by N. Heller
"How long have you been here? Do you remember when you came in?" Lin Sanjiu was speaking very fast and she wondered if the man caught what she was saying, "... While you were here, did you saw a large blueish building around? Please tell me where it is if you did, it's essential to me."
The drunkard gave a loud burp as he rummaged through the pockets on his body. Bathing under Lin Sanjiu's intense gaze, he took out a crumpled cigarette, stuck it into his thick beard, and lit it.
"Okay," He took a long pull at his cigarette, closed his jaw, and exhaled a smoke ring at Lin Sanjiu. Then, he talked as if he had a twist in his tongue, "... You, err, I should just call you a miss. Before answering your questions, I would rather like to accomplish my life goal first. After all, it seems more likely to happen."
"Wh-What?" Lin Sanjiu was stunned.
"... I have nothing but one wish: to die of alcohol poisoning."
After he had finished speaking, the drunkard leaned backward, allowing himself to fall onto the ground. As if he didn't feel the pain, he continued to puff out more smoke rings.
Lin Sanjiu rose to her feet. Fury had turned her eyes red and caused her heart to race.
With the cigarette dangling at the corner of his lips, the drunkard raised his arm into the air and bid her goodbye, all the while lying prone on the ground, "... Oh, are you leaving? See you no more, then."
Nobody would want to deal with this kind of person.
As expected, the tall woman remained frozen for a brief moment before pacing footsteps drifted into his ears—evidence of her going away. As the steps grew fainter and further away, the drunkard took another puff from the fag in his lips. However, before he could expel the smoke, his knotted his eyebrows together.
"The footsteps… Something is wrong with the footsteps. Why did the woman not leave at once but seems to stop from time to time… Wait, there are other sounds besides her footsteps. Ahh, why is she so difficult!"
The drunkard pouted and loathingly lifted his heavy and swimming head. Then, he was petrified.
"What-What are you doing?"
Peering through his blurry vision from the excessive intake of alcohol, he saw Lin Sanjiu was grinning like a Cheshire cat at him.
"What do you mean?" Lin Sanjiu crooked her head as if she didn't understand the man's question. However, her movements remained as fluid and as fast as she used to be. Walking two steps forward, she hovered her hand over a shelf, and as if she was performing magic, the large cabinet full of all kinds of liquors suddenly vanished into the ether.
The cigarette slipped out of the man's lips. He hurriedly darted forward and he gawked at Lin Sanjiu in utter disbelief. His eyes went bloodshot as he stammered, "Ah… You, you…"
"An enthusiastic man," Lin Sanjiu said through her gritted teeth, and her smile reminded the drunkard of the lunatic. She placed her hand on another cabinet, "And forthcoming gentleman of your ilk, I can't answer to my conscience if I allow you to die of alcohol poisoning, so I'll help you by putting these away."
"No! No!" The drunkard screamed as he lurched forward. He didn't go after Lin Sanjiu but the shelf, "At least leave my Bourbon alone!"
"What is Bourbon?"
Lin Sanjiu crooked her head and the cabinet disappeared with one swipe of her palm. The drunkard couldn't stop himself and banged into the wall. Without waiting for the man to recompose himself, Lin Sanjiu made a quick work of the shop. In the blink of an eye, Lin Sanjiu had stored everything in the shop. Then, she retreated to the entrance and waited for the man.
"Ah?" The drunkard swept a glance around. Even though his eyes were the only thing visible on his face, Lin Sanjiu could see the grief from the eyes, "Tea leaves? You only left the tea leaves for me?"
"Oh, it seems so."
"You… You don't look like a drinker nor do you look like a smoker!"
"Yes," Lin Sanjiu shrugged, "I plan to use the bottle to keep my things. As for the cigarettes, I'm going to throw them into a river somewhere."
Her words seemed to cause the drunkard more pain than flagellation. Crestfallen, the drunkard bent over and gasped for air before waving his hand in the air and admitting his defeat, "Okay, fine, fine. What do you want to know?"
"That's the right attitude," Lin Sanjiu nodded in contentment and walked out the door, "Come, let's talk outside."
As if he loathed the fresh air, the moment the drunkard walked out from the shop and the moonlight hit his shoulder, he cursed begrudgingly. Then in the next second, he was stunned.
"What's wrong?" Lin Sanjiu had been observing him. Seeing his reaction, her heart picked up its pace again.
The drunkard didn't reply; instead, he looked around.
"Where am I?" He stroked his beard hard and he sighed discontentedly, "... How come I have no memories about here? Could it be I really have drunk too much alcohol?"
"The green over there is a pocket dimension—Harry's Farm. Does that ring any bells?" Lin Sanjiu's heart was pumping faster and faster.
"No, it's impossible," The drunkard shook his head, "I, Qing Jiuliu, swear on my own name when I entered this liquor & tobacco shop, there was absolutely no pocket dimension in the vicinity."
Lin Sanjiu's heart skipped a beat.
Does that mean that somebody swapped the location of the building with this liquor & tobacco shop?
Chapter 454 - Velvet
"...How good it would be if I could turn back time. I'm sure my past self would rather choose to be mauled to death by that bastard if he knew he would have to walk so much one day in the future."
The sun above them was blazing like Titan's fiery wheel in the sky. Lances of its dazzling molten-gold beams splashed on the ground, vaporizing every single water particle that hung around in the atmosphere. With every step Lin Sanjiu took, choking dust particles would be raised into the dry air. Looking ahead, the districts were as barren as a wasteland. All of the buildings, avenues, and facilities from the modern days had been reduced to mere heaps of golden-colored sand and dust that acc.u.mulated to around the height of a human's calf. Whenever somebody stepped into the sea of sand and dust, it was as if stepping in a pool of quicksand, and it demanded strenuous effort to pluck their feet out of the sand.
Walking in this kind of environment was a soul-swelling experience, yet it was nothing compared to Qing Jiuliu's protracted and variety whining that took a different guise in every single passing minute. It wasn't something bearable to a normal human being, and it needed further forbearance to endure against it.
Lin Sanjiu covered her mouth with her hand and tried her very best effort not to query Qing Jiuliu about the anecdotes between him and that bastard.
"Why are we even here?" Qing Jiuliu w.h.i.n.ed. The liquid level of the whiskey in the bottle dropped a little, and this had prevented him from talking. Puffing his cheek, he revelled in the contentment of gargling his cakehole with the alcoholic drink before guzzling it down along his throat reluctantly. The moment he gulped down the beverage, he parted his lips again, "The tobacco & liquor can't be in here. That's axiomatic. You see, if it was here, it would have been long reduced to sand and dust along with other buildings."
"Then give me something more specific!" Lin Sanjiu raised her brows, "The location tobacco & liquor is on the roadside with a telephone pole next to it—to be honest, that's basically looking for a needle in a haystack."
Qing Jiuliu didn't give any comment. He remained silent for a short while and sighed. Then, the liquid in the bottle dropped again.
[Insolvent Drunkard's Light of Hope]
Those who are not addicted to something would never understand the excruciating feeling of being kept on the anxious seat. Imagine that when you have no beer and no money, anguish is probably the only feeling that you would feel. You can still squeeze out some nickel and dimes to purchase a few packets of fags by selling some household things, but that isn't the case for fine wine. The fine brew is the plaything for mega-rich, it isn't something like us who have only a few pennies in our po
cket could afford.
How great it would be great if I could drink the beer in the bottle by just touching it—one day, a drunkard really had developed such a skill.
Since the initial goal of the drunkard was to drink alcoholic beverages, this ability allowed the drunkard to remove the liquid inside something through the protective layer. He could extract beer through the bottle, wrench out blood through the skin, and remove urine through the bladder… Of course, nobody would want the last thing. All the liquid that had been extracted would be then ushered into the user's body—which in other words mean that the drunkard could only blot up the amount of liquid equivalent to how much his body could hold. If he tried to absorb every single drop of blood from his victim, he would blow up. However, the drunkard was willing to undertake the risk.
PS: This ability would automatically bypass the aftereffect of mixing different blood types. After all, no matter what type your blood is, it would become alcohol when it's absorbed into Qing Jiuliu's body.
"In any case, I can instantly recognize that place the moment we reach it." Right after Lin Sanjiu had again pressed onto him to think harder about the surrounding original spot of the tobacco & liquor, Qing Jiuliu added another sentence under his breath, "...I'm more anxious to find the place than you are."
Like hanging a radish in front of a donkey, Lin Sanjiu had to take out a bottle of wine or a cigar now and then to force Qing Jiuliu to continue to move forward. If they came across a shop that sells tobacco or alcohol along with their journey, Lin Sanjiu would need to engage in a battle with Qing Jiuliu first before she could keep the new alcohol and tobacco into her card. The good thing was she only needed to take care of his hand, and she could effortlessly maintain the upper hand in every single of their physical exchange.
Both of them moved bit by bit and very soon they had covered almost half of the city. This was, nevertheless, merely their assumption as the borderline of the city had long been blurred by the erosion of the apocalypse, so they couldn't tell the exact scope they had actually covered. Two days whizzed past like lightning yet they didn't come across any building with deep-blue colored paint.
The longer she walked, the more anxiety she'd built up.
So many days had passed and the probability that Ji Shanqing would still stay in the same establishment was almost non-existence. Although she didn't know what had happened to him, the only thing she could do right now was to look around in the building for any clues that he might have left behind.
That was... only if she could locate the building.
After the seventh time he said "this pole looks familiar" to a certain telephone pole along the road, Qing Jiuliu threw himself to the ground, sticking his b.u.t.t firmly by the roadside and demanding Lin Sanjiu to give him a rest.
Lin Sanjiu couldn't do anything to make him move, so she sat next to him. After she thought for a while, Lin Sanjiu took out her [Tape Recorder] and have Qing Jiuliu to record "immune to crypt particle" into the recorder. Since the ability was a one-time use, she decided not to use this until the situation called for it.
"I wonder how you survive in the apocalypse world," Lin Sanjiu cast a sidelong glance at Qing Jiuliu and said. The latter was lying prone on the avenue, looking like a dead fish. "How many worlds have you gone through?"
The man whose face was hidden behind his beard and fuzzy hair raised his hand after a short while and drew a "six" in the air, surprising Lin Sanjiu.
"I only needed to live, what's so hard about that?" He was slurring his words, "I have been alive for such a long time, though I was drunk for the majority of the time… If I had to say, for me, dying is much harder than living."
"You wish to die?"
"Oh, no. I guess you have it wrong," The wine in the bottle suddenly went down a bit and Qing Jiuliu muttered, "We'll all die one day. I just wish that my death would come along either when I'm drinking, smoking, or when I'm having a good night sleep in a nice, soft, and comfortable bed. Girls… I'd prefer to not have them around me when it's time for me to return to His side. They would be too sad if they saw me die."
Lin Sanjiu couldn't think of anyone who would cry for him when he died. And he wasn't just talking about a girl; he was saying "girls" which means a lot of girls would be crying for his death.
Both of them kept each other accompanied by talking. She didn't know if it was because of the anxiety and pressure in her heart or because she hadn't been drinking any water for the past few days, but her parched lips were so dry that they felt like two old leather sofas. Sighing heavily, she stopped talking. Every word that was being said felt like somebody was holding a blade, cutting at her hollow and seared breathing tube.
"Why don't you drink some water?" Qing Jiuliu suddenly asked. Then, he waved his hands, "...Anyway, it doesn't really matter to me."
"Are you nut? Don't you know that we'll go crazy if we drink the water?" Lin Sanjiu chose to simplify her words into a more simple sentence, despite her original wish to demolish him with a stream of expletives.
"Did you become crazy after you drink the water, or you witnessed somebody go insane after he or she drank the water?"
"No... but, as long as it's exposed in the air…"
"Says who?" Qing Jiuliu said as he jerked up from the ground. He lit up a cigarette and placed it in between his lips as if he was proving something to Lin Sanjiu, "See? Like you said if the crypt particle would contaminate everything that has been exposed to the air, and it would turn a person into a nutjob the moment we put the contaminated object into our mouth, I should've lost my mind right now."
Lin Sanjiu was stunned. She didn't categorize cigarette as food, so she didn't think it that way. Right now, after Qing Jiuliu had explained to her, she felt that what he had said actually made sense.
"And we should've inhaled more than enough crypt particles when we breathed through our nose and mouth, yet we're still fine." Drawing her brows, she said to herself.
"So don't trust everything in this world as the rules are a bit strange. We won't have any trouble if we drink the water, but wine does not work that way," Qing Jiuliu let out a regrettable breath as his voice was getting lower and lower. "The process of drinking wine is a holy ritual. To fully admire the greatness of a finely brewed wine, we should first press the cold-stored glass onto our lips before taking a sip."
Lin Sanjiu didn't reply as she was fully absorbed into the thought that had just surfaced in her mind.
She could drink mineral water just fine, but not the wine… Smoking and breathing were safe...
The common point of food and wine, and the similarities between breathing and water…
Her body quivered at her thought.
If her conjecture was correct, then even though she found a way to remove all the crypt particle from the surface of the food, she would still become crazy if she ate it.
Raising her head, Lin Sanjiu was going to say something to Qing Jiuliu but she was stunned at what greeted her eyes.
Unbeknownst to her, the man had fallen into a deep slumber. His loud snore reverberated through the air. His sleeping posture was so bad that he had exposed his belly to a stranger.
It was just that she couldn't bring herself to leave him so vulnerable there.
She dragged him along the avenue to a small compartment that seemed to be the housing for an ATM. Even though the condition in the small compartment was awful and the ATM had been destroyed beyond recognition that it was now only a chunk of wire-filled waste iron, she still thanked God for the fortune as the door of this compartment was still left intact, albeit only half of it. After she'd stuffed the man that slept like a log behind the door, she was dumbfounded by what she saw when she straightened herself.
… Maybe God had listened to her prayer. She had spent a lot of time searching without any result, yet it now had appeared in front of her.
She was sitting on the ground just now so another building blocked her line of vision. Once she stood up, the slightly slanting deep-bl
ue building swum into her sight.
She never thought that Qing Jiuliu was actually right this time!
Lin Sanjiu's heart picked up its pace but she didn't submit to her delight to make any rash moves. She recoiled two steps backward and scrutinized her surrounding thoroughly. After she had made sure that nobody was around in the street, she took out two bottles of wine and a cigarette from her card and placed them beside Qing Jiuliu. After that, she ghosted across the blocks toward the office building.
The building was much shorter that it was in her memory. It appeared a little bit slanted and its bottom had chipped off—clear evidence of a collision. Though it sounded pretty impossible, the building looked like it was lifted by an invisible hand that had accidentally let it fall which resulted in the impact.
When she recalled her memories, it seemed that tobacco & liquor had the same collision mark as well.
The districts here were relatively well preserved. She found the scene very much similar to the scene before the arrival of doomsday, minus the charred shop lots that were licked by an inferno and wailing of people that drifted into her ear from far away at odd occasions.
Her destination was only a few hundred meters away from the corner she was at right now, yet Lin Sanjiu didn't proceed forward. She retreated two steps back and waved her hand in the air; the [Tornado Whip] then appeared within her fingers.
As if it felt it had burst his guise, a large shadow suddenly shot from the corner and collided with the small tornado Lin Sanjiu had released. Both of their attacks covered half of the sky and none of them were willing to back down from the confrontation. Nevertheless, the dead heat was short-lived. The tornado roared wildly in the air for only a few minutes before being swallowed up by the shadow at an unimaginable speed.
The moment the gale dissipated from the air, Lin Sanjiu had already tumbled back. Only then she saw the shadow that hovered in mid-air was a piece of red velvet cloth that reminded her of the stage curtain in the theater.