The lighting in the room was quite good; William Carter immediately saw a middle-aged man lying on the bed, smoking homemade tobacco, with a fairly voluptuous young woman lying beside him. One of her breasts was being kneaded by his strong hand.

The middle-aged man, seeing Lauren Harris bring someone in, made no attempt to cover up at all. He simply sat up halfway and lazily asked, “What is it?”

When Lauren Harris saw this scene as she pushed the door open, her brows furrowed slightly as she said, “Chief, I found another person in the abandoned City No. 18 who had been asleep for fifty years and just woke up.”

A trace of displeasure flashed in the chief’s eyes. He looked William Carter up and down and said, “Lauren Harris, haven’t I told you before? Stop bringing back useless people. Our resources are not abundant. If it’s a beautiful woman, that’s one thing, but what use is a useless grown man?”

“But…” Lauren Harris wanted to explain, but the chief impatiently waved his hand and said, “Enough, that’s it! Take him to where the other useless people live and find him something he’s capable of doing. We can’t afford to keep idlers in the tribe.”

William Carter hadn’t spoken a word from start to finish; he was looking at the woman on the bed. She wasn’t a great beauty—at best, she could only be considered somewhat attractive. In such a harsh environment, perhaps beauty’s only use was to please the strong, in exchange for a bit of safety and a full meal.

Lauren Harris angrily led William Carter out of the wooden hut, looked up at the sky—now covered with dark clouds at some unknown point—and complained, “Is this still the ambitious chief from a year ago? Is this still the tribe that used to feel so warm? Why is it that after just a year, as soon as the tribe started to develop a little, everyone has changed like this?”

“That’s something you need to think about.” William Carter patted Lauren Harris on the shoulder and said, “Can you tell me which hut is mine?”

Lauren Harris pointed to a more dilapidated hut not far away. William Carter quickly picked up his fire axe and walked toward it—his comrade was there, a comrade he could reunite with after fifty years of slumber.

Pushing open the door, which looked like it could fall apart at any moment, a dark, damp stench wafted out from inside the hut.

“I really don’t feel well today, please, don’t make me work… please, don’t torture me anymore…”

William Carter saw a man, a little over five feet tall, in the dark room, now so thin he was just skin and bones, kneeling on the ground, banging his head repeatedly. If it weren’t for the two particularly glaring scars on the man’s bare upper body, William Carter would never have recognized him as his old partner, the good brother David Clark who had saved his life twice! Those two scars were left when David Clark had used his own body to shield William Carter from bullets.

“Brother, I owe you my life.”

David Clark’s body convulsed in pain, but he still managed to put on that reassuring, wooden smile.

“Brother! Damn it, I owe you my life again!”

David Clark had been wheeled out of the operating room and was lying on a hospital bed. Even though his face was pale, he still forced a silly smile.

The man from back then, the savior from back then, the brother who had faced life and death together, was now kneeling on the ground, kowtowing over and over.

William Carter strode forward and pulled David Clark up, giving him a slap across the face.

David Clark, stunned by the slap, saw the indescribably complex expression on William Carter’s face and froze.

Waaah—

David Clark threw his arms around William Carter and burst into tears. Even when he was hovering on the edge of death, even when bargaining with the King of Hell about whether to enter the “register of the dead,” this iron-willed man had never shed a single tear. But now, he couldn’t stop the tears streaming down his face.

William Carter stood quietly, letting his old comrade, his good brother, hold him and weep. Looking at the countless scars on David Clark’s body, at the several new wounds that still exposed bone, William Carter knew his friend needed to let it all out.

David Clark cried for a full hour and twenty-seven minutes before stopping. William Carter could easily keep track of the time—this was a basic skill for special forces soldiers.

William Carter had David Clark sit on the bed, then took out the few emergency wound care supplies he had from his combat uniform. As he carefully cleaned the deep, bone-revealing wounds on David Clark’s back, he softly asked, “What happened?”

“Ah…” David Clark groaned softly from the pain, as William Carter stitched his wounds without anesthesia. Sweat instantly beaded on his forehead, but he gritted his teeth and said, “I woke up a little over a month ago. For some reason, almost all my strength was gone. The strength I could use was about that of an eleven- or twelve-year-old child. I thought I was done for, but the people here saved me. Who would have thought, once they found out I was useless, they started resenting me for wasting food. The leaders here, along with some young men, even forced me to use my body to help them set traps to lure and catch those mutant creatures. These injuries are from dodging for my life—otherwise, I’d be dead already.”

When William Carter was stitching up the last wound on David Clark’s body, he ran out of suture thread.