Jiang Cheng’s convoy didn’t leave S City directly.
They first went along the road looking for more vehicles, to ease the traffic pressure and make everyone more comfortable.
They also needed to find fuel.
The first gas station they found had already exploded in the earthquake. They kept searching, found a second one, pumped out the fuel and filled the empty tanker trucks. The tanker trucks followed the convoy.
Then Jiang Cheng headed to the other survival bases. The first was Zheng Junwei’s.
After the cell phones lost their network, the districts had stayed in contact via radio. After the earthquake the night before last, they’d only found that shortwave radio—Song Jingshuo’s vehicle-mounted radio couldn’t be found.
The Tech District had completely lost contact with the other survival bases.
Zheng Junwei’s survival base was on the east side. Jiang Cheng went to find them first. She’d agreed with Su Yu: she’d contact the two on the east, Su Yu would contact the old city area in the city center and one on the west.
S City couldn’t be stayed in anymore—they had to call the survivors to leave together.
—
Zheng Junwei’s survival base was a river-view apartment complex by the river on the east side.
Jiang Cheng had been there twice.
But this time, that apartment complex was gone.
It wasn’t like the youth apartments, with rubble piled into mountains and ruins everywhere—it was just gone.
Meaning, that place was now a vast, open wasteland.
The people who’d been there before were stunned: “This is the place, right? It’s definitely here. Look over there—right? I remember that terrain. The river channel looks a bit different, but this should be it.”
Someone said: “What’s that?”
On a large stretch of wasteland, there was something like a small pavilion.
The convoy drove over. Only up close did they discover this “pavilion” was much larger than a real pavilion. It just had the shape of a pavilion—it wasn’t a real pavilion.
Everyone finally recognized what this thing was.
This was the decorative spire from the rooftop of the river-view apartment complex!
When it was still on the rooftop, from a distance it was just a little point. So it was actually this big.
Everyone fell silent, then stepped back. Stepping farther back could expand their field of view.
Seen this way, it became clear—the spire hadn’t fallen to the ground.
It had “grown” from the ground.
Zhao Yi crouched down, both hands pressing on the soil.
After a while, he stood up and told Jiang Cheng: “Let’s go.”
The earth split open, the entire apartment complex sank, and the earth closed again.
No survivors.
Essentially, they were just ants.
The convoy left that wasteland in silence. Continued toward another survival base.
When they arrived there, it was chaos.
The core personnel capable of holding a team together were gone. The former collective had scattered into loose sand, harming each other.
It looked like only two or three hundred people, yet there were many corpses on the ground.
There were female corpses with clothes unable to cover their bodies.
They saw the convoy. Someone recognized it: “It’s the Tech District! It’s the Tech District!”
They waved frantically, ran, chased the vehicles.
Jiang Cheng told the driver: “Don’t stop. Go.”
The lead vehicle accelerated. The vehicles behind all accelerated.
Someone tried to stop them with their body.
Wasn’t the Tech District always claiming to be a government? Then they should be morally manipulable.
Too naive.
The Tech District people, under Jiang Cheng’s leadership, had been through hundreds of battles. The large vehicle drivers had seen everything.
Jiang Cheng said “don’t stop”—so they didn’t stop.
Flooring the accelerator, crushing them directly into meat paste.
No one dared block them anymore. They watched helplessly as the massive convoy left.
“Where are they going?”
“Are they leaving S City?”
“There must be a situation—hurry, find a way to follow!”
The Tech District had always been the leader. They wouldn’t leave S City for no reason.
These people frantically went to find vehicles, trying to catch up with the main force.
The convoy left only a trail of dust.
—
As the mysterious man wished, Jiang Cheng planned a route heading east.
She traveled east the whole way. The final destination was set at Q City.
From S City to Q City was over seven hundred kilometers. In the past, driving the highway, it took one day.
But now, the convoy had been on the highway for only a short while when they discovered the road was broken. They had to turn around and reverse back out.
Fortunately, there were no vehicles on the highway at all now. Otherwise, it would have been a car crash in minutes.
They got off the highway and took the national road.
The convoy didn’t go fast at all—you could even say they were carefully moving at a slow pace.
They had no intention of racing off to meet the Zombie Emperor. Rather, they wanted to find a way to survive in this direction.
After leaving S City’s administrative boundaries, they indeed saw zombies they hadn’t seen in a long time.
Everyone had probably gone mad—seeing zombies actually felt familiar.
It was just that they truly hadn’t seen zombies in S City for a very long time.
Many refugees who had never joined the combat teams or gone on field missions hadn’t seen a zombie since seeking refuge in the Tech District.
If it was just scattered zombies, the convoy ran them over.
Only when they encountered a slightly larger gathering of zombies would they stop and get out to clear them.
Many people hadn’t worn armor in a long time. Those armors and crescent-blade shovels had all been collected during the extreme cold period. Now Jiang Cheng took them out and distributed them again: “Let’s warm up first.”
Since the expectation for the future was encountering the Zombie Emperor’s massive zombie army, for now they’d do some rehabilitation training.
Cooped up in buildings for months—don’t get rusty.
Song Jingshuo didn’t hide it anymore either. He directly tossed seedlings onto zombie corpses.
The seedlings rapidly grew, flowered, and bore fruit.
No one minded at all. Stepping on zombie bones, they picked watermelons, mangoes, and strawberries and squatted by the roadside eating them.
Before departure, the cooking team had already baked many large flatbreads. Now they took them out, heated them up, and ate.
The past few months locked in buildings had given the bean paste enough time to ferment. The aunties had finally made real doubanjiang.
Jiang Cheng’s space was the backup warehouse. Since it was a backup, she chose supplies that could be stored longer. She’d stored a lot of doubanjiang. Now she took it out and spread it on the hot flatbreads, then rolled in scallions and cucumbers that Song Jingshuo had grown on the spot.
Everyone squatted in rows, eating flatbread rolls with scallions together.
After eating and drinking, they also solved their excretion needs in the temporary latrines.
The driver honked the horn. Everyone boarded the vehicles one after another. The convoy set off again.
They passed through villages. No living people, only zombies. The convoy stopped wanting to see if there were any useful supplies, but in the houses they saw human corpses.
The corpses were all lying on beds, just beginning to rot.
Everyone analyzed: “They must have frozen to death.”
Frozen to death when the extreme cold came—that was months ago.
But in the extreme cold, corpses were like frozen—no decay. These past two days, the extreme cold had vanished. The corpses thawed and began to rot.
Untreated corpses could easily cause plague. The Tech District people buried those corpses together.
That night, everyone stayed in the village. It was actually better than the temporary dormitories—there were real beds. And they collected lots of pots, pans, bowls, and miscellaneous daily necessities, taking them all the next day.
The convoy drove another day. The villages, towns, and cities they passed in the morning had no living people.
Probably still within the extreme cold’s coverage area.
The small cities had quite a lot of zombies, and a few mutant zombies.
The former combat team members had rehabilitated quite well, finding their familiar combat rhythm.
Leaving the small city and continuing forward, by afternoon they drove into another small city, and finally saw signs of human habitation.
A human settlement survival base.
The people on the street weren’t wearing armor or carrying weapons. Clearly in the area near the survival base, zombies had been cleared and controlled very well, so people could walk outdoors safely without weapons.
The people in the vehicles pressed against the windows looking outside. The people outside looked in shock at this terrifyingly large convoy.
All converted into blade vehicles, gleaming silver, a long line driving into the city, an oppressive feeling hitting you in the face.
The convoy chose to stop on a wide road.
Everyone got out.
The local passersby stared blankly at these people.
Someone bold stepped forward to ask: “Where are you from?”
When everyone answered “S City,” the locals showed shocked expressions: “There are still living people in S City? Wasn’t that place frozen in ice and snow?”
The Tech District people wandered around, and curious locals gathered to watch. The two sides engaged in a relatively friendly communication and exchange.
It couldn’t not be friendly. The Tech District had almost two thousand people, quite a few wearing armor and carrying weapons, having regained the killing aura from months ago.
And everyone looked well-fed, full of energy.
No one dared attack or provoke them.
The Tech District people also noticed. They whispered: “So many people are thin enough to have hollow cheeks.”
“Looks like malnutrition.”
“Just now a girl who looked like a college student asked me if I had flatbread, said she only wanted one. Before she finished, a big sister rushed over saying she only wanted half. I fucking thought they were beggars, but then…”
It turned out they were selling their bodies.
A young one for one flatbread. An older one for half a flatbread.
The Tech District people were stunned.
In the past, everyone had complained about the Tech District’s basic survival policy of one potato per person per day.
But now, looking at this small city, if those women could be allocated a basketball-sized potato every day, they absolutely wouldn’t have to come out and sell their bodies.
No one was born lowly—they just wanted to live.
They asked the locals where there was a place that could accommodate two thousand people for camping. The locals pointed them to an elementary school.
An elementary school was great—it had buildings, classrooms, saving Zhao Yi and the others from having to build houses on the spot.
The convoy honked to assemble and drove to that school.
The school even had a cafeteria, so they didn’t need to build outdoor stoves—the fire-types could use it directly.
The cooking team got busy.
They’d had flatbread rolls with scallions at noon. Tonight they strove to let everyone eat a bit better.
Now the only wood-type was Song Jingshuo. Fortunately, Jiang Cheng’s reserves were astonishing. Along the way, they’d also collected large numbers of zombie corpses as fertilizer for Song Jingshuo.
Now they didn’t even need earth-types. Everyone’s hearts had long been tempered—they could just scatter seeds directly onto the zombies.
And to what degree had Song Jingshuo’s wood-type superpower evolved?
Long past directly ripening things in one go, he now catalyzed plants into an active state, and the plants would then absorb nutrients and grow on their own.
Though not as fast as from seed to food in two minutes, it was especially suited for large-scale planting.
After catalyzing to this state, the superpower user didn’t need to tend to it anymore. As long as fertilizer was sufficient, depending on the degree of catalysis, the plants would reach maturity in a few hours or overnight.
Large patches of plants appeared on the athletic field. Giant water storage tanks.
The metal-types polished the blade edges on the vehicles, in case they encountered the Zombie Emperor at any time.
Everyone lined up to collect bedding, orderly and neat. Once they got it, they went into the building to find classrooms and arrange accommodation.
Everything was methodical. Everyone followed commands.
It stunned the people watching from outside the fence.
The Tech District people hadn’t seen outsiders in a long time either.
Everyone had been cooped up miserably for the past few months. After the extreme cold retreated, earthquakes immediately followed. Now that the environment finally seemed safe, everyone wanted to go out and look around.
Jiang Cheng agreed: “Go in groups. Bring weapons. No one goes alone, especially women. Team leaders take full responsibility. If you lose someone, don’t come back.”
The refugees went out in groups.
They all wanted to see what kind of life people outside S City lived.
It was near dusk, the sky slightly dim.
The city had no electricity. The streets were lined with fire barrels converted from gasoline drums, faint lighting.
Many people were thin to the bone.
The men’s eyes were dangerous. The women’s expressions were cowering.
Walking on such streets, these Tech District people who’d always called themselves “refugees” looked—the men too healthy, the women too clean.
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