Ling Zhao found people entirely through the shelter’s surveillance cameras.
However, one-third of the shelter’s cameras had been dismantled, another third were broken, and only the remaining third were still functioning. Ling Zhao rearranged those cameras, doing her best to reduce the blind spots throughout the shelter.
After that, she relied entirely on her luck and keen eyesight to find these four people.
There was only one exception. Ling Zhao wasn’t sure whether she had bad luck or the other person had bad luck.
At first, Ling Zhao could still see her, but after she picked up the recruitment notice, the woman disappeared.
Ling Zhao searched for a while longer and realized that she had encountered a genuine directionless idiot.
By the time she saw Bei You appear on one of the cameras again, the girl was already on the verge of death.
Ling Zhao glanced at the supplies she had finished organizing in the shelter before these people arrived, as well as the item she had drawn that seemed the most useless.
[Leader’s Speech: Select one or more targets and project a speech in front of them.]
……
Bei You couldn’t read maps.
Nor could she find her way through buildings constructed by humans like this.
Out in the wilderness, she was as agile as a leopard cat. But in a place like this, there were no trees or soil. She couldn’t determine her bearings from the stars in the sky, nor could she find an exit by following the direction of the wind.
She could make bullets ride the wind and deliver death to her enemies, but in this place, where there wasn’t even any wind, she instead became completely lost.
Getting lost was practically inevitable for her.
Bei You ran into a Night Demon again.
This time, her luck wasn’t as good. There were three Night Demons together. Fortunately, when she encountered them, they were more than two hundred meters apart.
She shot two of them dead, but the third closed in on her.
After finally injuring the Night Demon and forcing it to flee, she realized that she had been wounded.
…Yes, wounded.
Bei You curled the corner of her lips. She wasn’t particularly surprised. Living on the Wasteland, there would always come a day like this.
I need to save one bullet for myself.
With that thought, she counted the bullets she had left.
Thirteen.
While counting her bullets, Bei You touched the nuts remaining in her pocket—the ones that hadn’t fallen out earlier.
Coincidentally, there were thirteen of those too.
Hmm. What could thirteen nuts buy?
It seemed like they were just enough to buy one bullet.
Thinking about this, Bei You laughed.
She had thought about how she would die before, but she hadn’t expected her death to be so uncreative.
Infected by a virus.
Tsk.
Bei You staggered forward. At the very least, she didn’t want to die inside someone else’s shelter. They would throw her body out.
She had seen people die in settlements, towns, and survivor camps. Nobody cared about them. In slightly better places, the bodies would be thrown outside like garbage.
In worse places, they couldn’t even be thrown out. The corpses would be divided up and completely stripped of everything valuable by the people in the settlement.
Bei You still wanted to give herself a small grave.
So she forced herself onward.
As she walked, she eventually entered a spacious hall.
It was a circular hall with a metal floor and cold-white walls covered in neat tiles.
In the center of the hall was a chair.
Someone was sitting in it.
The person had her head slightly lowered as she flipped through a book—or perhaps a notebook—resting on her knees.
Bei You held her breath and reached for the trigger.
“In my shelter, you still want to point a gun at me?”
The woman didn’t even raise her head. She simply turned another page of the notebook in her hands.
“Since you’re already on the verge of death, I won’t record this as a failed conduct violation for now.”
Bei You saw her raise her head, and her breathing instantly caught.
The woman had an exceptionally, exceptionally clean face.
Not clean in the sense of having been washed.
Rather, it was a face that had never been exposed to the sun or rain, nor marred by a single scrape or scar.
It was so clean that it didn’t contain even the slightest trace of hardship.
When she lifted her head, Bei You almost felt as though she were looking at a gemstone balanced on the tip of a blade—dazzling, with an edge that seemed to shine outward.
The sheer visual impact of someone who had been absolutely pampered made Bei You lose some of her confidence.
Clearly, there was a very high probability that the woman in front of her belonged to this shelter.
If she was one of the people who had just awakened, then that would be fine. At worst, she was simply somewhat spoiled.
But if she was a descendant of those people…
Then Bei You could only pray for herself.
Still, Bei You chose to put away her weapon.
She knew what the red dot above her head meant. She had once seen one at a settlement, and it was far more effective than the sniper rifle she currently had to calculate everything for herself.
It could practically hit whatever it was pointed at.
Later, the settlement’s owner had locked that weapon away and made it his private possession.
“A wise choice,” the woman said. “Now you can point the gun somewhere else.”
Bei You lowered the muzzle toward the floor and looked at her nervously and awkwardly.
“Um… could you let me leave? I’m afraid I’ll die within a few days. Er, if things go quickly, it might not even take that long.”
“I’d like to.”
The woman put away her notebook and tilted her head.
“But you have some guests following you. Even if I tell you where the exit is now, you won’t be able to get out.”
Bei You looked behind her and discovered that a group of Night Demons had actually followed her!
The one that had fled earlier was among them.
It had actually gone to get reinforcements!
Bei You looked at the woman in front of her, then at the Night Demons behind her.
“Hurry! Aren’t you going to run?” she asked urgently.
“I can’t run.”
Ling Zhao was telling the truth.
Her projection device was right beneath her feet.
Bei You stared at the woman’s completely motionless lower body. After a moment of realization, she fell silent for a while before raising her gun again.
She didn’t point it at the woman.
Instead, she turned around and gave the woman her back.
“Ma’am, kill yourself,” she said coldly. “These things are only interested in living people. And once a living person falls into their hands, they’ll wish they were dead.”
“I’m sorry for bringing these things in, but…”
She gritted her teeth.
“I’ll buy you enough time to kill yourself.”
Ling Zhao said something, but her words were drowned out by the sound of gunfire.
Bei You found that scenes from her life had already begun flashing through her mind.
It had been the same when she escaped with that older sister before.
At a moment like this, she couldn’t help but wonder:
Why?
Foul-smelling blood exploded everywhere.
Bei You fired several shots. Her hands were already unsteady. The fungus continued to erode her body, sending signals through her nerves and telling her that she should regard the things in front of her as her fellow kind—not shoot at them.
Her mind was filled with noise.
Now she could understand that the Night Demons’ chaotic, disordered howls were actually their method of communication.
But so what?
She simply kept firing.
One shot.
Then another.
How many bullets were left?
Seven?
Or eight?
“Sorry for this.”
Bei You’s hands began trembling even more violently. She retreated to the woman’s side and unceremoniously used the back of the woman’s chair and her shoulder as a brace.
She also took the opportunity to notice that the woman had no suitable weapon for killing herself, so she shoved her spare dagger into the woman’s hand.
“…”
Once again, Ling Zhao’s words were drowned out by the gunfire.
Bei You panted heavily.
She could even smell the blood coming from deep within her throat, along with the blood that continued to flow from her nostrils.
She seemed to remember smelling the same scent back then, when she was carrying that older sister on her back…
Bei You had never been able to understand why that older sister had been injured yet never said a word. In the end, when she looked back at her, all she received was a strange smile.
She had known perfectly well that once she became infected and began undergoing corpse transformation, Bei You would definitely be her first target…
Bei You coughed up a mouthful of blood, and she caught the strange, rancid smell.
She froze.
She… had never smelled this kind of scent back then.
So when corpse transformation reached the irreversible stage, a person would cough up blood.
Piece by piece, memories she had subconsciously ignored suddenly flooded back.
Her sister had gone several days without eating. She hadn’t seen her drink any water, either…
It was only after she died that blood began to trickle from the corner of her mouth…
And most importantly, that older sister had never undergone corpse transformation. She had stopped the process herself—the fungi could only infect living people.
She… had spent the entire journey on Bei You’s back, silently biting her own tongue to commit suicide.
She had gritted her teeth and swallowed her own tongue along with all the foul-smelling blood.
That was why all she had left for Bei You was that one smile.
When Bei You realized this, her entire field of vision was already stained red. She could no longer tell her tears from the blood streaming down her face.
The Night Demons in the corridor began breaking through the defensive line and entering the hall.
But they did not immediately pounce on Bei You. Instead, they began wandering around.
At that moment, they even regarded Bei You as one of their own.
Bei You failed to notice that the woman beside her wasn’t their target either.
Just then, the woman spoke.
“I said, please don’t ignore me.”
She continued, “Do you still want to live?”
“Huh?”
Bei You stared blankly at her and reached into her pocket.
Her hand came up empty.
Bei You said regretfully, “I forgot to leave you a bullet…”
If only she had used up those last thirteen nuts before setting out.
That was what she thought.
“I’ll keep this brief and say a few things.” Ling Zhao took a deep breath. “…First, I won’t die, and neither will you.”
“Second, I can save you. But from this moment onward, your life and your future will belong to me until you’ve paid off everything you owe me. Any objections?”
Bei You slowly shook her head.
Ling Zhao smiled in satisfaction. “Then here’s the third point. There’s a blue syringe underneath my chair. That’s a serum. Inject it.”
Bei You asked blankly, “Does a shelter… actually have something like that?”
“How could a shelter not have something like that?”
Ling Zhao had had a cleaning robot bring the serum over beforehand precisely because she wasn’t going to let Bei You die here.
A serum that had been extracted again after expiring, in exchange for a life—it was an extremely worthwhile deal.
Bei You took out the serum and immediately plunged it into her arm.
After injecting it, she saw, through her hazy consciousness, that the nearby Night Demons seemed to have found their target again.
Suddenly, they lunged toward her.
Bei You couldn’t move.
She saw the door on another level open, and her teammates followed behind a silver-white robot.
They were all terrified. Two of them immediately tried to run back, while the other two reacted differently—one stared at the machine, while the other immediately prepared for battle.
Time seemed to stretch endlessly at that moment.
She saw the woman raise her hand.
“Let me say a few things.”
She said, “First, Night Demons are forbidden from entering this place.”
Light began to glow from her fingertips.
Above them, on the dark ceiling, row after row of lights suddenly illuminated.
It was as though a sea of light had grown from the palm of her hand, sweeping forward and crushing all the filth in its path.
The Night Demons were reduced to powder before their eyes.
Then this interviewer raised her head and smiled at them.
“Second, you’re late for your interview.”
【Chairwoman, you have completed Task One: Complete a Transaction. The Character Panel is now unlocked.】
【You have completed Task Two: Recruit One Employee. Your Talent Trait has now been activated. In consideration of your task performance, it has automatically advanced by one level.】
【Your Talent: [Appraisal] has been upgraded to [Eye of Value Deconstruction].】
Author’s Note:
Ling Zhao: (tries to give a leadership speech)
(gets interrupted)
(tries to give another leadership speech)
(gets interrupted again)
“I’ll keep this brief and say a few things.”
The way she phrases her speeches is actually required by the item. She’d already been interrupted several times before she could finally say, “I’ll keep this brief and say a few things.”
……
I forgot to set up the scheduled-posting box. I was wondering why it wasn’t showing up…