Chapter 4: He Won’t Die No Matter What
Su Han kept his eyes glued to the gaunt youth until the latter quietly slipped out of the mission hall.
Coming up with a quick excuse, Su Han immediately trailed after him.
“Hey, I’m a new ability user in town and haven’t had any luck finding a squad for missions. Do you have teammates? Want to pair up?”
Su Han sidled up with easy, natural familiarity, blocking the young man’s path.
The youth stared blankly for a second, swiftly masking the grief on his face.
“Sorry, I don’t take missions outside the walls.”
An inkling of a suspicion formed in Su Han’s mind.
“If you don’t go outside to scavenge, you don’t eat. How could you possibly not go out?” Su Han shook his head playfully. “If you’re making up an excuse to turn me down, at least make it believable.”
“N-No, that’s not it!” The youth flushed with sudden urgency. “I’m a water-element ability user. The Leader… the Leader doesn’t allow me to leave the base.”
Water users were vital assets entitled to priority protection. All he had to do on a normal day was stay safely within the city walls and produce fresh water.
Su Han slipped two zombie crystal cores into the youth’s palm and produced an empty mineral water bottle.
Catching the hint, the young man didn’t hold back. He gripped the empty bottle with one hand, and within ten or so seconds, half a bottle of clean, sloshing water pooled inside.
He truly hadn’t been lying. To pull that off so effortlessly, his strength had to be at least that of a primary-tier ability user.
Infinitely better than Wang Jiafu’s pathetic few trickles.
Just as the two finalized the quiet transaction, a pair of guards in tactical combat gear marched over and led the youth away.
Under normal circumstances, it made complete sense to guard such a scarce talent with extreme care. Yet looking at the youth’s dejected, drooping posture, Su Han couldn’t shake the feeling that these two guards weren’t just protecting him—they were keeping him under surveillance.
After a moment’s thought, Su Han carried the bottle of water back to the mission hall, deliberately swaggering over to those base thugs to show it off:
“Look at this! I just bought half a bottle of water off a water-element guy.”
One of the scoundrels lazily peeled open an eye. “You mean Zhao Guang, right?”
“Don’t know his name, but a couple of guys just hauled him away.”
“Those are the men Leader Wang assigned to protect him. He’s the only high-output water user in our whole base. The poor guy nearly died during that last zombie siege—how could we not keep him heavily guarded?”
Su Han blinked, playing dumb. “Oh, so he’s the water user our Leader Wang saved?”
Now that Zhao Guang’s identity was confirmed, things would be much simpler.
Su Han shot the breeze with the crowd for a few more minutes, politely declined several team invitations, and leisurely strolled back home.
What a joke. He was currently keeping a whole grown man stashed out in the wild—teaming up with anyone would blow his cover instantly.
That afternoon, using the pretext of an out-of-town scavenging run, he took some food, water, and medicine, slipped beyond the base perimeter, and arrived at the safehouse where he had hidden Shen Chengyin.
Shen Chengyin remained deeply unconscious. The provisions Su Han had left beside him hadn’t been touched at all.
“When is the male lead ever going to wake up? His brain didn’t actually fry from the fever, did it?” Su Han reached out and pressed a palm to Shen Chengyin’s forehead.
The fever had broken.
[Awakening an ability takes at least two or three days. The male lead’s power is so overwhelming, maybe it just takes him a bit longer.]
The system hemmed and hawed, sounding just as clueless.
[Anyway, he’s the male lead; he won’t die no matter what. All you need to focus on is completing the mission.]
“Once the mission is complete, can I go back to my original world?” Su Han asked.
[Of course,] the system answered without a shred of hesitation.
A few blurry white silhouettes flickered through Su Han’s mind.
He could no longer clearly recall what his old life looked like, but it had to be a thousand times happier and safer than scraping by in this apocalyptic wasteland.
His resolve to finish the job and return home grew even firmer.
Spending some time coaxing water and medicine down Shen Chengyin’s throat, Su Han replenished the food by the bed and headed back.
On his return route, passing by the central administration building, Su Han noticed a crowd of guards in black combat gear gathered out front, shouting and cursing over something.
He casually drifted closer to listen, making inquiries among the curious onlookers gathered around, before piecing together that Hope Base’s own perimeter guards were raising hell.
The sentries and security forces were the core enforcers working directly under the base leadership—a cadre personally hand-picked by Shen Chengyin when the stronghold was first built.
They rarely ventured beyond the gates to scavenge, dedicating their time to maintaining internal order instead. Their rations and gear were fully subsidized by the base.
Yet over the past couple of days, they discovered that the rations distributed to them were not only stale, but some had actually gone rotten.
In the three months since Hope Base was founded, such a disgrace had never once occurred.
A cold sneer tugged at the corner of Su Han’s lips.
Without Shen Chengyin’s spatial void, the short-shelf-life goods hoarded before the world ended were bound to spoil at an alarming rate.
The entire base couldn’t possibly consume such an astronomical hoard of provisions before they went bad. Wang Jiafu’s secret was unraveling fast.
Rotten food couldn’t be handed out, and worse, it would contaminate the rest of the supplies stacked in the warehouse.
If Wang Jiafu wanted to keep the truth buried, he had no choice but to find a way to dispose of the spoiled stockpile.
Over the next few days, Su Han’s routine was relentless: tending to Shen Chengyin and scavenging outside by day, and keeping a hawkish surveillance on Wang Jiafu’s inner circle by night. The grueling schedule left him dizzy and exhausted, dark circles bruised beneath his eyes.
Fortunately, because he had maintained a solitary, aloof profile since entering the base and made zero friends, nobody paid him enough attention to notice his exhaustion.
Hard work paid off. After nearly a week of trailing Wang Jiafu’s subordinates, Su Han finally spotted two heavy-duty cargo trucks slipping out of the Hope Base storehouse under the cover of night.
Wang Jiafu was exceptionally cautious, deliberately picking three or four in the morning when the streets were dead silent, even dispatching the gate sentries away beforehand.
Presumably, the sheer volume of decomposing food rotting inside the warehouses had produced an unbearable, reeking stench. Wang Jiafu simply couldn’t keep it covered up any longer and had been forced to smuggle it out.
Su Han trailed the two trucks from a safe distance, betting they wouldn’t venture too far.
With hordes of undead roaming the wasteland, the roaring engines of two heavy trucks were loud enough to be an outright death sentence if they traveled deep into the wilderness.
Sure enough, after ten minutes, the vehicles ground to a halt in an open expanse of desolate wasteland not far from Hope Base.
Four men in tactical uniforms hopped down from the cabs, iron shovels in hand.
Two bent over and dug frantically into the dirt, while the other two began hauling the rotten provisions off the beds.
They intended to bury the spoiled rations.
Watching from the shadows, Su Han understood their plan and felt no rush to interfere.
There were only four of them. Digging a trench deep enough to swallow two full truckloads of supplies was easier said than done.
The men huffed and puffed for hours until the eastern horizon began to pale with dawn. Knowing they were out of time, they scrambled to bury roughly half the load, hastily throwing a scattering of loose weeds and dirt over the rest before packing up.
Su Han shadowed them on their way back to base. As expected, the guards at the gate had been reassigned elsewhere once again.
It made things remarkably convenient for him.
Su Han slipped out and slipped back in without a single soul being the wiser.
Rubbing his aching, stiff shoulders, he decided to turn in for a solid day of sleep and skip out on scavenging today.
Shen Chengyin hadn’t woken up anyway, and he hadn’t touched a crumb of food over the past several days. Skipping a single day wouldn’t kill the male lead.
Musing over this, he shut the front door behind him, and was just about to lie down and collapse onto the mattress when frantic shouts erupted along the street outside:
“Catch him!”
“Don’t let him get away!”
“Dammit, we lost him!”
It sounded like a pack of guards chasing down a runner.
Su Han couldn’t care less; it had nothing to do with him anyway.
He fastened the deadbolt and turned around—only to freeze dead in his tracks.
A tall, towering silhouette stood silently right behind him like an apparition.
Su Han nearly jumped out of his fucking skin.
