The strange atmosphere did not last long, because they soon reached the next junction and had to consult the map to adjust their route again.
They were now travelling along a provincial highway with relatively few people. The boxcar no longer needed to remain more than twenty storeys above the ground. It only had to fly four or five metres above the surface.
Along the way, they found an electric car that was still functional. They instructed the building to alter its connector, charged the car, secured the boxcar to its roof, and drove for part of the journey.
At two in the afternoon, the two of them arrived at the location where Fu Erdie’s grandmother had been when communications were briefly restored at the end of June.
It was a fork in the provincial highway. One road led out of the province, while the other continued towards Baochang County, her grandmother’s intended destination.
Fu Erdie immediately took the road towards Baochang County.
Fu Erdie vaguely remembered visiting Xiangde Village in Baochang County with her grandmother when she was a child.
There had been no expressway at the time, and the provincial highway had not yet been extended this far. Fu Erdie had spent an entire day on a long-distance bus, suffering from motion sickness and desperately needing the toilet with nowhere to go. After countless twists and turns, they had finally reached Baochang County. From there, they had taken a local resident’s motorcycle before eventually arriving at Xiangde Village.
The initial journey had been so miserable that Fu Erdie never accompanied her grandmother to the countryside again. She naturally had even fewer memories of the place now.
However, Fu Erdie knew that although the map showed they could reach their destination by following this branch of the road, unexpected obstacles might have forced her grandmother to take a detour. Relying on her own experience and memories of the old routes, her grandmother might have travelled along mountain paths that could not be found on the map.
Her concerns were confirmed when they reached a completely blocked road.
As expected, her grandmother could not have followed this road directly into the countryside.
A few scattered zombies heard the noise and began gathering nearby. Sang Wenhao dealt with them, providing Dandelion and the potato plant with an extra meal. He then had Dandelion disrupt and scatter their human scent.
On the paper map, Fu Erdie traced the route from the place where her grandmother had previously stayed to their current blocked location, marking several forks along the way.
There were also narrow paths running through the fields that vehicles could travel along, even though they were not displayed on the map.
Fu Erdie switched to a different coloured pen and marked the approximate locations of the small paths she had just noticed.
“We should still follow our original route and check Xiangde Village in Baochang County first. If no one is there, we may have to return to these marked junctions and search again.”
Fu Erdie pressed her lips together.
Grandma, you have to be safe. You have to be waiting somewhere for me to come and get you… You have to wait for me.
The rest of the flight went relatively smoothly. At five in the afternoon, they successfully arrived in the urban area of Baochang County.
Fu Erdie had imagined many possible situations.
The best outcome would be that everyone was still alive. Her grandmother, aunt and cousin might be staying with relatives or living in an abandoned house. Perhaps they had struggled to cultivate the land or searched for a local grain depot, barely managing to survive.
The worst outcome… was that neither the county nor its surrounding villages had been spared simply because there were fewer people. Everyone might still have turned into zombies, lost their food to others, or gradually died from illness and starvation over the past six months.
Fu Erdie desperately hoped for the better outcome. Even if the circumstances were worse than she had hoped, that was fine. As long as they were still alive, everything else could be resolved.
However, Fu Erdie had never expected the county town to be completely deserted when she arrived.
There were no zombies and no signs of people. Several rotting, foul-smelling remains lay on the ground, but they had clearly been there for months. They were not recent corpses.
The boxcar travelled steadily close to the ground. Fu Erdie circled the county town without seeing a single living person, then anxiously headed towards the village.
They encountered a few zombies along the way, but they were the sort that could be dealt with effortlessly. There were still no living people.
It was only when they reached a vast stretch of farmland that had clearly been tended that Fu Erdie finally sensed a trace of human presence.
She took out her binoculars and scanned the surroundings. At last, she spotted a dusty figure working on an inconspicuous ridge between the fields.
Fu Erdie quickly took out two buckets and had the building fill them with water. She also instructed the potato plant to produce several potatoes.
Under normal conditions, the potatoes produced by the potato plant were now as large as footballs. They did not spoil, could be eaten raw and were completely non-toxic. Its mutation had become remarkably considerate of human needs, making the potatoes extremely valuable as trade goods.
If an ordinary person rationed their food carefully, one potato could last ten days. By taking out three, Fu Erdie was providing enough food to sustain one person for an entire month.
Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao could not eat that much at mealtimes, so they usually had the potato plant control their size and produce potatoes roughly the size of a palm.
After preparing the goods they could exchange for information, the two controlled the boxcar and floated towards the farmer.
The farmer was extremely vigilant and constantly observed his surroundings. When he saw a dark object floating towards him from a distance, he was startled and immediately turned to run.
However, he could not outrun the boxcar when it was travelling at full speed. It quickly caught up to him.
Fu Erdie did not shout. Instead, once they were close enough for him to hear her clearly without being too near, she politely said, “We’re not bad people. We’re searching for our relatives and would like to ask you for some information.”
Upon hearing a normal human voice, the farmer slowed slightly.
The moment he stopped, the boxcar overtook him and moved in front of him.
By now, the boxcar had already been turned upright. It looked like an ordinary cable car from a tourist attraction before the apocalypse.
A man and a woman sat behind the windows of the little cable car, while enormous clusters of cotton-like dandelions floated above its roof. They looked like figures from a painting.
It took the farmer a long moment to react. Although he relaxed slightly, he remained highly cautious.
“You’re ability users? Who are you looking for?”
Fu Erdie gave him her grandmother’s name, Cao Xiufen.
The man let out an “Oh” and appeared to relax further.
“There were three of them—an elderly woman, a middle-aged woman and a young man, right? Apart from her, there was also her daughter and grandson?”
“Yes!” Fu Erdie’s eyes widened. “You know them? That’s wonderful! Could you please tell me where they are now?”
“They’ve already left.”
The farmer wanted to return to his work, but since the two of them were ability users, he did not dare offend them.
Fu Erdie clearly noticed his reluctance. She lifted a bucket of water from beneath the window.
“Do you have a container that can hold water? This is all clean drinking water. I can pour some out for you.”
The farmer’s eyes lit up.
The water he currently drank came from wells and rivers. However, it tasted strange, and many people had previously died after drinking it. He did not want to drink contaminated, mutated water at all. Having clean water that he could drink safely would be wonderful.
His attitude immediately changed. After glancing around and confirming that there were no other people or zombies nearby, he took the initiative to invite them back to his home to sit down. He was clearly willing to have a longer conversation now.
The older farmer’s home was an extremely ordinary single-storey rural house of the sort commonly found throughout the countryside. The interior was dark.
He found a room where the evening sunlight could still reach and invited the two of them inside. When Fu Erdie took out the football-sized potatoes, his smile became far more genuine.
“As you know, there aren’t many people in the countryside. Most of them are elderly people and children whose parents work elsewhere. After the apocalypse began, many elderly people didn’t turn into zombies. Their hearts simply couldn’t handle what was happening outside, and they were frightened to death.”
Fu Erdie could not help interrupting him.
“Could you please tell me where my grandmother went?”
“Don’t be impatient.” The farmer waved his hand. “Your grandmother went to a base. The roads are difficult to travel, and all kinds of accidents could have happened along the way. Even if you search for her, you won’t necessarily find her within a day or two. Let me finish explaining.”
A base?
Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao exchanged glances.
When Sang Wenhao had escaped from the university district while being chased by zombies, hadn’t he encountered a group from a base who were searching for survivors? He had even obtained his sniper rifle because of that encounter.
Could this village also have encountered a passing military unit?
Fu Erdie nodded to the older man.
“Sorry for interrupting. Please continue.”
The sun slowly descended in the west. By the time it finally reached the horizon, Fu Erdie had at last learned the entire course of events.
It was the ordinary apocalyptic life of people in a remote village where there were very few ability users.
Just as the older man had said, many people had turned into zombies after the apocalypse began, while many elderly people had simply been frightened to death.
However, these zombies were not like the speed-type zombie Fu Erdie had encountered on the first day of the apocalypse. They moved slowly, stumbling and limping. As long as they had not gathered into enormous hordes and created a disaster zone, ordinary people were capable of dealing with them.
In fact, this proved that people in the cities had made the correct choice by fleeing to the countryside. Rural areas were indeed far safer.
The zombies could be dealt with, but there was not enough food.
The fields here had originally been planted with rice. After a prolonged period of high temperatures without any rain, the rice had died within days.
They had attempted to plant the fields again, only to encounter frequent torrential rain that washed the seeds away to places no one could find. In short, they had worked for several months and harvested no grain whatsoever.
One advantage the countryside had over the cities was that nearly every household stored grain.
Moreover, everyone was a local who had been born and raised in the area. They knew where the warehouses used to purchase harvested crops were located. They could nervously drive there in trucks, deal with a few clumsy zombies and return with an entire truckload of grain.
Fu Erdie’s grandmother, Cao Xiufen, had nearly lost her way when she encountered a convoy travelling to a petrol station to collect petrol and diesel. It was only because of them that she had successfully reached Xiangde Village in Baochang County.
Fu Erdie felt a lingering fear when she imagined the situation.
Even her grandmother, who had returned to the countryside for a holiday every year, had taken the wrong road. Had Fu Erdie gone searching for her without any information, who knew how narrowly they might have missed each other…
“But even though we have grain now, we can’t simply sit around and consume it until there’s nothing left. We still have to find a way to farm.”
The older man sighed as he spoke.
“I thought that even if the soil was contaminated and the weather kept alternating between droughts and floods, we still had to plant whatever we could. Besides, no matter where we go, we’ll still have to farm. Do you think we wouldn’t need to grow crops if we went to one of those bases? It would be exactly the same.”
At the beginning of September, a convoy from a base had passed through the area.
They briefly repaired the town’s wireless broadcasting equipment and began playing announcements through the loudspeakers. Anyone who wanted to follow the convoy to the base could prepare to leave. The convoy would wait at a landmark square in the town.
“At the time, there were still some zombies in the town that hadn’t been killed. The people from the convoy cleared them away and told everyone to travel there before the scattered zombies could gather again. A lot of people went. Your grandmother and the other two were among them.”
After hearing the entire story, Fu Erdie felt slightly relieved.
However, she noticed that the farmer consistently referred to the group as a “convoy” rather than the “military.”
Why was that?
The farmer explained, “They said that the concept of a military doesn’t really exist in the same way anymore. If they want to protect the convoy, guns alone aren’t enough. They also need a large number of ability users.
“But those ability users obviously can’t simply be given the identities of former soldiers, and the military can’t demand that newly recruited ability users obey military discipline. That’s why ordinary people and the bases themselves now call them convoys.”
“To be honest, those ability users don’t have it easy either. They aren’t related to us and don’t owe us anything, yet they’re still willing to help ordinary people like us.”
The farmer suddenly jolted.
How had he forgotten that the two people in front of him were also ability users?
He hurriedly attempted to correct himself.
“I’m not saying that you’re bad people if you don’t help…”
“It’s fine. I understand what you mean.”
Fu Erdie poured the entire bucket of water into the older farmer’s water-storage container. She also gave him three enormous potatoes.
After saying goodbye, she and Sang Wenhao returned to the boxcar beneath the final rays of the setting sun and flew away.
Fu Erdie was afraid of straying too far from the route marked on the map, so they did not travel far. Instead, they chose a stretch of wasteland where they planned to stop for the night and sleep inside the boxcar.
She sorted through the information the farmer had given her. Several points were now extremely clear and important.
First, her grandmother, aunt and cousin did not possess any abilities.
Second, although the bases no longer followed the structure of the former official organisations and had undergone various changes after recruiting ability users, they currently appeared to take care of ordinary people.
Ordinary people like Fu Erdie’s grandmother, who suffered from numerous age-related illnesses but had no medicine, could receive assistance from healing-type ability users and temporarily recover their health.
Apparently, after arriving at a base, they could receive treatment from a healing-type ability user once every month, replacing the need for medicine.
Third, using abilities as a replacement for medicine required “payment.” This was connected to the exchange value of labour within the base.
Those who travelled to the base had to undertake extremely demanding work. The members of the convoy had not concealed this.
They had openly explained that the base’s current construction efforts required them to search for uncontaminated soil, transport it back and spread it layer by layer across the abandoned upper floors of high-rise buildings. They would then use the soil to cultivate shade-loving crops.
Apart from farming, many jobs that had previously been performed by machinery now required enormous amounts of human labour.
Mining and transporting coal, processing food, spinning and weaving fabric, and countless other tasks had all regressed to a stage where they had to be completed through manual labour.
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