CHAPTER 86: SCRAPING PUS AND DIGGING OUT ROTTEN FLESH

"They traded a thousand pounds of my wheat for apples a while back; their house must have surplus grain!"

"They still have so much to eat but refuse to share with us who are starving. Let’s stand together—if they don’t hand it over, we’ll smash the door and seize the grain!"

"Seize the grain! Seize the grain!"

This group of men and women was barely clothed due to the searing 43°C heat.

Smeared with a thick layer of mud to insulate against the heat, some squatted by the door while others, standing on stones, tried to climb the wall that had been heightened by several meters. A few even threw stones into the courtyard.

The eco-friendly car beeped its horn, headlights illuminating this crowd in tattered clothes, their bodies blackened like wild men from Africa, revealing their fierce faces and the sticks and knives in their hands.

At this point, they started converging on the car.

Grandma Jing gripped Jing Shu’s hand in fear.

Jing Shu quietly comforted her, stepped out of the air-conditioned car into a wave of heat, slammed the door shut, and fired a shot into the sky. With the BANG of the gunshot, the people in front of her immediately froze, staring at Jing Shu in terror as they scrambled back.

"You have three seconds to leave, or I’ll shoot. There are twelve bullets left in this gun, and you can very well try your luck to see if they’ll hit any of you."

"It’s just one gun, what’s there to fear, let’s take it..." someone still attempted to come closer.

"BANG!"

This person hadn’t even finished speaking when he was shot in the abdomen, and a cry of agony rang out instantly. The surroundings erupted in chaos as everyone ran, leaving no one in sight except for the man who lay on the ground wailing.

The gate slowly opened a crack, and a flashlight beam came through. A big man uncertainly asked, "Is that you, Jing Shu? ... Mom? What brings you here? Dad? Little brother-in-law, are you here too? Come on in quick, drive the car in and we’ll talk."

The big man was Wei Chang, Aunt Jing Pan’s husband. Compared to the honest and simple Aunt Jing Pan, Wei Chang was much shrewder and more astute. He opened the heavy double iron gates so Mr. Jing could drive the car inside.

Just then, two more figures suddenly ran out of the darkness, one of them shouting as she ran, "Mom, brother-in-law, it’s me, your little sister! Just now there were so many people at the door we didn’t dare come out."

Jing Shu squinted. Wasn’t this Jing Zhao, her second aunt whom she hadn’t seen in over a decade? The person following her was her cousin, 26-year-old Li Yun, who used to bully her whenever they met as children.

Looking at her second aunt now, her once 180-pound frame had slimmed down to 150 pounds. She wore a blackish-gray robe drenched in sweat, her lips were chapped and bleeding, her baggy pants colorless, her hair disheveled, hardly distinguishable from a beggar.

Cousin Li Yun was wearing only beach shorts, his face and body covered in dirt, his lips parched and peeling, and the smell of his athlete’s foot was detectable even from a distance. Jing Shu quietly kept her distance from them.

"How did you get here? Why didn’t you stay safe in the city, with all the chaos outside?" Grandma Jing scolded.

Second Aunt Jing Zhao hung her head, and Cousin Li Yun spoke up, "Grandma, my parents were arrested, remember? My mom was just released a few days ago, and my dad is still in jail for re-education. We’ve run out of food at home, so we came to ask for some from Aunt’s house."

Only then was Grandma Jing shocked. "Why were they put in jail? How come I didn’t know?"

Everyone kept it from you.

Standing to the side, Uncle Wei Chang affectionately pulled Grandma Jing aside and changed the subject. "Mom, Dad, you’ve come all this way. Why don’t you go inside and rest for a bit? Jing Pan has been worrying about you, and it’s too dangerous outside."

The family hurried into the house, closing the heavy iron door behind them. Grandma Jing, concerned about her eldest daughter, led everyone across the yard and into the house.

Aunt Jing Pan’s house was located in the town, where land was cheap. The courtyard was over two hundred square meters; the upper right corner held the squat toilet, the upper left corner the entrance to the apple orchard, with the vegetable garden in the middle, a root cellar in the lower right corner, and the main gate connected to the lower left corner. A row of houses occupied the far right, with the whole property measuring approximately 500 square meters.

When Jing Shu had visited in her past life, the building was still made of earth. Six or seven years earlier, the government had implemented beneficial policies, providing subsidies for construction materials for urban and rural housing. As a result, every household built beautiful homes with red bricks and green tiles, adorned with ceramic tiles and painted with emulsion paint, with the courtyards paved in cement—decorated almost like those in the city for less than a hundred thousand yuan.

Before the apocalypse, such a property, including the land and well-built house, was worth only around two hundred thousand yuan; the apple orchard and several acres of land beyond it were actually state-owned.

The closest neighbor was 300 meters away...

Jing Shu looked up at the wall which had originally been 2 meters tall but had now been redone in concrete and raised to over 5 meters, topped with densely packed nails and barbed wire.

There were many piles of young rotten corpse insects by the doorway, a sign that there had been a corpse, although it had been devoured. Uncle Wei Chang’s choice to ignore the person screaming on the ground indicated that he had grown accustomed to it.

It seemed that Aunt Jing Pan’s situation was not as troublesome as Grandma Jing had worried; Grandma Jing always said that her elder aunt was too naive and honest, fearful that she might be taken advantage of.

Once inside the house, the elder aunt lay weakly on the traditional brick bed. Grandma Jing, full of energy, went straight to Jing Pan, scolded her first, and then inspected the wound. The wound wasn’t deep, just a long cut from a kitchen knife, which would have needed at least twenty stitches before the apocalypse.

Jing Pan’s wound had merely been cleaned with alcohol and bandaged with cloth to stop the bleeding. Now, the wound hadn’t healed properly and was inflamed and oozing pus; the surrounding flesh was already rotting.

"Look what you’ve done to yourself... Where can we get medicine for you now?" Grandma Jing scolded as she tapped Aunt Jing Pan’s head. Mr. Jing, who had been silent, finally said, "Enough, leave the child some dignity."

Jing Shu took out her medical kit. "Gran, step aside. I’ve brought medicine."

A crowd gathered around, looking at the wound with lingering fear. They watched Jing Shu calmly treat the suppurating area; even the hand holding the flashlight trembled.

Jing Shu cut away the cloth, scraped off the pus, and removed the rotten flesh with steady hands and quick speed, as if it were not human flesh but a large pig’s trotter... She then applied an antibiotic ointment and Yunnan Baiyao aerosol for hemostasis, added a single drop of No. 3 Spiritual Spring, and then wrapped it with a bandage, leaving only a three-day course of antibiotics.

While Jing Shu had plenty of medicines, they were all reserved for emergencies, as they would become increasingly precious over the ten years of the apocalypse.

Applying the Spiritual Spring directly to the wound was something Jing Shu had only recently considered. The previous use of a single drop for Wang Dazhao had made her heartache, but she later wondered if applying it directly might be more effective?

After conducting experiments with No. 1 fat chicken and a regular chicken—enduring the difficulty of making even a small cut on the tough-skinned fat chicken—she found through numerous trials that No. 3 Spiritual Spring had a remarkable effect on external injuries, especially for those who frequently consumed it.

This discovery excited Jing Shu, as it was another survival skill for the apocalypse. It seemed she needed to make time to study the additional functions of the Magic Cube Space more thoroughly.

Lately, the fat chicken had been dodging Jing Shu sorrowfully, but whenever she called out for mealtime, it would hurriedly come trotting over, quite amusingly.

"It’s not serious; it’ll heal in three days," Jing Shu said lightly as she packed away her medical kit. Although, of course, without the Spiritual Spring, it might have been different...

Only then did the family breathe a sigh of relief, as though a great weight had been lifted.