Chapter 191

Jiang Cheng’s convoy did not leave S City immediately.

First, they searched along the way for more vehicles to ease the strain on traffic and make things a little more comfortable for everyone.

They also needed fuel.

The first gas station they found had already exploded in the earthquake. They continued searching and found a second one. They siphoned out the fuel, filled several empty tanker trucks, and had the tankers join the convoy.

Jiang Cheng then headed for the other survivor bases. The first one was Zheng Junwei’s.

After the phones lost network access, the various districts established contact through radio stations. After the earthquake the night before, they had found only the shortwave radio, but they still couldn’t locate Song Jingshuo’s vehicle radio.

The New Technology District had completely lost contact with the other survivor bases.

Zheng Junwei’s survivor base was on the eastern side, in a riverside housing development. Jiang Cheng had been there twice before.

But this time, the development was gone.

It wasn’t like the Youth Apartments, which had been reduced to a mountain of rubble and a field of ruins. It was simply gone.

All that remained was a broad, empty wasteland.

The people who had been there before were stunned.

“This is definitely the place. Look over there, see? I remember that terrain. The river channel seems a little different, but this should be it.”

Someone asked, “What’s that?”

In the middle of the vast wasteland stood something that looked like a small pavilion.

The convoy drove over. Only when they reached it did they discover that this “pavilion” was far larger than a real pavilion. It merely had the shape of one; it wasn’t actually a pavilion.

At last, everyone recognized what it was.

It was the decorative spire from the roof of the riverside housing development.

When it had still been on the roof, it had looked like a tiny pointed ornament from a distance. No one had realized it was actually this huge.

Everyone fell silent, then began backing away. The farther they retreated, the broader their field of view became.

From there, everything was clear.

The spire hadn’t fallen onto the ground.

It had “grown” out of it.

Zhao Yi crouched down and pressed both hands against the soil.

After a while, he stood up and said to Jiang Cheng, “Let’s go.”

The earth had split open, swallowing the entire housing development, then closed again.

No one had survived.

In the end, they were nothing more than ants.

The convoy left the barren wasteland in silence and continued toward another survivor base.

When they arrived, the place was in complete chaos.

The backbone personnel who had once held the group together were gone. The former community had disintegrated into a scattered mob, its members turning on one another.

There appeared to be only two or three hundred people, yet corpses littered the ground.

Some of the dead women were barely clothed.

When the people at the base saw the convoy, someone recognized it.

“It’s the New Technology District! It’s the New Technology District!”

They waved frantically, running after the vehicles.

Jiang Cheng told the drivers, “Don’t stop. Keep going.”

The lead vehicle accelerated, and the others followed suit.

Some people tried to force the convoy to stop by throwing themselves in its path.

The New Technology District had always presented itself as a government, hadn’t it? Then surely it could be pressured through morality.

How naïve.

Under Jiang Cheng’s leadership, the people of the New Technology District had been through countless battles. The truck drivers had seen every kind of trick.

When Jiang Cheng said not to stop, they didn’t stop.

They floored the gas and ran the people over, crushing them into bloody pulp.

After that, no one else dared to block the convoy. They could only watch helplessly as the enormous procession departed.

“Where are they going?”

“Are they leaving S City?”

“There must be something going on. Find a way to catch up with them!”

The New Technology District had always been the leader. They wouldn’t leave S City for no reason.

The people scrambled to find vehicles, trying to catch up with the main convoy.

All the convoy left behind was a trail of dust.

Just as the mysterious person had wished, Jiang Cheng planned a route eastward.

She traveled east the entire way, with Q City as their final destination.

The distance from S City to Q City was more than seven hundred kilometers. In the past, it would have taken only a day to drive there on the expressway.

But now, not long after the convoy entered the expressway, they discovered that the road had been cut off. They had no choice but to turn around and drive back against the traffic.

Fortunately, there were no vehicles on the expressway at all. Otherwise, they would have caused an accident in minutes.

After leaving the expressway, they switched to the national highway.

The convoy traveled slowly—not just slowly, but with extreme caution.

No one was planning to rush off to meet the Corpse Emperor. They wanted to search for a way to survive along the route.

Once they left S City’s administrative boundaries, they finally saw the zombies they had missed for so long.

Everyone must have gone crazy. They actually felt a sense of familiarity upon seeing zombies.

They really hadn’t seen a zombie in S City for a very long time.

Many of the refugees had never joined a team or gone on an outside mission. After taking shelter in the New Technology District, they had not seen a single zombie again.

When they encountered only scattered zombies, the convoy simply ran them over.

Only when they came across a somewhat larger gathering did they stop and get out to clear them away.

Many people hadn’t worn their armor in a long time. During the extreme cold, all the armor and crescent shovels had been collected and stored away. Now Jiang Cheng brought them out and distributed them again.

“Let’s get warmed up first.”

If they expected to face the Corpse Emperor’s massive zombie army in the future, they might as well get some practice now.

They had been cooped up inside buildings for months. They couldn’t afford to grow sluggish.

Song Jingshuo stopped hiding his ability, too. He simply tossed a seedling onto a zombie’s corpse.

The seedling rapidly grew, blossomed, and bore fruit.

No one minded. They stepped over the zombie remains, picked watermelons, mangoes, and strawberries, then squatted by the roadside and ate.

Before setting out, the cooking team had baked a large number of flatbreads. They only needed to heat them up before eating.

The several months spent trapped inside the buildings had given the bean paste plenty of time to ferment. The aunties had finally managed to make real doubanjiang.

Jiang Cheng’s space was a reserve warehouse, and since it was a reserve, she had chosen supplies that could be stored for longer periods. She had stored a great deal of doubanjiang.

Now she brought it out and spread it over the hot flatbreads, then rolled them up with the green onions and cucumbers Song Jingshuo had grown on the spot.

Everyone squatted in rows, eating flatbreads rolled around green onions.

After eating and drinking, they also took care of their bodily needs in the portable toilets.

The drivers honked their horns. Everyone climbed back into the vehicles, and the convoy set off again.

They passed through a village. There were no living people, only zombies.

The convoy stopped to look for useful supplies, but inside the houses they found human corpses instead.

The bodies were all lying in bed and had only just begun to decay.

Everyone analyzed the situation.

“They probably froze to death.”

That had happened months ago, when the extreme cold first arrived.

During the extreme cold, the bodies had been preserved as if frozen, so they hadn’t decomposed. Now that the extreme cold had vanished, the corpses had thawed and begun to rot.

If the bodies weren’t dealt with, they could cause an epidemic. The people from the New Technology District buried all the corpses together.

That night, the convoy stayed in the village. It was far better than the temporary dormitories, since there were actual beds. They also gathered a great deal of miscellaneous household equipment—pots, bowls, utensils, and other daily necessities—and loaded everything up the next day.

The convoy drove for another day. The villages, towns, and cities they passed that morning were all devoid of living people.

They were probably still within the area covered by the extreme cold.

The small cities contained a considerable number of zombies, including several mutated ones.

The former team members had recovered remarkably well. They had regained their familiar combat rhythm.

After leaving the small city and continuing onward, they entered another one in the afternoon.

At last, they saw signs of human life.

It was a survivor base inhabited by humans.

The people on the streets were not wearing armor or carrying weapons. Clearly, the zombies in the area around the survival base had been thoroughly cleared out and brought under control, allowing people to walk outside without weapons and feel safe.

The people inside the vehicles pressed against the windows to look outside, while the people outside stared in shock at the terrifyingly large convoy.

Every vehicle had been modified into a blade car, gleaming silver. The long line drove into the city, radiating an overwhelming sense of pressure.

The convoy chose to stop on a wide road.

Everyone got out.

The local passersby stared blankly at them.

One of the braver ones came forward and asked, “Where are you from?”

When everyone answered, “S City,” the locals all wore astonished expressions.

“There are still survivors in S City? Didn’t that place freeze solid under the ice and snow?”

The people from the Technology New District scattered in every direction, while the locals watched them with curiosity. The two sides engaged in communication and interaction in a reasonably friendly atmosphere.

It couldn’t not be friendly. The Technology New District had nearly two thousand people, and quite a number of them were wearing armor and carrying weapons. They had already regained the murderous aura they had possessed several months ago.

Besides, every one of them looked well-fed and full of strength.

No one dared attack or provoke them.

The people from the Technology New District also noticed something.

“So many of them are so thin their cheeks have caved in,” they whispered among themselves.

“They look malnourished.”

“A little while ago, a girl who looked about college age asked me if I had any flatbread. She said she only wanted one piece. Before she could finish, a middle-aged woman rushed over and said she only wanted half a piece. I thought they were beggars, but then...”

It turned out they were selling themselves.

One piece of flatbread for the younger women, half a piece for the older ones.

The people from the Technology New District were stunned.

In the past, everyone had complained about the Technology New District’s basic survival policy of giving each person one potato a day.

But now, looking at this small city, they realized that if those women had been given a potato the size of a basketball every day, they would never have needed to sell themselves.

No one was born depraved. They were simply trying to survive.

They asked the locals where they could find a place large enough to accommodate two thousand people.

The locals pointed them toward an elementary school.

An elementary school was perfect. It had buildings and classrooms, saving Zhao Yi and the others the trouble of constructing shelters themselves.

The convoy honked its horns to gather everyone, then drove to the school.

There was even a cafeteria. They did not need to build makeshift cooking pits, either; the fire-type ability users went straight to work.

The cooking team busied itself.

At noon, everyone ate scallion-filled flatbread rolls. In the evening, they made every effort to prepare a better meal.

Now Song Jingshuo was the only wood-type ability user left, but fortunately, Jiang Cheng’s reserves were astonishing. Along the way, they had also collected a large number of zombie corpses to use as fertilizer for Song Jingshuo.

They did not even need the earth-type ability users anymore. Everyone’s nerves had long since been hardened, so they simply scattered seeds directly onto the zombie corpses.

And how far had Song Jingshuo’s wood-type superpower evolved?

He no longer accelerated crops from seed to maturity in one continuous burst. Instead, he stimulated the plants into an active state, after which they would absorb nutrients and grow on their own.

Although this was not as insanely fast as growing a seed into food in two minutes, it was especially suitable for large-scale cultivation.

Once the plants had been stimulated into this state, the ability user no longer needed to manage them. As long as there was enough fertilizer, the plants would reach maturity within several hours or overnight, depending on how strongly they had been stimulated.

Large patches of crops appeared across the school field, along with enormous water-storage tanks.

The metal-type ability users polished the blades on the vehicles, preparing for the possibility of encountering a Corpse Emperor at any moment.

Everyone lined up to receive bedding. Once they had collected theirs, they went into the buildings to find classrooms and arrange sleeping quarters.

Everything proceeded in an orderly fashion. Everyone followed instructions.

The people watching from outside the fence were left utterly stunned.

The people from the Technology New District had not seen outsiders in a long time, either.

They had been cooped up for months. The moment the extreme cold receded, another earthquake struck. Now that the environment finally appeared safe, everyone wanted to go out and take a look around.

Jiang Cheng agreed.

“Go out in groups. Bring weapons. No one is to travel alone, especially women. The team leader will be held fully responsible. If you lose anyone, don’t come back.”

The refugees went out in groups.

They all wanted to see what life was like beyond S City.

It was nearly dusk, and the sky had grown dim.

There was no electricity in the city. All along the streets, oil drums had been converted into fire barrels, providing only feeble illumination.

Many people were skin and bones.

The men had dangerous looks in their eyes, while the women wore timid, shrinking expressions.

Walking through streets like these, the people from the Technology New District—who had always referred to themselves as “refugees”—looked far too healthy if they were men, and far too clean if they were women.