Once they cleared the threats, the ability users could slowly lure the zombies from the northwest back in batches after the weather cooled again. Although the battle line would stretch for a long time, there would eventually be a day when everything was dealt with.
So, after Fu Erdie, Sang Wenhao, and Han Zhi had gone out for a month and a half, returned to rest for five days, they set off again.
This time, they brought many ordinary mutated crops with them. When they encountered refugees they had met before, or might meet later on the road, they handed out mutated crops.
At the same time, with Butterfly Garden’s increasingly skilled plant cultivation, D City Base had already given every person two mutated crops.
In other words, even if the people of D City did nothing now, they could still eat their fill.
The work they had been forced to do for survival had reduced greatly. What remained was routine power generation, water filtration, making various components, and daily handmade goods.
However, because there was no longer any worry about food, and because everyone had worked hard for a long time before, some people began slacking after the base assigned them routine work, unwilling to move more each day.
The base did not force them at first, giving everyone who had worked hard for a year one lazy month to rest.
By September, they formally set work quotas.
If a person failed to complete that month’s work, their two mutated crops would be reclaimed, and they would return to the previous state of doing as much work as they wanted food for.
The moment they heard that the plants they had received could be taken back, everyone jolted awake and regained their energy, completing the base’s now much easier assigned work.
D City Base entered a state completely different from the other bases in Hua Country.
Other bases racked their brains trying to cut down their populations and find places to hide from zombies while quietly developing. D City was generating electricity and doing handicraft work.
Other bases trembled under the impact of zombie tides, wishing they could quickly push ordinary people and neighbouring bases out to die as shields. D City Base was generating electricity and doing handicraft work.
The strong people in other bases fought desperately in zombie tides, killing as many zombies as they could, enduring wind and fire, hoping to upgrade as soon as possible. D City Base was generating electricity and doing handicraft work.
Gradually, the other bases that learned information through telegraphs began to feel unbalanced. They sent telegrams one after another accusing D City of not thinking of danger in times of peace, and of not even going out to fight zombies and upgrade.
“Are you planning to stay at your current rank forever and wait until the ever-growing zombie tide returns and flattens D City?”
D City Base replied, “Sorry, but there are no zombies left around us.”
The other bases: ???
D City Base: “Not only that, our base is protected by hundreds and thousands of intelligent mutated plants. As long as they keep eating zombies, or if there are no zombies, simply keep living day after day, they can upgrade on the spot.”
The other bases were shocked.
The other bases were completely unbalanced.
The other bases all asked for the telegraph frequency of the source of all this: Butterfly Garden.
Butterfly Garden did not respond, and D City Base did not say. So every night from 8:00 to 8:30, all the bases noisily crowded into D City Base’s channel.
This noisy commotion had some purpose beyond relieving boredom.
Fu Erdie looked at the telegram coming through Butterfly Garden’s channel and raised her eyebrows slightly. “So it really is like this.”
[Zombies are still continuously mutating and upgrading. The proportion of ability zombies among zombie groups continues to rise.]
Fu Erdie felt that the reason for this situation was likely because the source causing mutation — whether radiation, virus, or some other unknown interference and infection — was still continuously affecting everyone.
On the first day of the apocalypse, the first batch of people had been screened out, affecting many people.
Later, as days passed, the ordinary people and ordinary zombies left after the screening were also subtly and continuously mutating.
When the mutation factor broke through a certain critical value, ordinary zombies would become ability zombies.
And ordinary humans might also become ability users, or simply become zombies.
This was the second piece of information sent by telegraph.
[D City Base has had 23 people successively turn into zombies without cause, and 16 people become ability users without cause. Since the zombies were controlled in time, there has been no major disturbance in the base.]
The information given by D City was direct, but it did not mention that when the first zombie appeared, the base had still fallen into panic for a while.
Because to ordinary people, they had been working normally one day when a colleague was suddenly attacked by dandelions, and their whole body exploded into a cloud of dandelion fluff.
At that time, people were terrified and fled in all directions, saying things like the plants had finally gone mad and started killing indiscriminately.
Forget ordinary people; even many ability users felt chilled.
At that moment, it was D City Base’s leader, Rong Le’an, who stepped forward. He personally came to the dandelion and asked what had happened.
The dandelion that had acted was a wild dandelion and had not received pinyin training at Butterfly Garden, so it did not know how to use the pinyin chart in Rong Le’an’s hand.
So, under the condition that he already had some guesses, Rong Le’an said, “Did you just deal with that person because he was turning into a zombie? If yes, nod. If not, shake your head.”
Under the crowd’s close watch, the dandelion nodded its flower.
There was an uproar.
Rong Le’an politely requested, “If next time, among our people, you discover someone turning into a zombie, could you only control them first and not kill them?”
Dandelion: “…”
The dandelion was too lazy to care. It turned and left.
With this departure, they directly flew off with all the dandelions in the city and went outside the city.
These people thought they were the gardener? So many demands?
These people did not like them, so they did not want these people either.
Rong Le’an’s expression changed slightly. He chased after the dandelions for a few steps, wanting to ask them to stay.
But the dandelions did not pay any attention to Rong Le’an and left the city from every direction.
The dandelions had a mysterious communication channel among themselves. One notified another, and that one notified the next. Added to the fact that they had wind attributes to begin with and were born liking to drift around in the wind, they simply ignored these humans and floated away with the wind.
The other plant babies did not understand the dandelions’ communication, but they could understand human speech and knew that humans had distrusted them just now.
Then…
Then the plant babies left too.
In any case, what the gardener had said was for them to look after D City Base and prevent zombies from disturbing it. Then they did not have to stay inside the city. They could go somewhere farther away and wander around, and that would be fine.
When the gardener was not here, they had dealt with quite a few zombie tides of various sizes. There were no zombies nearby anymore. Going out to play was no big deal. Maybe they could even discover zombies earlier than if they stayed in the city.
And so, the plants also left.
There were more than a thousand intelligent mutated plants here, ranging from first-rank to third-rank. The sight of them pulling themselves out by the roots and heading out of the city was extremely grand.
The base panicked and wanted to keep them. A bamboo that knew pinyin explained on the pinyin chart that they were only playing nearby, cleaning up zombies while they played, and nothing would happen.
Some dandelions saw that these silly slow-walking plants also wanted to leave, so they helped them by landing on the plants’ branches, tying them up with roots, and flying into the sky.
Because dandelion seeds spread too quickly, intelligent mutated dandelions had always increased exponentially. So their number was even greater than all the other intelligent mutated plants in D City Base combined. They grabbed the plants and left, flying in all directions.
The base urgently contacted the watchtowers around them, asking them to observe where the plants landed. Only after discovering that they had stopped merely one or two kilometres away did they finally let out a slight breath.
At least… it was not too terrible.
The base’s management knew this situation, but they did not tell the ordinary people.
The ordinary people did not know that just moments ago, they had been afraid of the plants and said things like “as expected of things without human nature” and “those not of our race.” Now, seeing these “foreign races” leave without the slightest hesitation or even a glance at them, their emotions became as complicated as spilled paint.
After experiencing hunger, thirst, and zombie sieges, they could not even say angry words like “leave if you want.” Awkwardness, panic, regret, and other emotions continued to spread. Only a few days later, when the base announced that the plants had not gone far, did the uneasy atmosphere temporarily settle.
But no one dared say anything bad about the plants anymore.
A few days later, at night, someone in the base suddenly turned into a zombie for no reason.
It climbed out through an unclosed balcony and scratched several nearby neighbours before being controlled.
That night, including him and the people infected by him, six people turned into zombies.
Such incidents happened at night, and later also occurred in front of everyone during the day. Finally, after three or four such cases, the people of the base realised that the people around them really could turn into zombies! And they really had wronged that dandelion that had dealt with the zombie at the beginning.
There was no need to say more about how chaotic the base became. But when Fu Erdie saw this news, she felt that when she went out in the future, either she would not bring the house, or she would have to return once a month, allowing her parents, grandma, and all ordinary people to undergo inspection and treatment in Building Seven, ensuring that the zombie-mutating factors in everyone’s bodies remained under control.
Her family could not have an accident. As for the others, she would also try to avoid accidents as much as possible.
So, after discussing it with everyone in Butterfly Garden, she set a twenty-five-day cycle and swept zombies across every district, county, and road in the northwest.
For some formed zombie tides, after Fu Erdie eliminated the zombie king and ability zombies, she skipped over them and continued travelling. While travelling, she cleared roads, then left three or four days to hurry home. Once home, she checked everyone in Butterfly Garden once, and also let non-ability-user management staff from D City Base, such as Rong Le’an, come over for inspection and treatment, removing the possibility of mutating toward zombification. Then, on the first day of the next month, she set off again. The cycle repeated.
By the end of November, after three months, Fu Erdie had finally cleared all the ability zombies across the vast north-western lands!
And this time, among roughly one hundred million zombies, Fu Erdie obtained far more crystal cores than expected: a full thirty thousand.
What kind of concept was thirty thousand?
According to D City Base’s data, after an ability user in their initial state ate one crystal core, they could officially reach first-rank. If they ate one or two more crystal cores of the same attribute, or ten to thirty first-rank crystal cores of different attributes, they could upgrade to second-rank.
A second-rank ability user could reach third-rank after eating one hundred crystal cores.
A third-rank ability user could reach fourth-rank after eating one thousand crystal cores.
Assuming that all the crystal cores eaten were of the same attribute, these numbers could be divided by ten. But ordinary people did not have that much choice, and usually ate a mix of various types.
The thirty thousand crystal cores Fu Erdie had collected over the past three months were enough to raise at least thirty ability users to fourth-rank!
And if all thirty thousand crystal cores were eaten by Fu Erdie, who knew what rank she would reach!
After all, Fu Erdie was an attribute-less ability user. Every kind of crystal core had the absorption efficiency of a same-attribute crystal core for her. That was why she had absorbed crystal cores while training abilities with Sang Wenhao, and had easily and effortlessly reached fifth-rank.
In addition, not every one of the thirty thousand crystal cores was first-rank. Generally speaking, the energy of a second-rank crystal core was seven or eight times that of a first-rank. A third-rank crystal core was fifty or sixty times that of a first-rank, sometimes even one or two hundred times. The specific situation varied greatly, and the effect on different people was also different. But one thing was certain: they could absolutely double everyone’s strength completely.
Among the thirty thousand crystal cores, fifty or sixty were mental-type, and two or three hundred were metal-type. So Fu Erdie directly had Han Zhi and Sang Wenhao absorb these crystal cores while travelling.
After returning to the complex, she urged them to first absorb crystal cores of other attributes, stopping only when Han Zhi broke through to fourth-rank and Sang Wenhao broke through to fifth-rank.
With enough same-attribute crystal cores, including quite a few second- and third-rank ones, Han Zhi absorbed another 452 crystal cores, while Sang Wenhao absorbed another 216 crystal cores. Each upgraded, reaching fourth-rank and fifth-rank respectively.
So aside from Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao, Butterfly Garden now had two fourth-rank ability users: Cen Xiyang and Han Zhi! They were enough to look down on more than half of Hua Country.
Fu Erdie rummaged through the crystal cores, keeping aside wind-type and lightning-type crystal cores needed by Butterfly Garden’s ability-user team as future monthly wages and bonuses. She also reserved crystal-core wages for Lucky Koi He Xuan, and for Pan Feizhou, the sports student whose attribute overlapped with Sang Wenhao’s metal-type, plus some stock for storage. The remaining twenty-eight thousand crystal cores were allocated as resources for this upcoming southern expedition with the plants on the first floor of Building Seven.
She wanted the house, the succulent, the pothos, the potato, and the others to upgrade.
First was the house. Fu Erdie did not know how many crystal cores the fourth-rank house needed to absorb to reach fifth-rank, so she used units of one hundred crystal cores, adding them one hundred at a time while having Professor Zhao record the process.
The house slowly absorbed them. When it had absorbed for five days, consuming a full 2,800 crystal cores, the house finally reached fifth-rank!
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