Shen Tangtang stood up, brushed the dirt off her clothes, and hauled her burlap sack over to another spot.
Half an hour later.
“Daiyu-jie, did you hear something?”
Shen Tangtang asked the girl beside her.
Looking completely bewildered, Lin Daiyu suddenly tensed up. “Tangtang, did you hear something?”
“Yeah, let’s go. Now.”
The very second the words left her mouth, Shen Tangtang grabbed her sack and bolted down toward the lower stream.
Lin Daiyu didn’t drag her feet either. Knowing how sharp Shen Tangtang’s instincts were, she didn’t even bother trying to slice off the edible foliage she had just scanned before running.
Five minutes after Shen Tangtang and Lin Daiyu fled, a colossal python slithered out from the canopy of leaves lining the waterfall, sliding smoothly into the deep pool below. It poked its head out, flicking its forked tongue through the air to taste the breeze, casting a puzzled glance toward the spot where Shen Tangtang and Lin Daiyu had just been resting. Too full from its recent meal, it sank back down to the bottom of the pool, waiting lazily for its next hunt.
It wasn’t until they dashed back into the water dropwort patch and spotted the cluster of surrounding scavengers that Shen Tangtang and Lin Daiyu finally caught their breath.
Both girls were flushed red, looking for all the world like they had a ghost hot on their heels. Their frantic entrance drew the curious gazes of the scavengers keeping watch nearby, among them Bai Yanjun.
Bai Yanjun’s face was practically dark enough to drip ink. When his lower back started aching earlier and he stood up to locate Lin Daiyu, he realized something was off—both she and Shen Tangtang had vanished completely.
Now they reappeared flushed and gasping, and judging by how heavy their sacks looked, the reality clicked instantly into place. He had been left behind out there, and neither of them had even crossed their minds to call out for him.
Neither Shen Tangtang nor Lin Daiyu had the mental bandwidth to care whether his feelings were hurt right now; they had run so hard they were nearly gasping their last breaths, especially during that initial five-minute sprint when Shen Tangtang had caught a whiff of an intensely heavy, foul musk in the air.
She knew something felt wrong. When they had lingered near the deep pool earlier to check out the water dropwort, she had noticed sticky, viscous fluid smeared across the leaves. Lin Daiyu hadn’t caught the scent and had even joked that the plants were drooling.
Ah… Connecting the dots to a terrifying possibility, Shen Tangtang felt goosebumps erupt all over her skin.
“Daiyu, why didn’t you guys call out for me when you left?”
Bai Yanjun’s voice carried a distinct, aggrieved edge.
Lin Daiyu offered an awkward, apologetic twitch of her lips. She honestly had no excuse—she had just seen Tangtang take off and instinctively followed right behind her, completely forgetting that another human being existed.
“Sorry, Jun-ge, I totally spaced out.”
The white moonlight protagonist was certainly honest to a fault.
Shen Tangtang’s lips twitched, fighting down a sudden urge to laugh.
“Daiyu-jie, let’s get away from this area first.”
Shen Tangtang whispered under her breath. She couldn’t guarantee whether that mutant beast would trail them here, but putting distance between themselves and the river was definitely the right call.
Nodding in agreement, Lin Daiyu cast a slightly guilty look back at Bai Yanjun. “Jun-ge, are you heading back with us?”
Glancing down at his wristband, Bai Yanjun noted it was pushing 5:00 PM, and walking back to the assembly point would take a solid half-hour. “Yeah, let’s go.”
Leading the pack, Shen Tangtang completely tuned out the awkward dynamic between the male lead and the supporting female lead. Other scavengers were already packing up their gear to head back, leaving only a sparse handful of people scattered around the water dropwort pool.
By the time they reached the assembly point, the transport bus had already rolled in and parked right in the open clearing, shaded by a massive sun umbrella where several squad leaders were conversing.
Shen Tangtang adjusted her woven sun hat and claimed a patch of ground to sit down.
With only half an hour left before roll call and departure, there was zero chance of scoring any more food anyway, so she might as well conserve her energy.
Roughly ten minutes later, a sudden wave of commotion broke out.
“Get the hell out of the way, don’t block the damn road!”
It was Zhang Yi’s voice, laced with frantic urgency and boiling fury.
Hearing that voice instantly snapped Shen Tangtang to full attention.
Her big round eyes locked onto the source of the noise. Zhang Yi was carrying a blood-soaked mercenary piggyback style. The man’s eyes were squeezed shut, looking for all the world like he was breathing his last breath.
He looked a little familiar… Wait, crap, how could he not look familiar? Wasn’t this the exact same guy who had flashed her a friendly grin while scanning her sack this morning?
What on earth had happened to them?
The muttered chatter of the surrounding crowd quickly filled in the blanks for Shen Tangtang.
“I heard the Third Mercenary Corps ran straight into a giant mutant python while chasing down a mutant wild turkey. Damn, word is over a dozen guys went out, and only those two made it back alive.”
“There’s a giant mutant python in this reclamation zone too? That’s a massive beast—safe zone headquarters is definitely going to dispatch the esper strike team to wipe it out!”
“Hard to say. I heard some monster of a beast popped up in the peach grove over by the First Mercenary Corps too, and the esper team only just sent guys out to handle that, so they probably can’t spare anyone anytime soon.”
“Well, looks like we can’t come back to this wasteland sector for a while. Better wait until the whole storm blows over.”
“True. My eldest uncle told me they just discovered a brand new bamboo grove out west—we should go check it out once it opens up and dig up some bamboo shoots.”
“Deal, it’s a plan. Make sure to holler at me when the time comes.”
Shen Tangtang tilted her head in confusion. How did the little made-up story she tossed out at noon actually turn out to be true?
An actual giant snake existed out here?
The speakers were two young men whose attire didn’t look anything like that of slum residents, let alone the shanty town rabble. Their faces were surprisingly clean, and they wore much sleeker, high-end scanning wristbands. One of them even had a compact bow and arrow slung across his back, completely devoid of the shell-shocked, numbed exhaustion that defined ordinary wasteland survivors.
Moreover, as the two chatted, their tones remained eerily calm. Even with the Third Mercenary Corps suffering heavy casualties, they merely talked about headquarters dispatching espers to clean it up. That meant these two either belonged to the noble district or were pampered kids from the military zone slumming it out to experience the wild.
Damn it all. She was the only pathetic little orphan struggling out here. Look at how effortlessly these rich kids operated, holding direct access to prime first-hand intel.
Back when she was a kid, the old nun had smuggled her out of her family’s home and taken her up to the mountains, where she’d spent years studying. If she hadn’t eventually buckled down to test into university, she never would have entered those competitions—only to ultimately kick the bucket from a sudden cardiac arrest caused by pulling all-nighters reading web novels.
Tsk tsk tsk, thinking about it made her chest ache with frustration.
If she weren’t blessed with an inherently optimistic personality, she probably would have been driven completely insane by the crushing, suffocating atmosphere of this wasteland world.
The only silver lining was that the shallow, diverse knowledge she had picked up in her past life gave her a slightly better edge at staying alive.
As Shen Tangtang lowered her gaze to mull things over, Lin Daiyu watched the crowd flocking toward the commotion, her face bubbling with unabashed curiosity.
It wasn’t until the whistle blew for roll call and line-up that the crowd finally snapped out of their panic and scurried to form queues.
This wasteland sector would likely remain locked down for the next few days, forcing everyone to return to older, thoroughly picked-over sectors where scavengers had scoured the ground a thousand times over just to hunt for edible scraps.
Shen Tangtang’s expression turned grim as well. While she had caught wind of the newly discovered bamboo grove out west, unauthorized civilians weren’t allowed to step foot there until it officially opened, and she had no earthly idea where it was anyway.
The southern wasteland sector was presumably open, but since it had been active for over a year, she and Lin Daiyu had barely scraped together a few half-meter leaves when they went last time—and that was with them catching a lucky break. Many others came back empty-handed and ended up going into debt to the mercenary corps just for the ride.
“Name and age?”
Shen Tangtang blinked, startled by how fast the line had moved.
“Shen Tangtang, 17.”
“Records check out. Put your sack on the scale… 89 catties, qualified.”
“Name and age?”
“Lin Daiyu, 17.”
“Records check out… 96 catties, qualified.”
Having wisely rejected Bai Yanjun’s request today, Lin Daiyu’s carried weight had stayed safely under the 100-catty limit, saving her from having any of her hard-earned harvest sheared away.