13. Arrival at the Underground Base

Arrival at the Underground Base

It took us nearly half an hour to reach our destination, and Chi Li moved through those tunnels faster than any normal girl should have been able to—never mind that she was carrying an unconscious person wearing a metal exoskeleton the whole way.

If I had not had other things on my mind, the slowness of it would have driven me mad after tasting the freedom and terrifying speed of flight.

The narrow, dark tunnel suddenly opened into a vast room flooded with light so bright it almost hurt. The transition came so abruptly that it felt like missing a stair in the dark and barely catching yourself before you fell.

Chi Li carried Cheng Rui to a sturdy wooden table beside the small entrance, while I did my best not to stare with my mouth open.

The space was the size of a basketball court. Dozens of floating yellow-white spheres lit it from above, their combined radiance brighter than noon. The room was full of dozens—no, hundreds—of flowerpots, wooden tubs packed with soil, and even entire seedbeds where green plants flourished.

Someone had moved a large garden, or perhaps a small farm, into a gigantic underground chamber beneath the hellscape that the city had become.

“Grandma Lin! We have a wounded person!” Chi Li shouted.

The moment she broke the silence, a weathered old woman with a radiant smile appeared from beneath an apple tree—an actual apple tree, with actual apples hanging from its branches—and walked toward us.

She was about Chi Li’s height, but built as solidly as an oak, with thick, calloused hands and arms that might once have been as broad as mine.

She was Cheng Rui’s aunt. I had only seen her once from a distance, on the first day of freshman year, when she sent a mortified Cheng Rui off to school.

“Oh, you reckless, foolish child,” she muttered.

Her smile softened into something more restrained as she set down the basket of fruit she had been carrying and leaned closer to inspect the huge wound in the brown-haired boy’s side—the wound I was still struggling to keep sealed.

“I told him not to go out without armor. But when has he ever listened to me?”

The world flickered and distorted like a badly edited film.

Something violently unpleasant collided with me at the deepest level of myself.

A nauseating pressure wrapped around me from the inside out. Then that unseen force tore at me, and the next thing I knew the old woman was staring at me strangely, holding a bread box that had not been there a moment ago.

“Please take a few steps back,” she said, polite but firm. “Your negative energy almost ruined my cookies, and this is a fresh batch. It would be such a shame to waste them.”

“I can’t step back,” I told her, still dizzy from… whatever that had been, from the whole-body, stomach-turning impact it had delivered.

“I’m physically holding his wound shut so it doesn’t split open and let him bleed to death.”

This was obviously part of the old woman’s power, but I had no idea what it had to do with cookies.

“Now that the child is here, there’s no need for that.”

As she spoke, she took two red cookies from the box. The tempting scent of caramelized sugar and real butter spread through the air.

She pressed the first cookie to Cheng Rui’s forehead. Just as when Chi Li had done it, a pulse of energy traveled through his body.

I reluctantly took several steps back and watched his wound heal like a film running in fast-forward.

The healing was faster than my own regeneration, but less thorough. It left thick, ugly scars and weak, tender tissue. Still, it was far better than the alternative.

“Chi Li, will you watch him? I need to pick the strawberries before they over-ripen. I don’t want my idiot nephew choking.”

As she said this, she forced Cheng Rui’s mouth open and stuffed the two halves of the second cookie inside.

More of that energy began flowing through his body. The ugly scar started healing again, very, very slowly.

“That way, when he wakes up, I can give him a proper scolding. You understand.”

“I think he’d rather choke,” the red-haired girl joked in a hoarse voice, breaking into tears of relief. “What about… standard procedure?”

“You young people remember procedure now, do you?” the old woman huffed. “I knew you were fine when you were still a mile away. Your friend is a little too negative and stubborn.”

She gave me the kind of annoyed look all elders give juniors.

“But she is your friend.”

Her shawl and robe swirled. Then she walked into her underground garden and vanished.

An instant later, a weeping Chi Li flung herself around me. She almost crushed me. Even with two layers of supernatural protection, my ribs hurt badly.

“I thought you were dead… We’ve had so many infiltration attempts… People disappeared and came back twisted… Idiots like Yue Xiao willingly joined the monsters… I didn’t know what to think.”

She sobbed the words into my shoulder.

“I kept hoping… hoping you were still yourself… and I was afraid you weren’t. That you had become a monster. I…”

She started crying again.

I patted her back awkwardly.

“We couldn’t say anything until we were sure. I… I’m really, really sorry!”

I had never been good at handling emotions, except the negative ones. I supposed that was baggage from the past.

The advantage was that whenever this hell the city had become spat another horror at me, I did not immediately flee screaming.

The disadvantage was…

Sometimes you really did have to comfort a crying friend.

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” I said, a little clumsily.

I swallowed the confusion I had felt earlier, when the joking between her and Cheng Rui had not included me. That feeling that they had moved forward, changed, while I had not been beside them.

“If I were in your place, I would have done the same.”

“You… you really are…”

Chi Li stopped. She wiped at her tears with the back of her hand, her flushed, luminous face carrying the kind of color only natural redheads seemed able to have, and struggled to find the right words.

“Thank you, Sister Rin.

“I… Can we catch up properly after Cheng Rui recovers?” she asked hopefully, her voice trembling with a trace of the timid girl she used to be.

I was trying to come up with something clever, comforting, and worthy of a true best friend when two more people entered the underground garden.

The first was an old man in his sixties, with gray, messy hair and an equally messy beard. His weather-beaten face was ugly, but cheerful.

He dragged a huge hunting rifle and wore a green-brown leather duster that could not be buttoned over his round belly. In short, he looked like Santa Claus playing a big-game hunter.

The other was a tiny black-haired girl in black robes, about seven years old.

“Chi Li, is this the friend you mentioned? She looks very tense.”

Before Chi Li could answer, a pained groan came from the table, followed by the sound of metal striking wood, and then more groaning. Chi Li immediately leapt to the newly awakened Cheng Rui’s side.

I gave the curious little thing a glance, then followed my best friend over to the brown-haired boy’s still-pale body.

“How do you feel, nerd?” I asked, surprised he was awake at all.

Magical healing or not, he was still pale and drenched in sweat.