Roses on the Ruins

The thing Lu Chenzhou regretted most in his life was picking up a deadweight in the third year of the apocalypse.

The kid couldn't lift a finger to help, ate through supplies faster than anyone else, and clung to him all day, calling him “Brother Lu.”

Later, while saving the kid, Lu Chenzhou got his forearm bitten through by a zombie.

Before he bled out, he shoved the kid into a safe room, then leaned against the door outside and waited to die.

Through the haze, he heard a heart-wrenching cry from inside.

When he opened his eyes again, the kid was looking red-eyed as he licked Lu Chenzhou's wound.

The rotting flesh was healing at a speed visible to the naked eye. Lu Chenzhou: ?

Jiang Mian raised his tear-filled eyes and whispered, “Brother Lu, I think… I'm not human.”

Only later did Lu Chenzhou learn that Jiang Mian was the apocalypse's only “healing-type mutant.”

Everyone wanted to drag him into a lab.

Lu Chenzhou tucked him behind his back and held his Tang sword across his chest. “Touch him, and you'll have to step over my corpse first.”

Later still, atop the walls of humanity's last base, he held the boy who had once been his deadweight and watched the first rose bloom among the ruins.

“Jiang Mian.”

“Yeah?”

“There are only two things I've done right in my life.”

“What are they?”

“Picking you up. And then never letting go.”