After Gu Yicheng and Ruan Ning dealt with those two men, they left the room and saw Xue Chen, Lin Yang, and the other two people staying on the same floor dragging two men out of the room diagonally opposite theirs. The men’s mouths had been stuffed shut with strips of cloth.
Naturally, Gu Yicheng and Ruan Ning came out empty-handed. As for the two men in their room who had been injected with the muscle relaxant, after questioning them, Gu Yicheng had knocked them unconscious and thrown them into a corner, leaving them to fend for themselves.
“Young Master Gu, someone snuck into our room tonight to ambush us. We also found four syringes of muscle relaxant on them,” Xue Chen said with concern. “How are things on your and Miss Ruan’s side? Did anything happen?”
Gu Yicheng said, “Two people also snuck into our room just now, but I’ve already knocked them unconscious. Ningning and I are planning to go upstairs now and find the person behind this.”
Go find the mastermind?
The other four exchanged looks. Since most of the team’s visible supplies were kept with them, they had assumed these two men had simply become greedy and come over to steal things, acting on their own. Under interrogation, the two men had said the same, so they had not suspected much else. They had not expected there to be another hidden truth—that someone else had been directing this from behind the scenes.
Lin Yang kicked the two men beside him, his tone dangerous. “Looks like you two weren’t honest at all. Even in this state, you still tried to trick us.”
They had nearly been fooled, almost overlooking the mastermind behind it.
Earlier, after recognising what was inside the syringes, they had not been without doubts. After all, muscle relaxants were controlled substances. Although after the apocalypse there was no one left to regulate these things, places like hospitals, which had a high concentration of patients, were far more dangerous than most other places in a city. With the pathetic skills of these two men, how could they possibly have obtained something so powerful?
The two men, tied up tightly with hemp rope and unable to speak a complete sentence, could only whimper. Under everyone’s gaze, they trembled uncontrollably.
“I’ll give you one more chance. Hurry up and explain everything you didn’t make clear before, honestly and completely. Otherwise, you know what the consequences will be. We’re not exactly good people…” Lin Yang crouched down, patted the two men on the shoulders, and said with a smiling face.
…
Ten minutes later.
The two men lay on the ground, their faces bruised black and blue from being beaten by Lin Yang after resisting. Their original appearances were almost unrecognisable, and their tears and snot ran freely.
At first, they had stubbornly resisted and refused to tell the truth. But after being beaten until they were afraid, naturally, they were willing to say anything.
This time, their explanation became the same as that of the two men in Ruan Ning’s room. They said that Sister Sun had ordered them to do this. Her goal was to quietly get rid of all dozen or so of them tonight. When Chen Ling woke up in the morning and saw that they had all died outside the base, his expression would surely be very ugly.
“Brother Gu, we can’t just swallow this loss! Since someone wants to mess with us, then we have to give them a taste of their own medicine. Let them learn a lesson and know that not everyone can be bullied,” Lin Yang said fiercely, holding the syringes of muscle relaxant he had found on the two men. He could not swallow this anger.
Even good-tempered people like Dacheng had no intention of objecting to this plan. They did not want to get involved in this base’s internal power struggles, but that did not mean they were willing to let others bully them for nothing. If they had not arranged for someone to keep watch in every room tonight, perhaps all of them would have fallen for the trap. The ones who died then would have been them.
However, it was true that only a small number of people in the hotel had been involved in this plan to take them down. These people had not lied about that. After all, their two rooms were not the only occupied rooms on this floor. Yet after such a thing happened, the commotion had not been small. If everyone had known about it, then after seeing that the plan had not succeeded for so long, the entire base would definitely have come over to surround them. There would have been no need to scheme against them in such a sinister and vicious way in the middle of the night.
Two people had been arranged to sneak into each of their four rooms in the middle of the night to inject them with a powerful drug. They really thought highly of them.
As for Chen Ling, fortunately, he did not know about this. Otherwise, they would not have let him off either.
After the members of the Morning Light Squad gathered on the fifth floor, they left some people behind to rest where they were, while the others were led by Gu Yicheng to the top floor to meet that Sister Sun who wanted them dead.
The stairwell was very dark. In order not to alert the enemy, they did not turn on their flashlights and went upstairs in the dark.
“Who are you?! Hurry up and go down! No one else is allowed on the floors above!” The guard in the middle of the ninth-floor corridor heard faint footsteps coming from downstairs. He quickly turned on his flashlight and walked down to check the situation, only to discover several unfamiliar people sneaking up the stairs.
Realising something was wrong, he was just about to run upstairs and sound the alarm when a vine appeared out of nowhere and tripped him to the ground. He rolled straight down the stairs.
The others immediately blocked his mouth and tied him up. The whole series of movements took less than half a minute.
As for the person who had used the wood-type ability just now, it was Xu Chi.
After Xu Chi was bitten by a zombie that time, he had not become one of them, but at the same time, he had not awakened an ability either. At that time, Gu Yicheng had kept him behind and said that he had a way to help him solve this problem.
Previously, the conditions had not been right because they had not encountered any level-three or higher zombies, nor had they obtained any high-level crystal nuclei. However, after leaving B University, the team suddenly gained several level-three crystal nuclei. Gu Yicheng kept two for upgrading, and handed another level-three wood-type crystal nucleus to Xu Chi. For Ningning’s sake, he told Xu Chi all the pros and cons and let him decide for himself whether he wanted to take the risk and stimulate an ability.
People with Xu Chi’s characteristics had appeared in his previous life too. Roughly one or two would appear among every hundred people who survived after being infected. If he did not use a high-level crystal nucleus to stimulate an ability, then although he would not be infected again even if he were scratched by a high-level zombie in the future, he would also never awaken an ability. He would only be an ordinary person for the rest of his life.
But if he chose to use a crystal nucleus to stimulate an ability, the chance of success was not high. It could even be called extremely low, about the same as the chance of an ordinary person not being infected after exposure to the zombie virus.
The one Gu Yicheng gave him was a wood-type crystal nucleus, the easiest to obtain and the mildest among the major ability types. It could be considered one of the options with a relatively higher chance of success.
After thinking about it for an entire night that day, Xu Chi used that crystal nucleus halfway through their journey. At the time, he bled from all seven orifices and nearly died. Fortunately, not only did he endure it, he also awakened a wood-type ability, and his ability level directly leapt to level two.
From then on, the team had one more ability user.
After controlling the guard, Lin Yang was too lazy to waste time talking. He directly used the fastest and most effective method: beating him with his fists. After that, they smoothly obtained the information they wanted from his mouth.
However, while being interrogated, the guard was so frightened that he almost fainted.
In reality, Ruan Ning and the others had no interest in killing a guard. Every grievance had its source, and every debt had its debtor. Whoever had schemed against them would have to bear the consequences.
The decoration on the top floor was even better than the floors below. On top of that, someone had probably been cleaning it every day even after the apocalypse, so it looked as if it were still frozen in the world before everything had collapsed.
There were two business suites on the top floor. According to what those people had said, the one on the right was Sister Sun’s room.
The hotel’s soundproofing was quite good. They had never intended to be low-key, but they also did not want to cause unnecessary trouble or let anyone escape. So they did not directly kick the door open. Instead, they used an ability to pry open the lock.
In the end, after searching inside, they discovered that there was no one in the room.
“Did those people lie to us again? There’s no one in this room.”
The huge business suite was currently empty. But when they opened the wardrobe beside the bed, they found many clothes inside. They were all women’s clothes.
Ruan Ning noticed that these clothes matched that woman’s style of dressing. This proved that the woman had at least lived here. They just did not know where she had gone tonight.
Ruan Ning knitted her pretty brows and guessed, “Could that Sister Sun have received the news in advance and run away?”
“Probably not. The people who came to ambush us in our rooms were all controlled by us immediately. There wouldn’t have been time for her to receive the news in advance,” Xue Chen analysed.
Moreover, this base was their territory. Even if the plan had been exposed, there was no reason for her to simply leave the base and run away. On the contrary, with her personality, if she had really received the news in advance, she should have sent some of her subordinates to intercept them.
Lin Yang thought for a moment and said, “Isn’t there another suite next door? Maybe that person is over there.”
Everyone also felt that this possibility made sense, so they returned to the corridor.
Using the same method, they pried open the lock of the other suite. After entering, they found that there were far more signs of life here than in the room next door. This meant someone should be living here. They split up and searched everywhere else. In the end, only the master bedroom at the very edge remained.
Before awakening his ability, Xu Chi had always regretted not being able to be of any real use to the team. This time, he volunteered to be the vanguard and kicked the bedroom door open.
There really were people inside.
But what they had not expected was that two naked people were lying on the large bed. The sound of the door being kicked open startled them, and they suddenly shot up from the bed. At the same time, clothes were scattered all over the floor beside the bed, both men’s and women’s. They did not recognise the man among the two, but the woman was clearly the one they had seen at the hotel entrance yesterday afternoon—the woman who did not get along with Chen Ling.
Ruan Ning had not expected that after the door opened, she would see such an explosive and shocking scene. She froze for a moment, then hurriedly turned her head away, no longer looking at the two people on the bed who were unfit for polite viewing.
And someone turned her head even faster than she did. A large hand blocked her face, covering her eyes. She could feel the warm body temperature coming from his palm. She blinked awkwardly. Her long eyelashes brushed across his palm, making Gu Yicheng beside her feel as if someone had swept a feather over his heart.
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