Chapter 84
The wall construction resumed with four people responsible for the safety of the ability users. The remainder confirmed that there was no other work to be done before taking up their weapons and shooting zombies.
After an evening and afternoon of gathering, there was a large mound of zombies under the walls, at least two or three hundred at first glance.
Luo Xun while shooting, secretly pulled out last night’s treated arrows. He used the opportunity to mix with other people’s attacks.
He squinted down at the bottom for a long time. Yan Fei gently touched him and Luo Xun returned to attention. “How was it?”
“Uh…the wounds are too far away, I’ll try again…”
The distance from the top of the wall was a little far, especially when a zombie is shot, the wounds were often self inflicted or done by companions. Then even if it was injured, the view was a little blurry from afar.
The most Luo Xun could tell Yan Fei that a rotten piece had broken off the zombie body. Even if the poisonous mushrooms could corrode the bodies, they could not see with other wounds and scars mixed in!
Yan Fei reminded Luo Xun, seeing that he was about to continue shooting. “Don’t shoot the head, try another place.”
Luo Xun’s crossbow was too accurate, he would hit the nucleus every time, even if the mushroom juice did not corrode, the zombie went down anyway. But now was the time to experiment with mushroom juice, not killing zombies.
Luo Xun quickly adjusted to shoot at a zombie’s shoulder. There was nothing right away, even shot in the shoulder, the zombie continued waving its claws. However after twenty or thirty seconds, the swinging arm flopped…it broke off.
Luo Xun narrowed his eyes and pointed at the zombie without an arm and asked, “Because of the mushroom? Or was it weak?”
How could Yan Fei know? He did not know if zombie bodies were all similar, so he could only suggest, “Try it somewhere else.”
So the zombie lost all its limbs, Luo Xun broke off the other arm, then two legs, waist then finally the head. This used up the few crossbow arrows Luo Xun had prepared last night.
“It seems to have an effect.” Luo Xun touched his chin and nodded.
It took some time to corrode the zombie’s body. But it took a while to make a difference, it did not seem that strong.
Yan Fei laughingly shook his head and whispered. “Let me try.”
He took out the hollow projectile he had filled with mushroom juice when no one was looking. Yan Fei aimed at a zombie’s head below the wall.
The metal bullet easily penetrated the head and then it exploded! Luo Xun complained that this speed was incomparable to his slow attack. With the naked eye, the wound in the zombie’s head gradually spread, not long after the monster was missing half of the head!
Because the positioning was a little distance from the nucleus, the zombie could still act. It was strange to see a zombie with only half a skull still moving around.
Yan Fei was very satisfied with this. Only pus colored liquid was flowing from the head wound and it did not look like the bright red liquid from the mushroom, which would not attract anyone’s attention.
Even the people in the vicinity
did not notice the zombie, with faint mist, it would have been even better.
Today’s experiment was very successful, which proved that the two people’s predictions were accurate. They should have Yan Fei go back and create further prototypes. Just then, the troops in charge of killing zombies came from another direction and cleaned up the zombies beneath the walls.
The zombies killed by Luo Xun’s experiment were eventually mixed in with the other bodes and taken away. The burning would not arouse any attention. Luo Xun and Yan Fei both observed that wounds from the mushroom juice and regular decayed wounds looked similar.
When burnt, there would be a crossbow arrow found…but there was nothing wrong with that. It was normal for a projectile to stay embedded in the body, no one would realize the decay was caused by the arrows.
Their hearts were satisfied with their discoveries. The two went home after work, the mushroom wood in the nursery room now had added importance.
“Next time we go out we can take this as ammo…Is it okay to put mushroom juice in the arrows?” Luo Xun checked the mushroom wood in the nursery room.
Sure enough, after placing them back with other plants, the poisonous mushrooms indeed grew much faster! The baby quails that hatched today were all normal!
“Not difficult, but I have to study how to auto-explode upon injection, otherwise the effect would not be good and instead a waste of time.” Yan Fei had been thinking about the problem today.
“Do you want to use real bombs?” Could they accidentally blow themselves up?
“The bullets explode when they hit the target because there’s gunpowder inside.” Yan Fei smiled while explaining. “I want to make the kind that blows up on contact, even if there’s no gunpowder, only relying on the impact. Anyway we still have some time. I will think of ways to experiment these next few days.”
Luo Xun thought for a moment. “Actually you can use a part of the arrow that is not as strong? We don’t have to let the crossbow explode in the target, you can get a similar effect through splitting and letting the juice flow out.”
Yan Fei lit up. “True, but also need to calculate the intensity, the distance. With this effect, also have to careful the arrows don’t break, carrying them would be dangerous…”
The two men engaged in a discussion about new crossbows and arrows. Before Yan Fei made solid arrows for a more powerful crossbow. This type of hollow bullet needed to reference the structure of gun bullets.
But they did not have much to work on, as long as they worked out results before the end of the month in order to make a batch of ammunition in advance.
Luo Xun experimented with the remaining mushroom juice from yesterday while Yan Fei started attempting the make the correct ammunition. See what it could decay?
After a night, Yan Fei found the appropriate thickness for the ammo, only needed to wait for mushrooms to test. Luo Xun tried a range of items so see what mushroom juice could corrode.
In general, metal, gla.s.s and rubber did not react but wood, cloth and all kinds of food, including bones were affected. Although Luo Xun was confused as to why wood was affected since it grew from wood.
Oh well, just
just needed to avoid direct contact with the mushroom juices.
In addition, he learned something important. “Water would not react and could be used to flush an affected area.”
If one day they accidentally touched the juice, they just had to wash with plenty of clean water to be safe.
Yan Fei and Luo Xun also did an experiment with a crystal nucleus. There was no effect at all, they could use the ammunition against the zombies and did have to worry about losing the crystal nucleus.
They had tried out the new crossbow and when the mushrooms are grown, they could make the arrows.
Yan Fei smiled at Luo Xun. “I decided to try and use the level two metal nuclei tomorrow.”
“You’re almost there?!” Luo Xun looked at him with excitement.
Yan Fei nodded. “Adding on the crystal nuclei given from working the wall, I should have have consumed enough to use the second level crystal core.”
He was not sure what would happen after using the level two crystals, so he decided to try it tomorrow night to make sure he had enough cores on hand as well as time.
He was afraid that if the level two crystal really upgraded, it would need more crystal nuclei to supplement. It would be a problem if he did not have any crystal nuclei on hand.
While the two were speaking, Li Tie and the others came back. The pair quickly welcomed them while Li Tie complained. “Today we were told that there was an earth user willing to go out of base but the price would half the nuclei the team harvested – half! Even the nuclei that has to handed over was counted! Plus not responsible for the nuclei mission. We rejected as soon as we heard it.”
Han Li had an angry face. “What kind of person is that? If a team went out and only got 200 nuclei, he would take 100 and we would still have to pay 100 to the base. Only he would end up with a gain? What a farce!”
w.a.n.g Duo added with cynical disdain. “Dreaming of such a good thing, they are always in the base inside the walls. I’ve heard that the earth users get 10 cores a day, so 100 is enough for a few days.”
Luo Xun and Yan Fei laughed upon hearing the request. They would not cooperate with that kind of att.i.tude.
Everyone was joking around when hurried footsteps came from the corridor. People were climbing the stairs without pause.
They could hear a woman’s voice, it seemed to Xu Mei and Song Lingling from the 15th floor, but they seemed to have encountered something.
The group looked at each other and waited at the stair gate instead of returning to their homes.
Sure enough, two figures hurried up and lit up seeing the people of the 16th floor.
“What’s the matter?! There’s blood!” The nearest person gasped and hastily opened the door.
“Li Tie, can you lend us some bandages? We can use crystal nuclei to change for medicine!” Xu Mei was holding a child to her chest. The figure seemed like a girl less than 10 years old.
“Have, have!” Li Tie quickly opened the gate to let the women enter.
Yan Fei walked over and sealed the door with his ability. Seeing the blood on the stairs, he whispered to Han
to Han Li. “Get some water to wash the blood off the stairs.”
Han Li pulled back and grabbed w.a.n.g Duo to get some water.
The group entered the room, Zhang Yi frowned at Xu Mei after was.h.i.+ng off the blood from the girl’s face. “Casually bandaging such a wound, until when would it be healed?”
Xu Mei and Song Lingling froze at the mocking tone and looked at him.
Zhang Yi washed off the blood and turned to w.a.n.g Duo. “Bring the medical supplies from my bag.”
Professionals were not the same, Zhang Yi brought out his own tools and cleansed the wound. Directly sewed the wound shut, but since there was no anesthetic, each time the needles went down people would shudder.
After finis.h.i.+ng the st.i.tches, Zhang Yi cut off the medical thread and bandaged the wound. He raised his eyebrows and smirked. “No moving and the st.i.tches should be gone in a few days. If the child recovers well maybe there won’t be any scars.” He also glanced at Xu Mei. “You? Look at the healing situation.”
Xu Mei, who was treated as a bad healer had no intention of arguing about her recovery.
Then Yan Fei asked, “What’s going on?”
Zhang Yi smiled from beside his medical tools. “Didn’t they steal someone’s child?”
Song Lingling choked, though it was not far from the truth.
She began to explain after taking a breath. “I met my…ex-boyfriend today, you’ve seen him before.”
The group remembered the man who had left her and run away.
“When I met him, he was selling the girl and speaking to a bunch of shady people about the price. I have a grudge against him so I attacked straight away. Those people saw us fight and ran away with the girl. We did not have time to chase them at first, but when we went back, Song Lingling heard someone crying in the alley. We saw those people bleeding at the end of the street, s.n.a.t.c.hed her back.”
She looked up to see several expressions of horror. “I don’t know what they were going to do but it was like that. They also used the child’s blood to paint on the ground and fill a bowl…it was creepy. If those people were simply buying a child because they had no food, giving her to others to feed is always better than starving to death. But what happened today was not normal.”
Song Lingling also added, “I heard them say to drink this child’s blood!”
It was not difficult for the two women with abilities to deal with Xu Mei’s slag ex-boyfriend. After all, those people were all ordinary. For the two women who had long been accustomed to fighting, it was easier than chopping down a zombie.
The problem came after.
“Where did the blood come from then?” Luo Xun asked in confusion, how could she and Song Lingling, a fire and water user, suffer such a heavy injury against those people?
“It was the people who bought the children!” Song Lingling stood up. “Two of them were very good and injured Xu Mei. If they had not wanted to capture us, I am afraid we would have…”
The strange scene of blood in that little alleyway was not normal at all.
Frankly, they would have left if it was a rogue. They had experienced similar situations, they quickly calmed and might not havemight not have killed them. But they saw the strange patterns drawn with blood, the bowls, children’s blood….The two had no doubt, if they were caught, they would likely encounter the same treatment.
“What were those people doing with the blood?” Wu Xin asked his friends.
Zhang Yi raised a puzzled eyebrow, he knew if there was no food, whether inside or outside the base then people might eat each other. Bleeding people before eating he understood but using the blood of others for painting…was this a special custom of cannibals?
But Luo Xun suddenly added. “They wouldn’t think that consuming the flesh and blood of ability users would grant powers, right?” Like how the monsters in Journey to the West always wanted to eat the monk.
His words silenced everyone in the room, the group stared at him so Luo Xun retreated a step.
He stiffly smiled and spread his hands. “Or were they making a blood sacrifice? Even specially drew a picture. Of course some people deliberately spread evil teachings. Such as using ability user’s, especially virgin girls to acquire powers and so on.” He had a weirdly vague impression.
In his last life, he had never seen children or women out alone in the southwest base. Luo Xun had chatted about this with people at work. He had heard that the reason why there were no children or single women in the streets was because of the possibility of abduction during the apocalypse.
But he also heard some strange rumors on base, such as the blood of ability users, especially virgins had powers. This caused the loss of children at the start of the apocalypse.
In addition to the meat shortage, women and children were the easiest to catch. So after a while, families with wives and children were not let in lest they were killed. They stayed at home for protection.
But as things went on, in later times, some of the relatively large forces that were powerful in base had no bottom line and would break into people’s homes to steal things and people.
However, Luo Xun had always thought these things to be stories, like rumours that a school was haunted, or there were ghosts in the nearby cemetery and so on.
Many things were like this, Luo Xun did not immediately think of them despite having be reborn. Many things had occurred and the details of the causes were in a forgotten corner of Luo Xun’s memory. No one had a perfect memory, he would not be able to remember every detail of his past life, every encounter and message.
It was a computer that could do that, not a person. And even if it was a computer, without a person, who would access the data anway?
“So it seems…” Zhang Yi took Luo Xun’s guess and looked at the bleeding, unconscious girl. “Is this little girl an ability user?”
Luo Xun also froze, he just subconsciously said stuff from his previous life, completely did not think that the child might be a normal person. Could it be those people thought they could coexist with the zombies if they acted like vampires?
Luo Xun shook his head and turned to Xu Mei. “I do not know.”
Xu Mei responded, “I also don’t know.”
After she looked at Luo Xun – you guessed this possibility, what do you think I would know?