RIACMET chapter 171

 

“So that’s how it is… Brother Jing detonated his crystal core… Where are the others now?”

Jiang Nian muttered to himself, a sharp pain suddenly rising in his eyes.

Piecing things together from his memories of his previous life, he was now certain that Chen Yue was telling the truth—but he was still hiding how he died.

Chen Yue paused for a moment before replying:

“In the previous life, Cheng Jing stayed at Base S from the beginning. He didn’t have friends like he does now. Maybe he wanted to avenge you on his own and didn’t want to drag anyone else into it.”

After awakening his superpower before the apocalypse, Cheng Jing went straight to Taipei to find Liang Yunhao and report to the authorities for help.

When the apocalypse hit, Cheng Jing stayed in Taipei and joined Base S from the start. His only friends were Liang Yunhao and Yang Kai.

Though they came from influential backgrounds, they ended up under house arrest at Base S with Cheng Jing’s family after helping him discover that Jiang Nian was imprisoned in Base Z.

Of course, that was also tied up in the power struggles among the base’s higher-ups.

His family and friends were imprisoned, and his ex-boyfriend was murdered. Base S was the mastermind behind it all, which pushed Cheng Jing to go dark and spiral into madness.

After bringing Jiang Nian, who had become a zombie, back to Qingyun City and calming him down, Cheng Jing somehow found a zombie king to act as his assistant.

With the zombie king’s help, they were captured and locked in an underground chamber in Qingyun City. There, they were tortured inhumanely and then butchered and fed to zombies.

Intent on dying, Cheng Jing and the zombie king brought Jiang Nian to Base S. Together with Xia Weiwei’s father and the other researchers involved in the human experiments, they died alongside the test subjects who were ready to fight to the death. In the process, they blew up the base’s core area.

The authorities then ordered Southern City Base to send troops to suppress the uprising and hunt the zombie king back to Qingyun City.

His memory broke off there, and Chen Yue trembled involuntarily. These were things that couldn’t be spoken aloud.

“…”

Jiang Nian stayed silent, thinking back to what Zhao Lei and the others had said. It seemed that everyone really did die when the acid rain fell in their past life.

Brother Jing had been inside Base S and hadn’t received any advance warning. He had been fooled from the start.

Seeing Jiang Nian lower his head in sorrow, Chen Yue took the opportunity to say,

“Jiang Nian, I know you and my dad had conflicts before the apocalypse. After it began, we lost contact and couldn’t protect you. You have every right to be angry, but—”

“But what?”

Jiang Nian looked up at him with red eyes. His voice was sharp as he gritted his teeth.

“Are you saying that you cared about me and that families shouldn’t hold grudges? Are you saying that just because you treated me well in the past, I should be kind to you now and we can all be nice to each other?

“I…”

Chen Yue clutched his chest, his expression twisting in discomfort.

“What I’m saying is true. With what I remember from the last life, we can avoid Base S’s traps. Weiwei changed after the apocalypse. We won’t follow her to Base S again. For the sake of our half-sibling, please help me, Jiang Nian.”

Before the apocalypse, he and Xia Weiwei were a sweet, innocent campus couple. Afterwards, with Base S’s manipulation and Professor Xia’s involvement, everything changed.

It was true that Xia Weiwei had been good to them, but it was also true that she’d used them.

He had always thought his girlfriend came from a decent family—gentle, kind, and naive. He never expected her to be so calm, shrewd, and calculating. She played every card to perfection, never once acting softhearted or sentimental.

“What you’re saying might be true. But are you seriously done now?”

Jiang Nian stared at him. When Chen Yue froze, he continued asking question after question:

“Don’t try to guilt-trip me with blood ties! Were you really good to me in the last life? Didn’t you yell at me for selling the house without asking Chen Shanmin first?”

“Didn’t you lock me in a basement to be used as an experiment and a backup blood bank? After stealing my superpower crystal core, didn’t you pump me full of a nutrient solution mixed with anesthetics so that I couldn’t die properly?”

“… ”

Chen Yue’s slow-moving brain stalled for a long while before finally kicking in. His face changed drastically.

“You…how could you…?”

Jiang Nian ignored him and pressed on.

“You took my crystal core and dumped me like garbage! Chen Lin injected me with a drugged nutrient solution, left me at Base Z, and forced me to watch myself get torn apart!”

“…”

The sudden flood of memories made Chen Yue’s pale face look even more lifeless. His breathing turned ragged.

“You…you’ve awakened your memories, too?”

Jiang Nian didn’t give a direct answer. He simply stared at Chen Yue coldly.

“When you regained your memories and realized how different things were in this life, didn’t you ever wonder why I didn’t want to be with you?”

“…”

Cough, cough, cough.

Chen Yue was so furious that he leaned forward and coughed up a mouthful of dark red blood.

Things he hadn’t been able to figure out before suddenly clicked into place. It was as if he had just seen the truth for the first time.

This was why Jiang Nian wasn’t normal. The changes didn’t start with him; they started when Jiang Nian remembered his past life. That’s why he avoided everyone in this life and waited for a chance to get revenge.

Jiang Nian triggered the butterfly effect!

He wasn’t the one favored by fate—Jiang Nian was!

“…”

Chen Yue trembled with rage, overwhelmed by helplessness and resentment. After a moment, he suddenly burst out laughing.

“Hahahaha…”

“So that’s it. No wonder your reaction was so off. Hahahaha…”

“You never planned to help us from the start…”

Cough, cough, cough—

“… ”

“Let’s switch roles. Would you have helped me?”

Compared to Chen Yue’s rage and hysteria, Jiang Nian asked the question calmly.

In his past life, he had experienced despair. He had resisted, begged, and obeyed, yet in the end, he only experienced betrayal, moral blackmail, and exploitation.

Even dying had been a luxury. Just because he didn’t want to take care of Chen Yue and had tried to end his own life, they tortured him more after dragging him back. He wanted to die, so they kept him teetering at death’s door, over and over again.

“…”

Chen Yue didn’t answer. He raised his hand and touched the collar around his neck. His expression twisted, his breathing became rapid, and blood trickled from the corners of his mouth.

Watching him cough up blood and seeing his face contort with rage, Jiang Nian felt relieved. He stepped forward, closed the distance, and looked down at Chen Yue.

“I want to know everything—from when you left Base Z until the moment you died.”

He wanted the full truth. He wanted every disgusting detail this bastard was still hiding.

Chen Yue gritted his teeth.

“You’re not letting us go anyway. Why should I tell you anything?!”

If there was no hope of survival, he would take those secrets to the grave.

“Why?”

Jiang Nian pulled a steel pipe out of thin air, something he’d picked up on a supply run earlier, and smiled coldly. It had already smashed countless zombies, and its length was perfect.

He stepped forward and rammed the pipe straight into the wound on Chen Yue’s right shoulder. With a twist and a shove, the infected, rotten flesh split open again.

“I can keep you sane and make you watch yourself rot over and over again! If that doesn’t work, I’ve got a few special concoctions from that perverted doctor that’ll make you talk.”

He had just taken several tubes of the doctor’s concoctions from the room next door. Of course, he didn’t take them all—he saved some for Tang Ji.