The cold air was filled with the smell of dry dust, mingled with a faint stench of decay.
Jiang Zhaoye frowned and continued walking forward. The further down he went, the more dead vegetation there was.
After another half hour, he finally spotted a person in the distance.
A person lying by the side of the road far off.
He rushed forward, only to come to a sudden halt.
It was a "person" in ragged clothing, curled up in the bushes by the roadside. It was impossible to tell if they were male or female because they were far too emaciated; their exposed arms were nothing more than a layer of filthy, yellowish-black skin wrapped over a clearly visible skeletal outline. Their face was too dirty to discern its original appearance, their lips shriveled and purple, their eyes half-open and half-closed, with pupils already dilated into a dead-gray haze.
Their fingers were dug deep into the dried mud, as if grasping at something before death.
The young boy was stunned where he stood.
The watch concealed under his sleeve, pressed tightly against his skin, suddenly vibrated violently at that moment. Xiao Ling's gentle, familiar voice reached his ears through the earpiece: “Human corpse detected. Preliminary cause of death: starvation, dehydration. Non-homicide. Recommending immediate report to the Security Bureau.”
Jiang Zhaoye shuddered, as if suddenly snapped awake. He stood there for a long, long time without speaking.
Afterward, he took a difficult step, stumbled, and kept walking forward.
Ten minutes later, Jiang Zhaoye's footsteps paused once again.
He stared at the rotting corpse lying in the middle of the road, a wave of chill shooting from the soles of his feet up his spine.
The watch vibrated again: “Human corpse detected. Preliminary cause of death: starvation and dehydration. Recommending detour.”
This student, who had only recently graduated from middle school, stood frozen on the spot. Only after a good while did he recover his senses, carefully bypassing the corpse to keep walking ahead.
As he walked further, he encountered another corpse by the roadside.
It was an old woman whose messy, graying hair hung loosely like withered grass, her clothes so tattered they barely covered her body.
She was sitting slumped against a tree trunk, still clutching a dry branch in her hand. Her head was tilted to one side, her cracked mouth opened in a contorted gape as if still crying out in her final moments. The shoes on her feet were worn through, revealing cracked feet covered in thick calluses and fissures.
“Human corpse detected. Preliminary cause of death: starvation and cold. Recommending detour.”
Jiang Zhaoye continued forward.
As the path went further, the corpses grew more numerous.
He saw a young woman holding an infant whose head had already shriveled like a dried apple. The woman's twig-like arms tightly locked around the baby in her embrace, so that not even death had separated them. On her thin, obscured face lingered a contorted bitterness—resembling hatred, yet also despair.
He saw an old man whose starved corpse was still clutching a handful of dry grass, rigidly maintaining the posture of stuffing it into his mouth.
He saw a young man lying dead on the ground, his five fingers dug deep into the dirt, with a long wound across his back that had already rotted black and dried of blood. His body was twisted, as though he had still been struggling forward in his final moments.
There were also children curled beneath withered trees, tiny skeletons clutching tree bark, their remaining eyes not yet fully closed, leaving a slit that stared straight up at the gloomy sky.
Jiang Zhaoye's heart thudded in his chest, beat by beat, growing faster and louder, thumping like a bell in his ears and ringing in his head.
He passed vast fields where, plot after plot, the crops were completely dead, leaving behind only dry, cracked clods of soil and withered stalks.
Jiang Zhaoye saw corpses once more and froze in shock.
Countless corpses lay strewn in the distance, field after field. Some were already rotted, exposing white bones, while others still retained intact forms, looking as if they had died only recently.
Corpses piled upon corpses; starvation littered the land.
At no moment had Jiang Zhaoye hated his excellent eyesight as much as he did right now.
He saw distinct bite marks on some of the corpses.
Torn marks crisscrossed over skin and flesh, deeply embedded in white bones, as if... they had been bitten and gnawed on by their own kind.
Jiang Zhaoye's stomach churned violently, and he finally vomited.
He threw up every bit of food in his stomach until there was nothing left, yet he kept dry-heaving uncontrollably. He had no choice but to force himself to stand upright and force himself to calm down.
Xiao Ling's dead-serious voice echoed in his ear: “Warning! Large number of human corpses detected! Warning! Traces of cannibalism found on some corpses! Please return immediately! Please return immediately!”
Jiang Zhaoye could not bear to look at the tragic sight before him any longer. A grand yet hollow sense of sorrow welled up in his heart.
His brief life and lack of experience were insufficient to bear such a grand, silent lamentation from his own species.
Having never faced such hellish misery before, Jiang Zhaoye could not believe this was still the human world. Centuries ago, during the Psionic Era, Blue Star had already achieved basic food and clothing for all, ensuring the elderly were cared for and the young were nurtured.
Raised in the city since childhood, he had lacked neither food nor clothing and had never starved. In the modest-sized Huaicheng, even homeless people were rare, and most beggars were just performing arts; he had never seen anyone starve to death.
White bones exposed in the wild was a sight that only appeared in history textbooks.
The naive student could not imagine there could still be such massive numbers of people starving and freezing to death, just as he had never imagined that humans would consume their own kind.
Jiang Zhaoye fled, running forward wildly, swiftly, and numbly.
Jiang Zhaoye didn't know why he was pushing forward, but he simply didn't want to stop. He wanted to leave that hell behind him; he wanted to see just how cruel this world could truly be.
He saw a dried-up riverbed, the mud at the bottom cracked into jigsaw-like blocks.
A few skeletal remains lay across the riverbed, long since gnawed incomplete by wild beasts, exposing stark white bones.
He passed through a withered forest, where several corpses were left beneath the trees in various postures—some lying down, some sitting, some prostrate on the ground, and some curled into a ball.
On all their faces lingered a similar numbness, as if they had long abandoned the struggle for life.
Xiao Ling's voice issued warnings in his ear time after time, urging him to return.
Jiang Zhaoye's steps grew slower and slower. He felt as though his legs were filled with lead, each step so heavy he could barely lift them.
The path beneath his feet became harder and harder to navigate, full of bumps and hollows as if churned over by something.
He looked down and discovered that the hollows bore traces left by humans.
They looked like marks gouged by human fingers—overlapping and dense—as if countless people had once crawled through here.
Sensing something, Jiang Zhaoye looked up. Far in the distance, the faint outline of a city wall emerged, grayish and misty like a mirage enveloped in fog.
He pursed his dry lips and continued walking forward.
Another stretch of road passed.
Jiang Zhaoye finally met the first living person.
It was a small figure curled up in a tree hollow.
Hearing their voice, Jiang Zhaoye practically sprinted over.
It was a child who appeared seven or eight years old, so thin they were practically just skin and bones. Covered in filth, rags wrapped around their frail body, too dirty to tell the original color. Their face was also too grimy to discern its features, lips cracked, eyes half-open, and chest rising and falling slowly as they let out weak, dream-like groans one after another.
Squatting down to examine the corpse-like, emaciated child, Jiang Zhaoye felt tears well in his eyes at that moment.
Without hesitation, he fished a compressed biscuit from his backpack, broke it into small pieces, and tentatively offered them to the child's lips.
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