On the wasteland, you never knew whether tomorrow or an accident would arrive first. Looking at the creatures behind them that could almost be described as a horde, Lin Xiao understood that they had no choice but to enter the shelter.
Compared with the fortress whose very doors were broken, this door could clearly provide them with enough of a sense of security.
He had initially thought that the seemingly sturdy door would be difficult to open, but the moment he placed his hand on it, the massive door began sliding open to both sides.
Authentication successful? What was going on?
There was no time to think about it now.
Lin Xiao slipped through the doorway. Then he raised his gun and fired single shots at the Night Demons. These bullets could not kill them in a short period of time, but hitting their joints could slow their movements.
One person who had fallen behind was dragged away by a Night Demon.
He screamed and begged, “Save me! Save me! Ah!!”
No one stayed behind to save him.
Not even the girl who had just turned fourteen.
She merely nimbly slipped through the gap in the door and immediately began closing it. Then, taking advantage of the brief opening, she fired two shots through the gap.
The first shot struck the Night Demon dragging the unfortunate man away, causing it to freeze momentarily.
Before the joy could even appear on the man’s face, her second shot struck him directly in the head.
Watching the blood flow across the ground, she prayed, “Amen. I hope you have more nuts than you could ever spend.”
Beside her, Lin Xiao put away his gun and silently counted.
Nine bullets.
Immediately afterward, Tang Yuan kicked away the last Night Demon that had followed them inside. Seeing the door about to close completely, he couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.
—The door stopped when there was still a gap about the width of a fist.
He instantly realized what this meant.
The shelter’s energy had been completely exhausted.
And without energy, this door couldn’t keep the Night Demons out.
They realized it too.
Cruel smiles appeared on their distorted faces as they reached out without hesitation, intending to pry the door open with their bare hands.
It was only a matter of time before the Night Demons entered.
“We can only keep moving inward.”
Lin Xiao suppressed the strange feeling he had sensed earlier and spoke calmly.
“A shelter won’t have only one entrance. If we find another exit, we still have a chance to survive.”
Otherwise, a shelter without energy and plunged into complete darkness, combined with Night Demons that had no weaknesses in the dark, would turn this place into their grave.
If they didn’t turn on the lights, they wouldn’t be able to see the Night Demons.
If they did turn on the lights, they would immediately become targets.
The five of them quickly checked one another for injuries while running, then headed deeper into the shelter.
They ran blindly through the darkness for a long time.
By the time everyone realized they had become separated from the others, there wasn’t a single person left in sight.
The girl sprinted through the darkness like a wary, agile leopard.
Perhaps she shouldn’t even be called a girl.
She was clearly too young to be called a teenager. At most, she could only be called a child.
Her breathing echoed through the darkness.
She didn’t know how long she had been running. Her footsteps were chaotic and hurried.
At first, someone had still answered whenever she called out.
Later, little by little, no one responded anymore.
The light was too dim, and the road was too long. She had thought perhaps the others were simply tired, or maybe…
A terrifying possibility emerged in her mind.
But she didn’t dare stop, nor did she dare call out again.
Because Night Demons were one of her nightmares.
Her previous settlement had been overrun by Night Demons.
These creatures would take living humans and use them to cultivate spores. People infected by the fungi would become zombies. Supposedly, those zombies were the predecessors of the Night Demons.
Had she fled for four days or five that time?
Bei You couldn’t remember anymore.
She only remembered that the entire journey had been filled with blood and screams.
During the day, she had run as fast as she could. Even when hunger caused her stomach to cramp, she didn’t dare stop. She had to keep running, running until it was almost night, when she would clean the sweat off her body and then gnaw on whatever rats or dried mushrooms she could find.
Night Demons had an extremely keen sense of smell, and they were active at night.
At night, she had to find somewhere to hide and pray in terror that she wouldn’t be discovered.
If there was a smell of blood, that person would be abandoned immediately, no matter how they had been injured.
There was no way to boil water on the road.
She had once drunk Level Four contaminated water that absolutely should not have been consumed. Even after rudimentary filtration, it gave her diarrhea for three days and caused a high fever.
But it had been a blessing in disguise.
The smell of her excrement mixed with the scent of soil, making her smell like a rotting corpse.
Compared with the other escapees covered in wounds, she had been given more opportunities to catch her breath.
A few days earlier, Bei You had still been dragging someone along behind her.
Who was that person?
It seemed to have been an older sister who had taken particularly good care of her.
She couldn’t remember the details anymore.
She only remembered that, at first, the older sister had still been talking to her.
Not long afterward, when Bei You looked back, she discovered that the woman’s leg had already begun to rot and transform into a corpse.
She had been infected by the virus.
Yet she hadn’t said a word.
She had only smiled when Bei You discovered it.
Even today, Bei You still couldn’t understand what that smile had meant.
She had only understood one thing:
On the wasteland, never turn your back on anyone.
Later, Bei You took the older sister’s gun and variable-focus scope.
She became a sniper.
And she remained one to this day.
A sniper stood in the farthest position.
There would be no one behind her.
So…
What was this breathing she could hear now?
Bei You stopped conserving her glow sticks.
She opened a new one and replaced the old one, narrowly dodging a set of claws that lunged at her.
Her teammates had long since disappeared.
In this pitch-black shelter, the faintly glowing green signs provided practically no illumination.
At some unknown junction, she was left completely alone.
And there was one Night Demon.
A Night Demon that had followed her at some unknown point and was now hiding behind her.
There was no way to dodge it.
Her gun couldn’t be fired at such close range.
Her knife was strapped to her leg.
And the Night Demon was staring intently at her arm.
The moment she made any movement, it would immediately pounce on her and tear into her flesh.
Was this the only one?
Or was she surrounded by Night Demons?
Those were two completely different concepts.
Night Demons were social creatures.
Encountering a lone Night Demon was fundamentally different from encountering the vanguard of a group.
She had encountered a lone Night Demon when she was fleeing before.
Her older sister had still been there then.
But how had she escaped?
Bei You couldn’t quite remember.
Just as Bei You decided to risk it and reach for her knife, the Night Demon moved.
It lunged sideways toward Bei You, extending its sharp claws until they almost touched her cheek.
Bei You realized that the creature’s reaction speed was far beyond that of a human.
She had underestimated it.
She could see it clearly, but her body couldn’t react in time!
At the boundary between life and death, time seemed to stretch infinitely.
Suddenly, she saw a white sheet of paper—with something apparently written on it—stuck to the Night Demon’s face.
The Night Demon missed its target.
Irritated, it tore the white paper off its face and ripped it to pieces.
Taking advantage of those few seconds, Bei You swiftly slipped into an open room beside her.
She had just breathed a sigh of relief when that breath nearly became stuck in her throat.
A sheet of white paper had appeared in front of her.
It looked as though someone had casually pasted it there.
And it seemed to have been put up only moments ago.
Bei You wasn’t very literate.
She stared at the suddenly appearing piece of paper, completely unaware of what it was.
Perhaps realizing that she couldn’t read it, the paper flipped over, revealing its white back.
A map and an arrow were marked on it.
It seemed to mean…
Go this way?
Bei You peeled the paper off.
She didn’t notice the line of text that flashed across it.
[The job applicant has accepted the interview invitation.]
At the marked location, a small line of text appeared:
[Noah Shelter Company has invited you here for an interview.]
…
Following the markings on the map, Lin Xiao continued through the shelter.
The farther he went, the more he felt that something was wrong with this shelter.
It possessed a strange, almost living quality.
It was as if someone was constantly watching him.
When he passed a corner he had previously walked through, he keenly noticed that the marks he had left behind only moments ago had already disappeared.
Sure enough, this place was active.
Mayor, oh, Mayor…
This is absolutely not a shelter that has simply run out of energy…
Lin Xiao even began to suspect that this place might be the site where a meteorite had fallen.
Everyone on the wasteland knew that ever since the meteorites had fallen 110 years ago, every place they struck had not only suffered the destruction of all life, but had gradually become a Deep Contaminated Zone.
To this day, no one had ever managed to emerge from a Deep Contaminated Zone.
And to this day, no one knew exactly what had fallen from the sky back then.
If this place was a Deep Contaminated Zone…
That would be even worse than radiation!
One was a case of being worse off alive than dead, while the other could neither die nor live.
Lin Xiao stopped at a corner.
He heard a strange noise coming from ahead, seemingly the heavy breathing of some creature.
He frowned deeply. The specifications and layouts of shelters were generally more or less the same. He had never seen a shelter that could move and change on its own, so there was a good chance that none of his previous experience would be useful here.
Waiting for him ahead were not only his separated teammates.
There was an even greater possibility that it was the Night Demons.
Lin Xiao instinctively wanted to avoid them, but when he turned around, he saw that the passage behind him had become a wall.
The breathing behind him grew even heavier.
Lin Xiao also caught an overwhelming smell of blood.
A Night Demon?!
Without even looking, Lin Xiao thrust his weapon backward.
The light, insubstantial sensation made him almost stumble.
…It didn’t feel like a living creature?
He suddenly turned his head and discovered a silver-white robot standing behind him.
The robot was holding one of the white sheets of paper he had seen before.
His backward stab had pierced straight through the paper.
The robot looked at the paper in its hand.
Lin Xiao looked at the Night Demon in the robot’s other hand.
A recruitment notice was still stuck to the Night Demon’s face.
At some point, the robot had begun hammering that recruitment notice into the Night Demon’s face with its fists, blow after blow. The white paper had almost completely turned red.
“For disrupting the company’s recruitment site, you will be eliminated…”
Lin Xiao stared at the sheet of paper he had pierced and felt an overwhelming sense of danger.
The last time he had experienced such a premonition, it had nearly cost him half his life. He had practically rolled through the gates of hell and back.
The robot’s eyes lit up with a red glow.
Lin Xiao’s instincts made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
His mind had already conjured up an image of himself being hammered into a pancake along with the robot and the recruitment notice.
His survival instinct made him blurt out,
“I…I accept the job offer.”
The red light in the robot’s eyes flickered.
Then it switched to a satisfied green. 🙂
“I hope you have a pleasant job-hunting experience at Noah Shelter Company.”
After saying this, it handed him the half of the recruitment notice that remained.
With its other hand, it gripped the Night Demon’s neck and dragged the creature away.
Lin Xiao breathed a sigh of relief.
He had just begun walking in the opposite direction from the location marked on the recruitment notice when the robot returned.
In a muffled mechanical voice, it said,
“The chairwoman said that we need to provide friendly service.”
“I’ll show you the way now.”
Lin Xiao: …
…
[Your recruitment notice has been torn up…]
[Your recruitment notice has been destroyed…]
[Your recruitment has been accepted. The applicant has submitted a résumé.]
[Your recruitment notice has been destroyed…]
[Your recruitment notice has been forcibly submitted…]
[Your recruitment has been accepted. The applicant has submitted a résumé.]
[Your recruitment notice has fallen into a septic tank…]
[Your recruitment notice has been preserved…]
[Your recruitment has been accepted. The applicant has submitted a résumé.]
…
[Your employees have lined up and begun their interviews. Interviewer, please arrive on time.]
[No interviewer detected. A temporary position has been added for you.]
[Interviewer, please report to the interview location.]
Author’s Note:
About shelters (tap tap tap).
For those interested in managing shelters, there really is a game about this: Fallout: Shelter.
It’s a free-to-play game, but Steam doesn’t have an official Chinese localization, so you’ll need to install a Chinese language patch yourself.
The good news is that Chinese patches for the game can be found pretty much everywhere.