After having Yu Yicheng use his healing ability to treat the sunburn, Cheng Yuchuan stopped bringing him along on secondary supply runs.
Lu Xihe had just gotten tired of fighting aberrants anyway, so he didn’t make a fuss about going. He went back to bed, drew the curtain, and lay down to play games on his phone.
The power grid had been damaged in the apocalypse, but with Cheng Yuchuan being a Level 5 all-attribute ability user, electricity wasn’t a problem. There just wasn’t any internet, so he could only play offline games.
They no longer traveled through the night now. The further north they went, the more frequently they encountered aberrant tides, and many of them were mid-to-high tier. Even ability users couldn’t keep up a 24-hour nonstop pace, so they’d adjusted to traveling during the day instead.
At night, just like Lu Xihe used to do, they’d find a concealed spot to park and rest. Cheng Yuchuan would then place an ability barrier around the RV, which would give them early warning if any mid-to-high tier aberrants stepped into its range.
Lu Xihe slept too much during the day, so he was full of energy at night, constantly dragging Cheng Yuchuan into conversation.
Cheng Yuchuan had to stay alert for aberrant tide movements during the day and maintain the barrier at night to guard against approaching mid-to-high tier aberrants. He’d stayed up talking with him through the entire first night, but after a while, he couldn’t take it anymore.
Cheng Yuchuan fell into a deep sleep, and Lu Xihe, bored out of his mind, decided to head up to the second floor to stargaze.
A tranquil night filled with countless stars, soft moonlight spilling across the earth, the sound of wind threading through the forest and rustling the leaves, it was a beautiful melody composed by nature itself.
It would’ve been even better if there were no aberrants.
Looking down at the ground, shadowy black figures flickered in and out of sight among the trees, occasionally letting out hoarse roars that added a layer of horror to the silent night. It gave him a strong sense of being in a horror movie.
Scanning his surroundings, Lu Xihe spotted a small one-story building not far away, less than two hundred meters from the RV. He’d casually glanced at it when they passed by in the evening, it was a small convenience store.
They’d picked up a few more survivors on the road yesterday, and the supplies in the vehicle now only had enough for two more days. Finding more couldn’t hurt.
It wasn’t that he wanted to go out for a stroll, finding supplies was legitimate work in the apocalypse.
With that thought, Lu Xihe turned and leaped from the RV’s second floor onto a nearby tree branch, then slid down the trunk to the ground.
The aberrants here were mostly common ones, with only the occasional low-tier. Mid-to-high tier ones weren’t even a shadow in sight. Two words to sum it up: totally doable.
Lu Xihe walked slowly toward the building with light footsteps. The evening breeze blew gently, carrying away the weariness from his body and soothing his restless thoughts.
Lu Xihe stretched happily and hummed a tune, but he’d only gone fifty meters when some clueless aberrant started stirring restlessly.
“Scram.” Lu Xihe glanced at the low-tier aberrant hurrying toward him and said irritably.
After getting past the initial thrill of fighting aberrants, Lu Xihe just found it tiring now. He was better suited to being a strategist, lying comfortably in the rear and directing Cheng Yuchuan in battle.
Though most of the time he didn’t even need to give orders, he just caused trouble on the sidelines. Sometimes he’d sit on Cheng Yuchuan’s shoulders to gaze into the distance, ordering him to fetch water and food, then lazily watch as aberrant after aberrant turned into cores that went into his pocket.
One sentence to sum it up: lie flat for a thousand years, show off for ten thousand!
He didn’t actually expect the aberrant to understand him. Lu Xihe was more used to speaking first and acting second, after all, when dealing with people, words alone could solve most problems. Even now in the apocalypse, some little habits hadn’t changed.
Unexpectedly, the aberrant actually stopped in its tracks, halting two meters away from Lu Xihe and just standing there blankly, staring at him.
Lu Xihe was slightly startled, then annoyed that the thing kept staring at him, so he cursed again: “What are you looking at? Get lost!”
He’d expected it to enrage the aberrant and was already preparing where to strike for a one-hit kill, but to his surprise, it actually understood. It closed its eyes and, sure enough, bent down, lay flat, and rolled away.
Lu Xihe couldn’t believe his eyes. He rubbed them, closed and opened them again, and the absurd sight of the aberrant rolling along the ground was still right in front of him.
Was he… able to command aberrants?!
Was this the second major discovery after being able to KO aberrants himself?
Without a second thought, Lu Xihe ran to the nearest common aberrant and said the same thing, “Scram”, but it had no effect. The common aberrant let out a roar and lunged at him, trying to bite.
Lu Xihe didn’t even raise an eyelid. A single chop of his hand split the common aberrant in two, then he went looking for the next one.
He tried three common aberrants in a row without the expected result. Remembering that the one that had understood his command was a low-tier aberrant, he hurried off to find another low-tier one.
Low-tier aberrants were truly scarce around here. Before he could find the next one, a swarm of common aberrants surrounded him. Lu Xihe dealt with one per slap, his hand growing tired from all the smacking before he was done.
“I’m not looking for you, okay? Can you not shamelessly cling to me like this? Sure, you’re easy to kill, but I get tired after killing too many.”
Lu Xihe looked speechlessly at the common aberrant rushing at him with claws bared, and helplessly shook his head.
That’s true, they can’t understand anyway, so I’ll just have to trouble my undefeated Diamond Palm again.
After dealing with the nearby ordinary aberrants, Lu Xihe finally had free time to go find the low-tier aberrant.
Patting the dust off his hands, Lu Xihe took a step back to head back, but the moment he lifted his foot, he bumped into something. Looking down, it was the low-tier aberrant that had rolled away earlier.
It was still rolling. It really was obedient.
Lu Xihe raised his foot to block its back, stopping it from rolling away, then gave another order:
“Get up. Stand at attention.”
The low-tier aberrant’s body froze at the words, its movements stiff and jerky but slowly executing. It took another two minutes before it stood at attention as he’d instructed.
“So it really can understand.” Lu Xihe was surprised, then let out a snicker.
“Do you know what number this is?” Lu Xihe held up three fingers in front of the low-tier aberrant.
After a long pause, no reaction.
“Raise your hand.”
The low-tier aberrant slowly raised both hands.
“What is this?” He casually plucked a blade of grass and asked.
Again, no response.
“Looks like it can only understand action commands,” Lu Xihe concluded. “Well, that’s better than not understanding human speech at all.”
“Follow me. Help me carry stuff.” Lu Xihe waved his hand and led the low-tier aberrant toward the convenience store.
The convenience store had long been ransacked. Forget food, even the shelves were gone. Only the cement stone counter remained, too heavy to move. Nothing else was left.
Lu Xihe methodically stepped on every floor tile in the room, trying to see if there was a cellar.
After circling around, he found no cellar, but there was a gap in the ceiling, just big enough for one person to pass through.
Lu Xihe first asked if anyone was up there. Hearing no answer, he found a rotten mop and poked it upward. With a whoosh, an aberrant lunged out and tore at the mop.
Lu Xihe felt a wave of fear. Good thing he hadn’t been reckless and called an aberrant over to use as a stepping stool to climb up and look himself, if it had launched a surprise attack, even an ordinary aberrant would’ve caught him off guard.
“Shut up! Let go!” Lu Xihe yanked at the mop and shouted, trying to test what rank the aberrant above was.
The moment the command was given, the aberrant beside him dropped its bag with a thud. At the same time, the one upstairs gnawing on the mop also stopped moving. The room fell silent as a graveyard.
Perfect. It was an aberrant that could understand commands.
This saved him the trouble of climbing up to check himself. He simply ordered the one upstairs to pass things down, and the one downstairs to catch, sort, and bag them.
But there was a downside too, the two could only follow commands and couldn’t tell which command was meant for which of them.
When Lu Xihe said “bring it here,” the one upstairs brought food to the opening, and the one downstairs also brought the bag to him. When he said “put it down,” both let go at once, and the food bags scattered all over the floor.
No choice. Lu Xihe had to focus on the one upstairs first, issuing orders one by one, guiding it to diligently toss all the food down.
And so a hilarious scene unfolded downstairs, a low-tier aberrant pacing back and forth in the empty room, picking up and putting down an empty plastic bag, while Lu Xihe watched and laughed.
Dumb, so dumb, hahaha…
Only when nothing more could be tossed down from above did Lu Xihe turn to command the aberrant downstairs to bag the food.
The one downstairs was huffing and puffing away at its work, while the one upstairs, following commands, was blindly groping around the empty floor. It accidentally triggered some mechanism, a square hatch opened in the ceiling directly above the stone counter, and a plump aberrant dropped down from it.
Now both of them had work to do.
Lu Xihe climbed onto the stone counter to look at the square hatch. Above it must have been the convenience store owner’s storage room. No wonder so much food could be tossed down.
The plump aberrant that fell later was probably the owner himself. Judging by the amount of snacks on the floor, the owner must have been bitten right at the start of the apocalypse. He thought hoarding supplies would let him survive a while, but in the end, he turned into an aberrant surrounded by a pile of food.
Sigh… life is unpredictable.
Lu Xihe shook his head with a sigh, stepped forward, and patted the owner, now an aberrant helping him bag things, as if to console him, and said with genuine gratitude: “Thank you for your contribution. Humanity’s glorious triumph has your name written all over it.”
After packing up all the snacks, the two aberrants each carried two large bags, waddling behind Lu Xihe, swaying left and right with every step like two clumsy fat bears.
Lu Xihe walked back toward the RV, returning fully loaded. The footsteps behind him gradually went from two people to three. Sensing something wrong, Lu Xihe immediately turned to look and saw a figure in the distance quickly duck behind a tree.
Moving that nimbly and knowing to hide, either it was a human, or… a higher-rank aberrant.
Lu Xihe suddenly felt a pang of panic. A mid-tier he could still fight, but a high-tier? He really couldn’t win against that.
But by all logic, high-tier aberrants appeared alongside aberrant tides. Could he have run into a low-key one?
The RV was still a hundred and fifty meters away, and he wasn’t sure if Cheng Yuchuan could hear him if he shouted from this far.
If it really was a high-tier aberrant, even commanding the two low-tiers behind him would be like a mantis trying to stop a chariot, utterly futile.
So, race a high-tier aberrant? Try to see if he can outrun it back to the protective shield?
That’s like asking a baby who can’t even walk yet to sprint a hundred meters against world champion Usain Bolt, he’s bound to lose.
Just as Lu Xihe was kicking himself for sneaking out to play on a whim, the figure hiding behind the tree moved.
The body shifted out from behind the tree, eyes glowing with a dim yellow light, it was a mid-tier aberrant.
Lu Xihe’s heart, which had leapt to his throat, sank back into his chest. He let out a long breath and raised a hand to pat his chest lightly. Alive, alive, he was suddenly alive again.
But…
Why did this aberrant look somewhat familiar?
As Lu Xihe was puzzling over it, the mid-tier aberrant flashed to a stop one meter in front of him. Its stiff right hand slowly rose and opened, revealing two buttons in its palm.
One blue, one pink.