Chapter 33: Snow Den Cubs
When there was work to be done, time flew by. The concrete staircase hadn’t even fully cured before Tang Heng was called back out on duty.
His first two days were spent driving out to the quarantine buffer zone to haul back personnel who had been stationed outside during the blizzard.
Zhao Man scrolled past several forum posts showing the returning patrolmen. They were slumped against the interior panels of the transports or curled up on the floor, eyes shut tight and faces etched with sheer exhaustion. The few who were still awake looked completely drained and listless.
With the worst of the blizzard behind them, several of the frozen mutated beasts on the sulfur rocks were gone, while the rest were those that had frozen solid right from the start. Out in the grove, the bamboo leaned at wild, broken angles—a grim testament to the storm’s fury.
The outdoor temperature now hovered around -55°C. Zhao Man stayed home and drilled his marksmanship every day. After weeks of steady practice, he had finally worked his way up to Tier 1.
After three days, the stairs had cured completely. Zhao Man walked up the steps to the rooftop cultivation deck. The planting platform spanned the entire length of the structure, stretching from the front entryway all the way to the rear courtyard, bordered by waist-high retaining rims.
The beds were still barren metal troughs without a single speck of soil, but Zhao Man felt as though his very soul had taken root up here, anchoring him firmly inside this new body. He strolled slowly along the perimeter, loop after loop, feeling just as he had back in his past life when wandering his grandmother’s little vegetable patch.
Before he could finish a third lap, a message pinged from Zhao Qingjin. Opening it, he found an instructional manual on cultivating sand yams. Zhao Man skimmed through it: the crop was fairly similar to standard potatoes, except during its vegetative growth phase, when it demanded more sunlight and only minimal watering.
Finishing the manual, Zhao Man looked up at the sky. The spot with the best sun exposure was naturally the dead center of the plot. Looking back down at the troughs, he mapped out the sand yam sector in his mind: the half of the bedroom roof closest to the courtyard.
That evening, Tang Heng returned hauling an electric motorized pulley system.
“Did you rent it?” Zhao Man asked.
“Bought it,” Tang Heng replied.
Zhao Man nodded. Sure enough, an alert for an eighty-point deduction had hit his terminal that afternoon.
Zhao Man had come to realize that on this base, anything with even a whiff of advanced technology was exorbitantly priced, whereas basic goods that anyone could cobble together from raw materials were dirt cheap.
The next day, Zhao Man bolted the pulley system to the framework above the recreation room. He hoisted the sand yam soil onto the roof, spreading it across the half of the bedroom facing the yard. The seven bags of dark dirt he had dug from the bamboo grove were laid out over the opposite half, leaving a narrow walkway down the center.
Twelve sacks of soil completely filled the beds over the bedroom, with just a thin layer spilling over onto the section above the recreation room.
Looking at the vast, empty stretches remaining, Zhao Man silently cheered himself on: Next year, I’m finding a lot more arable soil.
Five days later, the ice on the roof showed the first signs of melting. An occasional rhythmic drip, drop echoed from the eaves. Only then did Zhao Man realize that the drainage gutters ran right beneath them.
With the thaw beginning, Tang Heng took a day of leave. Together, they cleared the mutated beast carcasses from the sulfur rocks—fifteen in total, plus another three discovered on the roof. Out of the eighteen beasts, they recovered five energy stones.
“We need to officially register the energy stones from these eighteen beasts,” Tang Heng noted.
Zhao Man nodded. His house backed directly up to the mountain forest; claiming they hadn’t encountered a single beast all winter would look far too suspicious.
Once the carcasses were hauled clear of the sulfur rocks, Tang Heng unfurled his psychic senses to probe the conditions inside the bamboo grove.
The ground was a tangled mess of collapsed stalks, making it impossible to see what was happening beneath the surface with the naked eye.
“How does it look?”
“A-Man, that dirt you dug out from the bamboo grove—did you dig it right out of that snake den?” Tang Heng asked.
Seeing Zhao Man nod, he continued, “There’s something alive in there.”
Hearing this, Zhao Man looked toward the thicket. At the onset of winter, several stalks had collapsed over the pit. As the season wore on, more had come crashing down, sealed together by snow and ice. Thinking back to the head-deep crater he had hollowed out, it truly made a prime den for mutated beasts to ride out the winter.
Zhao Man eyed the tangled mass of fallen bamboo, heavily crusted in ice.
“Should we wait for the ice to melt? Or take them out with your psychic power right now?” Zhao Man asked.
“There are cubs in there with a mother beast. Killing them would be exhausting and completely not worth the effort. Waiting for the thaw won’t work either—give it two more days of melting, and they’ll clear out on their own,” Tang Heng said, studying the grove with a flat expression.
“Then what do we do?”
Tang Heng turned to Zhao Man, took him by the hand, and led him inside. “Don’t worry. It’s still too cold for the mother to move her cubs right away. Let’s head inside first; I need to grab some gear from the garrison.”
Half an hour later, Tang Heng returned carrying a reinforced chest. Seeing Zhao Man trailing behind him, he explained, “This is a thermal lure cage. Once we clear out the bamboo and let the den’s temperature drop, the cubs will crawl right into it on their own.”
Grabbing their tools, Tang Heng stepped onto the sulfur rocks to survey the grove. The winds had scoured the loose snow away, exposing the thicket frozen solid inside a sheet of ice: six bamboo stalks and three trees tangled into a dense, layered mass that sat level with the sulfur rocks. Trying to saw through it or drag it away in this state was out of the question.
“When you dug that pit, A-Man, did you dig inward toward the mountain?” Tang Heng pointed toward the slope.
“Yeah.” Wasn’t that obvious? Digging toward the mountain meant hauling the dirt out was closer to the house. Even if it was only a stride or two closer, every foot of carrying saved was energy spared.
Tang Heng nodded. Taking an ice chisel, he first shattered the ice encasing the two stalks and single tree that Zhao Man had previously cleared and piled by the edge of the rocks. He sawed them into short segments and tossed them onto the iced surface of the sulfur rocks behind him.
With those obstructions cleared, they had a solid foothold into the grove. Tang Heng crouched down. Because the lowest stalks were slender and the beasts had been active beneath, the soil below was loose and dry. Tang Heng easily located the den’s entrance.
The burrow was roofed by three collapsed bamboo stalks and a fallen tree, with two dead beasts frozen solid atop the pile. The deep freeze had fused the entire mass into a sealed, airtight canopy. The entrance faced the sulfur rocks, screened by the brush and timber Zhao Man had stacked along the rim. By mid-winter, the setup had become exceptionally concealed and warm.
Tang Heng projected his psychic senses, raised the ice chisel, and hammered hard across the entire frozen canopy. Once hairline fractures webbed through the ice, he wedged his tool beneath the topmost bamboo stalk.
The stalk lay pinned across the den, its tapered tip pointing toward the base’s perimeter wall. Once he chipped away the surrounding ice, Tang Heng drew his saw and severed the trunk. Gripping the tip with both hands, he gave a violent heave, snapped it free, and sawed through the remaining fibers. Standing on the sulfur rocks, Zhao Man took the severed length and hurled it into the buffer trench. Turning back, he saw Tang Heng already sawing near the root. Just like that, the main span pinning the den was cleared away.
With one layer of cover stripped, faint, high-pitched whimpers drifted from below, followed by a long, low, menacing growl. Without batting an eye, Tang Heng handed another log to Zhao Man, who hoisted it up and tossed it into the trench.
Tang Heng was already chiseling through the ice wedged between the final two bamboo stalks. Once it shattered, he grabbed the trunk and shook it violently from side to side. Zhao Man watched as cracks spread across the ice sheet. Tang Heng jabbed a few more fracture points with the chisel, then backed away, setting the chest from the garrison down right where he had been standing.
The chest radiated warmth. Its entrance was fitted with a one-way barbed mesh, and a palm-sized slab of meat was laid inside as bait.
With the trap primed, Tang Heng climbed back onto the sulfur rocks hauling two frozen carcasses. “Let’s head back,” he said to Zhao Man.
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. It should be a litter of Snow Den Cubs.” Seeing Zhao Man’s blank look, Tang Heng explained, “Snow Den Cub is the name for the young of a certain mutated bear. These bears produce two litters a year, with three to five cubs per litter. The winter cubs have pure white fur, so we call them Snow Den Cubs.”
“A bear? And you were hammering away like that right over its head? Weren’t you afraid it would charge out and maul us?”
At the mention of a bear, Zhao Man felt a sudden jolt of fear.
Tang Heng tossed the two carcasses into the buffer trench and led the way back into the courtyard. “A female bear needs massive amounts of food after giving birth. She must have been driven from her original den after the third cold snap and ended up here. Food was scarce back then, which means she’s barely eaten anything since whelping, all while nursing cubs. She’s in no state to hurt anyone. Did you hear that growl earlier? Completely weak and hollow.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Wait for the mother to leave. Once the den loses its warmth, the cubs won’t survive the freezing temperatures on the move. With no food and an active threat outside, the mother will abandon the cubs and cut her losses.”
Hearing Tang Heng’s reasoning, Zhao Man hurried to the window, his eyes glued to the bamboo grove. Sure enough, half an hour later, a gray bear emerged from the thicket. Tang Heng handed a rifle to Zhao Man, mounted his own on the rest, and unfurled his psychic senses. The bear circled the perimeter of the den twice, then lumbered off toward the deep mountains.
Tang Heng remained motionless. Twenty minutes later, his terminal chimed, indicating that life signs had entered the thermal trap.
Still, he held his position. Zhao Man did his best to ignore the ache in his arms and lower back. Only when the terminal signaled that the cage’s battery was nearly drained did a rustling sound drift from the grove, growing fainter and fainter until it vanished entirely.
Once the sound was gone, Zhao Man moved to stand up, but seeing Tang Heng stay put, he ducked back down. Ten minutes passed before Tang Heng finally rose and headed into the grove to retrieve the chest.
Inside, three small, white-furred creatures were huddled tightly together, shivering uncontrollably.
Tang Heng began working the knots out of Zhao Man’s aching arms and lower back. As he kneaded the tight muscles, he said, “Whenever you face mutated beasts, you have to be extremely cautious. Especially when they’re in a weakened state—the moment you show a single opening, they’ll tear into you to replenish their energy.”
It felt as though a heavy hammer had struck Zhao Man’s mind. He stared at Tang Heng in astonishment. “I thought she stayed because she was protecting her cubs…”
“Silly. The instant she resolved to abandon them, those cubs ceased to matter.”
“Really? Then why didn’t we just shoot her?” Zhao Man asked.
Tang Heng worked his thumbs slowly across Zhao Man’s lower back. “A mother that just whelped has practically burned through all the energy reserves in her body between birth and nursing. But mutated bears are naturally lethal, and they possess inherent resistance to an Alpha’s mental strength. I couldn’t guarantee taking her desperate, cornered counterattack alone. Killing her would have been exhausting and completely unprofitable. Running her off was the smarter move.”
“And what if she hadn’t left?”
“If she didn’t leave, I would have called Zhao Qingjin.”
“Why Zhao Qingjin? What about your own squad mates?” Zhao Man asked, puzzled.
Sigh. Tang Heng let out a soft breath. “A-Man, everyone knows you own this house, and they know you have this rear courtyard. Think about how many energy stones you’ve pulled from this back area alone. Not to mention the rooftop planting beds you’re setting up.”
Zhao Man ran the count in his head: four stones from earlier, plus five from this morning. Nine in total.
Guessing what was going through Zhao Man’s mind, Tang Heng continued, “Those eighteen beasts this morning yielded five energy stones. An ordinary citizen’s annual income from energy stones—setting aside their mandatory reserve service in February—hovers around five stones a year. You can never truly know what’s in another man’s heart. But Zhao Qingjin comes from a well-off family; he wouldn’t look twice at scraps like these.”
Seeing Zhao Man absorb the lesson calmly, Tang Heng added, “I’ll go turn in the bounty first. When I get back, we’ll clear the rest of the beasts from the grove together. While I’m gone, take some time to review how this hunt played out. This is all valuable experience for you.”
Once Tang Heng left, Zhao Man pulled out his terminal, opened his notes app, and began typing: After-Action Review: Hunting Snow Den Cubs (Mother Beast on Scene).
