Chapter 11: Highway Survival 8
With wolves ahead and tigers behind, and her means of transportation out of commission, her situation looked utterly wretched.
Chu Yun decisively abandoned the car. Pulling open the door, she dashed toward the heart of the desert, with Wang Mao trailing closely behind.
Before, when they had the car, they could easily shake off the zombies with speed. Now, they had to rely entirely on their legs to run. A human’s energy was finite, but a zombie’s stamina was infinite.
Two hours later, Wang Mao was completely exhausted. He collapsed onto the ground, looking up at the sky and gasping for breath in huge gulps. It felt as though if he didn’t breathe this way, he would drop dead immediately. He was too tired, far too tired; he couldn’t keep going.
Chu Yun looked back at the zombies still relentlessly tailing them, then lowered her head to ask, “Can you keep going?”
Wang Mao shook his head bitterly. He would probably have to exit the game now, unable to accompany the big shot to the final step.
Chu Yun understood implicitly. For him to make it this far was already remarkable. “Then you should exit.”
Wang Mao looked at her gratefully. “Yeah. Thank you, Chu Yun!”
Thank you for not disdaining me and carrying me all the way to the final day. Without a weakling like me holding her back, Chu Yun will probably be able to handle things with even greater ease.
Watching Wang Mao vanish into a plume of white smoke, Chu Yun turned around and sprinted into the distance. Her speed was even faster than before, rapidly widening the gap between herself and the zombies.
By 8:00 PM, the darkness had deepened. Once the tracks of the zombies were no longer visible behind her, Chu Yun finally slowed her pace and came to a halt. She exhaled a long, deep breath, retrieved a bottle of water from her storage ring, downed it in one go, and then spread her limbs wide to lie flat on the desert sand. She was so damn tired; she really just wanted to fall asleep like this. But she couldn’t; until the final moment arrived, she could never lower her guard.
Tonight, the weather began to warm up. There was no wind and no rain, making the temperature exceptionally comfortable. Overhead, it was no longer just a solitary moon; stars of all sizes dotted the pitch-black canopy, shimmering with dazzling brilliance. It had been a long time since she had seen such a beautiful night sky, whether in the mutated post-apocalyptic world or in modern society filled with exhaust pollution.
To think she would encounter such scenery inside a game. Chu Yun admired the night sky above, marveling silently.
After resting for ten minutes to replenish a bit of energy, Chu Yun stood up, patted the sand off her body, and walked deeper into the desert once more. The zombies behind her had caught up again. They were like a string of code, consistently following the game’s programming—wherever there were living humans, they would gather toward them.
Two hours later, Chu Yun encountered a processing factory. It was a spacious, two-story flat building, modest in size, with exterior walls built from yellow clay. Several eye-catching, large characters were written on the dirt wall: Desert Processing Factory. The inside was pitch black and completely silent; there shouldn’t be anyone there.
Chu Yun retrieved a wooden stick from her storage ring—it was something she had collected at the gas station and casually tossed inside. Using the flint she had obtained from Wang Mao, she lit the wooden stick and walked inside by its dim flame.
Since it was a processing factory, would there be any leftover supplies inside? According to standard game design, supplies were usually placed inside buildings or behind mobs and bosses. Stumbling upon a processing factory in this boundless desert sounded bizarre, but it was simply a resource point provided by the game.
With less than two hours left, she wanted to search for more supplies.
Chu Yun flipped in through the nearest window. This place had likely been an office before; inside, there was only a row of desks and a tall iron storage cabinet.
By the dim flame, Chu Yun spotted a row of switches behind the desk. She walked over and flipped them one by one, and the warm yellow lights overhead flickered on in sequence. Chu Yun raised an eyebrow. There was actually electricity? She snuffed out the flame on the wooden stick and turned to search the office for supplies.
The desks were covered in crumpled paper. Chu Yun flipped through them one by one, but they were just a miscellaneous assortment of drafts and of no use.
Next, she opened the drawers of the office desks one by one. There were only two brand-new pens and a stack of blank paper, all of which Chu Yun collected into her storage ring. Pens and paper were very precious, after all, as she hadn’t seen them for sale in the community convenience store.
Then she opened the rows of drawers in the storage cabinet. The cabinet was made of iron, and the friction of the sliding drawers sounded exceptionally loud in this empty space. That sharp screech of metal felt like it was repeatedly scraping against her nerves, giving her goosebumps from absolute revulsion. While enduring the sound of opening the cabinet, Chu Yun listened closely to her surroundings to guard against any sneak attacks.
Chu Yun hoped to find something useful in the iron cabinet, but reality proved that this was just a simple office. Aside from a stack of blank paper, there were no supplies.
Disappointed, Chu Yun walked toward the door, which was directly adjacent to the production workshop. Chu Yun cast a glance; the entire workshop had roughly ten production lines. A few processed goods were scattered randomly on the tracks, wrapped in plastic bags so she couldn’t tell what the heck they were. There was no machinery or equipment left either, presumably moved out long ago.
With a clear objective, Chu Yun searched the production lines one by one. To prevent the game from pulling another stunt with hidden black rats to harm people, Chu Yun was exceptionally cautious this time. She used her spiked mace to prod the contents of the plastic bags, only picking them up to inspect them after confirming they were inanimate objects.
The label read: Vegetable Seeds, 1 pack.
Chu Yun was stunned!
Seeds were fantastic! If they could be cultivated, she would have vegetables to eat in the future. This place must have processed vegetable seeds before. She hadn’t expected such a processing factory to appear in the desert, which was truly a pleasant surprise. Chu Yun thought about the island in Community 135; there didn’t seem to be any place to farm on the island, and the available land appeared scarce.
Chu Yun didn’t dwell on it too much. Regardless of the details, she shoved them all into her storage ring. She might as well collect the supplies first in case they proved useful later.
Time was short, so she moved rapidly, weaving between the production lines like an agile raccoon. She went on to collect three more packs of vegetable seeds. This processing factory also had a second floor. Chu Yun followed the only staircase up, finding the second floor equally pitch black.
Relying on her past experience scavenging for supplies among ruins, she quickly located the light switch. Many of the lamps were broken, but the few remaining lights were perfectly adequate to illuminate this small processing factory. The supplies on the second floor were noticeably more abundant than downstairs, and Chu Yun inspected them one by one with an excited heart.
Vegetable Seeds pack +2, Cotton Seeds pack +1, Corn Seeds pack +1, Potato Seeds pack +1. To her immense delight, she also collected a pack of rice seeds and a pack of fruit seeds. The fruit pack contained very few seeds; Chu Yun felt it with her hand and estimated there were only a handful. Scarcity naturally meant value, so Chu Yun stored them all in her storage ring. Having combed through the entire second floor, she couldn’t find anything else usable. Just as Chu Yun was preparing to leave, she suddenly heard guttural roars coming from downstairs.
This familiar tone could only belong to that pack of zombie brothers who had been tailing her for days! They really didn’t give her a single moment to rest.
Chu Yun ran into the only office on the second floor and peered out the window. The ground below was already swarming with zombies, a dense mass surrounding the processing factory, and a few had already made their way inside. Going down now would definitely result in being captured alive by the zombies; that wouldn’t work. Chu Yun ran to the window on the other side of the second floor to check; it was also packed with zombies. The second floor only had windows on these two sides, and both sides were under siege.
After thinking for a mere few seconds, Chu Yun found a solution. She rushed to the only entrance leading from the first floor to the second floor and shut the dilapidated door. Zombies couldn’t climb walls, so their only way to reach the second floor was through this doorway. However, this door wouldn’t hold them off for long. She immediately dashed into the office, using her storage ring to store the iron cabinet into her space. The storage ring’s space was only $4\text{m} \times 2\text{m} \times 2\text{m}$ and already held other supplies, so it became completely full just by taking in the iron cabinet.
Without a shred of hesitation, she sprinted back to the second-floor entrance. She could already hear the sound of zombies coming up the stairs; she had to move fast. By the time she slammed the iron cabinet against the door to barricade it, the first zombie had already reached the threshold. Scenting a living human, it was blocked by the door and the iron cabinet, leaving it unable to enter. It could only roar and slam its head against the door, the relentless thud, thud, thud making her feel as if her own head was about to crack. One iron cabinet wasn’t enough; with so many zombies downstairs, they would push through it sooner or later.
She sprinted back and forth between the office and the entrance, adding an office desk behind the iron cabinet, and then stacking one desk after another on top of it. Only when all the heavy items from the office were piled behind the door did Chu Yun finally breathe a sigh of relief. If the production lines weren’t too long to fit into her storage ring, she would have wanted to move those iron frames over as well.
Outside the door, the sound of zombies battering the entrance continued to echo, but since Chu Yun had piled thousands of pounds of items behind it, they wouldn’t be able to break through anytime soon.
Chu Yun walked to the window farthest from the entrance. At this moment, only a few scattered zombies were loitering around the exterior of the processing factory; the vast majority had entered the building.
There was no rush to escape just yet, but she still took the escape rope out of her storage ring. The rope was long enough to be folded in half and looped over the window frame, acting like a simple fixed pulley. Thanks to the supplies she had traded with Wang Mao earlier, it could now be put to good use.
Then she sat down peacefully to wait. While waiting, she even opened a boxed meal. She had been fleeing all afternoon and hadn’t had any time to eat. Now that the zombies were cordoned off outside and couldn’t get in, she seized the time to fill her stomach.
The hands of the watch ticked away. An hour later, the zombies were on the verge of breaking through. Watching the office desks topple over one by one, Chu Yun understood that the final iron cabinet probably wouldn’t hold out much longer either. She looked beneath the window; it happened to be clear of zombies, making it perfect for an escape.
Chu Yun tied the other end of the rope around her waist, gripped the escape rope tightly with both hands, faced the wall, and used her legs to push off. With her body arched like a cooked shrimp, she slid down the wall section by section. The factory building was only five meters high, and Chu Yun slid down in a matter of a dozen seconds. Chu Yun yanked one end of the escape rope, pulled the entire cord down, turned around, and bolted.
The exact split second her feet touched the ground, the zombies broke through the door upstairs.
However, they began to wander left and right as if they had hit a glitch. Chu Yun had already fled, and the aura of a living human had vanished into thin air on the second floor, leaving the zombies momentarily without a direction to advance. By the time they reacted and followed Chu Yun’s scent to pursue her, it was already too late.
Twenty minutes later, at 12:00 AM, the final second of the game concluded.
Chu Yun successfully cleared the stage.
