Tang Zeyu took a bite out of the wing. The crispy skin gave a sharp crackle, and the aroma of wood-roasting combined with the seasoning exploded on his tongue, along with a faint, ephemeral sweetness from the honey.
Shao Xingyang had long since run out of patience. He simply grabbed a chicken leg with his hands and began to gorge himself. The charred, crispy exterior was devoured entirely; once he broke through the glass-like outer shell, the juices of the roasted chicken began to gush out incessantly, a blend of sweet and savory flooding his mouth. The high heat had locked the moisture inside the snake-tailed chicken, and the moment the meat hit his tongue, its tenderness was apparent. The rich fat elevated the deliciousness to another level; oil coaxed out by the heat hid beneath the slightly scorched skin, waiting to flow out the moment someone took a bite.
The skin, as thin as a cicada’s wing, was the essence of the entire roast snake-tailed chicken. Ensuring the internal meat was fully cooked while preventing the outer skin from burning was a technical feat, and Lu Shiyu had clearly performed it perfectly. The skin shimmered with a moist oil and was covered in tiny, interlacing cracks—a testament to its crispness, shattering with the slightest bite.
The method of roasting the outside while boiling the inside truly made this snake-tailed chicken more delicious than an ordinary roast chicken. Yan Hong only had to bite into a piece of meat for the abundant juices to make her startle with their heat, before she instinctively swallowed the still-scalding liquid.
Chen Yunliang didn’t eat as frantically as Yan Hong or Shao Xingyang. He stacked a piece of crispy skin with a piece of meat and stuffed a half-cooked egg in the middle, sending the simple assembly into his mouth. First, he felt the crunch of the crispy skin as it crackled under his teeth, followed by the juices from the tender meat below flowing down his throat. Finally, there was the egg in the middle, which perfectly neutralized the sweetness of the skin and the savoriness of the meat, allowing the two flavors to blend softly. The smooth, runny egg yolk emitted the unique fragrance of eggs, making the flavor of the roast chicken more complex without becoming conflicting.
The group had waited so long for the chicken to roast that they were nearly faint with hunger. Once they could finally eat, everyone devoured it ravenously, looking like people truly starved.
In no time, the entire snake-tailed chicken had been picked clean. Shao Xingyang let out a satisfied burp.
“Too good,” Shao Xingyang said, leaning against his backpack and half-lying on the ground as he reminisced about the roast chicken’s flavor. “That’s the best roast chicken I’ve ever had. What will I do if I can never eat it again?”
Lu Shiyu joked, “Then mark this spot on the map. When you want to eat it in the future, come here and catch one.”
“Really?” Shao Xingyang sat up.
“And next time, I’ll let you be the one to lure the chickens away again.”
“Never mind then.” Shao Xingyang lay back down.
Lu Shiyu was obviously joking. After all, this place was a significant distance from the base; who would run to such a far and dangerous place just for a roast chicken? However, Tang Zeyu wordlessly pulled out the map, found their current approximate location, and drew a small icon of a chicken leg to mark the spot.
After everyone had eaten their fill, Lu Shiyu didn’t simply discard the bones left over from stripping the meat. Instead, she packed them carefully into a box. Seeing her actions while he was marking the map, Tang Zeyu asked why she was saving them.
“The bones can be kept to make soup tomorrow,” Lu Shiyu said, shaking the box in her hand. “I figured this out myself—soup made from roast chicken bones tastes quite similar to chicken stock.”
Tang Zeyu suddenly remembered something and asked her, “By the way, what did you mean earlier when you said, ‘So that’s how it is’?”
“Huh?” Lu Shiyu thought back for a moment before remembering what she had said back in the snake-tailed chicken’s territory, and she suddenly grew excited.
“I think I know why the ants crawled onto Shao Xingyang!”
Hearing his name mentioned in relation to the ants, Shao Xingyang, who had been bickering with Yan Hong, instinctively turned to look.
“The ants? It should be because of those flowers,” Chen Yunliang said, wiping his glasses with a cloth. “At the time, only Shao Xingyang was splashed with the liquid inside the flower, so only he suffered the ant night-raid.”
“That’s true,” Lu Shiyu nodded, “but that’s only part of it.”
“Part of it?” Everyone’s interest was instantly piqued.
“That kind of flower starts secreting a liquid while it’s still a bud—let’s treat it as nectar for now. When it’s about to bloom, that nectar becomes thick and loses its fluidity, hanging around the center of the flower. At that point, the ants that feed on nectar are attracted and begin to transport it. Simultaneously, these ants are one of the food sources for the snake-tailed chickens. The chickens gather in areas with many ants. So, the nectar attracts the ants, and the ants attract the chickens.”
Lu Shiyu added the final piece: “And the food for those flowers… is the snake-tailed chickens!”
This long string of logic left Shao Xingyang in a daze, but Tang Zeyu reacted quickly.
“So the flowers, the ants, and the chickens form a circular food chain.”
“Exactly!” Lu Shiyu snapped her fingers. “Stable food chains exist even among mutated creatures.”
Chen Yunliang had heard of such things and nodded after hearing her explanation. “I have indeed heard members of other exploration teams mention that current mutated creatures have developed new ecosystems and food chains, just like ordinary creatures of the past.”
“Current?” Lu Shiyu keenly caught the keyword.
“It’s your first time leaving the base, so it’s normal you don’t understand,” Yan Hong said, leaning against her backpack. “Things weren’t nearly as stable as they are now when the mutation disaster first began.”
“At the start of the disaster, various creatures appeared that simply couldn’t be explained by scientific theory. A large portion of them looked like they were randomly generated. You probably can’t imagine a snake with a dog’s head, right? But there were things much more ridiculous than that. All sorts of strangely shaped, terrifying creatures appeared all over the world. Those creatures were highly aggressive and would go into a frenzy upon seeing humans. Whether in the city or the countryside, any animal or plant would be affected.”
Yan Hong shifted into a more comfortable position, resting one leg on Shao Xingyang’s: “Later, the government sent out the military to deal with it, but those creatures seemed to come from nowhere, an endless supply. They were dangerous and numerous, and heavy weaponry couldn’t be used in the cities. You could say that at the beginning, we were just taking a beating from the mutated creatures.”
“And then?”
Lu Shiyu only remembered seeing many terrifying-looking things on television back then; at the time, she thought it was a cartoon and didn’t realize a disaster had arrived. Later, she was placed by her parents into a group entering the base, and she never saw them again.
“Then the government organized evacuations, concentrating everyone together to clear space for the military to deal with the creatures,” Yan Hong said, a hint of helplessness creeping into her tone. “But mutated creatures didn’t just exist on the surface; they were underground too. Some burst into the crowded venues from below, causing massive casualties. The death toll from that miscalculation was even higher than the previous total combined. Casualties could no longer be calculated in specific numbers; there were severed limbs and wreckage everywhere.”
The group fell into a collective silence as Yan Hong continued her story.
“At that time, some felt that if the government hadn’t demanded concentration, so many people wouldn’t have perished at once. Ultimately, under immense pressure, the government made its final and most difficult plan: the construction project for the human survivor bases.”
“Every available resource was mobilized. On one hand, we had to resist the surging waves of mutated creatures, and on the other, we had to race against time to build high walls that could keep them all out,” Tang Zeyu took over from Yan Hong. “Finally, at a tragic cost—a cost where the military was nearly wiped out—enough time was bought. The base was completed, and then came the screening of entrants.”
“Everyone was arranged in order based on the criteria set by the base,” even the usually frivolous Shao Xingyang became uncharacteristically serious. “Children entered first, then young adults, then middle-aged technicians, and finally the ordinary middle-aged and elderly.”
This was also why there were almost no elderly people in the base; most of those at the end of the line died of various causes before it was their turn to enter.
“Why doesn’t anyone in the base know about this? And how do you all know?”
Tang Zeyu said, “Because we are the most unique group in the base. Every member of an exploration team knows these things, but we can’t reveal a single word to the ordinary citizens who don’t know the full picture. In their eyes, things were simply a disaster followed by people hiding and living in shelters. If these details spread in the base, there’s a high probability they would cause panic and chaos, and the balance we’ve struggled to maintain would be shattered.”
“Lu Shiyu, you have to keep our secret,” Shao Xingyang said with a smile. “If others find out we revealed this to you, we might just get a bullet to the head.”
Lu Shiyu nodded blankly.
“The base kept its gates tightly shut after the initial intake. It wasn’t until several years later that the first exploration team was sent out to gather intelligence. They were wiped out entirely, but subsequent teams found records of mutated creatures among their belongings. Since then, new exploration teams have been formed and sacrificed continuously. The mission of an exploration team is to explore the world outside and send intelligence back behind the walls. Those first few years were very dangerous; if one out of ten people came back alive, it was considered a success. Later, the teams matured, and the outside world began to grow less dangerous.”
“What about those creatures that actively attack people?”
Yan Hong sneered. “Remember the dog-headed snake? It died. For no reason, it just died mysteriously.”
“Those mutated creatures that are severely biologically illogical don’t need human attacks or infighting to perish; left alone, they simply die off on their own. So, the safe environment outside the base wasn’t won by humans; it’s mostly that the monsters died, leaving only the relatively normal ones to survive. Take the snake-tailed chicken, for example; it didn’t die like the dog-headed snake and successfully thrived.”
“Since the greatest danger is disappearing, has the interior of the base never thought about stepping outside?” Lu Shiyu asked.
“Of course they have. That’s why exploration teams are constantly sent out to draw maps, record species, and study traits—all of which rely on exploration teams to complete,” Shao Xingyang said with some self-satisfaction. “But those have nothing to do with us. Our squad doesn’t do such basic missions; we only go for the big ones!”
Despite Shao Xingyang’s arrogance, the others didn’t contradict him. The missions they executed were indeed always difficult, never easy.
“Are you really that impressive? Then why were you covered in ants and chased by chickens?” Lu Shiyu asked curiously.
Shao Xingyang instantly bristled: “Don’t mention those things again!”
“Oh.”