, however, those two girls just had to keep their eyes glued to each other’s chopsticks.

"If you two don’t start eating properly, you can take your bowls and go eat canned food with Lin Fan."

Su Qing popped the meat into her mouth, a hint of matriarchal authority flickering in her gentle eyes.

The threat was as powerful as a forbidden spell. Canned food couldn’t hold a candle to hot pot.

The two, who had been posturing like a pair of fighting cocks, instantly backed down.

"Hmph!" "Hmph!"

The pair snorted in perfect unison, turned their heads away from each other, and then their chopsticks once again became a blur, launching a frenzied assault on the two newly served plates of Fresh Meat.

Su Qing paid them no more mind and joined the great meat-snatching free-for-all. While replenishing her energy, she looked up toward a building under construction at the edge of the block. A white light was shining starkly from the fourth floor.

A figure was perched atop that white light.

...

The night sky, scoured clean by the downpour, possessed a heart-stopping clarity. Or perhaps, now that the smokestacks of industrial civilization had gone cold and the city lights were extinguished, the heavens, shrouded by smog for decades, had finally revealed their original, exquisite beauty.

Lin Fan sat on the edge of the fifth floor of the unfinished building, where the windows had yet to be installed. His legs dangled in the air, swaying gently with the night breeze.

Above him, billions of stars spread across the velvet canopy of the sky like shattered diamonds. The Milky Way was a silken sash slanting across the heavens. This kind of dazzling, almost oppressive starlight was something one could previously only see from a high plateau or a lone boat in the deep ocean.

But now, it hung starkly and indifferently above the ruins of the city.

The starlight was cold and clear, breathtakingly beautiful, yet utterly devoid of any human warmth.

But when Lin Fan’s gaze drifted downward, the brilliant river of stars came to an abrupt halt, as if sliced in half by a colossal black blade.

A deathly pitch-blackness.

The distant city districts were like a giant, abyssal black hole, swallowing all light. The once-glorious landmark buildings were now just blurry, menacing silhouettes, transformed into rows of massive tombstones.

Above this dead city, devoid of a single light, the universe displayed its original grandeur and indifference.

The flickering embers that had not yet died out in the depths of the darkness were like will-o’-the-wisps dancing over a mass grave, burning silently in the dead stillness.

Only the brightly lit camp and its cooking fires below, along with the small dinner table across the road, could bring him a sliver of peace.

GULP.

He held a can of meat, tilted his head back, and, as if drinking water, poured the entire contents—semi-congealed fat, chunks of meat, and salty broth—straight into his mouth.

Salt, water, starch, fat, protein—they were all sources of energy his body needed.

It wasn’t just the can in his hand; two other empty cans lay discarded beside him.

Ever since his constitution began to improve, his appetite had grown frighteningly large. It was manageable when he wasn’t active, but after exercising or recovering from an injury, the hunger was so intense he felt like he could devour ten pounds of meat.

He licked the grease from the corner of his mouth, let out a long breath, and his gaze drifted between the starry sky and the ruins below. Then, he pulled out a fourth can.

Below his dangling legs, the once-empty platform on the fourth floor had now been converted into a temporary, open-air drafting room.

Two high-powered industrial floor lamps, one on each side, bathed the large table in the middle—cobbled together from a few discarded door panels—in a light as starkly white as an operating table. The tabletop was covered in various papers, their corners weighed down with brick fragments to keep them from blowing away.

Ye Qingzhou stood by the table, her body practically hunched over it. Her left hand held down a long, mottled wooden ruler, while her right hand gripped a pencil sharpened to an extremely fine point. Her expression was as focused as if she were dissecting a corpse.

SCRITCH—SCRITCH—

The sound of the pencil tip scratching across the rough paper was exceptionally clear in the dead of night, carrying a unique, rhythmic quality.

"Don’t enjoy this silence."

Ye Qingzhou didn’t look up. Her pencil drew a long, straight line along the ruler, and her voice drifted up from below Lin Fan’s feet through the open window frame.

"An August night with no sound of cicadas or other insects... it’s an ecological vacuum. It means that, apart from the dead, there are no other living carbon-based organisms around here."

’Was it just his imagination, or had this female officer become... a bit more talkative since the health bar above her head turned green?’

"I’ve been on field exercises with the army before. It was the same kind of wilderness, also on an August night."

She spoke as she continued to draw.

"As soon as you turned on these big lights, within ten minutes, the beams would be thick with moths and mosquitos, all of them smacking against the lampshades with a constant PITTER-PATTER..."

She straightened up and used the shaft of her pencil to point at the two bright but deathly silent lightbulbs above.

"Back then, you could sweep up ten pounds of bugs in a single night. Enough to fill an entire washbasin."

The two high-powered lightbulbs radiated a glaring light and heat, but the air around them was completely clear.