Fu Erdie did not know what rank Jing City Base’s ability-user teams were, but she imagined they had not reached the point where seventh-ranks were everywhere.
Who knew how long it would take them to go out and gather accurate information?
She sent another telegram, saying that she could take the strongest ability users from their base to the front line to see the situation.
However, this time, Jing City Base replied quite quickly. But the content of the reply was: “The base is currently occupied with food-related work and cannot spare manpower. We hope the conflict between the butterfly garden and Ning City Base can be resolved peacefully on your own.”
Fu Erdie: “…”
Damn it!
At this point, what else was there not to understand? They had completely treated the fight between the zombie king horde and the butterfly garden as a power struggle between bases!
She took a deep breath and still felt that dealing with this kind of responsible organisation had to be left to the old foxes of D City Base.
At the very least, those people needed to know something about the outside situation, instead of constantly circling around the area near Jing City.
For now, she could not place her hopes on Jing City’s weapons. Fu Erdie continued making battle arrangements.
She needed to control the dandelions to monitor the front line while gradually retreating.
In fact, the vast inland area occupied by the dandelions had already been divided into two factions by the butterfly garden and Ning City Base. One faction had joined Ning City Base. They were strong and moved quickly, so Fu Erdie had no way to clear them all out one by one. She could only use the dandelions around them to harass them at the right moments. They would also actively attack the dandelions, destroying every dandelion within sight whenever they had the chance.
Whether they were ordinary wild dandelions or intelligent dandelions released by Fu Erdie, they killed them all.
Fu Erdie needed to split off part of her attention to speed up the retreat of dandelions in danger.
The ability users who had sided with Fu Erdie had already been gradually retreating toward C City and D City.
After some of them learned information related to Fu Erdie’s “close companions,” they voluntarily applied to become her close companions.
Fu Erdie accepted everyone who came. As long as her ability could smoothly enter the other person’s energy space, it proved that they had truly made up their minds to hand their ability completely over to Fu Erdie in exchange for peace in their own energy space.
Because close companions needed to be within a certain range of Fu Erdie to be effective, Fu Erdie placed all of them in Building Seven and had them move together with it.
A system was formed from this.
Building Seven protected the close companions. The close companions provided ability options. Fu Erdie used the abilities.
As long as the enemy could not break through the layers of defence formed by Building Seven’s many plants and the house itself, Fu Erdie could freely choose abilities according to the situation.
As the number of close companions grew larger and larger, even breaking past one hundred people, Fu Erdie’s ability attributes also upgraded. At first, she could only use two abilities at the same time. Gradually, she could use three or four. Now, she could use six abilities simultaneously, giving her more and more options in battle.
However, one thing had always been a thorn in Fu Erdie’s heart: the strange psychic control of Ning City’s psychic ability user.
After experiencing the self-destruction of seventh-rank ability users several more times, Fu Erdie had already discovered that when these ability users self-destructed, the explosion of seventh-rank psychic energy would directly impact the energy space.
Other people were not sensitive to the energy space, so they were not greatly affected. But as an ability user who controlled energy spaces, Fu Erdie felt extremely uncomfortable almost every time.
The dandelions also felt terrible. To some extent, they were already living inside the energy space, overlapping the energy space with reality.
If reality and the energy space were two parallel nets, then the shockwave created after Ning City’s seventh-rank ability users—or rather, false seventh-rank ability users—self-destructed would break through the boundary between those two nets and act across a large area of the energy space, creating an earthquake in it.
Fu Erdie tried various methods to resist it, such as increasing the energy strength around the explosion point to form an energy wall, or disconnecting from the energy spaces of all people, humans, and plants at the instant of explosion, stopping the use of her ability.
But these methods had very little effect. Disconnecting could only ensure that the impact did not affect anyone or any plants other than the dandelions. Fu Erdie herself and large expanses of dandelions were still affected.
It could be said that this kind of self-destruction was either something Ning City’s psychic ability user had deliberately created to target Fu Erdie, or else, as a seventh-rank psychic ability user, he shared some commonalities with Fu Erdie’s and the dandelions’ abilities, all of which could directly act on the energy space.
If that was the case… then a battle between her and the psychic ability user…
Fu Erdie did not voice her guess and add to everyone else’s anxiety. Instead, she brought the ability users back and contracted their forces to An City Base, waiting for the zombie horde to arrive. She herself returned to D City Base with Sang Wenhao, handing over the collected necrotic dandelion leaves and roots to the technical team for testing, while also undergoing an examination herself.
After D City Base no longer faced a zombie threat, they had been carrying out research intensively. Their ability-detection device was no longer limited to simply judging ability rank. Based on the various special crystal cores and special ability-zombie samples Fu Erdie had sent over one after another, they had already collected and compared data, and could now distinguish damage differences caused by different attack methods.
For example, now, D City’s technical department discovered that the necrotic symptoms in the dandelions’ dead tissue were somewhat similar to the state of zombies after Fu Erdie directly used her ability to empty and destroy their energy spaces.
It was a kind of rapid death caused by an individual losing its inner source of driving force.
“However, your ability is energy deprivation, while that psychic ability user’s is more like energy contamination,” the head of the technical department explained. “Your offensive power is stronger. Once you lock onto the other party’s energy space, you can attack directly. His instant damage is not high, but his sustained damage is greater. That is also why fifth- and sixth-rank dandelions could survive against a seventh-rank ability user who should have completely crushed them. If you had not pulled them back in time, they really would have died, but they would not have died immediately at that moment.”
“But even after being rescued, the contamination is still there and will require a long time to recover slowly. Even you, after being hit by the shockwaves from those self-destructing ability users and ability zombies, show symptoms of your ability being contaminated. But don’t worry. This is like a viral flu. With your self-healing ability, you’ll gradually recover.”
Fu Erdie digested the information for a moment, then asked, “Is there any way to defend against it?”
“No,” the technical department head sighed. “Your abilities counter each other. If you truly face each other, neither side will come out well.”
While Fu Erdie, Sang Wenhao, and the technical department head were speaking, D City’s leader Rong Le’an and the other decision-making staff were also present. Rong Le’an immediately said, “Why don’t you stay here and become the eyes for the long-range strike weapons, helping the weapons locate targets instead of going to the front line to fight?”
Fu Erdie nodded and immediately began learning how to read the weapon-location maps.
Sang Wenhao stayed behind Fu Erdie the entire time, occasionally drawing out the terrain map that had already changed.
The Ning City zombie king horde was pressing forward at a decent speed, but it was far from Fu Erdie’s ability to travel a thousand li in a day. Ten days after setting out, they were still three hundred kilometres from An City Base and more than a thousand kilometres from C City.
Judging from their direction of advance, their target should be Senyu Residential Compound in C City.
The zombie king horde consisted of sixth- and seventh-rank zombies, but their speeds varied. In order to make sure all the zombie kings kept up and attacked together, the psychic ability user could only move steadily at the pace of the slowest zombie.
Road conditions everywhere inland were poor. They not only obstructed D City’s armed forces, but also hindered the zombie king horde’s advance.
So for now, Fu Erdie still had time.
She spent two hours comparing the distorted landmarks with the zombie king horde’s actual route. Then she used the more numerous small long-range attack weapons to strike the zombie king horde.
The first missile landed far off-target, more than ten kilometres away.
Fu Erdie adjusted the target position again, and D City Base continued firing.
After wasting about five shots, the missile finally struck the edge of the zombie king horde.
The dandelions at the front line were affected. Fu Erdie increased the strength of her push-pull ability, helping the dandelions recover quickly, then continued using them as eyes, monitoring from high in the sky at a distance.
A large section of the zombie king horde was blasted over. From the images, Fu Erdie could clearly distinguish which ones were false high-rank ability users and false high-rank zombies. Those with genuinely strong power could dodge in advance or withstand the attack and survive. But those who had eaten fake seventh-rank psychic crystal cores died under the bombardment.
When Rong Le’an heard Fu Erdie relay the front-line situation, he said with some regret, “It would be good if those crystal cores could be recovered.”
Fu Erdie shook her head. “Anyone contaminated by that psychic ability user will have their crystal core disappear after death. It should be remotely absorbed by Ning City’s boss.”
After killing so many ability zombies and ability users sent by Ning City Base, Fu Erdie had already discovered that the deeper a person or zombie was controlled by that psychic ability user called Bin Mushi, the less valuable their crystal core became. During the process of contamination and hypnosis, Bin Mushi had already given them falsely inflated strength while also absorbing the energy inside their minds for his own use.
The same was true of those self-destructing seventh-rank ability users. At the final moment, the energy belonging to their crystal cores had already been remotely absorbed. The abilities existing throughout their limbs, bones, and energy spaces without the crystal core’s control then completely exploded, leaving Fu Erdie no room to gain anything.
Fu Erdie strongly suspected that with so many seventh-rank ability zombies and ability users, Bin Mushi had already levelled up to eighth-rank.
She quickly explained her guess, then continued moving the strike-point cursor, launching attacks according to the zombie king horde’s movement path.
The weaker false high-ranks had almost all died. The remaining high-rank zombies and ability users scattered and fled. Continuing to fire would only waste ammunition.
Rong Le’an’s expression was grim.
It was not that D City Base lacked long-range, large-scale destructive weapons. But before the apocalypse, these had been controlled by the central authorities. Layer after layer of keys were all top-level secrets. After the internet, signals, and various satellites failed, weapons like these were locked down, and they could not open them.
Jing City Base… had grown too powerful to easily control.
“I’ll contact Jing City again. Before that,” Rong Le’an said solemnly, “we’ll have to entrust the front line to you.”
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