Chapter 68 - Down South
Qi Jingchen was very quick at reading, and the more he read, the more serious his expression became.
“Big brother, how’s the book? I found this with great difficulty and asked lots of people!” Qi An said.
“Asked... lots of people?” Qi Jingchen raised his head. His face was obviously expressionless but Qi An felt his hair raise.
“Big Brother... It’s not like I know about this, so I have to ask around... Also, you know that this type of book wouldn’t be published regularly; it was so hard to find,” Qi An said. He was still young when the apocalypse struck and had honestly forgotten almost everything before the apocalypse. He had no idea about the literature before the apocalypse, so how could he find books without asking around?
“But everyone I asked was regular people in W County secure base. Don’t worry, no one knows!”
Qi Jingchen knew more about life before the apocalypse, and the book in his hands definitely couldn’t be published normally. They even had to be careful when printing it in secret. Otherwise, it would be considered as spreading around that sort of thing, then Mr. Police would come knocking on their door.
Qi An definitely faced difficulty in finding this, but the contents in this book was a little exaggerated... or... He had too little experience?
“Aside from this book, is there anything else?”
“Yes, I found a lot of male and male books in that house, but I just browsed through them and saw that this book was the most detailed,” Qi An said. Most of the books didn’t have any sex scene at all, it really was too much! He heard that before the apocalypse, writing this subject was still illegal... He didn’t know the consequences of breaking the law back then. Was being executed one of them?
“You’re still young, don’t read books like this.” Qi Jingchen frowned. Qi An browsed through the books? Would it corrupt children?
“I’m not young anymore!” Qi An promptly refuted. He hated it the most when other people called him young.
Qi Jingchen gave Qi An a look, then didn’t mind so much after recalling that he wasn’t mentally young. Moreover... Qi An had already killed so many people, so what would it matter if he read a book like this?
“You really aren’t young anymore... Then keep that book, I’ll slowly read it in the future,” Qi Jingchen said, then continued reading the one in his hands.
This book was written a little exaggeratedly, but he could still pick up a few pointers from it.
After reading it halfway, Qi Jingchen suddenly shut the book and threw it at Qi An. “Keep it safe.”
Even though Qi An was confused, he still packed it away in his bag and planned to have Xiaomao store it in the space later. Right after he put it away, he saw Nie Yi return.
Boss really was worthy of being the boss. Nie Yi was so far away but he already could tell that Nie Yi was coming! However, he didn’t have to hide this, right? Why didn’t Boss bluntly take the book and discuss the content with Nie Yi?
If the boss ‘did’ Nie Yi, he could make fun of Nie Yi!
“I was held back for a while.” Nie Yi walked over quickly. “Did you wait long?”
“No,” Qi Jingchen said. He honestly didn’t mind if Nie Yi took a little longer— He had to close the book at itsclimax.
“Okay, everything’s done. Let’s continue on!” Nie Yi said. Even though he was delayed for some time, it wasn’t nightfall yet so they could still continue a little longer and set up camp later on.
Everyone quickly packed up, then mobilised the vehicles. Right at this time, a few helicopters suddenly flew overhead.
The most convenient form of transport during the beginning stage of the apocalypse was the helicopter, a small flying vehicle that could fly at a low altitude. But it consumed a lot of fuel, and had low capacity. As such, they would only use it for rescuing important figures. Namely, B City secure base had used helicopters during the start to save a lot of family members of famous figures. Then, they even sent many people to an island.
There were now many islands that were cleared out and had no zombies there. It was extremely safe, and could even serve as farmland. It was definitely a paradise, but later... All the aquatic creatures had turned into zombie beasts. Even if the fish couldn’t climb ashore, lobsters, crabs, and turtles weren’t easy to handle.
Follow on NovᴇlEnglish.nᴇt“It seems that these helicopters are coming from the south.” Ping Shengchao looked at the helicopters above. “They’re probably heading to B City.”
Nie Yi agreed. They had seen helicopters fly overhead a few times in the past, and didn’t care about it much. Instead, they continued driving down south.
They would be reaching a small secure base next, which was the hometown of two Chenguang Team members. They wanted to check if their family members were still there.
“Chenguang Team?” Hearing this name, Qi Jingchen’s brows furrowed slightly.
“Yes, I named it Chenguang Team. How is it? Does it sound nice?”
“Not bad.” Qi Jingchen nodded. He liked using Chenguang pens when he was young, because it was an inexpensive brand.
Having never paid attention to stationery, or having once noticed but forgotten after experiencing ten years of the apocalypse, Nie Yi didn’t notice anything odd and merely felt that this name was extremely cool.
That night, they chose to stop by a village.
Nowadays, there weren’t many survivors in the city, because not only did level two zombies spout black mist, they were also much stronger and exceptionally clingy.
Even if those who hid and never left their homes had enough food and water, with the level two zombies endlessly pounding on their door, or climbing over to their balcony from the neighbouring balcony and smashing through their windows, they would somehow always manage to enter. Even if they couldn’t, the day by day fear caused many people to choose suicide as a way out.
But it wasn’t the same in the countryside. There weren’t many zombies in rural areas and everyone lived in separate houses so it was much safer. Nie Yi recalled that some remote villages would gather villagers to clear out the zombies in the village after the apocalypse struck, then continue with their lives as before. Even though this village wasn’t remote, there were still seven or eight people living right now, and not many zombies were outside.
Nie Yi didn’t come in contact with those people, but killed all the zombies in the village. One of the survivors asked them for help, saying that there were two zombies locked inside one of the rooms in his house, and his men also went to help.
“Since there are people still alive here, my parents might also be fine.” One of the members of the Chenguang Team couldn’t help muttering to his friend upon seeing the survivors come out to pick vegetables and ask them for water once the zombies outside were gone.
“Ge, our parents...” Qi Yaoyao began to think about the Qi parents.
Qi Jingchen didn’t speak. He knew that the Qi parents were no longer around.
Everyone in the Chenguang Team hoped that their family was still alive, but reality clearly wasn’t that beautiful.
In the following period, they continuously passed by some secure bases but couldn’t find a single family member.
Nie Yi was unsurprised, but the men in the team were somewhat disappointed, and were even more forceful when killing zombies— It was these zombies that destroyed their homes!
Nie Yi’s party continued down south, but they didn’t know that the day after they left the cement plant, a group of people went there and thoroughly examined the cement plant several times.
In the blink of an eye, they had left W County secure base for ten days already, and they were nearing a medium-sized secure base.
This secure base was also established by the local garrison, and was next to the provincial city, J City. Even though J City secure base couldn’t compare to B City secure base, it was already fairly large. It had been pretty infamous before Nie Yi’s rebirth because it had been exposed to have experimented on ability users. Later, the secure base had been occupied by angry ability users and they began to bully regular people.
Ability users had appeared all of a sudden, so everyone was curious about their existence. B City secure base also had several people experimenting in this aspect, but after a tussle from various sides, B City ended up only researching on the corpses of ability users, and recruited volunteers to observe their situation. They would never experiment on ability users, and definitely wouldn’t rob ability users of their lives.
As for J City secure base... it was said that many people died at that time. ????n????????????αd. ????om
“Let’s stay there for a few more days.” Standing on the car roof and surveying in J City’s direction, Qi Jingchen suddenly spoke up.
“Why?”
“Mu Yi is there.” Qi Jingchen said, “I want to see whether everyone will be reborn.”
Nie Yi was very familiar with the name Mu Yi. She was a wind ability user like Jiang Huai, and had once been his subordinate.
Qi An had been picked up by Qi Jingchen, but it was Nie Yi who had saved Mu Yi. Back then, he saw a few secure base people chase after a woman, and based on the principle of an enemy of my enemy is my friend, he saved that girl. Then, Mu Yi followed him to rely on Qi Jingchen.
However, he had no idea that Mu Yi was someone from this secure base. He only remembered that Mu Yi had said she had been betrayed by a friend and nearly died, so she turned around and killed them instead, and had provoked people to hunt her down to kill.
This woman had a very powerful ability and was very resilient. Her strength was startling; at the same time, she was inversely the fourth among their side to die.
She had been a little distracted at that time, then for some reason, said she could see a bright, colourful light and dispersed her domain and died.
This situation was really common. After all, the pressure on everyone was enormous and they weren’t really sad about it. They killed her after she turned into a zombie, then found a place to bury her.
If she had been reborn as well... Then perhaps more people would continue to be reborn... This was bad for them.
“How troublesome.” Nie Yi said, “Fortunately, there were just those few people jumping around during the last stage of the apocalypse; if worse came to worst, just kill all of them.”
“...” Qi Jingchen looked at Nie Yi. They were also the ones ‘jumping around’ during the end days of the apocalypse.
Even though they decided to head to that secure base, they went to gather some supplies first.
They had gathered a lot of supplies during the journey, but who would ever hate having too much supplies? Besides that, Xiaomao’s space still wasn’t full.
Everyone in the Chenguang Team knew of Xiaomao being a space ability user now. It had made them even more worshipful towards Nie Yi and increased their belief in this team.
As long as they protected Xiaomao well, they had no need to worry about starving; how good was that?
However, they were also confused about something. For example, since Xiaomao was so important, why didn’t Qi Jingchen and Nie Yi personally take care of her, but passed her to a seven or eight-year-old child instead?
The place they chose to gather supplies today was the large city, J City, that was next to J City secure base.
There were lots of soldiers in B City secure base, but they couldn’t possibly gather all of the supplies in such a large city like B City, so there’s no need to speak of J City.
Chenguang Team slowly proceeded, and it wasn’t long before they found a store selling grains and oil. Nie Yi brought Qi An and Xiaomao in, then everything in this store was ‘put away’, leaving behind a small portion.
They didn’t lack in supplies, so Nie Yi had established a rule to always leave some supplies behind.
He wasn’t a good person at all, and could even kill someone with the slightest disagreement. However, he was still ‘friendly’ to those who had never provoked him— After a lion had its fill, it definitely wouldn’t care about hyenas and vultures eating the scraps it left behind.
Xiaomao walked a circle and those rice and grain disappeared. The team’s gaze towards Xiaomao was increasingly gentle.
But Xiaomao ignored them, instead running to Qi An’s side. “Gege, carry!”
Xiaomao had initially been taken in by Mother Ping. Mother Ping treated her well and she also was a little dependent on Mother Ping. Qi An had only carried her around for a while before she eventually only had him in her eyes. Perhaps it was because the two of them shared a sense of familiarity as space ability users.
Qi Jingchen thought that was how it was, but if Qi An heard it, he would disagree with Qi Jingchen; the real reason why Xiaomao became close with him was because he had coaxed her.
He really could be said to have fulfilled every single wish Xiaomao had! Not only did he bring Xiaomao around wherever he went, whenever he had the time, he would also use it to teach her.
Follow on Novᴇl-Onlinᴇ.cᴏmEveryone who lived in the apocalypse was very lonely. At this time, he should properly teach Xiaomao, and then she would accompany him till their deaths.
After they left the store, they went to a nearby supermarket that had been cleared out and took all the basic toiletries, then went to the milk tea shop next door to collect all the remaining powdered milk.
There were also a few restaurants and hotels; though the food supply in the kitchens had all gone bad, there was a lot of rice, noodles, and condiments remaining. They also found some vacuum-sealed cured meat, dried meat, and even ham.
They had collected a lot of supplies, but the present situation seemed pretty bad...
When a level two zombie was about to crash into a group member, Nie Yi used his ice blade to kill it off, his expression ugly.
The level two zombies were increasing. After this, the level three zombies should be appearing, right?
Level two zombies could spout black fog and had a black liquid drop in their brain. Meanwhile, level three zombies would spout black water and the black liquid in their brains would have turned into black, gummy candy-like crystal.
Level three ability users also had this squishy crystal. Its shape was irregular, and would grow larger as their ability grew stronger, then stimulated their cerebrum.
This stimulant would allow spiritual strength to appear much faster, and would also cause ability users to become increasingly irritable, with frequent headaches. If their ability was unstable, they would self-explode after the headache and die.
Speaking of which, Zhang Zihai had died in this manner.
Back when it started, no one knew how to deal with this matter and only knew that the ‘panacea’ would alleviate it. It was because of this that W County secure base became increasingly famous.
Of course, this matter would no longer appear, because regardless of them or Yu Xuguang, they all knew that they only needed to use their spiritual strength to compress the ‘gummy candy’, and once it was pressed into a solid crystal, they would become level four. At the same time, they would no longer have headaches or self-explode.
It wasn’t suitable to stop in the city, so after they collected enough supplies, Nie Yi retreated with the Chenguang Team, and finally chose to stop in a factory building near J City.
“Let’s go for a stroll?” After dinner, Nie Yi spoke to Qi Jingchen.
“You go by yourself,” Qi Jingchen said. He really wanted to read that unfinished book but... These days, Nie Yi simply hadn’t left his side at all.
“Since you don’t want to, I’ll stay behind and accompany you.” Nie Yi smiled.
“We might as well go,” Qi Jingchen said.
Nie Yi didn’t know why Qi Jingchen changed his mind, but he still happily took him away from their resting area.
“We can still see the moon now; that won’t be happening in a few more days.” After Qi Jingchen came out, he realised the night scene was truly beautiful.
“Let’s go look at the stars on the roof?” Nie Yi suggested.
“No thanks...Let’s go look over there!” Qi Jingchen suddenly pointed at a direction and said, “I sensed some energy fluctuation there, and the energy is very pure.”
Qi Jingchen suddenly sensed a turbulent energy fluctuation, but when Nie Yi ran over while carrying him, he felt the fluctuation gradually weakening, and was much harder to sense.
What was going on?
The two of them continued on, and suddenly realised that several zombies were also running in that direction.
Seeing this, Nie Yi sped up. When they arrived, they realised a group of zombies were tearing into a corpse, and one of them was even clasping a skull and biting into it.
They had seen this scenario on more than one occasion, and it would have been nothing much if there wasn’t a circular hole the size of a teacup drilled into this skull.
A human skull was very hard and current zombies couldn’t really open it, nor would they bother to do so... In fact, even if zombies grew stronger in the future, they would just use violence to pulverise the skull and wouldn’t create such a symmetrical, circular hole.