Yun Qingyue had stored quite a bit of drinking water, because clean drinking water would become a problem after the apocalypse arrived.
She originally thought it would last a week. Now she realized the few of them were using quite a lot of drinking water every day. Yun Qingyue didn’t dwell on it, since she felt no one was wasting water; it was all being used for necessities.
Thus, she concluded that the reason it seemed to run out quickly was simply because she was used to having running tap water in the past, and thus had no real concept of water reserves.
“Our task assignment for today is as follows.” As soon as nine o’clock hit, Captain Yun began assigning tasks.
Yun Qingyue wrote the names of the four squad members on the small blackboard.
[Apocalypse Squad]
Captain: Yun Qingyue
Member: No. 59
Member: Haihai
Member: Yangyang
She added both children to the list. Yun Qingyue didn’t know how to raise two kids. She was still unaware that the children already knew their parents had turned into zombies.
She only sensed that the two kids were extremely insecure. After breakfast this morning, the siblings had sat off to the side, watching the two adults eat.
At the time, Yun Qingyue had assumed they hadn’t eaten their fill. It turned out the sister said, “We’re waiting to work. Brother can wash the dishes, and I can wipe the table.”
So they were waiting for the adults to finish eating, ready to wash dishes and wipe the table.
The brother added, “We can also do things.”
Yun Qingyue realized that, living with strangers, in the apocalypse, with Zombie Dogs and Zombie Humans outside, the two children felt deeply insecure. They needed to do something, wanted to find a place within the team, to guarantee they wouldn’t be casually abandoned.
So, during the nine o’clock work meeting, Yun Qingyue wrote the siblings’ names on the blackboard and assigned them tasks as well.
“Haihai! Yangyang! From today onward, you are our team’s Power Department. These solar charging panels are under your protection.”
Yun Qingyue demonstrated to them how to open the panels and place them on the RV’s roof for charging. The two children watched very attentively.
“In a bit, you need to watch whether the electricity is fully charged. Once it’s full, you must quickly change them. If it rains, you need to bring them back inside. This electricity is very important to us. We need it for cooking and lighting.”
At this stage, the safe zone was too limited, and there were few tasks the children could do. Yun Qingyue chose something uncomplicated but one that would genuinely give them a sense of purpose.
This was a major project. The two children immediately stood up and replied with proper formality, “Roger!”
Hey? Yun Qingyue found them adorable, but a captain couldn’t show it. The captain merely nodded coolly, gesturing for them to sit back down.
Experiment Subject No. 59 had been watching this entire time, looking at the charging panel, then looking at Yun Qingyue.
Yun Qingyue assigned No. 59 his task.
“You’ll come with me to search for a water source.”
Today, they’d first solve the drinking water problem.
No. 59 nodded.
The task assignments done, before leaving, Yun Qingyue first went outside to check on the Zombie Dogs.
No. 59 followed her out.
The three Zombie Dogs were penned separately in three locations. Last night, their bellies had still been crushed flat, unable to stand.
But today, all three Zombie Dogs could already stand. Such a terrifying recovery ability.
This kind of recovery ability was likely because their bodies were completely taken over by the zombie virus, so they could no longer be understood by common logic.
Looking at the red-eyed, mindless Zombie Dogs, Yun Qingyue recalled a biological entity from her own world.
Yun Qingyue turned back and asked her colleague buddy behind her, “Have you ever heard of caterpillar fungus?”
Caterpillar fungus? Experiment Subject No. 59 hadn’t.
Yun Qingyue explained, “When I was in my final year of high school, I was under a lot of pressure and kept catching colds. My grandmother heard from a friend that caterpillar fungus could boost the immune system, improve sleep, and enhance memory.”
Yun Qingyue recalled that period, her mood complex.
Exhausting and bitter, yet back then, she truly believed that if she endured, she would surely rise above.
In reality, after finishing being a corporate drone in her own world, she came to an apocalypse world to be cannon fodder.
Back then, her grandmother had spent over three thousand yuan to buy a large box, telling her to take one in the morning and one at night.
Looking back now, she found it almost unbelievable. How could her grandmother have been willing to spend that much?
At first, she just thought the bottom half of this “grass” really looked like a worm, but the top half was clearly a plant.
No wonder it was called caterpillar fungus. Back then, her brain was filled with the impending college entrance exams, so she didn’t think much of it. Besides, plenty of plants in the botanical world looked like animals.
Until one day when she woke up late and didn’t steep it at home, instead bringing it directly to school to steep. Then, a knowledgeable classmate gave her a lesson.
This thing was called caterpillar fungus not because it looked like a worm, but because it was the result of a fungus parasitizing a worm and growing out of it.
That classmate, the class know-it-all, started giving everyone a science lesson: “That’s nothing. There’s even an ant that, after being parasitized by this kind of virus, gets its brain directly controlled by the virus. The virus manipulates the ant’s movements, making it crawl to a desired location, and then releases spores.”
After that, every time she ate it, she felt like she was eating a zombie.
At the time, she’d even had a nightmare, dreaming that the entire world had been eroded by this fungus, and humans had turned into the same thing.
In her dream, she might have given herself some superpowers, because in the dream, due to eating zombie corpses every day, she hadn’t been infected. Instead, she became a Zombie King that everyone feared.
Suspected to be a wonderful dream caused by eating too much caterpillar fungus.
She didn’t tell her new colleague all this, only briefly explaining the caterpillar fungus.
Now, looking at the red-eyed, furiously barking Zombie Dogs in the cage, she figured that Zombie Dogs and Zombie Humans were basically in this situation: completely parasitized. The fungus inside them controlled their bodies, constantly driving them to consume things quickly, to rapidly claim more hosts.
But the interesting part was that Zombie Humans were afraid of Zombie Dogs. If it was truly like parasitism, was there a difference between the fungus parasitizing dogs and the one parasitizing humans?
She was actually quite curious. If this was the case, was there hope for humans to communicate with the fungus inside the dogs? This fungus should have some perception of the external world.
She watched for a while. Behind her, Experiment Subject No. 59 watched the Zombie Dogs with her.
After about ten minutes of observation, Yun Qingyue decided she couldn’t slack off any longer. She checked that the cage holding the Zombie Dogs was still secure, then took her colleague into the sedan and left the area.
Finding water naturally meant heading to the villages up the county road. A place like this should definitely have some small hamlets.
She just didn’t know how many normal people were left, and how many were zombies.
The apocalyptic zombie novels Yun Qingyue had crammed before rarely mentioned situations in these urban-rural fringe areas. It was either rural villages or cities.
So she had no experience either. In any case, she’d just drive up first.
The car quickly passed the spot where they’d encountered the Zombie Dogs before and continued forward.
Just as they were about to pass the next bend, faint voices could be heard from ahead.
It was an elderly woman’s cursing.
Yun Qingyue couldn’t make out what was being cursed.
Yun Qingyue was somewhat surprised. She hadn’t had much of an idea how many normal humans were up here, and even thought there might not be many.
For a very simple reason: Yun Qingyue had a stereotype. She felt that villages like this didn’t have many young people; most were elderly. The elderly didn’t pay much attention to the internet, so naturally, they wouldn’t know about the situation with Zombie Humans and Zombie Dogs in time.
And the people around here kept a lot of dogs, and none of them were leashed.
Once zombified, the lethality was shocking.
For example, the ones they had encountered were clearly all raised on these hills.
Because of this assumption, when Yun Qingyue drove the sedan around a sharp bend and saw a three-wheeled vehicle being chased by a pack of zombies up ahead…
Yun Qingyue was stunned.
And the cursing she had heard earlier was the driver of that three-wheeler, cursing them out.
As the three-wheeler passed the sedan, Yun Qingyue could see its driver was wearing a metal bucket on their head, secured to metal sheeting on their body with wire, leaving only two small holes exposed.
They were clad entirely in metal sheeting.
A horde of zombies was chasing behind the three-wheeler.
Yun Qingyue immediately stopped the car, then rolled down her window and stuck out her hand: “Over here, over here!”
Sure enough, the zombies were immediately drawn over.
Seeing them coming, and gauging they were far enough from the three-wheeler, Yun Qingyue didn’t hesitate. She floored the accelerator and plowed straight into them.
After dealing with the zombies, Yun Qingyue drove after the three-wheeler.
Pulling the sedan up beside the three-wheeler, she only rolled down her own window.
“Hello?”
The three-wheeler had also noticed them. Now seeing the car catching up, it stopped. The person on board took off the metal bucket.
An elderly woman’s face, full of wrinkles, was revealed. She looked around seventy years old.
“Granny, where are you headed?” Yun Qingyue glanced at the metal bucket and thought the elderly person was impressively handy.
The old woman saw her and said, “I need to go to the city. Did you two come from the city? How are things there now?”
Yun Qingyue then learned that the old woman lived alone in a bungalow up ahead, growing vegetables and raising a few chickens and ducks. On weekends, her son’s family, who worked in the city, would come back to visit her.
The elderly woman had a surveillance camera at her door. The night before last, while she was sleeping, she’d suddenly heard her granddaughter shouting through the camera: “Grandma, close the windows! Close the windows quick!”
She didn’t know what was happening, but having lived through things, she immediately went and shut the windows.
And just as she closed them, the neighbor’s dog charged up and slammed right into the window glass.
Her granddaughter was yelling through the camera: “Grandma, the apocalypse is here! There are zombies! No matter who knocks on the door these next few days, don’t open it! They will bite people!”
The elderly woman didn’t really know what a zombie was, but she knew something was wrong, something big had gone wrong.
She didn’t sleep all night, just peered out the window. Soon enough, she saw Old Man Li from the village being chased and mauled by two dogs.
Soon, Old Man Li collapsed.
What was wrong with these dogs?
But soon, she had no time to think about the dogs, because Old Man Li, who had collapsed and clearly stopped breathing, got back up. Then Old Man Li started chasing and biting other people.
This scene delivered a shock to this seventy-something-year-old woman.
Only then did the elderly woman understand: people had gone mad, the dogs had gone mad.
She began to worry desperately. What about her son’s family?
She couldn’t get through on the phone. Her granddaughter didn’t speak through the camera again.
She agonized over it, unable to sleep. She armored herself in metal sheets. Early this morning, she loaded up with eggs, rice, and some vegetables, then rode her three-wheeler to head for the city.
After hearing the old woman’s story, looking at her, Yun Qingyue very much wanted to persuade her that going to the city now was pointless.
The situation in the city was definitely even worse.
But she looked at the back of the old woman’s three-wheeler. Inside two large mineral water bottles were eggs, packed full. There was also a drinking water barrel holding a live chicken, and the rest were fresh vegetable leaves.
Those vegetable leaves looked like they’d been picked just today. How had she managed to avoid zombies to pick vegetables in the field?
Yun Qingyue didn’t know what to say.
Experiment Subject No. 59 had also been listening. He could feel an aura he was very familiar with emanating from the person beside him.
Damp, gloomy. Her blood flow had even slowed a little. She was feeling sad.
He was familiar with this aura, but he still found it uncomfortable.
However, this aura didn’t linger on Yun Qingyue for long, because Experiment Subject No. 59 heard her say, “Granny, getting to the city on this vehicle will be very difficult. How about this? You help us find a water source, and we’ll drive you into the city.”
Yun Qingyue thought to herself: it was time to see if what the System said about her absolutely not dying was true.
No. 59 sensed that the damp aura around her was swept away in an instant.