The Stepmother

The village was like he remembered. Before the zombies, before Nanshan Estate, there was his life in Sun Village— the life before he lost his dad and the life after it.

Xu Zeng tried not to think about either time spent in Sun Village because both brought sharp pains to his chest. It seemed like a completely different lifetime, but it was only a mere year ago that he called Sun Village home.

From the Trick Chestnut Trees at the entrance of the village— the ones that held fruit that looked like Chestnuts, but were actually poisonous— to the thatched roofs and sparse tiled roofs, Sun Village seemed stuck in time.

He had grown and changed, but the village stayed the same. He knew the people had grown with the passage of time, and things wouldn't be the same, but the feeling of being frozen in time was still hard to shake.