The scent of the advance party had faded.
Night Demons could already drive away and summon zombies. As the leader of the Night Demons—a particularly exceptional evolved specimen that was extremely rare even among Night Demons—it possessed the ability to control Night Demons within a certain range.
This group of Night Demons was migrating, and it was searching for a good place.
The fungus parasitizing its body was urging it onward. Winter was coming soon, and the urgency was even causing a dull ache in the Night Demon’s sluggish nerves.
The cold weather of winter would reduce the fungus’s activity, while prolonged freezing temperatures would stiffen the host’s tissues, destroy the fungal network, and could even freeze the fungal cells to death.
If it did not find a suitable place, such as an underground railway, a surviving greenhouse, a shelter, or some natural heat source, its population would be reduced by more than half after winter.
Around here… based on its memories from when it had still been human, it remembered there being one or two shelters nearby.
Once it determined the colony’s next place of residence, it could begin hunting.
……
The shelter’s doors opened once again.
This time, only four people walked out.
One person had been left behind.
“Damn it! She actually just let us leave like that!” The speaker still looked rather indignant. “Who would know what time it was?! I can’t even read numbers! She didn’t cut us any slack at all.”
“All right, all right. Say a little less.” The data clerk adjusted his glasses and said, “I was scared half to death back there. I was afraid she’d make you stay behind to work off your debt. Don’t think shelters are all good places. Some shelters have already been taken over by raiders and have practically become distribution centers for human body parts…”
“Ugh, I just…” Li Shangshan, the porter, sighed twice. He simply couldn’t bring himself to accept it, though even he didn’t understand where that unwillingness had come from.
He had two children and an elderly person at home. Every day, he worked himself to the bone for his children and the old man. Someone had once advised him to take the elderly person outside and abandon him, but he had refused every time. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have accepted this kind of job that required him to leave Lingfeng Town and even risk his life.
This was the first time…
The first time he had seen a place that gave him hope of raising his daughter properly.
Yet before he had even gotten to experience that happiness in his imagination, that person had ruthlessly taken it away from him.
He wasn’t angry.
He just felt… a little wronged.
“Forget it, forget it.” Li Shangshan comforted himself. “Even if she was just messing with us, the fact remains that we damaged the shelter. If she wanted us to stay and compensate her, I’m afraid none of us could afford it except this outsider.”
“All right. You really think that woman was just messing with you?” Tang Yuan patted the two men on the shoulders and lowered his voice. “She could have forcibly kept us there. With that move that turned the Night Demons into powder, do you really think we could have escaped?”
“You really think she wanted to recruit us? Do you remember how we got inside? The door just opened! Do you really think you can just walk in because someone happens to be there?” Tang Yuan wore an expression as though he had seen through everything. “You youngsters are still too inexperienced.”
After saying that, he looked at Lin Xiao beside him.
“Hey, outsider. You say a few words too.”
“…The recruitment probably began testing us the moment we arrived here.” Lin Xiao had originally been keeping watch over their surroundings and didn’t want to talk, but seeing Tang Yuan’s expression, he eventually spoke. “If the Night Demons were the test, then we had already failed from the very beginning.”
“But she still let us in, even going so far as to spend precious water resources on us.” Lin Xiao paused. “Put simply, we weren’t even worth as much as the water she spent on us. She probably knew what our purpose was from the beginning. What she did was both a demonstration of strength and a warning not to entertain any improper thoughts.”
“There, even the person among us who knows the most about shelters has said so.” Tang Yuan said. “When we get back, we just need to tell the mayor all this. If she doesn’t believe us, she can send another group over…”
“If you don’t want to die, shut up. We need to get back quickly.” Lin Xiao interrupted him. He raised a finger to his lips in a gesture for silence. “Something followed us.”
Everyone looked behind them.
The grass in the distance was trembling irregularly.
Lin Xiao moved his hand away from his firearm and switched to the shotgun he carried with him.
“Who’s there?” he demanded in a low voice.
……
After a brief commotion—
“Wait! Wait!” The person pinned to the ground grimaced in pain. “I’m a traveling merchant passing through! What are you doing?!”
“A traveling merchant? A traveling merchant wouldn’t be traveling this late at night.” Lin Xiao crouched in front of her. Tang Yuan was pinning the merchant down and firmly restraining her hands, so Lin Xiao gestured for him not to let go yet. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Of course I do! My campsite is nearby!” the merchant hissed. “You suddenly came to my campsite in the middle of the night and attacked me! If I really wanted to do something to you, do you think human strength could possibly go up against a mechanical limb?”
Tang Yuan held the merchant down. Under the starlight, he could see a metallic sheen on her left hand.
She had a metal arm.
Under the cover of night, Lin Xiao noticed a small emblem tattooed on the merchant’s shoulder. It appeared to be some kind of bird.
A bird…
A merchant…
He remembered something.
“Okay. Let her go.”
Tang Yuan stood up.
The merchant rubbed her shoulder and rose to her feet, smugly muttering, “That’s more like it. Do you know who I am?”
“I’m from the famous Raven Merchant Association—” She rubbed her nose. “How dare you treat me like that! I’m really going to report you to the Association!”
Lin Xiao interrupted her.
“But you’re only a Sparrow. If I remember correctly, Sparrows are peripheral members. You haven’t even passed the assessment yet, have you?”
Raven.
No one on the Wasteland was unfamiliar with that name.
It was the largest traveling merchant organization in the entire Wasteland. Supposedly, 110 years ago, Raven had been one of the Nine Megacorporations. However, Raven had not been a merchant association back then.
If Raven blacklisted a region, its entire commercial economy was essentially doomed.
If a place wasn’t on their blacklist, it could only mean that it was an undeveloped region. Traveling merchants would still come there.
But once Raven blacklisted a place, it meant that the region had absolutely no value.
Bandits running rampant, harsh environments, no special local products, frequent natural disasters, monsters everywhere…
If one or two factors that could cause major losses reached the point where even Raven could no longer handle them, they would blacklist the area.
Other independent traveling merchants, upon seeing that a region was on Raven’s blacklist, would naturally choose to avoid the risk as well.
They simply didn’t have the scale of the Raven Merchant Association. If even Raven didn’t want to go somewhere, they certainly wouldn’t dare to either.
“So what?” The merchant showed no embarrassment at being exposed. Instead, she confidently declared, “Sooner or later, I’ll become an officially registered traveling merchant under the Raven Merchant Association!”
Tang Yuan had already returned.
He had just gone to inspect the direction she had indicated. There was only a scale horse there, with two crates and two sacks beside it.
A campfire on the ground had already gone out, and a leather sleeping bag lay beside it.
She really had been camping there.
A traveling merchant traveling alone across the Wasteland with nothing but a scale horse was either particularly foolish…
Or she had something to rely on.
After all, slave traders and raiders didn’t care who you were when they came looking for goods.
“Since there’s a good chance we’re heading in the same direction, if you’re also going to camp around here, you’d better keep your distance from me.” She glanced at the group. “I’ll let it go this time, but I won’t be so polite next time.”
With that, she flipped up the fingertips of her left hand, revealing a dark gun barrel.
“That gun of yours is fine for shooting people, but can it handle Night Demons?” Tang Yuan glanced at the caliber, his eyes showing a hint of envy. “Do you have a handgun in this caliber?”
“Night Demons?” The merchant snorted. She said cheerfully, “I have something even better for dealing with Night Demons! Here, it’s a new product from Shelter 199!”
She walked over to the Scale Horse and directly unhooked a lantern from the creature. It had lizard-like scales, a lizard’s tail, and webbed feet.
“An ultraviolet lamp! The natural enemy of Night Demons! With this, you don’t have to be afraid no matter how many Night Demons come!”
“I only bit the bullet and bought this because the zombie horde migration is about to begin. There were only three in total. Do you want one?” she asked. “It can seriously injure Night Demons below A-rank, but it won’t work against A-rank or above. At most, it can force them back. But if a Night Demon of that level really shows up, this whole area is finished anyway. That kind of thing is extremely rare.”
Lin Xiao estimated their current distance from the shelter. They were already quite a ways away, and this was indeed the best campsite in the surrounding area, so he decided to camp here as well.
There was another reason. The shelter had just dealt with that group of Night Demons, so there probably wouldn’t be any Night Demons in this area for the time being.
They quickly cleared out a patch of open ground. They could have skipped the clearing, but if they did, they might wake up the next morning to find that someone had already died from poisonous insect bites.
Li Shangshan had been carrying the supplies the whole time. Now he unloaded the things from his back and, while setting up camp, stared curiously at the Scale Horse.
A Scale Horse was a domesticated variant—a creature possessing traits of both lizards and horses. It had the body shape and physical strength of a horse, while its lizard scales provided warmth and protection against poisonous insects. Its balancing tail and lizard-like webbed feet allowed it to walk across almost any difficult terrain.
He was a little envious. Just owning a horse like this could practically be considered a livelihood in itself.
“Oh, right. I heard that only Night Demons at A-rank or above, particularly S-rank Night Demons, can remember their memories from when they were human, or retain some fragments of them. Is that true?” Li Shangshan suddenly remembered something and lowered his head to ask the data clerk, who was yawning repeatedly beside him.
The data clerk rubbed his eyes. “Huh? You mean that? It’s only a rumor for now. No one can confirm it. But it is true that during winter, Night Demons will attack shelters, subway systems, and places with stable temperatures, like greenhouses. If you’re scavenging in winter, never go anywhere near those places.”
“Besides, Night Demons are already evolved forms of zombies. The probability of a zombie evolving into a Night Demon is incredibly low, and for a Night Demon to evolve further is even more difficult. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”
……
“That little girl just now took the ultraviolet lamp that was placed at the entrance. Judging from her footprints, she seems to have followed them.”
Sentry Type-I was carrying out its employer’s orders. Its current field of vision was synchronized with its employer and directly projected onto one of the screens inside the shelter.
“According to the positioning device inside the lamp, she didn’t travel in a straight line. She should be following the safe route they discovered. There are other monsters in the areas she avoided, and I have already marked them.”
Taking advantage of the darkness and keeping itself concealed, Sentry Type-I recorded and scanned all the surrounding terrain, making sure there were no additional threats nearby. This had been the original purpose of its model in the first place.
Sentry Type-I had already traveled 15 kilometers away from the shelter. In the wasteland, that was a distance that would take a human more than a week to walk.
“There are traces of Night Demons. They seem to be heading toward the survivor settlement.”
Sentry Type-I began its report.
“There are also traces of zombies… They are accompanied by a large number of zombies.”
Author’s Note:
I revised the numbers. Covering 30 kilometers across this terrain in less than one night was still a bit too far.