Chapter 31: Patrol Team Quotas
Early the next morning, Tang Heng took the four worker ants with him, and Zhao Man settled into his winter hibernation routine: eat, drill marksmanship, and browse the forums.
The temperature plunged that very night. Zhao Man was huddled beneath the thick quilt with the space heater running, scrolling through forum posts, when the base broadcast a red alert. He watched the outdoor temperature reading on his terminal plummet from -40°C, spiraling downward until it finally bottomed out at -60°C.
The local boards were suddenly flooded with distress calls, intermingled with recruitment notices from the base administration.
Most of the pleas came from residents in the Fifth and Sixth Rings who fell just short of qualifying for official relief shelters, yet were barely hanging on: widowed spouses, families with sick elders or children, households hit by mutated beasts. The desperate appeals were endless. In a winter like this, a single stroke of bad luck was enough to cost someone their life at any moment.
Meanwhile, the recruitment posts continued soliciting volunteer homes to serve as emergency shelters, offering ten points per person taken in.
Zhao Man swiped past them without a second thought. He would never allow an unvetted stranger across his threshold. Tang Heng had told him about a homeowner who had taken in an evacuee, only for unregistered outlaws to break in and butcher the host. The refugee survived—and now that the house was being relisted by the base, that very same refugee had stepped up with an offer to buy it.
“The base doesn’t investigate that kind of thing? It’s blindingly obvious the refugee colluded with the outlaws,” Zhao Man had asked.
Tang Heng had pulled him close, saying, “They can’t. The entire household was wiped out, so there’s no claimant left to file a complaint. There was no surveillance, and with the blizzard blanketing every lead under feet of snow, there’s no paper trail to follow.”
Even tucked inside a warm bed, Zhao Man had felt a chill creep down his spine. Sensing him stiffen, Tang Heng had wrapped his arms tight around him. “Don’t be scared, A-Man. Your house has full surveillance and automated defenses. Without your permission, nobody gets in.”
Tang Heng returned on the afternoon of the sixth day. After stepping inside, he only had the energy to exchange a few hushed words with Zhao Man while washing up before collapsing into bed. He slept straight through until the morning of the eighth day before his mind finally cleared.
Following the third major freeze, the mercury had kept dropping, ultimately bottoming out at -85°C outside, with the daytime high struggling to reach -60°C.
“Is the situation on base really that bad? You look completely drained,” Zhao Man asked.
Tang Heng’s thoughts were sluggish, and he took a few moments to form the words. “Not too terrible. The early preparations were thorough, so aside from regular patrols, things were quiet for the most part. But toward the end, we caught two households of unregistered outlaws trying to incite a riot. Before we could even wrap that up, a couple of rookie guards made a blunder and nearly got swept away by a micro-blizzard. We had to rush over to pull them out, which held us up.”
Tang Heng spoke very slowly, his voice rough and gravelly as if squeezed out of a parched throat, thick with lingering sleep.
“Did you really go five straight days without sleep?”
“Pretty much.” Before finishing his answer, Tang Heng let out a wide yawn.
“Do you want to sleep some more?” Zhao Man asked.
“No, I’ve had enough. I just want to lie here and talk with you. Feels like it’s been ages since I could just lie down in peace like this.”
They chatted lazily for a while until Zhao Man’s stomach let out an audible rumble, finally prodding them both out of bed.
After breakfast, Zhao Man reorganized the bedroom. He shifted the bed and wardrobe against the newly installed transparent partition, and moved the weapons rack into the center of the room to divide the space in two, stacking their food reserves on the side adjacent to the kitchen.
“You’re off duty from the garrison right now—is it because your shift rotation came up?” Zhao Man asked, trying to look at it through his own frame of reference; he remembered a relative in his past life who served in the military had scheduled leaves like that.
Tang Heng was busy maintaining his rifle. At the question, he glanced up. “No, we don’t get scheduled leave. A-Man, do you know how large the base actually is?”
Zhao Man thought for a moment and shook his head. He had glanced at a map when he first started scavenging, but the exact square footage had slipped his mind long ago.
“The greater base covers nearly fifty thousand square kilometers, but the inhabited perimeter only accounts for a little over thirty thousand. The rest is a buffer zone outside the main settlements—the scavenging grounds.”
Zhao Man picked up the firearm he had seized from the intruders days ago, mirroring Tang Heng’s motions by carefully wiping it down with a cloth. Seeing his clumsy, amateur technique, Tang Heng didn’t bother correcting him, simply continuing, “When you went out to scavenge, did most of the wild flora look relatively normal to you?”
Zhao Man nodded.
“That’s because the base keeps the energy shield running, while inhibitors and neutralizing towers keep the mutations in check. Later on, when you venture into the true untamed wilderness, you’ll see what high-radiation plants really look like. And as you know, our patrol squads have mandatory annual performance quotas.” Tang Heng clicked the final component into place. Seeing that Zhao Man was still running the rag along the barrel while looking attentively at him, he went on:
“Every single patrol brigade in the West Sixth Ring is tasked with securing enough energy to power the entire base for one full day as their annual baseline quota.”
Zhao Man drew in a sharp breath. “That much?”
“In practice, they adjust it based on circumstances—a minimum of 0.7, with no upper limit. If you pull guard duty in the buffer zones during the blizzard storm cycle, you can knock out five percent of your annual quota in one go. In regular years, every squad scrambles for those deployments. But this year, thanks to you, my team and Brigade 7 locked in a 1.9 rating. Do you know what that means?”
Zhao Man shook his head.
“It means that for the next two years, as long as our squads handle baseline daily duties, my men can survive without stepping foot into the high-radiation zones to hunt. Naturally, we won’t stop going out entirely, but it’s an ironclad safety net. That’s why we were pulled off buffer zone guard duty this season and reassigned to relief tasks that don’t count toward quotas.” Tang Heng wrung out the cloth soaked in low-temperature gun oil and slowly wiped down the rifle receiver.
Zhao Man looked at Tang Heng, stunned. For an Alpha civil servant in this world, the bare minimum bar was merely staying alive.
Catching Zhao Man staring unblinkingly at him, Tang Heng assumed the kid was feeling bad on his behalf. “It’s fine. We’re all comrades on the force, and our squads stood out far too much this year. When it’s time to step back, you step back.”
Zhao Man looked away, letting out a quiet, subdued “Mm.” Then, suddenly piecing things together, his voice rose. “Wait, was that ant queen’s mental energy really powerful enough to power the entire base’s shield for a full day?”
“Its energy stone wasn’t ranked that high on its own, but we also got credit for discovering the sand yam crop. And while the queen’s tier wasn’t exceptionally high, it had an innate ability to suppress its own presence. Otherwise, with dozens of people walking past that mound every day—even an occasional Alpha—how did nobody notice it until you came along?”
Hearing Tang Heng lay it out, Zhao Man nodded in sudden comprehension, recalling that the discovery had earned him sixty points as well.
Finishing up with the gun oil, Tang Heng laid the rifle on a sheet of paper, pulled off his work gloves, and took Zhao Man by the hand. “Alright, time for target practice. Let’s see how much progress you’ve made these past few days.”
At the mention of practice, Zhao Man felt a twinge of guilt. The courtyard was massive; following the latest freeze, it remained bitterly cold even with the auxiliary heater running, so he had cut his drills a little short. A week had passed and he was still stuck on Tier 4, though at least his shots were landing on the paper now.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
After watching a few rounds, Tang Heng shared a handful of practical pointers, then stepped over to the window, gazing out at the snow-covered woods beyond. Sensing a familiar ripple of psychic energy humming through the air, Zhao Man lowered his gun. “What are you doing?”
“Honing my perception. The blizzard phase lasts about half a month. If a patrolman goes two weeks without flexing their mental strength, their senses turn sluggish—and in our line of work, that’s fatal.” As he spoke, Tang Heng’s psychic senses unfurled, creeping past the bamboo grove and reaching deep into the jagged mountains beyond.
Zhao Man turned back to face the target, tuning out everything else to focus on his marksmanship. For a time, the only sound echoing through the house was the rhythmic crack-crack-crack of gunfire.
Zhao Man braced his aching forearm with everything he had. Watching the simulated beast weave toward him in a frantic serpentine sprint, he tracked its movement, waited for the exact opening, and fired—bang, bang!
Both rounds clipped its hind legs.
“Alright, A-Man, take a breather.”
Tang Heng had materialized beside him without a sound. As Zhao Man lowered the training gun, Tang Heng gently massaged his sore forearms.
“Not bad at all. You can graduate to Tier 3 tomorrow,” Tang Heng said.
His arms felt like overcooked noodles and fatigue weighed on his limbs, so Zhao Man merely offered a tired smile, too spent to speak.
Right as he was catching his breath, the cheerful chime of coins clearing an account rang out from his terminal. While Tang Heng was deployed on duty, his wages cleared every three days; for a sense of occasion, Zhao Man had specially set a bright notification chime for incoming deposits.
Tang Heng’s standard patrol shifts paid regular base rates, while disaster relief assignments during the deep freeze compensated at double wages, topped off with hazard allowances. For this five-day deployment, a total of 43 points cleared straight into their joint marital account.
His lower back stopped aching, the weakness vanished from his arms, and Zhao Man felt instantly revitalized.
