“Are you sure?”
The blond doctor strode over, snatched the instrument, and tested it again. It was still 0 milligrams per cubic meter.
“Good. Good… After searching for a full ten years…”
The blond doctor fixed his gaze on Zhuang Fan. “We’ve finally found a young demon scout.”
Demon scout… Zhuang Fan silently committed the term to memory, keeping his tone steady. “So, I passed the screening?”
“There are still more tests.”
The white coat beside him shook his head. “The concentration of uncanny mist here isn’t high enough. We’ll have to take him into the wild and test him again.”
The blond doctor nodded, then looked toward the guard. “Go ask Supervisor David to come over.”
The guard who had kicked Zhuang Fan earlier was now full of fear and did not dare meet his eyes.
Zhuang Fan, meanwhile, relaxed slightly. At the very least, he would not be fed to the walking corpses. That meant there was still room to maneuver.
Five minutes later, a burly bald white man walked in. He wore camouflage pants and a black vest, his muscles knotted and bulging. His right arm was a mechanical bionic limb that gleamed with a metallic sheen; one look was enough to know he was not someone to trifle with.
David’s status seemed fairly high. After learning the whole story, he merely gave Zhuang Fan a surprised glance, then waved his hand indifferently. “Then let’s go. We’ll take a little stroll outside and come right back.”
Zhuang Fan gave David another look. What was with that familiar tone? Afterward, he was escorted out of the testing area by four guards.
Along the way, Zhuang Fan kept memorizing every passage and airlock, trying to reconstruct the shelter’s exact layout in his mind.
He had an eidetic memory, but the more carefully he thought about it, the more he realized that this shelter was terrifyingly large.
Each fan-shaped section covered over a thousand square meters. Branching corridors spread like a spiderweb, connecting to other sections, their spaces fitted tightly together like a flattened, colossal honeycomb.
Between the corridors were independent lead-sealed airlocks that required multiple layers of identity verification to pass through. Mechanical guards patrolled back and forth in countless numbers, not to mention the hidden sentry machine guns and mechanical patrol dogs.
His chances of successfully breaking out were basically zero.
He had thought the mechanical guards were already powerful enough—until he saw the soldiers encased in steel armor.
Those “armored giants” were nearly three meters tall, their helmets almost brushing the ceiling. They were like humanoid tanks rumbling past him, their heavy footsteps even sending faint tremors through the floor.
The sense of oppression bearing down on him made him feel as though every move he made was being seen with perfect clarity.
He did not have much time left. He had to make a decision as soon as possible.
At the very front of the group, David waved a hand, and six armored giants followed behind him.
He glanced sideways at Zhuang Fan and grinned. “Quit looking. Even if you memorize it all, you won’t be able to escape.”
Zhuang Fan gave a light cough to conceal his intentions. “I’m just curious. These steel giants…”
“They’re armored soldiers.”
“Right. What powers the armored soldiers? I saw a battery compartment on their backs. Cold fusion batteries?”
“Heh, even nuclear fusion power stations are half-dead these days, and you’re talking cold fusion? I’ve never even heard of that stuff. It’s all lithium solid-state, sodium solid-state, thorium molten salt, that kind of thing now. Oh, and there’s nuclear decay batteries too. Those are the most expensive. Damn things—one battery alone weighs five hundred kilograms. Ridiculous as hell.”
After chatting with David for a few sentences, Zhuang Fan probed, “Brother, if it’s convenient, could you tell me where this is?”
“What’re you on about? You’re already in here and still don’t know what place this is?”
David’s half-dialect, half-Esperanto accent once again left him at a loss.
“Just look at the mark on the wall, then look at my name badge.”
David patted his chest. “See that? Nuclear Group. Shelter No. 331. One star, two bars. Newly appointed security supervisor of Area C—David Du. That’s yours truly!”
Zhuang Fan held back for quite a while before repeating, “Dawei Du?”
“Got a problem with that?”
“Your parents gave you that name?”
“Heh, what decent person has parents? I’m a management trainee custom-raised by the company.”
Seeing that Zhuang Fan was still thinking, David rubbed his smooth head. “Forgot you’re an old popsicle who just got thawed out. No wonder your Esperanto’s lousy and you can’t read the words either. Keep up.”
“You really never studied Chinese?”
“Chinese? What the hell is that?”
“…”
Zhuang Fan said nothing more.
The group soon arrived at a gigantic lift platform ten meters wide.
The platform rose rapidly, taking only fifteen seconds in total. Zhuang Fan estimated that the shelter had to be two hundred meters deep.
As the metal disc above them gave a dull click from its hinges, the lift platform reached the top and entered an enormous military fortress.
Security inside the fortress was extremely tight, with large numbers of heavy weapons, armored soldiers, and guards deployed throughout.
Through the dark bulletproof glass windows, Zhuang Fan discovered that this was a hidden fortress built halfway up a mountain. A few scattered walking corpses were trying to climb up the cliff, but they were quickly shot down by patrolling drones.
After putting on a powered exoskeleton, David stopped the guards who were preparing an aircar. “Don’t bother with that. We’d have to register going out. Too much trouble. We’ll just find some shady place and get it done quick.”
“But Boss, the hordes of walking corpses at the foot of the mountain…”
“You blockhead. Who said we have to go to the foot of the mountain? We can just go around. I don’t think we even need to go down—finding a cave would be more convenient.”
The guards nodded gravely, not daring to argue.
David chuckled again. “If you don’t take a little risk, you won’t grow a backbone. What’s there to be scared of? Move it, let’s go.”
After glancing at him, Zhuang Fan became even more certain that something had definitely been added to the language-fusion process of this world.
The alloy gate of the military fortress slowly opened, and blinding light poured in at once.
The heat wave rushing toward him made Zhuang Fan feel slightly suffocated. The air outside was abnormally scorching.
David raised his hand and checked the device on his wrist. “Temperature, 53 degrees. UV index, 14. Humidity, 26%. Yo, weather’s not bad.”
The six armored soldiers acted as the vanguard, walking out the gate with rotary machine guns in hand. Bronze-colored ammunition belts extended from the magazine boxes on their backs all the way to the gun bodies, looking extraordinarily imposing.
Twenty mechanical guards followed close behind, surrounding Zhuang Fan at the center of the formation.
When he stepped through the gate and onto a hillside, the bizarre scene that entered his eyes completely overturned all his expectations.
The blazing sun hung high in the sky, and there was not a cloud for ten thousand li. Yet the world held not the slightest sense of clarity or brightness—only sweltering heat and drought.
Across the entire horizon, whether the distant continuous mountains and forests or the nearby ruined buildings and roads, everything was shrouded in a layer of gray haze, making visibility extremely poor.
Zhuang Fan was very familiar with this gray haze. It was exactly the same as the uncanny mist that had surged out of the walking corpses in the testing area earlier.
In areas struck directly by sunlight, the uncanny mist was somewhat thinner. The more shaded or dark a place was, the denser the mist became, even growing so thick that it darkened to black, as though it meant to devour all living things.
Zhuang Fan was silent for a moment. He confirmed that there was nothing wrong with his eyes; rather, the entire world had been evenly contaminated.
Several kilometers away, walking corpses were packed together in dense masses. Although he could not see them very clearly, a rough estimate put their numbers at over a hundred thousand.
They were abnormally frenzied, madly assaulting a stretch of forest. Their roars could be heard even from far away.
Zhuang Fan asked with some doubt, “What are they doing? Gnawing on trees?”
“Fighting.”
“Hmm?”
David glanced at him and said teasingly, “Heard the treants’ roots burrowed into the walking corpses’ territory. Both sides are stubborn as hell, neither giving way, so they just bit the bullet and went at it. We thought this thing would quiet down after a month, but it’s been kicking up again these past few days.”
The amount of information contained in that brief explanation nearly made Zhuang Fan’s mind crash. David even considerately handed him an infrared long-range viewer.
He strained his eyes to look into the distance. He saw tree after tree twisting their branches and whipping them madly against the ground. Each strike swept several walking corpses away. Some trees even stepped forward on leg-like roots, crushing walking corpses into pulp.
The horde of walking corpses howled and screeched. Among them were giant corpse monsters reaching three meters in height, which leaped straight up from the ground, clung to tree trunks, and clawed and gnawed at them frantically. The scene was utter chaos.
Zhuang Fan lowered the long-range viewer and stayed silent for a long while before reorganizing his words. “Do these walking corpses possess reason?”
“Most of them are idiots. They only listen to the Corpse Queen. So there’s definitely a fat, slick big white worm napping somewhere underground around here. Whoever catches it is going to make a fortune.”
“Most are idiots. Which means a small number…” Zhuang Fan caught the key point.
“The small number with brains, we call corpse-men. You’ll learn about them later.”
Afterward, David patiently gave him a popular-science lesson on several kinds of mutated creatures in the distance.
For example, there was a huge fatty eight meters tall whose skin bulged with countless green sacs, called a “Meat Mountain.” It picked up broken stones, tree roots, sheets of iron, and even passing walking corpses from the ground and stuffed them all madly into its mouth.
In the sky, “vulture-men” with wingspans of six meters circled overhead. But when their natural predator, a giant eagle with a wingspan of twelve meters, flew over, they immediately scattered in panic.
A “mountain giant” nearly twenty meters tall, its whole body made of rock, was picking up boulders and smashing flat any walking corpses that came near, defending its territory.
There were also hunchbacked giant rats that looked like people. Draped in camouflage, they held crossbows and hid motionless in the ruins, waiting for an opportunity to ambush.
“Those big rats are…?”
“You mean the rat-men? A bunch of sneaky thieves. They just love setting ambushes and robbing people. A few days ago, we caught one using a Gatling crossbow. Wounded several of my brothers. Guess what happened in the end? We skinned it and roasted it straight away. Sizzled like crazy. Smelled so damn good it’d make you drunk. But I found it disgusting, so we fed all the meat to the wolves.”
Rat-men. Gatling crossbows?
Zhuang Fan only felt that everything before him was far too absurd. Had the animal kingdom become this wild?
Seeing him fall into a daze, David was clearly long accustomed to the mentality of these old popsicles. He smiled and said, “Welcome to the wasteland. Stay confused for a few days and you’ll get used to it.”
“I’ll try.”
Zhuang Fan answered verbally while secretly estimating the height from the cliff to the foot of the mountain, and how high his survival rate and chance of escape would be if he jumped down.
But David’s gun barrel was already pressed against his back, the corners of his mouth spreading into a grin. “Hey, what’re you staring at? I’ve been pretty decent to you, haven’t I? Answered all your questions nice and clear. So I’ll trouble you to cooperate too. Don’t mess around, don’t stir up trouble. Once the test is done, we’ll head right back to base, quick and easy. Got it?”
“Got it. Don’t worry.”
“I like dealing with sharp folks.”
But the gun barrel remained pressed against his back, so Zhuang Fan could only helplessly return to the center of the formation.
The eight mechanical guards at the very front opened the way with flamethrowers. It took only a dozen seconds or so to burn away a small patch of pale uncanny mist.
“Brother, is all this uncanny mist produced by walking corpses?”
“Bullshit. Look at that bunch outside—birdmen, rats, stone men. Damn near anything can spew uncanny mist.”
David talked freely. “When humans and animals enter this uncanny mist, as long as they stay in it long enough, they either turn into walking corpses or into other monsters. Then the uncanny mist spreads from one to ten, ten to a hundred, and there’s no stopping it at all.”
Hearing this, Zhuang Fan shook his head slightly. “But I’m certain some uncanny mist appears out of thin air. It has nothing to do with the walking corpses in the lab earlier.”
“That’s exactly what makes it so tricky. No matter what we do, we can’t figure it out…”
David’s expression sank slightly. “If it were only those mutants producing uncanny mist, and it was just aerosol transmission, then we’d have it easy. Spend a few decades, pay a huge price, use all kinds of incendiary bombs, white phosphorus bombs, thermobaric bombs, hell, even three-stage bombs—we’d settle it one way or another.”
Zhuang Fan understood this principle as well. No matter how strong a carbon-based life-form was, it had to kneel within the range of truth.
“Heh, pity this thing ain’t that simple. Let’s put it this way: as soon as there’s a shadow on the ground, that thing comes along with it. The bigger and darker the shadow, the heavier that yin energy gets! So once night falls, the wilds get lively. There’s uncanny mist everywhere!”
Zhuang Fan frowned. What sort of bizarre rule was that? How was a shadow defined?
He straightened out his thoughts and gave an example. “Brother, say I put my hands together right now and cup my palms. The dark area inside…”
“It’ll generate uncanny mist too. Try it yourself if you don’t believe me.”
Zhuang Fan tried it, and it truly came true. Within the shadow between his palms, a little pale mist appeared out of thin air, startling him.
“What does that count as?”
David snorted. “That’s nothing. Your skull, your chest, your internal organs, your intestines—anywhere dark enough, even if there’s just the tiniest bit of shadow, the uncanny mist can still get it done.”