The familiar signboards on the side of the road, the rusty cars, the newspaper leaflets scattered everywhere have gone dark, the tall office buildings are crawling with moss, and even the green grass is drilled out of the broken oil road, and the difference in the sky is too crazy to describe.

I stopped in front of a supermarket on the side of the road.

There are people inside.

I saw a thin, yellow-skinned girl hurriedly flipping through the shelves, unaware of my approach.

I didn't expect that there were still living people in the No. 1 work.

"This food is highly rotten, isn't it? Do you still need to turn them over? ”

I stood behind the girl and asked softly, and my sudden appearance made her scream in fright, and strode through the door.

Judging by the way she escaped, the girl was highly adapted to the rules of survival in the last days - she did not choose the main entrance of the supermarket, but escaped through the back door that had been left in advance, which was clever enough to avoid my accomplices lurking outside the gate.

But I had no accomplices, and I had no intention of hurting the girl.

I was still in the dark supermarket, and a few minutes later, the girl came back through the back door, and instead of running away, she hid in the dark and peeked at me.

She knew that I was harmless, so she plucked up the courage to step forward and said to me in a cold voice: "There is an excessive dose of preservatives added to the food, and there is no so-called expiration date at all." ”

"Where are you from? You don't understand such simple common sense? How did you get to where you are now? ”

No expiration date?

The girl asked me a lot of questions, I looked at her carefully, if I cleaned up, she must be the beauty of the symbol, but she was too embarrassed, her face was covered with black ash, and her smart eyes looked straight at me with playfulness and vigilance.

Seeing that I was eyeing her short hair, the girl frowned and explained, "Is it strange? All the girls cut their hair short, tied their breasts, and painted their faces with ash so that they would think I was a man......"

"Don't be afraid, I'm one of them." I asked curiously.

"You're certainly not." The girl smiled at me a little frivolously: "You have not killed anyone, or very few people, and you can see from your pampered clothes and clean skin that you must be from the cannery." ”

"Maybe your father is the director of the cannery, right?"

With that, she ignored me and continued to flip through the shelves.

"Canneries?"

"Yes, they take the poor and make canned food, and then sell it to the poor at a high price." The girl looked at me suspiciously as she put shabby snacks in her pockets: "You don't even know about the cannery?" Let me guess, your dad is from the Planning Bureau? ”

"The Planning Bureau controls the most supplies, they stand at the top of the food chain, and they are also the worst, worse than the canneries."

It turns out that even after the extinction, the people who survived still established civilization and class, and mutilated their own kind in a familiar way.

I shook my head slowly and told her very seriously: "My father is an ordinary farmer in Northeast China, but I have long lost contact with my family, they hate me, and I hate them even more." ”

The girl looked at me with some astonishment: "Where is the Northeast?" ”

I told her bluntly, "I'm from the real world. ”

"The real world? What about me? The girl's face became even more confused.

"The world you live in is just a painting, the name of the painting is destruction, and it was painted by my master's insidious peak."

The girl stayed for a long time, and then laughed out loud: "You guy, your brain is wrong. ”

"Then tell me, what do you do in the so-called real world?"

"Soul Painter."

"Can you draw something to eat?"

I didn't say anything, and the girl quickly ransacked the supermarket, in fact, there was nothing to scavenge here, she only found three bags of snacks in total, and they were all hawthorn chips, which would only make her hungrier if she ate them.

She poked her head out nervously, looked around the street, hesitated, and then turned to me and said, "It's getting dark, and those things will wake up after dark." ”

"No one can survive the darkness in the wild, and you are no exception, let's go, I'll take you to my house."

I followed her out of the supermarket and around to a low building.

"What's your name?"

"Xiao Zhu."

"My name is Shaxi." The girl didn't mind telling me her real name, there was a manhole cover on the road not far from the building, Shaxi found an iron hook out of nowhere, pulled it open with difficulty, and whispered to me:

"What? Come down. ”

"I thought you lived in the house." I took a deep breath and pointed to the low building not far away.

Shaxi said disdainfully: "Don't be naïve, no one dares to live in a building, after dark, those things will go around in groups to hunt for food, and the whole city will be turned over by them." ”

"No matter how strong the house is, it can't stop them, and the sewers are safe."

We climbed down the ladder.

The sewers had long since dried up, and Shaxi was feeling dark, and the familiar car took me to the end of the road, and opened the heavy iron gate with the key.

The world behind the door is far more lively than I imagined, the people in the slums, living here, on both sides of the corridor, are doors hung with white cloths, each door, representing a family.

There are even shops, arms shops, and vendors who set up stalls to sell things.

Unlike the dead cities on the ground, the sewers are another world entirely, and the people here are all tired and in a hurry, they have long been accustomed to seeing too much life and death, and they know very well the way of survival in this world, which is a numb, distorted and indifferent human face.

But almost every human face carries the most primitive greed and dirty desires.

In the No. 1 work, the sinister peak left a very strong will to destroy, but in the endless destruction, he used profound techniques to leave a glimmer of life.

I need to feel the No. 1 work and realize the higher realm of ink aura.

I had to fully immerse myself in the world of painting, and perhaps, Shaxi, which led the way ahead, was a good place to start.

Shaxi led me and walked past a bald man covered in sweat, who smiled evilly and slapped Shaxi's buttocks:

"Xiao Shaxi, don't think I don't know, you are a daughter, how old are you this year? Is there a 17? ”

Shaxi's face burned, stopped, and stared coldly at the bald head, the bald head licked his lips disgustingly, his eyes squinted at Shaxi's slightly immature body, and said foul language:

"What a beautiful little girl, her face is smeared with dust, and she can't hide the sweet and sour fragrance, Xiao Shaxi, come to my house when you're hungry, don't be shy, I have prepared a big piece of sweet potato for you."

Shaxi ignored her and continued to lead me forward, and a bald laugh came from behind: "It's useless if you don't agree, you will be mine sooner or later, and when I take you down, it will be your sister's turn." ”

After a while, we came to one of the hundreds of small rooms in the sewers, lifted the curtain, and Shaxi smiled at me and said, "We're home." ”

Family?

The so-called home is more shabby than the kennel, this small room is only two or three square meters in total, there are two blankets on the ground, a small broken square table, a kerosene lamp, some tattered girls' clothes on the wall, and a few bottles of muddy water in the corner of the wall.

On one of the carpets, there was a teenage girl lying down, I looked at her in horror, this little girl was actually very similar to the little girl I depicted in "Spring Blossoms", holding a red balloon.

What does this secret conjunction represent?

I mean, the insidious peak created the No. 1 work a long time ago, and my spring blossoms were created dozens of minutes ago.

In two works with very different styles, the characters overlap? Could it be that the scene of my creation of the spring male blossom had been predicted many days ago?

He's trying to use this overlap to wake me up, or to prompt me something?

"This is my sister." Shaxi breathed a sigh of relief, sat down beside his sister, and took out the hawthorn slices from his pocket.

"What's your name?" I crouched down in front of the little girl and asked her curiously.

"Sha Tian." The little girl replied in a milky voice.

Shatian, the word reminds me of chilled watermelon in summer.

"You don't have to look at me with sympathy, the cheapest thing in this world is sympathy." Shaxi said to me coldly: "I can take care of my sister, I go out to find food during the day, she stays at home, sometimes she is lucky, she can find rare dead limbs, and she can exchange them for a few days' rations at the merchant's place." ”

"No, you can't." I rudely snatched the hawthorn chips from her hand and threw them in the corner: "Don't eat this, the more you eat, the hungrier you get." ”

"What to eat?" Shaxi looked at me with some annoyance.

"Let's have some sweet potatoes first." I thought of the disgusting bald man before: "Shaxi, it's not the first time that person has done groping to you, right?" ”