Chapter 4: Nothing Holding Him Back — The First Bite Didn’t Taste Good.

The first bite didn’t taste good.

The mutated Venus flytrap’s trap was extremely rough—biting into it was like biting rubber, the taste sour and astringent, utterly impossible to swallow.

But the layer of red membrane beneath the deep green skin was delicious—chewy without being tough, sweet and springy.

A bit like gummy candy, Su Ze assessed coolly, and took another bite.

This bite broke through the trap, and transparent digestive fluid poured from the rupture, carrying a fresh botanical fragrance as it instantly filled his mouth.

Afraid of choking, Su Ze swallowed instinctively. The viscous liquid streamed in a steady flow down his throat and into his stomach, and before long, he’d drunk his fill.

Full—from drinking.

Feeling the unprecedented satisfaction spreading through his body, Su Ze’s eyes widened slightly. Mouth still wrapped around the hole he’d bitten open, he froze entirely.

The reason Su Ze could never eat enough before wasn’t that his appetite was enormous. In fact, his food intake was about the same as anyone’s—on the low side even among adult men.

The problem was that the food he ate couldn’t replenish the energy his body needed. It was like drinking water.

Without water, a person could survive seven days. On water alone, a month at most.

Su Ze was like that person living on water alone—alive, but only barely. He didn’t know how long the state could last; he only knew that if it went on, sooner or later he would die.

Ever since realizing that everything he ate amounted to the same thing, Su Ze had eaten only high-calorie snacks and convenience foods; he stopped working as soon as he’d saved up enough to cover a stretch of living expenses, and slept whenever he had nothing else to do.

If anyone had known the state of his life during those years he lived alone in Zhongdu, they would quite possibly have been terrified.

Because most of the time, he lay motionless in bed, like a dead man.

Now, for the first time in his life, Su Ze felt the fullness his brain released once his stomach was filled with “food.” Slightly dizzy with it, it took him a good while to realize: he could now absolutely break free of the mutated Venus flytrap’s coils and escape.

What a novel feeling.

Before, no matter how much he ate, it had been like filling his belly with “water”—uncomfortably bloated yet still unbearably hungry, limbs without strength.

Thinking this, Su Ze glanced at the mutated Venus flytrap, still diligently gnawing on him.

As a plant, a Venus flytrap—even a mutated one—had no brain to grow, and so failed to grasp its current situation of “failing to eat a human and getting gnawed instead.” Even with a hole torn in its trap and digestive fluid gushing out, it didn’t consider this worth its attention—just a hole in a leaf, nothing serious.

Only when Su Ze stood and started walking toward the kitchen did a vague thought form: The prey is escaping!

Absolutely not!

The mutated Venus flytrap immediately tightened its body, trying to restrain Su Ze, only to be carried along by him. It wasn’t until its massive trap slammed into the kitchen doorframe that it sensed something amiss.

Since when was the prey this strong?

Unfortunately, even sensing something off, the mutated Venus flytrap still followed its instincts, clamped down on Su Ze for dear life, refusing to let go of this hard-won prey.

Only when Su Ze brought the kitchen cleaver down on its body did it react and begin to struggle—but it was clearly too late.

A few strokes severed the flytrap at the waist. Face unchanged, Su Ze grabbed the still-struggling trap, held it above an empty glass jar, and collected the leaking digestive fluid.

The glass jar was a pickle jar Su Qiuyu used to use, sitting idle since she’d fallen ill. It turned out to be surprisingly suitable for holding corrosive digestive fluid.

Only after half the jar was filled—a good three or four pounds’ worth—did the mutated Venus flytrap stop struggling, looking close to death.

The digestive fluid was the flytrap’s digestive organ and also its lifeblood—its main component was water, which is vitally important to plants.

It had already gone a full week without water, surviving only by gnawing on the roots and stems of the other plants. Then last night, it had leaked all night trying to soften Su Ze up. This bit of digestive fluid was the last of its stores—losing it meant losing every drop of moisture in its body. Of course it couldn’t survive.

Su Ze shook the limp trap, and after confirming not one more drop would come out, he glanced at the dining room floor.

What a waste…

But no matter how hungry he was, Su Ze couldn’t bring himself to lick the floor. He could only turn his gaze to the mutated Venus flytrap’s body.

The outer skin was definitely inedible, but that red, gummy-candy-like membrane absolutely had to be peeled off. The body should be peeled open too—maybe there were more edible parts to be found.

Driven by appetite, Su Ze worked with full motivation and soon had everything processed—refrigerator items refrigerated, refuse balled up and stuffed into trash bags.

Only after tidying the room, showering, and changing clothes did Su Ze sit down in the living room with his phone, intending to check the situation outside online. But the moment he unlocked it, a glaring “No Signal” notice blinked in the upper left corner.

Su Ze frowned and carried his phone to the dining room windowsill to look out.

The aging complex had no greenery of its own, but there were street trees along the road outside. The wutong tree by the complex gate, previously about two stories tall, had shot up five or six meters overnight, its trunk a full size thicker around, its protruding roots cracking straight through the asphalt road like so many deep-brown giant serpents.

And among those roots, Su Ze faintly made out some fabric.

“L-Little Ze… Little Ze!” A suppressed, terrified voice came from not far away. Su Ze followed the sound with his eyes—it was Grandpa Liu, the next-door neighbor who, just yesterday, had been so forceful in proving Su Ze’s “wolfish ambitions.”

Su Ze looked at Grandpa Liu without speaking.

In the past, to conserve energy, he had always spoken little and done little. Now he’d eaten his fill, but no one knew where his next meal was coming from—so of course he had to maintain the fine tradition of energy conservation and low emissions.

Besides, he wasn’t particularly inclined to engage with people who gossiped about him behind his back.

Grandpa Liu felt a bit guilty under Su Ze’s gaze, but steeled himself to ask: “Do you know what’s happened?”

Su Ze shook his head.

“You don’t know either? Th-this—what are we supposed to do…” Grandpa Liu’s hands shook with anxiety. “This morning I went out to buy groceries, and when I got to the complex gate I saw a person being eaten by a tree… The tree was eating people! How can a tree eat people…”

Seeing Grandpa Liu grow more and more frantic, Su Ze finally spoke: “Did you hear anything last night?”

Grandpa Liu froze. “…No, I took a sleeping pill and went to bed. Didn’t hear a thing… Little Ze, did you hear something?”

Su Ze thought for a moment, then shook his head. Last night he’d been busy playing hero against the evil weeds, his attention entirely on the mutated Venus flytrap—and later he’d been too dizzy with hunger to pay the slightest attention to his surroundings.

“Then what do we do? The phones won’t connect… what do we do…” Grandpa Liu spun in circles anxiously. Seeing Su Ze silently watching out the window, his eyes lit up. “Little Ze… how about you go out and take a look? Think about it—of everyone in this complex, you’re probably the youngest and strongest. Compared to us old-timers with our old arms and legs, you can run! Go outside and see what’s going on, then come back and we’ll figure out a solution together…”

Under Su Ze’s gaze, Grandpa Liu’s voice dropped lower and lower until it nearly vanished—then abruptly rose again: “I’m not asking you to go die! But you know how things are in our complex—everyone’s kids are either out of town, or there’s no money and the whole family’s crammed in together. Those of us with families in tow really don’t have the freedom you do, with nothing holding you back…”

“Fine.” Su Ze agreed, and turned back inside.

“Really?!” Grandpa Liu cried out in delight, then realized how loud he’d been and hurriedly clapped a hand over his mouth, backing away from the windowsill.

Su Ze went into the kitchen, fished a glass jar out from among a pile of bottles and containers, and filled it with the mutated Venus flytrap’s digestive fluid.

Truthfully, even without Grandpa Liu’s performance, he’d planned to go out and look around anyway.

With his five senses beyond the ordinary, Su Ze had long since detected all manner of strangeness. But what exactly had happened still required investigation.

Besides, in just this little stretch of time, he was already getting a bit hungry.

Taking a sip of digestive fluid, Su Ze licked the residue from the corner of his lips and estimated how long his remaining supplies would last.

A day at most.

The digestive fluid was mostly water—there was energy in it, but strip out the moisture and the actual content wasn’t much. As for the red membrane, it looked bouncy and chewy, but the energy it held was worth even less than the fluid.

Unwilling to starve again, Su Ze would have to take the offensive.

Refilling the jar once more, Su Ze screwed the lid on tight, took a container of the red membrane from the fridge, and picked up the kitchen cleaver from the cutting board—he needed something for self-defense, after all.

With everything packed into his backpack, Su Ze opened his door. He’d just reached the top of the stairs when Grandpa Liu’s tremulous voice came from behind.

“B-be careful… If you really c-can’t manage, come back…”

Su Ze glanced back at the old man peeking through his door crack, nodded silently, and continued downstairs.

At every floor, he paused in the stairwell to listen carefully to the sounds behind each door. By the time he reached the ground floor, he had a clear picture of every household in the unit.

Five floors, ten households including his. One home was deathly silent inside, with a thick smell of blood; one had neither sound nor blood-smell; two had the smell of blood and coarse, inhuman panting; the remaining five had no blood-smell and the ordinary noise of human activity.

Six of ten households surviving… roughly a 60% survival rate. But the precondition was that the family who’d left had survived, and he himself obviously couldn’t count as a data point.

So the actual survival rate was around fifty percent.

Drawing a deep breath, Su Ze walked out of the stairwell with his backpack and came to the complex gate, looking at the roots at his feet.

…Up close, they looked even more like snakes.

As for that fabric—unsurprisingly, it was clothing. And the person who’d worn it was there too, though only a thin layer of skin remained stretched over the skeleton, a bit like the mummies from third-rate horror flicks, except not so desiccated—instead there was something disgustingly slick and greasy about it.

And the blood? Where was the flesh? Su Ze wondered. He took the kitchen cleaver from his backpack, raised his hand, and chopped down at the root!

Clang!

It was clearly wood, yet the sound rang like struck metal. Su Ze looked at the gash—less than three millimeters deep—in the root, eyes narrowing slightly. Only after a long moment did he shift his gaze to those skeletal remains.

The remains beneath the roots lay flat, clothing intact, form complete, the whole body pressed under an interlocking mesh of roots in a bizarre sleeping posture—with the roots serving as the blanket.

After a while, Su Ze rose and looked around, only to find that the other street trees hadn’t changed at all—despite the fact that they were all wutong trees.

Puzzled, Su Ze circled the mutated wutong tree before him. Its trunk circumference had at least doubled, and the territory its roots occupied covered roughly thirty square meters, spanning the entire street and blocking the complex gate outright. As for height, there was no need to even mention it—one look up gave the impression of a canopy blotting out the sky.

More importantly, Su Ze found seven or eight sets of skeletal remains among its roots—mostly human, with only two belonging to animals.

Looking at the remains in the roots that clearly belonged to a large dog, Su Ze prodded the root beneath his foot, somewhat puzzled.

Its appetite looked perfectly good. So why is it so quiet now?

The cleaver couldn’t cut it, and he couldn’t very well set it on fire. Was he supposed to go get a chainsaw?