Chapter 15: Destined to Meet
Destined to meet?
Hearing those four words, Ji Nian felt a strange sensation.
Qin Xiao laughed, his smile warm and pure. His bright, clear eyes focused on the road ahead. “It’s destined that we’ll always be together, conquering zombies together, and restoring our beautiful home!”
But…so cliché.
“So, where did you go after that?”
After a short while, Qin Xiao asked Ji Nian about what happened that year.
That was Qin Xiao’s first day in City A, when he was ten years old.
The first time Qin Xiao saw Ji Nian, he thought, “Wow, is this a boy or a girl? How pretty!”
Ji Nian was wearing a white T-shirt that day. His mother had unique taste and liked clothes with small animal patterns.
Ji Nian’s white T-shirt featured a large-headed Hello Kitty. He wore black shorts and white sneakers.
Ji Nian had always been fair-skinned, and his exposed legs were white, slender, and straight. Qin Xiao couldn’t tell the gender—it wasn’t his fault.
But little boys have a rebellious streak. Noticing that Qin Xiao had been staring at him for a long time, Ji Nian retorted, “Looking for your dad?”
Ji Nian knocked Qin Xiao down and ran away. At that time, he was almost a head shorter than Qin Xiao. Being able to knock Qin Xiao down was pure luck.
Why wouldn’t he run? Was he waiting to get beaten up?
But afterward, he didn’t really avoid Qin Xiao. Their apartment complex was large, and they lived in the same building but different units, with four entrances to the complex.
Besides going to school, he also had martial arts training every day, rising earlier than the chickens and returning later than the ducks.
His mother was quite interesting. She and his father were 1.7 meters and 1.8 meters tall respectively. Seeing that Ji Nian wasn’t growing, she once suspected that he had been switched at the hospital.
Fearing he would be a shorty for life, they spent a lot of money on self-defense training for him, fearing he would be bullied in the future.
Children’s enthusiasm is fleeting. Qin Xiao did look for Ji Nian in the complex, but he didn’t run into him several times, so he eventually forgot about it.
Later, they both grew up and got busier—boarding school, tutoring, internet, bars…
Ji Nian, in particular, was quiet and generally didn’t go out after school. Since they didn’t live in the same unit, frankly, they didn’t recognize each other later on.
Who would stare at someone’s face every day? They were both boys, with easygoing personalities. If Qin Xiao hadn’t mentioned it today, Ji Nian would only vaguely remember something like that happening.
But as Qin Xiao said,
They really did have fate.
The first person Qin Xiao remembered when he first came to City A was Ji Nian.
The reason Qin Xiao’s car stopped was because the road ahead was blocked.
Not just the road, but thick iron plates completely surrounded the entire village. The iron plates had sharp steel bars, each razor-sharp, with a high defense coefficient.
Bloodstains were faintly visible on the steel bars, and some still had scraps of torn clothing hanging on them.
It didn’t look like someone deliberately hung them there. It seemed something had climbed over and its clothes got caught on the steel bars.
Ji Nian and Qin Xiao exchanged a glance, tightened their backpacks, re-tied their shoelaces, and got out of the car with their weapons.
It seemed there were two possibilities: either zombies had climbed in, and the inside was full of them—after all, zombies don’t feel pain, so even if their bodies were pierced by steel bars, they could continue fighting.
Or, it was a “paradise” inside.
After getting out of the car, Qin Xiao stood by the car first, picked up a small stone, and threw it at the iron plate to listen for any sounds inside.
If there were people inside, someone would definitely be on guard duty, and they would see them from somewhere upon hearing the sound.
“Bang.”
Whether anyone secretly saw them or not, there was no sound from inside.
Qin Xiao threw another stone, this time with a little more force.
The sound of the stone hitting the iron plate was louder than before, but there was still no sound from inside.
“There should be people inside, and they should have seen us by now. Their lack of response means they don’t intend to pay attention to us, and they certainly don’t want us to enter.”
Ji Nian looked around, alert and observant.
“What’s going on?”
The burly man’s car had been following them, and he got out and walked over to ask.
“Can’t you see for yourself?”
Qin Xiao was annoyed. They had finally arrived, and they were being ignored.
“They’re not opening the door, are they?”
The burly man’s companion asked, “Then what do we do? If we can’t knock, we’ll just break it down!”
“Break what?”
Qin Xiao leaned against the car, clutching his long knife. “Besides the fact that breaking it down might get you killed by the people inside, what if you attract zombies with the noise?”
They hadn’t seen any zombies on the road before, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any.
Seeing the bloodstains on the steel bars confirmed that there were.
As soon as the two big men heard this, their eyes darted around, and they nervously huddled closer to Qin Xiao.
Qin Xiao kicked them. “I’m only protecting Ji Nian. Get lost.”
The two burly men were only big in size; they were no match for the two teenagers in terms of resourcefulness.
Since they had followed them all the way, they didn’t want to fall out with Ji Nian and Qin Xiao, at least not before they got inside the village.