Armed Train in the Apocalypse

His strength had long been enough to get him added to the corps, but this batch of recruits were basically all halfway converts, each of them not weak. Once this opening was made, it’d be hard to judge fairly afterward, so they simply tossed them all into the new recruit camp.

The three men moved over to the explosive plant. The soldier in the middle drew a dagger and stabbed it precisely into the plant’s root stem, then twisted it once, prying the whole thing out. The soldier beside him had already opened a black sack; he tossed it in, pulled the drawstring, and the two of them let out a breath at the same time.

Ding Hui, who was guarding at the side, suddenly swung his shield without any warning, blocking the two of them.

Two crisp "pa pa" sounds rang out.

Two inch-long spikes were deflected by the shield, flying off into the darkness.

Tactical lights carved streaks of illumination through the jungle. A long-limbed figure flashed and vanished.

"What plant is that?"

"No... it’s a person!"

Gunfire blossomed, and a low, pained growl came from within the jungle.

In the air a hundred meters up, Su Huan stood with Yu Yue and Lin Jin among the branches, carefully observing a strange "human" roughly thirty meters above the ground.

The man was even a head taller than Su Huan, his skin a bluish pale. Several dark-brown hard vines had broken through the skin at his protruding shoulder blades, winding across his collarbones and around to his chest, wrapping most of his torso in ring after ring like armor. His lower body wore a pair of beach shorts.

He held a longbow about two meters in length, entirely formed from vines, and his dark green eyes were locked tightly onto the battle in the jungle.

The mutations on his body weren’t even that obvious.

Another young man on the ground was even more exaggerated: half his face was covered by some kind of smooth dark green bark, and thorned creepers grew along the side of his neck, rising and falling with his pulse. He lay prone in the humus, his body color slowly, unevenly deepening, shifting toward the tones of the dead branches and shadows around him.

At a glance he looked like a thicket of thorns; you couldn’t even make out a human shape anymore.

Lin Jin’s brows knitted tight. "Could it be gene collapse leading to Degeneration?"

Degeneration was a term Director Xu had coined, used to describe those who had entered a zombified state due to gene collapse—like the Slaughterer.

Yu Yue speculated, "Probably not. After Degeneration they’re zombies in essence. Low-Tier Zombies don’t have the awareness for ambushes or pack hunting."

"Is it possible they’re in the middle of degenerating? Director Xu said Degeneration depends on the Evolver’s strength and willpower. The stronger the will, the longer the degeneration time."

Lin Jin countered.

Yu Yue thought for a moment, then still shook her head. "The process of Degeneration is the process of deepening an obsession. During that time they’ll be driven by that obsession. But there’s no way this many people have the exact same obsession. This should be pure mutation."

"Maybe all of their obsessions are guarding the jungle?"

Lin Jin couldn’t help undercutting himself after he said it. He scratched his head. "I’m not just nitpicking."

Yu Yue smiled, then said calmly, "Their numbers are large and their minds are clear. This should be some ’evolution’ path different from ours, or a kind of group mutation."

"That’s probably it..."

The two turned their gaze toward Su Huan, who hadn’t said a word in the middle.

He, meanwhile, was looking out toward the deeper parts of the Plant Zone.

"Whether it’s evolution or mutation, we’ll know once we go take a look."

The three departed. As Yu Yue left, she lightly tapped twice. The two unobtrusive little trees blocking Ding Hui’s trio suddenly moved, letting out screams of terror, then were shredded into splinters by bullets.

Dozens of kilometers flicked by. The jungle that was like an impossible trial for others was no different from the lawn in front of the door to Su Huan.

He carried the two of them with ease as they skimmed over it.

After Su Huan and Yu Yue’s crisscrossed search, the three quickly found a patch of remaining buildings in the lush jungle.

Six twenty-story buildings were joined together, probably a residential complex from before the apocalypse.

Further out there were similar complexes, most of them submerged in plants, only a few showing a roof and half a body.

This was a bit strange.

They’d rushed all the way here barely seeing any buildings at all. To these mutated plants, even reinforced concrete had become delicious tofu dregs, long since devoured clean.

Only by digging up the ground could one find traces of humans that hadn’t had time to rot away.

But here several complete complexes were hidden, which made it hard not to suspect something.

The windows of the buildings were all carefully sealed off with bricks and sheets of old iron, leaving only narrow observation slits. Along the edge of the roof, half-man-high walls of sandbags had been piled up. The sandbags were patched together from all kinds of woven sacks, filled with rubble and hard earth, already fused with the walls and covered in layered vines.

Ropes were strung across the rooftop, one end tied to the frame of an abandoned solar water heater, the other to the iron bars of a ventilation shaft. A few damp pieces of clothing hung from them, one of which was a neatly pressed suit covered by a black cloth, clearly very cherished by its owner.

The jarring contrast of this scene made one feel a moment of disorientation.

"This place feels a lot like Iron Mountain Shelter."

Yu Yue muttered softly.

"It does."

Su Huan nodded in agreement.

Looking down from the edge of the high-rise, there was nothing to see—only a gray-white, moist sea of fog slowly shifting. Occasionally the fog would thin a little, revealing the dark crowns of trees below, but it would close up again very quickly.

No sound rose from within the fog; even the wind seemed swallowed.

"Has Xiaodong talked to you recently?"

"He spoke once a month ago. He said Qi Tieshan’s health is getting worse and worse. He hasn’t been pushing, but he’s been waiting for news of the army the whole time."

The two chatted as they walked down.

Lin Jin could only follow behind. Of the three, his sensing Ability was the weakest; he couldn’t even tell if there were people in the camp.

Just like above, below also showed traces of survivors living here, but everyone had vanished.

It was like they’d suddenly learned of something, then hurried off without even packing the most basic supplies.

Halfway down, the view suddenly opened up. This entire floor had been knocked through. The walls were covered everywhere with mutated plants, but these plants had grown very orderly, without the frenzied territorial spread of those outside.

A big hole had been opened in the side wall, and a thick tree branch lay across it.

Beyond it was all dense white mist.

It looked very wrong, but Su Huan walked forward without the slightest hesitation.

He kept going for more than ten meters until he reached the junction of the branches, where the footing suddenly widened a lot.

"Everyone’s hiding here."

Seeing the conductor’s back stop, Lin Jin raised his head in puzzlement, and his pupils shrank slightly at the scene before him.

Hundreds of people were crammed together at the central junction of the tree trunks.

There were old folk, women, and children. Their skin was bluish pale, and each of them bore more or less some plant-like mutated tissue, exactly the same as the group who’d attacked the recruits.

But faced with outsiders, these people showed no reaction at all.

They huddled tightly together, hands clasped over their ears, eyes fixed on their folded legs. Every face was either numb or agonized, but what they all conveyed, without exception, was a kind of Fear that had seeped into their bones!

As if some invisible presence were perched on their shoulders, pressing each person so hard their backs were hunched, like they wished they could tuck their heads into their crotches.

"What... are they afraid of?"

The bizarre scene made Yu Yue’s voice tremble a little. She instinctively moved closer to Su Huan.

He shrugged. "How would I know?"

In fact, before they even came in he’d already swept through the entire camp from top to bottom. Aside from these frail old, weak, sick and disabled, the camp only had one or two Tier One Energy sources around it—and he couldn’t even tell if they belonged to original plants or people turned into plants.

Their Energy nature was completely identical.

In his perception, they were fused as one with the surrounding jungle.

And further out, twenty kilometers, thirty kilometers, there were no abnormal Energy sources at all. From the perspective of Energy distribution, this place...

was very ordinary.

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