Su Ze was racing through the forest at that very moment.
The white figure, swift as lightning, stopped at intervals—listening intently, fixing the direction, then setting off again—a phantom threading through the trees.
His lips pressed into a thin line, his face grave as still water, some indescribable emotion flickering in his eyes as he chased the sound drifting from up ahead, until it grew clearer and clearer—
“Quick… run! Quick, run! Run! Run—!”
Cries of desperate urgency echoed through the dense forest, interwoven with the roar of a wild beast—tragic and brutal.
For some reason, Su Ze’s heart pounded, his nose stung, the corners of his eyes burned. Something buried deep inside him was being pulled by that voice, surging toward the surface…
The next second, the view suddenly opened up—fallen trees lay ahead, forming a clearing, where a Giant Bear reared up on its hind legs, relentlessly attacking the shrub before it.
The Giant Bear stood about three meters tall. Its front paws alone were nearly the size of a human head, its jet-black claws like drawn blades—each swipe shearing off countless branches.
It attacked and roared at once, and within that thunderous rumble was tangled the furious shouting of a man.
“Run! Quick, run! Run—!”
Only then did Su Ze understand. The cries for help he’d heard had come from the Giant Bear itself.
The sensation of being swept up by that emotion vanished in an instant. Su Ze reverted to a rational, detached third party, standing in the forest’s shadows, silently observing the scene.
The Giant Bear bore obvious traces of mutation—its swollen body and razor claws proved as much. As for why it was attacking the shrub…
Su Ze shifted his gaze, studying the shrub closely. A moment later, his pupils contracted. The next instant, branch in hand, he burst from the trees and hurled himself high at the Giant Bear—in a blink, driving the branch into its left eye!
“Run—!” The Giant Bear let out a keening wail, tangled with words it could not comprehend, and its massive paw abandoned the shrub to claw at its own face.
Su Ze, whose strike had landed, used the branch buried in the bear’s left eye as a pivot, twisted his hips, and swung up onto the back of its skull—dodging the paw by a hair’s breadth.
Sensing the enemy behind its head, the bear flipped a paw around to snatch at him, but Su Ze dodged nimbly, gripping its fur. After several failed attempts, the bear bellowed, dropped to all fours, and charged at a great tree.
Su Ze didn’t panic. Seizing the bear’s ears with both hands and wrenching his waist with all his strength, his whole body—weightless as a falling leaf—flipped into an inverted hang.
The next moment, his arms coiled and snapped out, and he launched himself clean off the bear’s back!
The instant his feet touched ground, the bear slammed sideways into the great tree, snapping that two-arm-spans-thick trunk clean in half!
Seeing this, Su Ze plucked up another branch, charged in at an angle, and drove it upward through the gap as the bear heaved itself upright!
“Run! Run—!” The Giant Bear’s screams rang through the forest. It flailed its massive paws wildly, trying to seize Su Ze—but blind now, it could only spin in place.
Su Ze had already withdrawn beyond its reach. Among the fallen trees he found a branch thick as his forearm, snapped off the forked twigs by hand, and kept working until it had been trimmed into a sharpened wooden stake.
Testing the stake’s weight, Su Ze carried it, closing in on the bear step by step. Timing the moment it threw its head back to howl, he dropped into a half-crouch, gathered force in his legs, and shot out like a loosed sword—ramming the stake straight down the Giant Bear’s throat!
Seconds later, the Giant Bear crashed to the earth. Su Ze glanced at the stake jutting from the back of its skull, then turned and walked toward the shrub.
Up close, he examined the plant—roughly two meters tall and three meters square—and the longer he looked, the stranger it seemed.
First, the shrub had no leaves—only bare branches, gnarled and interlocking, forming a cage-like lattice.
Second, it wasn’t rooted in the soil at all. Every branch emerged concentrated from a single side, like a crooked-neck tree, with no visible root anywhere, and its growth pattern was deeply strange.
Whatever. Deal with it later. Saving people comes first.
Thinking this, Su Ze bent down to peer through the gaps between branches and addressed the people hiding inside. “Are you alright?”
Yes—there were people inside the shrub. More than one.
The reason Su Ze had changed his approach and struck first was precisely because he’d seen them.
The two hiding within were a man and a woman. The woman looked very young, draped bodily over the man’s back in a protective posture. Her face was bloodless, her eyes shut tight, and she seemed to be enduring extraordinary pain.
The man she shielded so desperately beneath her was an old man—graying hair, deeply lined face, curled motionless on the ground. He had already fainted.
At the sound of Su Ze’s voice, the young woman lifted her head slightly and opened her eyes, her voice weak and hoarse. “…Who?”
Her eyes were not the dark brown common among Hua State people, but a striking green, like mountain lakes. At the moment, though, her pupils were unfocused, her mind seemingly adrift—veiling those two lakes in a mist-like gauze.
“My name is Su Ze. I’m—”
Before he could finish, the woman’s eyes suddenly lit up, her voice rising with excitement. “Are you a survivor from the ‘Gale’ Squad? Where are Little Lu, Little Wang, Captain Zhou—where are they?”
Su Ze was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry. I’m not with the Gale Squad…”
“Then the new squad the Military Region sent… Teacher, he’s here—take him and go, leave me! Call the helicopter right now… No, no—we can’t call a helicopter!” The woman suddenly cried out, then just as quickly clamped her mouth shut, her face full of terror, her whole body trembling.
Su Ze wasn’t good at comforting people. Seeing that the woman showed no sign of calming down anytime soon, he decided to get her out of the brush first.
No sooner thought than done: Su Ze reached out, took hold of a branch, and pulled hard.
Crack!
“Ahh—!”
As the branch snapped, the woman screamed—and from the ragged break, transparent sap threaded with wisps of blood welled out instantly.
Only then did Su Ze realize: this shrub hadn’t grown out of the ground at all. It had grown out of the woman’s body.
“You…” Su Ze’s pupils trembled faintly.
In the village where Wu Chengzhi lived, he had seen plant life in human form. From their state he could infer that they had all been humans parasitized by plants—flesh converted into nutrients, transformed into walking plant culture dishes.
But the young woman before him was completely different. Her condition, rather than a plant parasitizing a human, was a human fused with a plant—just like Lin Xiuzhu. Two entirely different species, merged into one by some eerie power.
Looking down at the broken branches in his hand, Su Ze tossed them away, somewhat flustered. “You… are you okay? I’m sorry, I didn’t know… Can you retract these branches?”
Though Su Ze had wounded her unintentionally, the pain seemed to have jolted the woman’s consciousness awake. Her eyes gradually cleared, her pupils no longer adrift, and fixed on Su Ze’s face.
A long while later, the woman murmured, “Are you… an elf?”
Su Ze: “…?”
Several more minutes passed.
Su Ze took hold of the branches. “I’m snapping them now, okay?”
The young woman, a branch as thick as three fingers clenched between her teeth, nodded.
Seeing her face bloodless but her gaze firm, Su Ze drew a deep breath and yanked with both hands!
Crack!
Most of the branches snapped clean off. The woman let out a muffled grunt—and the branch between her teeth gave a soft crunch. She had bitten clean through it.
These branches had grown from her own body—they were, in effect, parts of her. Snapping them off alive was no different from hacking off her own limbs.
The violent pain threw the woman’s body into convulsions, her eyes rolling back as she pitched toward the ground. Fortunately, Su Ze reacted in time, catching her in one motion and laying her down on the open ground nearby.
Only now could Su Ze truly see the mutation that had overtaken the woman.
It wasn’t just her eyes that had turned green. Her hair had shifted from black to a deep forest green, the strands far thicker than an ordinary human’s. Beyond that, she had retained a basically human form.
The branches growing from her flesh did not burst through the skin, nor sprout directly from its surface, as one might imagine. Instead, fine translucent filaments emerged one by one from her pores, wove themselves into a net across the skin, and only then grew into branches.
No wonder she couldn’t retract them… Su Ze’s gaze darkened slightly. He turned, ducked into the half-collapsed brush, and carried out the unconscious old man.
Unlike the woman, whose clothes had been shredded to near indecency, the old man’s field jacket was filthy but whole; apart from a few scrapes, he was unharmed. One look told you he had been carefully protected.
Recalling the woman’s protective posture over the old man—and how she had mistaken him for Military Region rescue personnel, instinctively urging him to carry the old man out first—Su Ze concluded this old man had to be someone of no small importance.
With that thought, Su Ze walked over to the dead Giant Bear, lifted one ear to raise its head, and carefully examined the structure of its mouth.
Sure enough—two sets of vocal cords. One normal; the other seemingly grafted straight from another species.
Thinking of the urging cries the Giant Bear had produced, of the words the woman had said, and of the old man’s condition, Su Ze released the bear’s head, his face blank.
An old man of great importance had entered Changling Mountain for his own reasons, never imagining the apocalypse would erupt and trap them in these mountains. The military had sent rescuers. The man had been found—and they had crossed paths with a Mutated Giant Bear.
Everything Su Ze had observed indicated that most creatures, even mutated, still behaved on instinct—hunting when hungry, resting when full, possessing none of the imagined malice. But the state of this Mutated Giant Bear proved that not every Mutated Creature respected the laws of nature.
And more—the Mutated Giant Bear had fused the vocal organs of another species. That was plainly selective fusion mutation. Would an ordinary animal do that? Furthermore, the bear clearly couldn’t understand what its own roars meant—so what purpose did fusing that organ serve? Luring prey? Disguising itself? Or no purpose at all—just another blind accident of apocalyptic mutation?
Or… a trap laid deliberately for humans?
Because the Mutated Giant Bear had fused a rescue soldier’s vocal cords and kept bellowing that nameless soldier’s final furious shouts, Su Ze himself had been pulled toward it by an emotion he couldn’t name…
Gazing at the bear’s corpse, Su Ze’s brow locked tight, and for a long time he did not move.
