The off-road vehicle sped down the road toward Linzhou. Bai Zhuo lowered her head and picked at the gauze on her hand, her mind full of her own guesses.
The appearance of the zombies wasn’t necessarily man-made, but the evolution that followed, that definitely was.
If that was the case…
Bai Zhuo glanced at Chongming, who was driving. The latter wore a grave expression, all her earlier ease gone, clearly she’d arrived at the same suspicion.
A sudden downpour cut off Bai Zhuo’s train of thought. She looked up out the window, and in an instant the heavy rain had blurred everything from view.
The bitter cold spell had barely been over a few days, and now a rainstorm had arrived, she couldn’t tell whether that was a good thing or a bad one.
Fortunately, they made it safely to Linzhou.
“Find somewhere to drop us off.”
Chongming slammed on the brakes and looked at Bai Zhuo in surprise. “You’re not coming with me to the survivor base?”
Bai Zhuo shook her head with a smile. “We never said we were going to the base, did we?”
“But it’s still raining out there, you two…”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got rain gear. We can look after ourselves.”
Chongming was anxious to hand over the two corpses in the trunk. After hearing Bai Zhuo out, she hesitated a moment, then nodded. “If you run into trouble, come straight to the survivor base and find me. I’ll be staying there for a while.”
“All right.”
The moment the car crossed into Linzhou territory, Bai Zhuo had told the system to open a loot box, and just as she’d expected, she got a map of Linzhou.
Xue Yanhen shouldered her hiking pack and pulled on a rain slicker before turning to Bai Zhuo. “Where are we going?”
“Let’s find somewhere to hole up first.”
Linzhou’s infrastructure had been wrecked even worse than Yun City’s or Ning City’s. The two of them picked their way carefully through the rubble and finally stopped in front of an unfinished residential development.
This block of buildings must have only just been completed, most of the owners hadn’t even had a chance to move in before the apocalypse hit.
Maybe because the population here had been small to begin with, conditions were a little better than in other places.
Most of the units still had bare concrete floors, untouched by renovation, some didn’t even have their windows installed.
The two of them made a circuit and finally settled into a unit that had been given a full interior finish to serve as a model home.
Peeling off her rain slicker, Bai Zhuo called out to the system in her mind. 【How’s the safe house unlock progress coming along?】
【It’s at 12% now, host.】
Bai Zhuo couldn’t help pressing at her brow. Only 12%, when on earth would she get to live in the safe house?
Xue Yanhen took out the medicine and gauze and motioned for Bai Zhuo to let her rewrap her hand.
“No need. We can change the dressing tomorrow. We’re low on both medicine and gauze right now, so we should be sparing with them,” Bai Zhuo said with a grin.
She did, in fact, have a whole big bag of gauze in her system inventory, but she just hadn’t found the right moment to pull it out yet.
Xue Yanhen looked at her, deadpan. Bai Zhuo let out a couple of guilty little chuckles and turned to head for the kitchen.
“So hungry, so hungry, I urgently need a bowl of instant noodles to soothe my wounded heart.”
Xue Yanhen sighed helplessly and put the supplies away.
The rain outside gradually stopped. Bai Zhuo, cradling her bowl, was a little surprised. “I thought it would keep raining nonstop.”
“Don’t go jinxing it. [1]don’t tempt fate by saying it out loud, lit. ‘crow’s mouth’ jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2936279_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2936279_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });”
Before turning in, Bai Zhuo still fixed the door shut with a chain, that way, at the very least, they’d have time to react if danger came.
The two of them again dragged the mattress out to the living room. Xue Yanhen seemed a little tired, not long after she closed her eyes, her breathing evened out and she was asleep.
Bai Zhuo wasn’t the least bit sleepy. She was busy bickering with the system, before she’d met Xue Yanhen, it had been her favorite pastime. Sometimes the system would get so annoyed by Bai Zhuo that it would have bristled all over, if it had a body.
Bai Zhuo wanted to wheedle more out of the system, things like the zombie evolution, and the missions it had been issuing lately.
Unfortunately, this time the system seemed to have wised up. No matter how she asked, it made no sound, as if it had gone dormant.
Bai Zhuo clicked her tongue inwardly. The system had grown up, no fun anymore.
Since she couldn’t get any more information out of the system, Bai Zhuo gave up on poking at it and soon fell asleep too.
Chongming, having passed through layer upon layer of checks to enter the central zone of the Linzhou survivor base, now stood facing off against the man across from her, her expression dark.
The middle-aged man wore an arrogant look, as if he didn’t take Chongming seriously at all.
“Everything I’ve told you is the truth,” Chongming repeated in a low voice, suppressing her anger.
“Nobody actually witnessed this process you’re describing. Who’s to say you didn’t just make it up to fool us?”
Chongming’s hands tightened slightly around her sniper rifle. She could see it now, the Linzhou base simply didn’t care about this. Or rather, they figured the Linzhou base had strong defenses and plenty of high-tier ability users, so even if someone were manipulating the zombie mutations, it wouldn’t affect them in the slightest.
They didn’t care in the least whether other people lived or died.
Chongming regarded them coldly, and, no longer bothering to argue, turned and left.
One of the reasons she’d wanted to hand the two corpses over to the Linzhou base was that they had a powerful wood-type ability user here, a senior researcher before the apocalypse, who might have been able to spot something. But now, she couldn’t even get in to see her.
Bai Zhuo woke from her sleep and walked out onto the balcony. The long-absent sunlight fell on her, and even someone like her, who wasn’t fond of the sun, found it pleasant.
Xue Yanhen yawned. Before she’d even opened her eyes, she called out to Bai Zhuo, “Come here, dressing change.”
Bai Zhuo turned back, and this time she didn’t try to wriggle out of it.
The flesh around the wound had curled outward a bit, but at least it wasn’t oozing blood anymore.
Xue Yanhen’s hand paused with the medicine in it. “This thing of yours, are you sure it’s really fine without stitching it up?”
“Stitch it how? You? Or me?”
Bai Zhuo’s question stumped Xue Yanhen. She hadn’t studied medicine, how was she supposed to stitch someone’s wound?
With no other choice, Xue Yanhen could only do it the same way as yesterday: apply medicine to the wound and wrap it up with gauze.
Bai Zhuo got to her feet. “Want to go out and check things out? There seem to be a couple of shopping malls and a supermarket nearby.”
“Sure.”
They had no intention of going to the Linzhou survivor base, it was just that if they ran into more extreme weather, they’d have to tough it out on their own. And having an equal store of survival supplies was what would give them the confidence to tough it out.
While Xue Yanhen wasn’t looking, Bai Zhuo fished a pair of half-finger tactical gloves out of her system inventory and pulled them on, then grabbed a crowbar and headed out.
There really were very few people and zombies in this area, though something must have happened here at some point: several cars had the road completely blocked. Bai Zhuo and Xue Yanhen climbed over a smashed-up car one after the other and continued on.
The glass at the mall entrance had all been shattered. Besides the broken glass on the ground, there was all kinds of trash, along with the corpses of zombies and humans.
What Bai Zhuo and Xue Yanhen didn’t expect was that the moment they went in, they ran straight into a group of people who’d also come to scavenge for supplies.
Both sides eyed each other warily. But probably because the two of them looked like unthreatening young women, the people over there clearly didn’t take them seriously, some of them even wore disgusting, lecherous expressions.
Killing intent surged in Bai Zhuo’s heart.
References[+]