Chapter 10: The Little Fish
Waking up early, Zhao Man checked his notifications and saw the two points Zhao Qingjin had wired him the day before. After accepting the transfer, he typed out a quick reply—Thank you, Captain Zhao, sorry to trouble you—before downing a vial of nutrient solution. He changed into his work clothes, slung his pack over his shoulders, and headed out to scavenge.
He couldn’t tell if it was just his imagination, but today he felt like someone was peeking at him from the shadows. He looked around cautiously, but found no one.
Reaching the city gate, Zhao Man found an out-of-the-way corner and listened to the murmurs of the crowd as they discussed the several heavy construction machines that had rolled out the previous afternoon.
As he listened, he noticed someone sidling up beside him. Turning his head, he found a female Beta with slender limbs. Seeing Zhao Man glance her way, she offered him a gentle smile, projecting the demeanor of an innocent girl next door.
“Hello there. I live right across from your place. My name is Ye Qing. What’s yours?” Ye Qing inquired in a hushed whisper.
Zhao Man withdrew his gaze, pulled his pack tighter against his chest, and lowered his head without a word. Although he hadn’t been in this world long, his host’s original memories gave him a solid read on the realities of the wasteland: out here, nobody reached out without an angle.
Seeing that he wouldn’t engage, Ye Qing held her tongue, though she threw a glance his way every few moments. Zhao Man simply treated her as thin air.
The second the clock struck five, Zhao Man surged forward with the shuffling tide of scavengers. Since the hill sector was off-limits, he picked a random footpath branching off halfway down the main road and turned off.
After walking for a bit, Zhao Man realized that Ye Qing was still tailing him. He drew his dagger in one clean motion, spun around to face her, and said in a chilling voice, “Stop following me.”
Ye Qing seemed genuinely startled, staring back at him with a timid look. After a moment, seeing that Zhao Man’s icy expression didn’t waver in the slightest, she dropped the meek facade and replied coldly, “This just happens to be the path I’m taking.”
“You go first, then,” Zhao Man countered.
He waited in place for a full minute after she passed him, then turned on his heel and jogged back toward the main road. Once there, he randomly picked another trail branching off the opposite side.
Being closer to the base made this area relatively safe. Every few minutes, he would happen upon small groves of seven or eight large trees, but every single one already had scavengers scanning the brush inside. Whenever Zhao Man drew near, they shot him chilling, hostile stares, leaving him no choice but to move on quickly.
The side path gradually narrowed from a two-person lane into a true sheep track. Zhao Man had yet to find a viable foraging spot; any location that looked promising was already occupied. Looking about as he walked, his foot suddenly found nothing but empty air. Before he could react, he plunged straight into a ditch.
The trench wasn’t wide—just barely enough for a person and a half to stand abreast—but it was exceptionally deep. Zhao Man stood on his tiptoes and stretched his arms upward, but couldn’t even graze the rim. The sheer walls were lined with short wild grasses, while tall, tangled weeds flourished at the top, intertwining from both sides to form a dense canopy that practically blocked out the sky.
Beneath his boots lay damp river pebbles and silty sand, though there was no running water. Zhao Man wanted to call out for help, but feared startling any nearby mutated beasts. Just as he was debating whether to open his mouth, the crunch of approaching footsteps drifted down from above.
Surging with hope, he was just about to shout when the newcomer spoke first: “Hand over the food.”
Before Zhao Man could say a word, a timid, trembling voice answered from the right: “I… I haven’t found any food yet.”
Heavy footsteps crunched toward the right, followed immediately by dull thuds of impact, muffled groans of someone taking a beating, and the frantic rustling of a pack being rummaged through. “Out here this long and not a single bite of food to show for it—and you still have the nerve to chase after A-Ya?”
With that, the footsteps receded into the distance. Just as Zhao Man was wondering whether he should call out to the victim, the beaten man cursed under his breath: “She looks down on me, but it’s not like she’d ever look at you either! Just you wait—I’m gonna slip a couple of high-radiation plants into your rations later and rot your guts out, you bastard. Ptu!”
A flurry of rustling followed as the man picked himself up, his footsteps gradually fading away.
Zhao Man waited a while longer. Once he was certain complete silence had settled over the area, he looked left and right, trying to read the terrain.
After his run-ins with the serpents behind his yard, the ants on the knoll, and that four-legged lizard, Zhao Man had realized his gut instincts were surprisingly sharp. Right now, neither direction felt ominous. He chose to head left; he had no idea where the trench sloped back up to ground level, but this direction at least took him closer to the base.
The ditch was humid. After just a few paces, he spotted a cluster of wild water dropwort. Zhao Man stepped forward in high spirits to scan it, but every single stalk registered as highly irradiated.
Armed with a slender stick, Zhao Man searched in every direction. Aside from water dropwort, the ditch hosted an array of plants he couldn’t even name. Whenever he spotted something that looked remotely edible, he tested it. Working his way along the trench, he managed to scrounge up two edible leaves.
Coming across yet another patch of water dropwort, Zhao Man let out a sigh. He had tested this species eight or ten times already along the way, and hadn’t found a single low-radiation, edible specimen.
Wait. Low radiation?
This was the first time in ages he had seen a plant register as low radiation. Even though it was a stalk of dropwort that had already gone to flower, Zhao Man yanked it out by the roots without hesitation, then scanned every plant around it. He turned up three more stalks of moderate radiation.
The vegetation here wasn’t nearly as thick as the stalks by the low hill; each was barely the width of a thumb. Zhao Man was just about to stow them into his pack when he noticed the fine silt clinging to the roots. Glancing back, he saw that the stretch behind him was entirely dry sand, whereas beneath his boots now, the ground had turned into slick, soupy mud.
Fortunately, he was wearing sturdy boots; otherwise, trudging through this muck would have been miserable.
Finding a broad leaf, he wrapped the muddy roots carefully and stowed the bundle into his pack. He pushed on. The farther he walked, the wetter and squelchier the ground became, but thankfully the trench walls were growing lower as well.
Up ahead, he stumbled upon a lush cluster of water dropwort growing flush against the embankment. The stalks were as thick as chopsticks, packed together in dense rows beside a small pool of standing water.
Zhao Man crouched down and tested them one by one. After ten minutes of scanning, he secured three low-radiation stalks and two of moderate radiation. Refusing to leave the odds to chance, he scanned the pool itself.
Beep-beep. Low-radiation water source. Contains heavy bacterial load, larvae, and insect eggs. Ingestion not recommended.
If he couldn’t drink it, so be it. Staring at this long, lush furrow of water dropwort, Zhao Man couldn’t suppress a grin. Better yet, after turning up two more edible stems, his eyes caught movement—a fish!
It was about the size of an adult palm. Having grown up with no natural predators, it hovered in place, completely dumb and still. Zhao Man stood up, plucked a broad leaf, and snatched the silly fish straight from the pool. He drove his dagger into its head, pulled the blade free, and smeared a drop of fish fluid across the terminal sensor.
Beep-beep. Moderate radiation. Meat suitable for consumption.
Meat! Actual meat! Zhao Man held the fish, screaming silently in triumph. Since arriving in this godforsaken world, he hadn’t tasted a single morsel of meat.
After five minutes of silent celebration, Zhao Man brought his excitement under control. It was already nearing one-thirty in the afternoon; he needed to find a way out of the ditch and back onto level ground. Snapping a photo of the water dropwort patch, he wrapped the fish securely in leaves and tucked it into his pack alongside the seven stalks of dropwort. Gripping his stick, he resumed his march forward.
From that point on, whenever he spotted promising vegetation, he refrained from stopping to test it, simply noting the locations in his head as he pressed on. Without scanning to drag out his pace, the ditch grew progressively shallower, and twenty minutes later Zhao Man found himself standing beneath the outer perimeter wall of the base, right beside a small bamboo grove.
The bamboo stalks here were very slender, the thickest barely matching the width of a thumb. Pushing his way out of the grove, he was greeted by an expanse of man-tall weeds.
There were no trails in sight. Plotting the layout in his head, he calculated that the main road lay off to his left. Seeing that it was still early, Zhao Man began scanning the immediate surroundings, looking for a way out while testing the brush.
An hour later, after winding through the brush, Zhao Man finally stumbled onto a worn footpath. He hadn’t found a single edible leaf during that hour, but he had gathered an armful of dry firewood. Securing the wood with a length of rope, Zhao Man set off down the path toward the base.
Halfway down, he spotted the depression where he had fallen in earlier. A clump of crushed foliage was slowly springing back into shape. The narrow ditch was completely concealed beneath thickets of thorny brambles, sprawling so densely that anyone would assume the vines were growing directly out of the flat ground.
Noticing fresh, tender shoots budding along the brambles, Zhao Man hooked a branch with his stick and sliced a shoot free with his dagger. Just as he raised his terminal to scan it, a passerby strolled past.
“Tch, another spineless coward?”
Zhao Man blinked. How does picking a shoot make me a coward?
The scan came back: inedible. Zhao Man picked his bundle of kindling back up, gathering stray sticks along the trail as he marched toward the perimeter. By the time he neared the outer squatter settlement, the bundle had grown far too large to carry in his arms. He paused by the roadside to retie and balance the load, hoisting it over his shoulder.
Scavengers were already trickling back from the wilds, forming two long queues outside the city gate. Zhao Man took his place at the rear of the line, setting the firewood down by his feet while keeping a firm grip on the binding rope.
“Hmph.”
Zhao Man turned toward the sound. Ye Qing was standing in the adjacent queue. Seeing him plastered in mud with nothing to show for his day except a bundle of firewood, she rolled her eyes and turned her head away with blatant disdain.
Zhao Man didn’t bother acknowledging her, waiting quietly in line to enter the city. Suddenly, a commotion erupted from behind them.
“The base hunting squad is back!”
Zhao Man instinctively looked over his shoulder, then snapped his gaze back around in a flash.
Sure enough, the instant he pivoted forward, he caught sight of a hand gripping a razor blade, reaching directly toward his backpack. Zhao Man dodged aside with a sharp twist of his torso and drove his boot out in a clean kick.
The scrawny thief crashed to the ground, scrambled to his feet in a panic, and bolted into the crowd. Moments later, angry curses rang out from further ahead: “Someone swiped my stuff!”
A shrill cry of distress rose from Ye Qing in the next lane as well. Zhao Man shifted his bundle of firewood to cradle it against his chest, clamped his backpack firmly under his arm, and inched forward with detached calm, treating the chaos as none of his concern.
After queuing for over twenty minutes, Zhao Man finally swiped his terminal at the checkpoint and passed into the base. The moment he was through, he hoisted the firewood and made a beeline for home at a brisk jog.
The water in his flask had run dry long ago. He barely had time to swallow two gulps from a bowl when a barrage of heavy bangs hammered against his front door.
Zzzzt!
“Aaargh!”
A shrill scream pierced the air, followed immediately by Ye Qing’s furious shrieking: “Open up! Come out here! You stole my greens, and you think you can just run away?!”
Zhao Man found the whole situation utterly absurd. A system prompt flashed onto his terminal screen: Intruder detected. Request emergency dispatch?
He selected Confirm and paid the two points. Once the display confirmed that Outer Ring West Patrol Brigade 12 was en route, Zhao Man calmly finished his water.
Ignoring the furious banging outside, Zhao Man pulled the fish and water dropwort from his pack.
The flowering stalk of water dropwort was quite old, already bearing tiny green seed capsules. After a moment’s thought, he drew his machete and severed a forearm-thick segment of bamboo. He was just about to trim the node and hollow it out when a notification chimed on his terminal: the patrol squad had arrived on scene, requesting his presence outside.
