Fu Erdie’s group found some cold-weather clothing in malls and residential buildings, but the quantity and warmth were limited.
Because Qing City itself was in the south, it could be considered spring like all year round. Even in the coldest part of winter, people only needed to wear one extra fleece-lined jacket. Truly thick cold-weather clothing basically did not exist.
The warm clothes Fu Erdie found were all from places where elderly people gathered, such as nursing homes. Elderly people feared the cold and had different daily habits from young people, so after searching here and there, they still managed to find items like down jackets and hard-shell jackets.
But still…
For the nth time, Cen Xiyang asked the soul-searching question, “Where are the zombies? Or the living people? The survivors?”
If not for the occasional frightened, struggling ability users they encountered along the way, they would have thought this place was safer than C City.
Fu Erdie shook her head.
Perhaps many zombie kings in the south were like the zombie king that had surrounded D City before, able to eat zombies to level up.
And perhaps there were many of them. Perhaps they ate zombies very quickly. That was why, by now, ordinary zombies were rarely seen on the roads. Apart from those staggering, soaking-wet zombies that had just climbed out of the water and were very easy to identify, other zombies that were dry and had stayed on land for some time were practically as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns.
Of course, it was also possible that all these zombies had been taken away by different zombie kings, forming zombie groups. And because Fu Erdie had deliberately avoided zombie groups to keep a low profile, they had avoided large-scale conflict.
Logically, with Han Zhi’s mental ability, they should have been able to travel without obstruction. But in reality, the floodwater had frozen over, and the damp ground was slippery everywhere.
The weather was cold and windy. When everyone sat in the box vehicle and flew, not only was it cold, it also consumed a lot of ability energy.
Inland, with Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao’s perpetual-motion-like ability, they could travel without stopping. But here, in a zero-degree environment, wearing thin down jackets and thin sweaters, while resisting the cold and dealing with the chaotic wind blowing from all directions outside, everyone in the vehicle was a mess.
In Han Zhi’s words, it was like flying through the wild wind of a fourth-rank wind ability user.
Fu Erdie agreed completely. Helplessly, they went from occasionally flying low-key when no one was around and riding bicycles to disguise themselves as ordinary ability users when people were nearby, to being unable to use bicycles at all. Everyone held umbrellas made of metal and walked forward against the wind.
The wind in Qing City was chaotic. There was cold high pressure blowing in from inland, as well as typhoons and ocean currents from the sea. One moment, the wind came from the front; the next, it came from the side. So after Fu Erdie and Sang Wenhao held umbrellas for several hours, they gave up. They found windproof goggles, windproof scarves, and windproof gloves from a sporting goods store, wrapped themselves from head to toe, and braced themselves against the gale.
Cen Xiyang and Han Zhi were fifth-rank ability users, but it was still difficult for them to resist wind comparable to fourth rank. So they shared a strange metal umbrella that blocked all directions, as if they had stuffed themselves into a metal shell. Then, relying on Han Zhi’s shared vision to distinguish the road outside, they moved forward with difficulty.
At noon, the group reached a ruined shop. They braced against the cold wind, sealed the door, leaving only one opening for light, and began eating lunch.
For once, they did not eat zucchini fruit. Instead, they ate instant noodles with no real nutrition.
They took out a storage battery from the space, found a new kettle in the shop, and extravagantly boiled a pot of water. They soaked the instant noodles, then drank down the noodles, seasoning, and broth together. Their bodies, cold for a long time, gradually warmed up.
Fu Erdie let out a satisfied sigh. Borrowing the light, she took out the map and reluctantly studied their next route.
They did not know whether the temperature would continue to drop.
And she, a seventh-rank ability user whose name would sound impressive if spoken aloud, had never tested the limit of her cold resistance. Her close companions had not tested theirs either, and they did not want to.
They had to find a factory producing specialised cold-weather clothing as soon as possible and replace the clothes that had already been tortured by the wild wind until their seams were coming loose.
Although Qing City was warm, there were many factories processing various types of clothing.
Fu Erdie studied the map while Sang Wenhao helped her gently pat her wind-deformed down jacket back into shape, doing what little he could to maintain its warmth.
“There’s a large outdoor cold-weather equipment factory here.” Fu Erdie pointed to a place on the map. “It’s an OEM factory. The terrain is relatively high and the location is quite remote. If we go, we’ll probably have to reach it in one push. Otherwise, the route is all mountain forest or farmland, with no buildings to spend the night in. We’d have to stay in a temporary metal house.”
Sang Wenhao estimated the distance. “If the wind in the mountains is a little weaker, or if it’s a tailwind, we should be able to arrive by evening.”
Cen Xiyang and Han Zhi had no objections.
Most importantly, as fifth-rank ability users, they were the two in the team most afraid of the cold. They urgently needed warm, cold-resistant items.
Fu Erdie could not copy Cen Xiyang’s spatial ability, and Cen Xiyang’s space was limited. Most of it was used to store water; a smaller part held large storage batteries, the telegraph machine, and other miscellaneous items. The remaining space was extremely precious. There was no room to stuff in all kinds of thick cold-weather gear, sleeping bags, quilts, and so on.
So each of the four had to carry a heavy, large mountaineering backpack themselves, leaving space to collect supplies once they reached their destination.
This OEM factory was extremely large. It made products for many top foreign outdoor extreme-survival brands and also handled the manufacturing of many domestic cold-weather products.
The products did not look good, but they were practical. With different brand labels attached, they could be sold through different brand channels.
The factory’s raw materials, whether down feathers or certain original tree species used for cold-resistant materials, needed land for breeding and planting. So the location was very remote and covered a large area. From far away, one could already tell it belonged to the factory.
Fu Erdie’s group spent the whole afternoon and barely managed to find the outermost wall of the factory before sunset, but they still had not seen the factory buildings inside.
Braving the wild wind, they raised the box vehicle very, very high. Only then did they see the factory buildings and various shipping containers deep within the mountain forest, halfway up the mountain, in a relatively flat area.
Fu Erdie: “…”
Cen Xiyang lowered her hands from where she had been peering into the distance and sighed. “A mountain looks close, but running to it breaks your legs. We still have to rush a bit more.”
The sky had already darkened. The wild wind and heavy clouds made the already grey weather even gloomier.
Fu Erdie activated her ability and took a deep breath.
Was it not just the last few dozen kilometres?
Was it not just crossing a valley and facing the wild wind at the mountain pass?
It was fine. If they rushed through in one go, they would have lots and lots of warm clothes and quilts.
Thinking of her family and teammates back in C City, as well as the employees, Fu Erdie felt that she could use a shipping container to bring more clothes back. In a few days or a few months, when the wind died down, she would send these supplies back.
Yes. Once the wind stopped, she absolutely had to run across the whole country at top speed and drag back every useful and useless supply from every remote corner!
She missed the house. She missed the warm bed at home.
With a wicked fire burning in her heart, Fu Erdie lifted the box vehicle and charged inward with everyone inside.
In the mountain forest, they had no time to keep a low profile. They had to fly higher than the trees to move in a straight line toward the factory buildings.
But the instant her ability rose, Fu Erdie sensed a violent ability fluctuation through Han Zhi’s mental ability.
Her reaction speed, honed from being out for so long, allowed her to instantly identify the source of the attack—a lightning ability user among a group at the mountain pass.
Fu Erdie tugged the corner of her lips.
Good. The wicked fire in her heart now had somewhere to go.
At the mountain pass, five people watched the box vehicle in the air from afar, excitement rising in their hearts.
Ability users, and they did not look weak. If they shot them down, the crystal cores would be theirs!
These days, the ability users outside were all clever, hiding like underground rats. They had finally encountered wild ability users! They could get crystal cores again, and maybe new supplies too!
Their wild joy lasted only three seconds before they realised something was wrong.
Because…
The strange metal box in the distant sky had disappeared, but there was no sound of it falling to the ground!
Countless thoughts flashed through their minds, and they instinctively wanted to hide.
At that very moment, a huge root burst out of the ground. The tip of the root immediately turned into a metal blade and pierced through the hearts of all five people.
The group could not believe it. Blood already gushed out along the metal root.
One of them was a fire ability user and tried to burn away the root at his chest.
But when he used his strength, he could not even break through the metal shell outside the root, let alone the mutated plant inside.
They stared desperately and hatefully in the direction the root had come from. Then they saw a man and a woman strolling out from the forest.
The two held a strange metal “umbrella” and did not reveal their eyes, yet they walked accurately toward them.
The woman under the umbrella exclaimed, “Butterfly, your ability combinations are getting better and better!”
Butterfly? Did that mean the other man under the umbrella was called Butterfly?
From the shadows of the forest, two more people walked out.
“It was beyond my usual performance. Metal abilities need a medium to extend; as expected, it’s still somewhat strenuous.”
The five-person ability team struggled to look toward the voice, wanting to see the face of the person who had killed them. But even at the very end, they never saw that person’s appearance clearly.
They only suddenly remembered…
The high-rank ability user Boss Ying Da had been searching for recently had the codename Butterfly Garden Principal.
So it was her…
Fu Erdie approached, took out the device, and tested them. She raised her brows.
They were actually all fifth-rank ability users.
Qing City really was a place where fifth-rank ability users walked everywhere.
Fu Erdie checked the injuries of the five people. Four were already dead. One remained alive, probably because he specialised in defence and had heavily protected his vitals. The metal root had only just pierced into his heart before being forcefully blocked. The muscles around the wound and his remaining ability energy squeezed the injury shut, forcibly stopping the bleeding. For the moment, he had only fainted and would not die.
That was perfect. Capturing a fifth-rank ability user alive might allow them to ask for some intelligence.
Thinking this, Fu Erdie crushed a zucchini fruit with her bare hands and stuffed it into the man’s mouth.
Seeing this, Sang Wenhao cooperated by dislocating the man’s jaw, forcing his mouth wide open so he swallowed all the zucchini.
Like potatoes, under Fu Erdie’s training, zucchini had a certain healing effect. In particular, wounds like this kind of trauma were very easy to stabilise.
However, the man would not wake up for the time being. So Sang Wenhao bound him with metal chains and threw him into the box vehicle. Once they reached the factory, they would wake him up and question him.
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