Chapter 16: CH 16

When the name “Meng Rongxuan” reached her ears, Chu Qianxun finally remembered when she met this person. 

In her first life, about a year after the demon seeds descended, Chu Qianxun returned to Lu Island after several setbacks. 

At the time, the name “Meng Rongxuan” was already resounding throughout the island. 

He was a hero, and countless people placed their hopes on him as if they were praying to a god at the altar. 

However, his own brother-in-arms slandered him, and in the end he was pulled off the altar and suffered a miserable fate. 

Back then Chu Qianxun was still weak and the disputes between big shots like them had nothing to do with her. She only remembered the day when a few enormous monsters crossed the strait and besieged Lu Island. Chu Qianxun hid in a cold, damp corner of the fortress, shivering as she watched the huge head of a monster appear from outside the high fortress walls. She desperately prayed that the hero standing atop the city walls would be victorious. 

That day, the sky above was thick with thunderclouds, silver snake-like lightning scattered in all directions, and the low, guttural sounds of monsters reverberated throughout the city. 

Chu Qianxun looked up from the corner where she was hiding, just in time to Meng Rongxuan on the high city wall, his profile illuminated by lightning. 

At that time he was the hope of the entire city. 

That was the only time Chu Qianxun had seen Meng Rongxuan. 

Afterwards, it didn’t take long to hear that he had died at the hands of his comrade in an internal fight. 

From what little she’d glimpsed of him during the day, Chu Qianxun couldn’t associate the white-collar office worker, wearing a dress shirt and neatly trimmed hair, with the once great hero of Lu Island. 

She stood up and walked out the door. 

“Q-Qianxun, where are you going when it’s raining this hard?” Gan Xiaodan called out to her. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Chu Qianxun’s figure disappeared into the curtain of rain. 

Though she had no friendship with Meng Rongxuan.

But after all, this is a hero who had protected the lives of an entire city, and Chu Qianxun had been just one of the thousands of people who was saved. 

Since it wouldn’t hurt her, she couldn’t watch Meng Rongxuan be abandoned by the roadside in the pouring rain.

Back then, even Meng Rongxuan’s enemies didn’t dare to recklessly dispose of his body, and held a grand funeral in his honor. 

Braving the rain on this dark night, Chu Qianxun found Meng Rongxuan on the side of the road, far away from the convenience store. 

He was abandoned under a billboard that did nothing to shield him from the heavy rain, soaked through with water and still unconscious. 

When Chu Qianxun returned with Meng Rongxuan on her back, everyone inside the store was shocked. 

Chu Qianxun didn’t acknowledge them, nor did she return to the side of Gan Xiaodan, Gao Yan and the others. 

Instead she took her backpack, placed the man in a corner far away from the crowd, and sat beside him. 

The cherry of a cigarette blazes in the darkness, illuminating the unpleasant silhouette of a man. He winked, and the two men beside him stood up and walked straight towards Chu Qianxun. 

“Little miss, don’t meddle in other people’s business. Our Wei ge said this person can’t come in,” one man said. 

“You’re pretty strong for your size. But if you fight wherever like this, us brothers can’t be bothered with you.” the other man skillfully flicked the butterfly knife in his hand. 

Chu Qianxun said nothing, pulling out a gun and using three fingers, pushed the safety off with a click. 

“A gun?” The two men stepped back subconsciously and glanced at each other, hesitating briefly before retreating to the smoking man’s side. “Wei ge, that girl has a gun in her hand, a real one.” 

Wei ge deeply inhaled, pursing his lips, and put out his cigarette on the floor, exhaling smoke through his nose.

“Forget it, I’ll go take a look.” 

A married woman in her fifties who was dressed fashionably confronted Chu Qianxun, “Little girl, it’s not us being unreasonable, it’s you who is intolerable. If this person becomes a monster, so many of us will be endangered.” 

Others in the store quickly chimed in. 

“Yes, yes, you can’t endanger everyone’s safety for one person.” 

“If you want to be a good person, go out and take care of him by yourself, a little girl carrying that big guy, tsk tsk.” 

Seeing so many people backing her up, the middle-aged woman couldn’t help but feel a little proud. She reached out to pull at Chu Qianxun: “It’s not that Auntie is flaunting her seniority, you should take him out. Auntie can’t let you harm us, and everyone else feels the same way–” 

She hadn’t yet finished speaking before something icy settled on her skin. 

It was the cold muzzle of a gun pressed against her forehead. 

Chu Qianxun didn’t speak, merely watching her indifferently. 

The old woman hastily waved her hands with the nails painted red: “This isn’t good, this isn’t good. Don’t be so angry, I’ll just go, just go.” 

She retreated in a panic, hiding behind her companion and no longer daring to speak. 

The chattering of the whole convenience store was silenced in a split second. 

The people surrounding Chu Qianxun quickly moved their things away from her, leaving a wide berth. 

Chu Qianxun didn’t care one bit. 

She shrugged off her soaking jacket, wrapped the blanket around herself. She still held her gun as she crossed her arms over her chest, then leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. 

Meng Rongxuan lay unconscious beside her, drenched and feverish, occasionally muttering incomprehensibly.

His body heat was so high that white steam was faintly wafting from his soaked clothes.  

Chu Qianxun curled up in her blanket and ignored him. 

In her heart, she was so envious that her teeth itched.

Burning so hot like this, it was a sure sign of obtaining a powerful ability. 

Fate was so generous, it’s a pity the person was foolish, and such a good hand ended so miserably. Hopefully in this life he would live a little smarter. 

But what did it matter to her? Tomorrow at dawn they would go their separate ways.

These super bosses entangled in their grievances, Chu Qianxun intended to stay far, far away. 

In this life, she had to avoid these troublesome and dangerous people, she just needed to live a simple life with her aunt’s family. 

When the sky grew a little brighter, Meng Rongxuan woke up.

Tonight he seemed to have walked through hell, sometimes as hot as boiling lava, sometimes as cold as falling into an icy cavern. 

You are reading story Apocalypse Arrival at novel35.com

It felt like his soul had been forcibly ripped from his body, and experiencing this agonizing process was sobering.

For a moment, he seemed to sink into a particularly strange state. 

All of his pain vanished in an instant, leaving only an incomparable sense of comfort and joy. From the depths of his soul emerged a deep desire, an intense desire for food: fresh, bloody food. 

He was instinctively afraid of this bloodthirsty state. Eventually he managed to restrain it, falling back into the abyss of pain, as if his whole body had been taken apart and restructured countless times. 

He didn’t know how long it took until this inhuman torture stopped. 

Meng Rongxuan opened his eyes to see an ant crawling across the floor in front of him. The ant had dark brown stripes, six feet, and two faintly trembling antennae atop its head. 

In the early morning after the rain, the distant sounds of birds and insects were unusually distinct to his ears. 

Meng Rongxuan didn’t understand what was going on. Clearly he had just recovered from a serious illness, so why was it that his vision and hearing became so sharp instead? 

He looked at the person sitting next to him. 

Although Meng Rongxuan couldn’t move at all last night, he was actually very clear-headed. He knew that someone had approached him in the heavy rain, carried him on their shoulders and brought him back here. 

Somehow that person turned out to be this delicate woman. 

The sleeping girl abruptly opened her eyes. In the morning light, her irises looked like ice-cold pools, and she turned away indifferently. Meng Rongxuan’s grateful words got stuck in his throat. 

“Awake?” Chu Qianxun said mildly, neither friendly nor distant. 

She glimpsed a few tiny, nearly invisible arcs of electricity flashing on the man’s body.

The boss is still the boss, everyone’s abilities are the same as last time, only she has turned into a weak chicken. 

Chu Qianxun took a bottle of mineral water from her bag and placed it in front of Meng Rongxuan. She promptly folded up her blanket and left. 

“Get up, we’re leaving.” Chu Qianxun informed Xiaodan and the others as she returned to their side. 

The people in the convenience store woke up one after another. Some, upon noticing that Meng Rongxuan was safe and sound, showed embarrassed expressions. 

The middle aged woman who’d insisted on driving Meng Rongxuan out muttered in a low voice: “A few days ago when the green moon appeared, the young man next door had a fever. Then his whole body became covered in scales and he devoured his old man. Aiyou, how scary, I didn’t talk nonsense.” 

Outside, Chu Qianxun sat in the passenger’s seat and yawned enormously. 

Last night she had to guard against the people around her and didn’t dare to actually sleep. 

Now she’s exhausted, so she told Feng Junlei and Gao Yan to take turns driving, planning to make up for her lack of sleep on the road. 

Someone knocked on the car window, and Chu Qianxun rolled it down, looking at the person outside. 

The young Meng Rongxuan still didn’t have the big boss aura he’d possessed in the later ages, and seemed a little shaky. 

Face glowing and eyes bright, he extended his hand through the car window: “Thank you, you’ve saved me twice. I have no idea how to possibly thank you enough. My name is Meng Rongxuan.” 

Chu Qianxun grasped his hand and shook it once politely: “Chu Qianxun.” 

She glanced at the van not too far away along with the trash people outside it, and added: “Take care of yourself, and don’t mind other people’s business. You’ll live a little longer that way.” 

The window rolled up and the Hummer’s engine roared, raising dust in its wake as it departed.

Meng Rongxuan was a little disappointed. He felt he still needed to gain experience fighting monsters. He wanted to ask if he could ride in Chu Qianxun’s car, but in the end was too embarrassed to speak. 

His colleagues pushed and shoved each other, and a girl squeezed out of the crowd.

It was the girl who was almost dragged from the car by the blasphemer, forcing Meng Rongxuan to risk getting out of the car to save her. 

She was a new saleswoman he had been teaching.

The girl stepped forward and timidly said “Meng ge, I’m sorry.” 

“Sorry, there was nothing we could do, the people in the room were fierce, and we were so scared.” Her eyes reddened as if she was the one who was wronged, and she reached out a hand to tug on the corner of Meng Rongxuan’s jacket. “Forgive us, Meng ge, okay?” 

“Yeah, we were wrong, forgive us.” 

“Also, we heard you would turn into a monster and were scared for a while, next time it definitely won’t be like this.”

Several people started talking all at once. Their leader, Meng Rongxuan, is the most well-spoken manager of the entire business department. No matter what his subordinates did wrong, as long as they behaved with the correct attitude and lowered their head in apology, he would forgive them and let it slide. This time he must do the same. 

Meng Rongxuan looked at this group of companions for a moment. Some of them had been alongside him for several years, some of them had just joined the company. All of them he had taught by his own hands. Every day, these people called him “Meng ge,” reminding him that they were still young. He was their senior, so all the responsibilities that had to be carried would be carried on his shoulders. 

Now he realized that age was not an excuse, and that the moment between life and death depended on human nature.

When it was truly dangerous, wasn’t the unfamiliar woman who saved him even younger than his colleagues? 

When that girl left, her expression– like she was looking at a fool –made him feel a little uncomfortable. 

He pulled the corner of his clothes out of his subordinate’s hand. 

“I’ll give you the car, you’re on your own from now on.” 

Meng Rongxuan turned and left without looking back. 

“What is he pulling? I thought he was still the manager. What are we going to do now?” 

“Just let him go, one less person leaves more room for us. I don’t believe we can’t go on without him.” 

Their faint remarks drifted from behind him. 

Those voices struck Meng Rongxuan in the heart. 

He raised his head and walked onward alone, holding only the bottle of mineral water in his hand. 

At this moment, he seemed to have let go of the burden on his shoulders, feeling a kind of light-heartedness he’d never felt before. 

Author’s afterthoughts:

This is also not the male lead. Because of the timeline, some male characters must appear before the male lead, so I can’t do anything about the male lead not yet being revealed.

Although Chu Qianxun and Cheng Qianye both have the “Qian” character, their personalities are completely different due to the different environments they’ve grown in.

There will be many characters with contradictory personalities in this book, and there are very few genuinely good people. I hope everyone can get used to it.

TL sidenote: Is Cheng Qianye a FL from a different novel by the author? IDK who she is T_T

You can find story with these keywords: Apocalypse Arrival, Read Apocalypse Arrival, Apocalypse Arrival novel, Apocalypse Arrival book, Apocalypse Arrival story, Apocalypse Arrival full, Apocalypse Arrival Latest Chapter