Chapter Fourteen: Murder

With a heavy sigh, Liu Chang continued walking forward, doing his best to avoid the anguished faces around him, to shut out the wails of despair, to ignore the cries of those on the brink of death and the weeping of their loved ones.

Yet the more he tried to block out these sights and sounds, the more keenly he became aware of every stir, every whisper of the wind around him. The pained expressions etched themselves into his mind, one after another, pressing on his chest until he could barely breathe.

He moved on, skirting the edge of people's vision, feeling like nothing more than a wandering spirit.

"Be good, listen—go and see what's happening in the hospital, and this lollipop will be yours." As Liu Chang drifted through the fog, another discordant voice reached his ears.

"No, I don't want to go." The reply was a little girl's sobbing.

"Will you go or not?" The first voice suddenly turned harsh.

This chilling exchange drew Liu Chang’s attention, shattering his resolve to remain indifferent. He followed the voices and soon saw three short-haired men.

One had a scarred face, another was heavyset, and the third had a hooked nose. All three wore the unmistakable "prison cut"—coarse, bristling hair cropped close to the scalp, somewhere between bald and unkempt. This style was so rare that among a hundred people, hardly one would have it. Yet here were three together, their identities plain as day—convicts.

Everything about them, from their looks to their bearing, screamed ex-convict. Though they weren’t clad in prison uniforms, Liu Chang was certain of what they were. Scars marred their faces and bodies, clear evidence of recent brawls. No doubt these three had broken out after the red mist descended, and their wounds were already festering and infected.

In front of them stood a little girl, six or seven at most. Clearly, they were strangers to her, and no adult guardians were in sight.

"I don’t want to go, it’s dangerous in there." The girl shrank back as the men barked at her.

"Danger, my ass. You’re just going in to take a look, nothing’s going to happen to you." The man with the hooked nose leered and winked.

"It’s dangerous in there..." the girl repeated, her voice already choked with tears.

At this sight, that suffocating sense of helplessness seized Liu Chang again—the eternal struggle between morality and survival threatening to overwhelm him. But he didn’t want to play the hero a second time. In this chaos, scenes like this were everywhere, far beyond his power to change. He refused to risk his life again for a fleeting sense of moral worth.

He swallowed hard, averted his face, and turned to walk away.

He had barely taken a step when the smack of a slap echoed behind him.

"You little bitch, you’ll do as you’re told! Enough with the whining!" The heavyset man’s voice grated in Liu Chang’s ears, harsh and jarring.

The girl began to sob.

Liu Chang clenched his teeth and kept walking.

But then came another sound that stopped him cold—the click of a switchblade snapping open, the sickening rip of blade against flesh, and the girl’s piercing, heartbroken wail.

"Goddammit!" Spitting furiously on the ground, Liu Chang spun around. The girl, once so fair and delicate, now had a deep, bloody gash running down her cheek, crimson soaking half her small face. She screamed in pain, but the three men before her showed not a flicker of sympathy.

"Goddammit!" he cursed again, and for the first time since the apocalypse, the self-styled calm and rational Liu Chang felt a white-hot, irrational rage. Pulling the scalpel from behind his back, he charged forward in three long strides.

In this thick fog, an ordinary person’s visibility was only three meters. Three meters—hardly more than a leap or two at a run.

Such a short distance.

So when Liu Chang drove his scalpel into the hooked-nose man’s neck, the man hadn’t even seen his face.

The blade pierced the artery; Liu Chang gave a practiced flick of the wrist, feeling the sudden snap as flesh and sinew parted beneath the scalpel. Blood sprayed in a wild arc. The hooked-nose man clutched his throat and stared, but the expression lasted only a few seconds before he collapsed in a heap.

Yet no one cared for him, or even spared him a glance. The remaining two men stared in terror at the young man who had burst from the fog, their eyes locked on his bloodied right hand and the dripping scalpel.

After ending a life, Liu Chang stood motionless, gripping his weapon, his gaze fixed just as intently on the remaining two.

"Who are you?" The scar-faced man was the first to break the silence after several seconds.

"A passerby," Liu Chang replied honestly. Killing for the first time was far from pleasant, but it had unleashed something within him. The moral burden he’d carried seemed to dissolve the instant his blade struck. A strange calm settled in his heart.

But while his mind was calm, his body was surging with adrenaline, leaving him trembling where he stood.

"A passerby?" The scar-faced man noticed Liu Chang’s trembling, recognizing him as an amateur acting on impulse, not a hardened killer. A sneer twisted his lips. "Kid, watched too many TV dramas, have you? Trying to play the hero? Heh. Too bad for you—being a hero isn’t as easy as it looks."

He flicked open his own switchblade; the blade was still stained with blood—so it had been this man who slashed the girl’s face.

At this, Liu Chang narrowed his eyes, said nothing, and retreated a few steps.

"What’s the matter, hero? Getting cold feet now?" Seeing Liu Chang fade into the fog, Scarface laughed cruelly. "You little bastard, don’t go playing hero if you can’t finish the job. Where’s that courage you had just now? Idiot!"

Standing at the edge of the mist, just beyond their line of sight, Liu Chang took several deep breaths, steadying his trembling body. His face was expressionless as he watched Scarface rant deeper in the fog.

Then, moving slowly, he circled them in a wide arc, stopping four or five meters behind his target—a distance where he could see Scarface’s every move, but the man was blind to him.

What happened next was simple. In two swift steps, Liu Chang lunged forward, driving the scalpel into Scarface’s spine. As the man screamed, Liu Chang yanked the blade free and disappeared, leaving only a convulsing, shrieking body behind.

"Ahhh! Ahhh!"

The agony of a shattered spine was unbearable. Scarface writhed, his upper and lower body no longer able to move in concert.

His screams finally roused the last man’s sense of danger. Only now did he realize how uncanny the young man’s attacks had been. Panicked, he made a choice—one both right and terribly wrong.

He grabbed the little girl.