Chapter 164 — Solar Energy and the Fields
As they walked, Luo Xun asked Li Tie in surprise, “What else did you find?”
“An experimental base.” Li Tie suddenly stopped, turned around, and said mysteriously to the two of them, “An experimental farming base—from before the apocalypse!”
A similar light instantly flashed in both Luo Xun’s and Yan Fei’s eyes. They exchanged a glance and immediately quickened their pace toward Apartment 1601.
Everyone inside the room was gathered around the same computer. Earlier, in order to make sure everyone had one to use, they had taken advantage of the fact that some people in the military had access to excess computer parts. They had already managed to assemble enough computers for everyone in the team and had long since placed them in each person’s room.
“They’re here, they’re here!” Li Tie shouted the moment he entered.
The group gathered around the computer all looked up together and waved the two over.
Sitting in front of the computer was He Qiankun. Though he was fat, his hands moved astonishingly fast over the keyboard. His ten chubby fingers flew across the keys as he pulled up a file and opened several images.
“Brother Luo, Brother Yan, look! We found this in the middle of the night.”
Staying up all night only to get up and play on the computer… honestly, that was exactly the sort of thing only shut-in nerds could do. Well, maybe gaming addicts and insomniacs too. But ordinary people waking up in the middle of the night to search for information instead of gaming or watching movies? That was rare.
Luo Xun forcibly dragged his wandering thoughts back and focused carefully on the file at the top of the screen.
It was a mission dispatch order issued before the Lunar New Year. The document ordered a military convoy to leave the base on a mission. Their target was the solar panel factory closest to A City.
A total of five cargo trucks had been dispatched, accompanied by three armored vehicles and three jeeps. Their objective was to retrieve the solar panel equipment produced there while also scouting zombie distribution along the route and assessing damage to the factory facilities.
If the equipment hadn’t suffered serious damage and the roads remained relatively safe, the base would decide whether to organize a future retrieval mission based on the results of this investigation.
After the two finished reading, He Qiankun opened several photographs. They showed the convoy members and satellite images of the target factory.
“Satellite images?” Luo Xun paused in surprise before immediately understanding. Since they were sending out so many people, of course they would make preparations beforehand.
But Li Tie and the others misunderstood his reaction and explained, “The satellites are still functioning normally. Actually, before this, if people outside the base got into trouble and sent distress signals through their phones, the base could receive them too, but…”
He spread his hands helplessly.
Wang Duo beside him finished the explanation. “Unless the person had some special status, they couldn’t tell whether the location was dangerous or whether the person would even still be alive by the time rescue arrived. So they mostly ignored those signals. At most, they’d forward the signal to nearby survivors’ phones. Unless someone nearby happened to be nosy enough and strong enough to deal with the zombies, those people basically had no chance of making it back alive.”
Luo Xun naturally already knew all this, so there was no need to explain. Instead, he pointed at the screen.
“This mission was sent out before the zombie siege. Is there any follow-up information?”
He Qiankun rapidly pulled up another set of files. The contents were difficult for Luo Xun to understand, so he explained while pointing at the screen.
“This is all stuff I found after connecting to the military network this morning. This convoy lost contact three days before the zombie tide broke out. After the zombie tide, the military never sent anyone to investigate what happened to them. We think…”
He trailed off halfway before Han Li continued, “Either the current base leadership doesn’t want to bother with it, or they simply don’t know.”
“Don’t know?” Luo Xun raised an eyebrow in surprise.
“I dug this file out from some forgotten corner of the archive database,” He Qiankun explained. “After checking further, it seems nobody internally accessed or moved this file after the zombie tide. So either they really don’t know about it, or they just don’t care.”
The straightforward college students who had once been burned by coworkers had slowly become more cautious. They no longer instinctively assumed the best about people and situations like before.
Especially now, after seeing that newborn baby—whose survival was still uncertain—abandoned so cruelly by his own father, they could no longer judge people merely by appearances.
“What about the convoy itself?” Yan Fei suddenly asked. “No news after the zombie siege either?”
Everyone exchanged looks and shook their heads.
“There’s no record of them returning to the base.”
They had left around the New Year, failed to return before the zombie tide, and still hadn’t shown up afterward…
Everyone silently understood.
Most likely, the convoy had never made it back at all.
“Where was their last contact with the base?” Luo Xun leaned closer to the computer.
“Around this area.” He Qiankun pulled up the map again. “Pretty close to the factory. They probably made it there successfully and lost contact while returning to the city.”
He enlarged the map further.
“This factory isn’t too far from A City. Under current conditions… judging from the convoy’s situation, it would probably take two or three days to get there, assuming the roads aren’t too terrible.”
Travel after the apocalypse couldn’t be compared to before.
Even traveling within the city to hunt zombies—a trip that once took only an hour or two by car—now required several hours or even half a day. And if the roads were bad… like last time when they took the sled to their old zombie-hunting area, it had taken most of the day.
Excitement burst from Li Tie’s eyes.
“Brother Luo, we were thinking… sooner or later we’ll be leaving the base anyway. Once the weather warms up and the roads improve, why don’t we head there and check it out?”
“Exactly! Even if that convoy managed to take some solar panels, there’s no way they carried all of them away, right? If we can just find what they left behind, that’d be enough!” Everyone nodded vigorously, their eyes shining as they looked at Luo Xun.
Luo Xun laughed helplessly.
“We’re definitely going. But we have to wait until the roads are passable. Don’t forget, melting snow makes the roads the hardest to travel.”
Thanks to the previous cleanup efforts, there was barely any snow left around their residential area now. But elsewhere it was another story. The weather was still freezing cold, and any home with poor insulation felt unbearable. Many residential districts were still buried under heavy snow, making even walking difficult.
Li Tie and the others nodded in realization.
They were eager to get those solar panels—who wouldn’t want free resources? But they still needed the right conditions before taking action.
“And nobody knows what the zombies outside the base are like now either,” Yan Fei added.
His words were like a bucket of ice water poured over everyone’s heads. The excitement from discovering the solar panel factory immediately cooled, and their expressions turned serious.
Luo Xun smiled and deliberately changed the subject.
“Right, what about that experimental farm Li Tie mentioned?”
Everyone immediately became excited again.
He Qiankun quickly opened another document and adjusted the map.
“Brother Luo, we found this while searching for the route to the solar panel factory. This place was specially marked. It used to be an agricultural experimental field before the apocalypse…”
The experimental farm wasn’t large. In fact, it was tiny. And since it was located some distance from the base, even the military had never paid it much attention.
Besides, although crops had already been planted there before the apocalypse, what could such a small patch of farmland possibly produce? And since it was an experimental field, who knew what kinds of strange crops had been grown there.
After investigating, Li Tie and the others discovered the site belonged to a university in A City before the apocalypse. Supposedly, it contained quite a lot of high-tech agricultural equipment.
That was what truly excited them.
As for the farmland itself… come on. Even if they cleared it out and occupied it, how would they manage it afterward?
The place wasn’t actually too far from the base. But if they truly cleared the land and planted crops there, what then? If satellites scanned the area, or passing survivor teams happened to notice it, how could they possibly protect it?
And even if they could protect it, fighting humans was very different from fighting zombies.
So what Li Tie and the others cared about wasn’t the farmland itself, but whether there were usable machines they could bring home—and intact crop seeds.
Luo Xun was clearly thinking the same thing.
After hearing everything, he rubbed his chin while studying the map before finally nodding decisively.
“No problem. Once the weather improves, once we can leave the base, and once we figure out the zombie situation outside, we’ll make the trip.”
They would leave the base, using the solar panel factory as their ultimate destination while stopping at the experimental farm along the way to see if there was anything worth salvaging.
Unlike the city center, zombies in outlying areas weren’t usually concentrated in massive numbers.
Of course, that was assuming another terrifying zombie tide hadn’t swept through the area like before. If one had…
Then it wouldn’t matter what kind of place it was. Everything would be crushed to nothing under the tide of zombies.
Ever since the apocalypse began, Luo Xun finally felt as though he had heard some genuinely good news.
He only hoped that by the time they arrived, those places hadn’t already been torn to pieces by wandering zombies.
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