He Guying had Director Hu summon all the senior leadership of Yicheng Base, as well as all the researchers and technical staff from the research building. He then explained the entire matter of the Waterlin organization and, in front of everyone, formally handed over the vial of serum.
As the vial was taken away, both He Guying and Zhao Changyue seemed to feel as if a huge weight had finally been lifted from their shoulders. From that moment on, they had completely drawn a line between themselves and their past.
Xin Xiaoru patted the two of them on the shoulders. “Let’s go. We’ll bring back an experienced old farmer to take a look.”
When people heard that a farm in the outskirts needed help, many farmers eagerly signed up. Not only elderly men and women over sixty-eight with nothing to do, but even many younger people wanted to go to Youzhuang. The reason was simple: the flying RV was incredibly popular in Yicheng.
Going to Youzhuang meant becoming a subordinate of the RV’s owner. And being the RV owner’s subordinate meant getting to live in an RV with air conditioning and electricity.
Was there anything more tempting than living comfortably in air conditioning during the height of summer, without any burdens?
Xin Xiaoru walked among the many applicants in the plaza. In the end, she didn’t choose any young, strong workers, but instead picked a small elderly woman in her early seventies.
Her farmland didn’t need to occupy Yicheng’s prime labor force, and Xin Xiaoru herself didn’t currently need to hire anyone to farm. Even if she later decided not to farm and wanted to hire laborers, she still needed to learn and practice farming herself so she would know what she was doing and wouldn’t be deceived in the future.
An elderly woman with farming experience was just right.
Most importantly, this woman was a typical elderly rural resident, very short, and not someone who took up much space inside the RV.
In theory, the RV’s layout allowed four people to sleep inside if they squeezed. Two could sleep on the bed when it wasn’t extended, and two on the sofa when it was pulled out.
However, when the bed wasn’t extended, its length was just the width of the RV, only 1.75 meters. Its dimensions were 1.75 by 1.0 meters, which meant two petite women could barely squeeze in together.
The bed was positioned quite high, level with the top of the sofa backrest. It could be pulled forward along the grooves in the sofa and the surface of the adjacent storage cabinet, turning into a 1.75 by 2.2 meter bed. Sometimes Xin Xiaoru, He Guying, and Zhao Changyue would all lie together on this single bed that took up almost the entire floor space of the RV. Sometimes they lay side by side; other times the two taller men lay together, with their feet slightly hanging off, while Xin Xiaoru slept crosswise at the rear of the vehicle, which also served as their pillow area.
As for the sofa, once pulled out, its length was sufficient, it extended all the way to the passenger seat, filling the passageway in front of the door and bathroom compartment, reaching a length of 1.9 meters, enough even for tall people to sleep on. However, its width was significantly reduced by the bathroom compartment and storage cabinets, leaving only about 1.0 to 1.2 meters.
As a result, bed arrangements for the three of them were always awkward. Either they extended the bed and all three squeezed onto the large bed; or they didn’t extend it, with Xin Xiaoru sleeping alone on the bed while He Guying and Zhao Changyue slept on the long-but-narrow sofa; or they extended both the bed and the sofa, sleeping on both sides, but the person on the sofa would end up sleeping almost pressed against the underside of the bed, with only their upper body exposed. Sometimes even turning over would result in bumps and collisions.
Later, after the space upgrade, once He Guying’s off-road RV was stored in the extra-dimensional space, their sleeping options expanded significantly. They could all sleep in He Guying’s larger RV, with plenty of choices among double beds, sofa beds, or single beds. Still, because the three of them had long been used to squeezing together, they subconsciously tended to choose the smallest-framed person, someone who could sleep anywhere without issue.
And so, late August passed amid their regular routine.
During the day, they stayed in Youzhuang, farming, weeding, and killing pests. At night, the RV carried them back to Yicheng Base, hovering in the air with its headlights turned on to facilitate nighttime construction. While workers labored below, Xin Xiaoru had the RV enhance its soundproofing and slept inside the airborne vehicle.
With the nighttime lighting problem solved, the base no longer needed to work under the intense daytime heat and solar radiation. Many able-bodied workers began living nocturnal schedules, resting by day and working by night.
At the same time, many others spent the daytime fully reclaiming land for farming, developing every cultivable part of the 400 square kilometers available. There was no time to worry about damaging vegetation or the environment, everything was focused on growing crops and keeping as many people alive as possible.
The ability users weren’t idle either. The base assigned specialized researchers to study and record the patterns behind each ability user person’s training and leveling, helping everyone become familiar with their abilities. In particular, those with military backgrounds combined military-style management with ability training, learning to control their powers, improve precision, appropriately stimulate their potential, and increase their overall output.
Of course, to avoid wasting abilities, the captains of each ability user squad also linked ability training with base construction. While training, they earned rations such as rice, flour, oil, and salt as wages, expanding their own reserves.
He Guying and Zhao Changyue had both been rigorously trained by an organization. Seeing the training methods used by Yicheng’s ability user teams made them itch to join in. Whenever they felt something was off, they would adjust things themselves, then raise questions and offer reference suggestions.
Without anyone really noticing, the RV trio and everyone at Yicheng Base, top to bottom, had blended together, becoming a very special cooperative sub-team. The special mission on the notice board in Xin Xiaoru’s mind—【Establish a friendly relationship with a base】, quietly changed to a “completed” status. All that remained was to finish the upgrade task, after which they would gain a hotel that could be placed independently, or, more accurately, a collective dormitory.
While He Guying and Zhao Changyue were busy training, Xin Xiaoru wasn’t idle either. She diligently followed the elderly woman, learning a great deal of farming knowledge and taking extensive notes. The bok choy in the terraced fields, growing crookedly at first, began to thrive at a pace visible to the naked eye, showing excellent growth.
Seeing the good results, and with the number of snowballs He Guying could condense increasing day by day, Xin Xiaoru reclaimed another patch of land. On the elderly woman’s advice, she planted carrots, cauliflower, peas, crown daisy, and more, keeping herself happily busy every day.
Compared with the orderly chaos of the base and Youzhuang, the rest of Yicheng had long since descended into utter disorder.
Originally, the zombies had already been wiped out by the military, the police, and high-combat individuals like He Guying. Yet for some unknown reason, people continued to turn into zombies one after another without any apparent cause.
These zombies weren’t captured immediately. They went on to cause trouble, scratching and biting people everywhere.
When Xin Xiaoru happened to encounter them, she would take her blade and deal with them. If she ran into more agile zombies, usually those with deeper mutations that had already evolved crystal cores, she would swiftly crush their heads, extract the cores, and give them to He Guying and Zhao Changyue to absorb.
She didn’t keep this to herself. She informed the base about the spontaneous appearance of zombies and the existence of ability crystal cores. The base immediately took it seriously and began enforcing a curfew.
Aside from able-bodied workers who worked at night and could move about under the protection of Xin Xiaoru’s RV, anyone else found moving around at night would be arrested on sight by ability user patrols and expelled from the base depending on the circumstances.
The government also called on everyone to closely observe the condition of family members and friends living under the same roof. If anyone showed symptoms such as fever or abnormally dilated pupils, it was to be reported immediately. If the person could be restrained first and then reported, that would be even better.
For a time, everyone in Yicheng Base was on extreme alert, jumpy and suspicious, seeing potential mutation in everyone they looked at.
This level of vigilance was effective. Those wandering the streets at night were almost always zombies, making it easier to kill them promptly without mistakenly harming others. When abnormalities were discovered during the day and reported to the police, the police could also kill the individual before full zombification, saving both time and effort.
However, while the zombie problem was brought under control, there were still many malicious incidents.
The most typical cases involved people who disliked each other getting into violent fights, or families with elderly members deciding the elderly were useless and only wasted food. They would kill them, then wait until the pupils naturally dilated after death before going to the police, claiming the person had turned into a zombie.
When the police determined that the victim was not a zombie, the perpetrator would wail and cry, saying things like, “It’s all my fault! I was too sensitive! I’m so sorry—I killed you…” and so on.
After some discussion, the base’s senior leadership decided that regardless of truth or falsehood, all such people would be expelled from the base, with the reasoning: “Someone so ‘perceptive’ should be able to survive in the dangerous outside world.”
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People who tried to stir up trouble dropped sharply, and more people began to follow police instructions properly when identifying zombies. If there was even a bit of uncertainty, they would bind the person and ask the police to confirm, rather than acting rashly on their own.
Thus, under the forceful implementation of various measures, Yicheng Base remained relatively safe.
Outside the base, however, chaos only continued to worsen.
For example, in some residential compounds, water supply and drainage systems broke down. No one was willing to repair them for free, and no one was willing to spend their ever-dwindling supplies to hire repair workers. With water becoming scarce, filth in the toilets couldn’t be flushed away, and entire streets grew increasingly foul.
Whenever Xin Xiaoru traveled back and forth between Youzhuang and the base, the stench was so overwhelming that she would rather detour along other roads.
By early September, there were far more zombies on the streets than the month before. On September 7, another solar magnetic storm struck. Brilliant auroras appeared in the sky, and countless people collapsed under the stimulation of radiation.
The next day, zombies erupted on a significant scale in many parts of the world.
Data compiled in Huaguo on the second day showed that, aside from the 62 cities that had lost power, or rather, bases, the probability of zombification elsewhere reached 6%.
On the third day, reports from the various power-cut bases, combined with uploaded data from nearby cities that still had electricity, revealed a stark contrast: during the magnetic storm, only 0.5% of people in power-cut areas became zombies, a tenfold difference. Power outages worked.
Because many of the cities that had cut power had experienced problems similar to the Yicheng riots, they were forced to shrink their managed zones. This allowed police and military forces to concentrate more effectively, while ability users gathered in large numbers, often in the thousands, and followed unified command. Any sign of zombification was dealt with immediately, and astonishingly, no zombie tide erupted.
In contrast, in other cities, the original 6% who had turned into zombies were not effectively contained. They continued scratching and biting people around them, causing zombie numbers to skyrocket.
The most chaotic places were those that, like Yicheng, had been designated power-cut cities but chose not to follow official guidance and endure the hard labor. From the very moment the magnetic storm arrived, it was all but decided that these places would become living hells.
After dealing with the zombies inside the base, Xin Xiaoru’s group of three, together with Yicheng Base’s ability user teams, formed squads to eliminate zombies outside.
They rode in Xin Xiaoru’s RV to zombie-dense areas, turned on loudspeakers to warn civilians to stay away, then used the commotion to draw zombies in. From elevated positions, they released area-of-effect abilities, killing as many zombies as they could.
Everyone’s abilities were still very basic. Although these were technically group skills released from above, allowing them to kill zombies without injury, their power was limited. Many attacks only slowed the zombies’ already sluggish movement rather than killing them outright. Left alone, most injured zombies could heal within two hours.
So after creating some obstruction, the group would park on the rooftop of a nine-story building, keep broadcasting through loudspeakers to lure zombies up, kill as many as they could when the zombies reached the top, and once they could no longer keep going, take off in the vehicle and leave.
Similar zombie-clearing scenes played out in many places, but the results were minimal, better than nothing, at best. For every hundred zombies killed by ability users, thousands more might already have been infected elsewhere. The scale on both sides was completely mismatched.
Many cities resolved that, no matter how hot the weather, they would cut power citywide to slow the spread of the zombie virus, but it was already too late.
On September 17, all cities, whether they had already cut power or not, were plunged into darkness.
The magnetic storm that, in the previous life, marked the full arrival of the apocalypse swept across the globe. Satellites, communication networks, power plants, and signal towers all fell.
Humanity, of which only half had remained normal, once again suffered mass zombification under radiation.
This time, the zombification rate was 36%.
The gigantic blade hanging high in the sky finally fell.
On the same day, Xin Xiaoru completed her upgrade from Lv2 to Lv3 and obtained a compact hotel that could accommodate 30 people. The lodging fee increased from 500 yuan per day to either 1,000 yuan per day or 5 jin of grain per day.
She suddenly realized that the operation of the RV hotel was deliberately guiding her toward a path of supporting ordinary people.
Whether it was 1,000 yuan or 5 jin of grain, both were far too expensive for most people. Unless it was a life-and-death situation, where staying in the RV for one night was the only way to be taken out of a danger zone, no one would be willing to spend that kind of money to board it.
And for those who could afford it, aside from occasionally coming in to cool off when the heat became unbearable, most of them would not stay. It simply wasn’t dignified.
People who had plenty of money and food and could still live well in the apocalypse were usually those with power and influence in cities or bases. As long as they weren’t on the verge of dying from the heat, they were generally unwilling to squeeze into an RV and sleep alongside others, let alone move into an even more cramped interdimensional compact hotel.
Yicheng was no exception. Many officials or wealthy individuals were tempted by the RV and would come up from time to time to sit, enjoy the breeze, and cool off. But once too many people crowded in to share the air conditioning, they would feel it wasn’t worth competing for a spot and would find an excuse to leave.
Let alone paying to stay the night, they didn’t even like sitting around for too long, much less squeezing into a small space with so many people. Therefore, a bed-dense hotel was never meant for the wealthy who could afford it.
At least, not for now.
So who was it meant for?
For ordinary people with no money or influence, or for ordinary ability users.
Can’t pay in cash? Then pay with grain.
Can’t afford grain? Then work the farm.
To achieve this goal, the system’s notice board had deliberately arranged a special task: allowing the built-in compact hotel to be placed separately, independent of the RV. Wasn’t this precisely so that while Xin Xiaoru roamed freely, there would still be people farming and living on the land?
The compact hotel housed 30 people. In the early stages, when they couldn’t yet farm or pay rent, it was effectively free lodging. If one had to put it into words, they were contributing their “popularity value” each day, increasing the RV’s stamina.
Once grain was harvested, it could then be handed over to Xin Xiaoru as “room fees,” just enough to formally complete the system’s upgrade task.
The next upgrade required 100 five-star reviews. Even if she immediately found 30 people to farm, there wouldn’t be enough time. She would still need He Guying and Zhao Changyue to spend 50 days completing the task.
“Nominally, it’s an RV hotel,” Xin Xiaoru sighed inwardly, “but in reality, it’s making me farm and do infrastructure development.”
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