Ch96.1 – Paradise
The scene in the Golden Crow Wheel was extremely calm. The pale sunlight illuminated the ruins, colouring it with a sense of desolation. Zhou Sheng looked at it for awhile and didn’t see any danger. There was even the ferris wheel that they had ridden on before in the projection.
“Go in to take a look?” Zhou Sheng said, “Wait under the ferris wheel?”
Yu Hao kept silent while filled with doubts. The master of the dreamscape was someone he knew in reality, and someone who had dreamt of him too, which was why the Golden Crow Wheel could show him this scene.
Zhou Sheng and Yu Hao looked at each other. Yu Hao nodded, and Zhou Sheng said, “It doesn’t look dangerous, and the sun’s still there too. If we end up separating, stay put and wait for me. I’ll summon my dragon over.”
Yu Hao and Zhou Sheng took a step forward and jumped into the Golden Crow Wheel at the same time.
A glaring light flashed; Yu Hao stood in a deserted playground. A gust of wind blew, and not far away was the ferris wheel where Zhou Sheng had confessed to him. Leaflets were swirling in the wind, and messy piles of cardboard could be seen everywhere. The cold light from the sun spilled down. This place was like a scene from a wasteland science fiction movie, and not a single person could be seen.
“This amusement park again?” Yu Hao said to himself.
At first, Yu Hao doubted if it could be Cen Shan’s or Fu Liqun’s, or it could even belong to the people from the sports class who were with them at the amusement park that day.
“Zhou Sheng——”
He shielded himself from the scorching glare of the sun and raised his head slightly. He saw a dragon fly out of the sun — Zhou Sheng had summoned his mount over. Yu Hao ran over to the ferris wheel in large strides and waved at the sky.
Suddenly, Yu Hao heard a soft rustling nearby.
“Zhou Sheng?”
Yu Hao passed by the restaurant in the amusement park and saw a figure inside. Was it an NPC? He took a few steps forward and looked inside through the French windows. The tables, chairs, and food within the restaurant had been knocked over and were strewn all over the floor.
Within the reflection in the French window, Yu Hao clearly saw that behind him, staggering from side to side with clothes that had been torn into tatters, a human-like monster with a rotten skull staring straight at him.
Yu Hao’s hairs immediately stood on end. Immediately following which, that zombie let out a vague cry and lunged towards him! Yu Hao almost didn’t react in time, but within that short instant, the instinct that he had polished through his innumerable experiences in dreams kicked in, and he jumped to one side, avoiding that monster. The rotten monster smashed into the French window with a loud “thud”, and a large mass of brain paste spattered out!
Two monsters, three monsters; Yu Hao turned around, lifted a mop in a corner, and stabbed at the monsters that had rushed forward to send them flying. At the moment when the monster rushed right in front of him, its appearance became much clearer.
“Whose dream is this?! Why are there zombies??!” Yu Hao blew up as he shouted.
Previously, in an American series that Fu Liqun often watched, there were a lot of walking corpses. When Yu Hao watched the show with Fu Liqun, he saw those characters more than once, and these monsters looked exactly the same. He had no time to even think about what would happen if he got bitten, or whether or not he would recover; his only desire for survival prompted him to start escaping. Fortunately, at this critical moment when everything was hanging by a single thread, the parkour that Zhou Sheng taught him came in very handy. Yu Hao jumped onto the haunted house from the back of the amusement park restaurant and ran quickly along the haunted house, then rolled onto the roof of the merry-go-round. When he looked back——
——that one glance was horrible; there were hundreds of zombies that had been startled by Yu Hao, and they were rushing over from all sides!
There were no more buildings beyond the roof of the merry-go-round. Yu Hao was about to jump into the verdant plantation to escape using the trees as his cover when the whole world suddenly shook!
Zhou Sheng was currently racing at top speed with a group of zombies chasing him from behind. He roared, “Wife! Where are you?!”
Zhou Sheng was extremely fast; ordinary zombies had no chance of outrunning him at all, and he was familiar with the amusement park as well. After several twists and turns, he instantly shook off the zombies who were hot on his heels. While he was climbing up the winding stairs to the roller coaster, the earthquake began; Zhou Sheng lost his footing and nearly fell down, but he immediately wielded his jingubang to jam it between the stairs. He flipped and sat on the jingubang, then looked into the distance.
The black dragon left the pale sun in this dream world and flew towards the earth. Zhou Sheng whistled, reached the top of the winding stairs in a few steps, then turned around and landed on the black dragon’s back. He raised his hand and beckoned to summon his jingubang back.
Yu Hao slid down from the roof of the merry-go-round and immediately fell into the center of a bunch of zombies, then got held down by a zombie that opened its mouth wide to bite him on the spot. Yu Hao shouted again, made a 360-degree maneuver, kicked the zombie in front of him to send it flying, then pulled the zombie behind him over his shoulder to hurl it away!
The earthquake stopped.
“Zhou Sheng!” Yu Hao broke free of his predicament and ran away quickly. He passed through the fencing of a flowerbed, rushed past a grassland, and ran towards the ferris wheel. Following which, another earthquake started, and this time, the earth began to tilt, turning the grassland into a slope. Yu Hao was caught off guard and almost slid right into the group of zombies that were chasing him!
The earthquake this time was even more violent than the one before. The world spun crazily; the ferris wheel tilted under the earthquake’s violent tremble, and a carriage was flung out, smashing straight down with an impact that shook the earth.
Yu Hao, “……”
Yu Hao dashed through the slope and jumped over innumerable ferris wheel carriages that were rolling towards him. More zombies emerged from both sides to pursue him, but they were all getting hit by the carriages one after another and rolled down the slope. Yu Hao felt like he had been thrown into a large-scale Temple Run game and roared angrily, “What the hell is all this?!??!”
“Wife——!”
“Zhou Sheng!”
Dragon fire spewed out and ignited the zombies with a blast. Zhou Sheng swung his jingubang out, knocking away a ferris wheel carriage that almost rolled onto Yu Hao and flung it towards the zombies behind him! However, even more zombies pounced onto the black dragon; some held onto its tail while others grabbed its wings, and within an instant, they all began to weigh heavily down on the dragon.
Yu Hao was dashing away on the ground. The black dragon roared, then rushed towards Yu Hao. Zhou Sheng stretched his hand out, and Yu Hao leapt and flipped in mid air.
Zombies closed in on him from both sides. Yu Hao jumped into the air, and Zhou Sheng caught him around his waist. The black dragon violently kicked off from the ground, beat its wings, and left behind two deep footprints in the ground as it suddenly leapt up.
“Hold on tight!” Zhou Sheng roared.
Yu Hao immediately hugged Zhou Sheng tightly out of pure instinct. The black dragon unfolded its wings several meters from the ground and did a massive spin to shake off all the zombies that were on it. Yu Hao felt a bout of dizziness before landing on the dragon’s back again. The black dragon soared into the sky and flew up high!
“Fuck, this is Gege’s dream? All he watches are zombie movies……” Zhou Sheng looked back at the earth.
“Roller coaster! Watch out!” Yu Hao shouted.
Just as the black dragon flew up and was looking back at the zombies below, the roller coaster track in front of them had collapsed amidst the earthquake and was falling down on the two men and dragon. Zhou Sheng suddenly turned his head, and they shouted loudly at the same time. The black dragon almost got hit, but Zhou Sheng pressed down on the dragon’s head violently in the nick of time and the black dragon disintegrated into light particles before vanishing. Following which, Zhou Sheng hugged Yu Hao with one hand while he grabbed the roller coaster track with his other, then along with the collapsing roller coaster, they plunged straight into the lake outside the amusement park.
“AAHHHHH——”
The roller coaster track that was nearly twenty meters long plunged straight down, taking the two of them along as it crashed into the lake. Yu Hao could hear a loud ringing in his ears; he was submerged, but Zhou Sheng grabbed him with one hand and dragged him out of the water.
Yu Hao couldn’t stop coughing by the lakeside. Zhou Sheng rubbed his back and looked to his right and left. His fingers shook the jingubang; it shrunk and turned into a golden circlet, then he casually put it on his head at a slanted angle.
Yu Hao, “Is your birdie alright?”
Zhou Sheng, “That’s not a birdie!!!”
Yu Hao started laughing. Zhou Sheng kept an eye on their surroundings at all times and whispered, “Don’t make too much noise. Walk along the surrounding walls, and get out as soon as possible.”
“What about your dragon?” But Yu Hao was worried about the dragon instead.
“It went back for now.” Zhou Sheng said, “It’s too big of a target and frightens the zombies too easily. We can summon it back once we find a safe open space. For now, we need to figure out what kind of place this is first.”
Yu Hao said, “Apocalypse, zombies, and earthquakes. This is seriously too weird.”
Zhou Sheng saw three zombies that were wandering around in the distance and said, “Only the apocalypse and zombies, or rather, there are only zombies. The apocalypse is caused by the zombies.”
“Then what about the earthquakes?” Yu Hao frowned.
“Earthquakes only just started in this dream.” Zhou Sheng said, “Look, all the buildings don’t look like they collapsed because of the earthquakes; it might have been a result of the influence of the outside world on the dreamer.”
Yu Hao recalled that one time in Chen Yekai’s dream when the turbulence he experienced on the plane caused tremors in his dreamscape.
“So the master of the dreamscape is on a plane too?” Yu Hao guessed.
“Even more violent than a plane.” Zhou Sheng gestured with his hand and made a tilting motion, “What do you think it seemed like when the earth turned into a slope just now? I think it was like a car braking.”
Yu Hao, “Oh yeah!”
They passed by the secret CS game room. Yu Hao continued, “Dreaming in a car…it wouldn’t be Gege, could it be sis-in-law?”
“I don’t think so.” Zhou Sheng said, “It was just a guess before we came in, but after seeing how there aren’t any living people and only zombies here, it’s almost certain who this dream belongs to. Think about it, who would think that everyone in the city are ‘walking corpses’?”
“Is it him?!” Yu Hao instantly felt enlightened; the indifference of society to many things, garnering attention at the cost of one’s blood and life — who else could it be but Ou Qihang?!
Zhou Sheng opened the door to the equipment room of the Wargame in the amusement park, “It’s him for sure. Let’s hurry and look for him.”
Yu Hao said, “This is a paint gun.”
“I’m guessing that it’ll be useful.” Zhou Sheng said, “Do you remember how he said that on the day he met you, he had just finished playing paintball? If he likes playing it, then the paint gun should be a pretty impressive weapon in his impression……”
Before anyone could register it, Zhou Sheng wielded a submachine gun in one hand, turned around rapidly and put the gun on Yu Hao’s shoulder, then fired a shot!
Behind Yu Hao, a zombie that was rushing forward got shot. Its head exploded before it fell to the ground.
“Go!” Zhou Sheng threw the other gun to Yu Hao and whistled at the same time. The black dragon rushed out of the pale sun again and flew towards the earth!
Yu Hao held a gun and shouted, “It really does work!”
“There are too many zombies!” Zhou Sheng said, “Get out of the amusement park first and find a place where there’s no one around!”
