Those struggling to survive saw hope. Those harbouring ulterior motives felt alarm bells ringing.
Fu Erdie listened daily to reports from the complex. At 8:00 p.m. every day, she also switched channels on time to listen to news from D City Base or other bases.
As time passed, bases of all sizes across Hua Country slowly developed their own channels for communication and information exchange.
Most survivors seemed to have a rough idea of what they were doing. When they needed something for daily survival, they could trade with nearby bases.
But from the perspective of D City Base and Butterfly Garden, this exchange of information was often limited to local areas. The situation farther away was still unclear.
After all, for many bases, distant water could not quench present thirst. Even if they occasionally heard how well D City or Butterfly Garden was doing, that had nothing to do with people one or two thousand kilometres away.
They would come to D City Base’s channel to listen to the conversations between D City Base and Butterfly Garden and receive information from D City, but they would not share their own information.
This lack of clarity became even more obvious after it was confirmed that most bases had already been taken over by ability users, who had driven out the ordinary people previously rescued by the government.
To these ability users who had taken over bases, they were the “new faction” made entirely of “elites.” D City Base, whose management had not changed, belonged to the old faction.
The “new faction” still symbolically turned on their telegraph machines every day at 8:00 p.m., using a little power to listen for any news.
The batteries of many small bases’ telegraph machines were barely maintained by the tiny amount of solar power they could generate. They were reluctant to waste even a bit extra, so the moment 8:00 p.m. arrived, they wished they could immediately contact their intended target, send and receive messages at the fastest speed, get useful information, then shut it off right away.
The originally agreed half-hour daily telegraph session, whether there was news or not, slowly became twenty minutes, ten minutes, and now even five minutes.
Small bases bought their telegraph machines from larger bases with technical staff. If the machines broke with use and could not be repaired in time for various reasons, then they were basically useless.
Gradually, more and more people owned telegraph machines, but the amount of information Fu Erdie and D City received did not increase. Sometimes when they wandered to other bases’ channels, they even found some bases speaking in riddles. The translated words were not pinyin or English, but other languages; or even if they were English, they clearly represented different meanings.
This made D City’s external affairs department rather frustrated and confused.
Fu Erdie’s group travelled while playing. Along the way, they occasionally had the leisure to listen to other telegraph channels, but in the end they gained no useful information. They simply continued drifting downstream, sightseeing as they went.
By late January, after travelling and stopping along the way, they had only covered seven or eight hundred kilometres.
On January 24th, Fu Erdie and the others planned to leave Building Seven and its plants by the riverbank, then take the house into the box truck and return home for the end-of-month treatment in the complex. But suddenly, they noticed a zombie tide of around three hundred thousand about one hundred and thirty kilometres from the riverbank.
Led by a zombie king, the tide seemed to be purposefully surrounding a certain area.
After discovering this, Fu Erdie had the house slowly move ashore toward the target location, while the four of them went ahead first to deal with the zombie king.
This time, the disposal was easy. The zombie king was just an ordinary fourth-rank. To the local organisation, it was extremely dangerous, but to the four of them, it was truly effortless.
After obtaining all the crystal cores from this zombie tide, Fu Erdie discovered that behind them, in the direction they had come from, something was burning.
They hurried back and saw that the thing burning was indeed Building Seven. The whole building was surrounded by fire on all sides, and the plant babies had all retreated inside, no longer able to transform feet and continue moving the building forward.
Fu Erdie pressed her lips together and quickly rushed into Building Seven through the flames. She used her ability on the house, then used the suddenly increased water pressure and volume from the taps inside the house to wash away the surrounding fire.
Sang Wenhao, Han Zhi, and Cen Xiyang did not rush inside. Instead, relying on Han Zhi’s shared vision, they quickly found the ability zombie that had started the fire.
It was also a fourth-rank zombie.
They quickly dealt with the ambushing zombie and cooperated with Fu Erdie to control the fire and extinguish it.
The fire caused no real damage. After all, the fifth-rank house’s defence was very strong. Once the doors and windows on all sides closed, the whole building sealed itself into an enclosed space. The part belonging to the house’s main body resisted the flames on the outermost layer, while the plant parts hid inside. There was no way a fourth-rank ability zombie’s fire could burn through.
Even if some places were charred black, the house could recover quickly through its own self-healing ability.
But Fu Erdie still felt uncomfortable. It was the discomfort of a pleasant holiday being disturbed and forced to end.
This was only a small town, and it looked like a relatively ordinary situation where a zombie king led a zombie tide toward a target base. But when the zombie king itself was only fourth-rank, it could actually cooperate with another fourth-rank zombie?
One handled the visible action, while the other observed and launched a hidden attack. This kind of strategic behaviour made Fu Erdie feel that dealing with zombies from now on would become more troublesome.
Because this meant that ability zombies had already completely developed normal human intelligence.
But if that was truly the case, then why did it not go out when its teammate was attacked, and instead attack Building Seven in the rear?
Could this have been the plan from the start?
Then where did they get their understanding of Building Seven from?
If they had some understanding, then they should know Fu Erdie’s group’s approximate level.
Since they knew their approximate level, why would they still fight them like they were sending themselves to death instead of simply running away?
No matter how she looked at it, there was a contradictory sense of testing involved.
After thinking about it, Fu Erdie decided the plan to return home needed to change. She could not take the house back and leave only the plant babies here.
The plants were not yet smart enough to use the telegraph machine and keep in touch with the complex at any time.
So this time, she decided to have Sang Wenhao alone take the house and drive the electric car back, while she, Cen Xiyang, and Han Zhi would stay with Building Seven by the riverbank. In fact, staying in the middle of the river the whole time would also be fine.
Only…
Fu Erdie looked at her boyfriend, whom she had met at the beginning of the apocalypse’s first year and had never separated from since. Her emotions surged.
Perhaps the apocalypse had deepened their bond and dependence on each other. She felt a reluctance and worry she had never experienced before.
She looked at Sang Wenhao. Sang Wenhao looked back at her. The two gazed at each other reluctantly, until Cen Xiyang, who really could not stand it anymore, interrupted them.
“You two, go back together!” She pointed at the electric car stored in the building. “Leave now. Don’t act like this is some life-or-death farewell!”
Fu Erdie shook her head. “I’m worried about you.”
Cen Xiyang found her dramatic and slapped the table. “We have so many fifth-rank ability bodies! And he’s mental-type! I’m also a long-range attacker to some extent! If we still got wiped out like this, then we’d be too useless!”
Fu Erdie frowned and was about to speak, but Cen Xiyang bundled her up in a few swift moves and stuffed her into the electric car.
Only after Fu Erdie compromised with a helpless expression did Cen Xiyang continue, “Trust us. The two of us guarded the complex for so long before. There’s no reason we can’t guard it now. Besides, it’s not just the two of us fighting alone. Pothos, the succulent, and the others are all here too. How could anything happen?”
Fu Erdie took a deep breath.
This time, they were the attacking side, and a whole building was too large a target. If some especially powerful ability zombie — or even ability user — set their sights on them, she would not feel at ease.
“I’ll come back as soon as possible. Be careful.”
She left all the dandelions here and told them that if they truly encountered danger, the plants should sink to the bottom and hide in the river to avoid outside attacks. Cen Xiyang and Han Zhi should rely on the dandelions to fly high into the air.
Among the dandelions here, the highest-ranked one was fourth-rank and could let the two of them fly very high.
Cen Xiyang nodded repeatedly and told the two of them to leave.
Only then did Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao control the electric car and box truck to fly out of Building Seven. After Building Seven became a flat pancake floating on the water’s surface, the white light darted into the box truck Fu Erdie was bringing back. The two sides officially said goodbye.
Eight hundred kilometres away, Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao, who had both learned to drive, took turns driving for a full day and night. After detouring around many congested roads, they returned to the complex the next morning.
The house’s attribute was very special. Its special ability could not be copied and used by Fu Erdie. The places where it could land were still “old objects” like the box truck, and places where Building Seven — to be precise, the original main body, 16-1 — existed.
Now that the main body had left the complex, the energy body returned, but could not directly land and cover the area. Instead, it had to use the box truck as its main body and extend outward after landing.
The moment it extended, everyone in the complex, whether or not they had seen Fu Erdie’s group return, instantly noticed the difference and began looking around.
Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao were exhausted from travelling. They lifted the box truck and electric car, parked them on the roof of Building Six, then let the house first treat their own family. After that, under the family’s arrangements, it treated outside ability users who qualified and were willing to use corresponding treatment sessions. After giving instructions, she and Sang Wenhao took an afternoon nap.
When they woke at three in the afternoon, most of the people in the complex who needed treatment had already been treated. Only then did she go understand the condition of the plant babies in the complex that month and read the messages Cen Xiyang had sent from Building Seven.
Building Seven was safe. The complex had also successively handled seventy to eighty thousand zombies lured back by ability users. A new third-rank plant, three second-rank plants, and dozens of newly stabilised first-rank plants had been added.
After confirming these things, Fu Erdie did not wait for the Spring Festival at the start of February. She stayed in the complex for only one night before setting out again, preparing to reunite with Cen Xiyang and the others at Building Seven.
However, this time, Fu Erdie did not head straight to her destination. Along the way, she brought out over ten thousand dandelions from the complex.
The northwest no longer had threats, and the southeast was their direction of advance, so for now there was nothing there that could cross Building Seven and threaten the complex. But in several other directions, there were places she could not temporarily take care of.
So Fu Erdie released many dandelion babies into the wild. If there was food, they could eat; if not, they would stand guard. Once her group had roughly cleared the cities along the Li River for some time, she would come find them.
At that time, those that still wanted to stay in the complex, or wanted to follow Fu Erdie around, would be brought along again.
She spent three days planting dandelions along all the necessary routes that zombie tides might take within a three-hundred-kilometre radius.
With dandelions providing some monitoring and security, plus D City Base’s newly developed device that could detect high-rank ability zombies within five hundred kilometres, the main base’s safety had another layer of protection.
The two of them and one box truck hurried along and finally returned to Building Seven before Spring Festival, reuniting with Cen Xiyang, Pothos, and the others.
During that time, Building Seven had not encountered any major incidents, but it had visibly run into many small troubles.
Many fire-type zombies seemed to approach the riverbank near Building Seven, throwing fire toward it, then running away immediately after setting the fire. They never gave Cen Xiyang and the others time to counterattack.
Looking at those zombies lifting burning fireballs and throwing them at Building Seven, there was a moment when Cen Xiyang suspected they were not ability zombies at all, but ability users.
But Han Zhi’s vision could not be wrong. They could clearly see the corpse spots on those ability zombies.
“It’s very strange. They have corpse spots, but they aren’t as terrifying as other zombies, or the ability zombies we saw before.” Cen Xiyang felt creeped out just thinking about it. “Some of them look like ability zombies that only died a few days ago. But if that’s the case, they should only be first-rank.”
Cen Xiyang had briefly mentioned all this through the telegraph machine, but a few words on the telegraph could not compare to actually seeing it.
On Spring Festival, Fu Erdie saw the ability zombies Cen Xiyang mentioned, the ones that often came to harass them.
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