Chapter 62: Well, Then It Tasted Pretty Damn Good
Ever since the Chinese Restaurant first appeared, too many things had shattered everyone’s understanding of reality.
To be precise, it went against the collective consensus humanity had formed after the cataclysm.
Edible fruits, safe vegetables, clean animal meat; a machine that exchanged toxic, mutated biomass for cold, hard currency; a gorgeous restaurant standing proud outside the city walls; and a dome of white light that completely repelled the emerald mist.
Not to mention the mouthwatering new dishes added to the menu every few days…
The regular patrons had grown numb to the recurring shock. Standing before this fresh plot of land behind the restaurant, astonishment gave way to boundless reverence.
They were thoroughly, hopelessly won over.
In their eyes, there was nothing this miraculous shopkeeper could not do.
Even if the boss sprouted wings tomorrow, grew eight heads, and revealed a thousand arms and legs… they would probably accept it without batting an eye.
At most, after picking their jaws up off the dirt, they would offer a hearty cheer: “Incredible! The boss is so damn cool!”
The newcomers like Xia Dong, however, were not nearly so composed.
From the moment they crossed the threshold of the white light, their breathless gasps had barely stopped.
They cautiously breathed the crisp air inside the restaurant—completely stripped of the emerald rot—and stared in disbelief at dishes that carried not a single microgram of toxicity.
After reading the bizarre list of “status buffs” scribbled across the menu, they were left entirely flabbergasted, jaws practically scraping the floorboards.
Thank goodness their face cloths hid their expressions, or they would have looked utterly brain-dead.
Having just barely digested the wonders inside the shop, the sight of this lush plot of soil proved to be the final straw for their fragile composure.
“This is…” Xia Dong tentatively took a step toward the fenced tilled ground.
A floating line of text materialized directly before her eyes.
[This is the shopkeeper’s private property. Please do not approach.]
A gentle pulse of white light pressed firmly against her chest, nudging Xia Dong back two paces.
“Xia Dong.” Zhou Xue’s reflexes kicked in; stepping forward in a flash, she caught her comrade by the elbow. “What happened?”
“A line of words appeared out of thin air, saying it’s the owner’s private property and trespassers aren’t allowed,” Xia Dong explained, gesturing awkwardly with her hands.
“That’s right! Same thing happened to me when I tried to sneak a closer look just now,” a bystander in the crowd chimed in with a chuckle.
“If the boss doesn’t want us close, we’d better keep our distance! What if the lingering rot on our clothes contaminates the seedlings?!”
“Makes total sense!”
“I don’t know why, but watching healthy green sprouts poke out of honest-to-god dirt… it just makes me feel so emotional.”
“Feels like before the cataclysm, doesn’t it?”
“Yes! Exactly that!” an older man sighed, rubbing his bristly chin. “It feels completely unreal.”
Auntie Yun, standing nearby, scoffed good-naturedly. “Real or not, old Rhodes, does sitting in that restaurant with a hot meal feel real to you?”
“Eh?”
“Doesn’t feel real either, does it? After the world went to hell, who would have thought we’d ever live like this again—sitting down peacefully in a proper diner to eat our fill?”
“Suppose you’re right.” Old Rhodes rubbed his rough hands together with a dry laugh.
The crowd gazed upon the tender green shoots peeking through the dark soil, hearts brimming with quiet awe.
The plot was modest in size, but inexplicably… it felt as though a tiny seed of hope had sprouted in every chest.
Once the initial shock wore off, Xia Dong and the others stayed behind at the Chinese Restaurant.
Following the examples set by the regular scavengers, they gathered the hemlines of their cloaks into makeshift pouches, preparing to trek out to the abandoned fields and dig up toxic crops.
They carried a decent cache of energy crystals and were far from destitute by Seed City’s standards.
Yet during their brief wait by the entrance, they had overheard two young girls chatting with a pair of boys.
“Jia Si, how much have you guys saved up?”
“Hit three hundred and seventy City Coins last night!”
“Aww, we’re only at three hundred and fifty. It’s totally my fault for being a glutton—my sister and I spent twenty-six whole coins on skewers yesterday!”
“Don’t sweat it, Lina! I’ll take you guys to harvest wild garlic today! My brother spotted a fresh patch yesterday, and the payout rate is sky-high!”
…Even little children were sitting on a fortune like that. Terrifying.
The squad suddenly felt their own pockets were nowhere near as deep as they had assumed.
Nothing laid bare a person’s helplessness quite like finding something they desperately needed, only to realize they didn’t have the coin to afford it.
Zhou Xue and her crew had been backed into a corner before.
Forcing an awakening by ingesting crystals carried a horrific mortality rate, and they had been forced to stand by, watching their brothers and sisters rot to death in agony.
Things were different now. As long as they scraped together enough currency, they could drastically improve the survival odds of anyone whose body rejected a crystal.
Theoretically, that survival rate could reach one hundred percent.
—Dark Star still had over twenty members waiting to awaken. If they wanted everyone to make it through in one piece, relying solely on the meager crystal rations Yves squeezed out for them was suicide.
Parting ways with their comrades, Zhou Xue led her vanguard unit north.
Their mission today was to cull five E-rank mutants designated on their hit list.
According to the inter-city treaties, the designated safe zone encircling any frontier city was supposed to harbor only F-rank threats and below.
Mutants exceeding that authorized threshold had been festering around Seed City for months. By rights, an elite Awakener deployment from the Three Great Cities should have arrived to purge the perimeter long ago.
Yet the reinforcements never materialized.
Zhou Xue had no idea what political games were stalling the central command; all she knew was that Yves had pawned the grim task off onto Dark Star and the Red Flag Society.
And he had enforced a mandatory awakening quota to get it done.
The first two targets on today’s hit list were mutated chestnut trees.
Reconnaissance from a few days back indicated that both had evolved to E-rank.
They had pinned down the coordinates—just southwest of where they had clashed with the bull-lion chimera.
Root-bound mutated flora of the E-rank tier typically could not wander far. Yet after combing through the brush near the coordinates, the squad found not a single trace of the two monstrosities.
Luo Xianghuai flared his senses, sniffing the wind, but couldn’t glean anything definitive.
Shelley stared down at two massive craters left in the dirt. “Could those two trees have consumed other mutants and developed the ability to uproot and sprint?”
Zhou Xue shook her head. “There are no high-tier mutants in the immediate vicinity. Their growth couldn’t possibly be that rapid.”
“Hey, do you think it’s possible…” Hall peeled a roasted chestnut and tossed it into his mouth.
Chew, chew, chew.
“…that these two trees were turned into sugar-roasted chestnuts?”
Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew.
Everyone snapped their heads around to stare at the steaming paper bag in his hands.
“?”
Recalling Hall’s frantic recounting of how Boss Ling had dispatched that C-rank beast… the theory suddenly sounded shockingly plausible.
Otherwise, where had today’s fresh chestnuts come from?
“Move on to the next objective.”
Zhou Xue glanced at the roster, leading her squad further north.
The third target was a mutated radish. Yves’s mission brief noted that this specimen had fused with a mutated hare, with suspected growth pushing it into D-rank territory.
Its coordinates weren’t far from the chestnut grove.
Following Luo Xianghuai, who tracked the faint scent of shed rabbit fur drifting on the breeze, Zhou Xue and her squad arrived before an overgrown wall of brambles.
Judging by the shattered foliage and claw marks raking the soil, a mutant had certainly made its home here.
Yet after circling the brush, they found no trace of any radish abomination.
Just as everyone was scratching their heads in confusion, Hall munched contentedly on a strip of pickled daikon radish, asking through puffed cheeks:
“Hey, do you think there’s a chance…”
Chew, chew, chew.
“…that this mutant got turned into the crunchy radish strips in my mouth?”
Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew.
The entire squad: “…”
Well, then it tasted pretty damn good.
