The Reborn Otaku’s Code of Practice for the Apocalypse – CH204

Chapter 204 — The Glass Factory

It took a full half-day just to sort out that troublesome quail room. After “inviting” the flock of suddenly mutated quails into their new home and observing them for a bit, everyone dragged their exhausted bodies back to the first-floor cafeteria to eat.

“Brother Luo, didn’t you say earlier that we should convert the ground-level open space into an orchard for fruit trees? Why don’t we just make it like that room upstairs? Turn it into a small garden park?” During lunch, a sudden spark of inspiration struck Wang Duo. Strolling romantically hand-in-hand with his beloved in a garden-like orchard was practically the most beautiful thing imaginable!

Luo Xun’s hand holding the chopsticks paused. After a moment of thought, he nodded. “Sure. In any case, we can’t start on that area until we get the glass. I’ll draw up a blueprint later.”

“Awesome, awesome! We need to make a small hill! Plant the hill thick with peach trees!”

“Pear trees would work too.”

“And cherry trees!”

“Why don’t we make several small hills, with one type of tree per hilltop?”

“We need a little bridge over flowing water…”

“The shrubs by the path can be replaced with lemon trees.”

“I remember Brother Luo also brought back star anise trees, right? Do we have Sichuan peppercorns?”

“We can use green scallions to beautify the roadsides, and some cilantro too…”

“Aren’t the vegetables supposed to be grown in the basement? Right, right! When we go out to scavenge later, if we see any flowers or plants that haven’t mutated, can’t we just transplant a few back?”

“Don’t forget to set aside a dedicated area for sunflowers and watermelons.”

“Those are easy. The watermelon patch needs sandy soil, and we can’t overwater them. If they get too much water, the watermelons won’t be sweet…”

Now that their lives were comfortable, everyone began striving to make their environment as pleasant as possible to enjoy life. Luo Xun and Yan Fei exchanged a smile. Luo Xun tapped his bowl with his chopsticks. “The ground-level first floor is easy to handle. We can just construct it later based on standard park layouts. But you all need to think carefully about your own bedrooms. If you’re interested, you can draw up your own blueprints, and we’ll remodel them slowly.”

Hearing his words, the group grew excited once more. He Qiankun announced that he recalled seeing some pre-apocalyptic interior design blueprints that someone had downloaded back when he was organizing data. He promised to look for them later so everyone could remodel their rooms based on those layouts.

The group chatted up a storm around the lunch table, but when afternoon arrived, they had to obediently head back down to the basement to haul dirt.

Yan Fei retracted the metal on the far wall of the basement, and little Xinran began sandifying the concrete wall. Maintaining the exact same height and width, she continuously sandified, sandified, and sandified straight ahead. The sandified soil was shoveled into the metal frame carts on the side, and Luo Xun and the able-bodied men took turns using the elevator to haul the earth to the surface.

Little Xinran kept watch over the baby alongside the puppy while practicing her writing. Xu Mei and Song Lingling handled the finishing touches in the second-floor quail room, planting vegetables on the uncultivated patches of soil, loading mealworms into the feeding boxes placed inside the room, and separating the large quails from the small ones to prevent the big ones from injuring the chicks.

This grand excavation project lasted for a full two days. Over those two days, no one had any spare time to leave the base to search for other resources, continuing until the first basement room reached the required dimensions, forty to fifty percent of their metal was consumed, and the ground-level areas unreachable by the mutated plants were covered with sandified soil laid out to dry.

“…It looks like heaven destined us to move as a single force,” Luo Xun sighed, turning to look at the group with a trace of helplessness.

“That’s perfect. It’s safer this way anyway. Let’s head out together first thing tomorrow morning.” The others harbored no objections. Now that the first large basement room was finished, they had a place to organize the crowded planting racks brought out from the Southwest Base. Next, they had to handle the planting space on the second basement level. Once the second basement floor was expanded, they would excavate a new planting room to cultivate other crops.

The electric vehicles at home had already been fully charged using their storage batteries. After testing them briefly to ensure there were no issues, everyone happily decided to use these vehicles for this supply run—they were highly capable of hauling goods anyway.

This excursion utilized four small cars and one large truck. Using the truck was an absolute necessity; after all, though the electric vehicles were convenient, their cargo capacity was ultimately small. If they went out specifically to scavenge massive volumes of resources, those cars wouldn’t cut it.

Although their electric trucks possessed a decent-sized container bed, their actual volume was roughly similar to a minivan, meaning the cargo they could carry was limited.

The night before, they simply arranged the interiors of the vehicles they were driving out. They placed the car refrigerator into Xu Mei and Song Lingling’s truck, while Luo Xun and Yan Fei’s car was fitted with a dog bed and the little baby’s cradle right behind the two front seats. Furthermore, a solar charging panel was mounted onto the roof of every single vehicle, allowing them to carry storage batteries to charge while driving.

With Yan Fei with them, the solar panels they mounted were vastly different from standard modifications; he had smoothly fused the panels straight into the vehicle roofs… Moreover, if it ever rained, he could use his metal ability to seal a layer of metal over the roof to shield them from the wind and rain, which was incredibly convenient.

At the break of dawn, the group set out, racing toward an alternative route they had never taken before. The current road conditions were growing increasingly worse, and the vehicles jolted and bumped practically from start to finish. In particular, several small paths in this vicinity had fractured completely, leaving the ground littered with tiny stone fragments. Fortunately, the road conditions inside the city center were decent; as long as the asphalt hadn’t been explicitly destroyed by the superpowers of humans, mutated animals, or zombies, the vehicles could drive normally.

“Is it just me, or do those mutated plants look like they’ve grown taller?”

Luo Xun and the team chatted intermittently over the walkie-talkie during the journey. After all, there were only about two people per vehicle, and everyone thoroughly enjoyed the lively atmosphere.

“It looks like it, but maybe the height of our vehicles just got lower?”

“The large truck Wang Duo and his partner are sitting in hasn’t changed. Wang Duo, do you think the mutated plants outside have grown taller?”

Wang Duo debated for a moment. “It seems like they have… but it also seems like they haven’t.” Beside him, Zhang Su was currently resting with his eyes closed and his hands laced behind his head—a certain beauty’s night life had been highly rich, leaving him quite exhausted last night.

The convoy continued its advance, and before long, they merged onto another highway that wasn’t as broken. Everyone was finally spared from the continuous jolting that made them feel as though they were sitting in electric chairs. Yan Fei held the little baby in one arm—the child had just woken up, babbling and flailing his little arms and hands without crying or throwing a tantrum, appearing as though he wanted to play with something.

Luo Xun drove while occasionally teasing the child, while Yan Fei used his free hand to flip through a tablet computer mounted before the dashboard. Items like this were exceptionally easy to find after the apocalypse; taking a turn around any shopping mall yielded a mountain of these electronic devices completely abandoned.

Displayed on the screen were a series of satellite images newly transmitted over the past couple of days. Currently, the data showed the closest zombie presence to City A—the exact same zombie tide that had reached the coast a few days ago. By now, they had all crowded along the shoreline. Their single-minded march had thrown the ranks into chaos due to the sudden appearance of the ocean, and it remained unknown whether they would simply plunge headfirst into the sea or pivot and retrace their steps.

“It would be great if the zombies just jumped into the ocean,” Luo Xun remarked casually, glancing at the screen.

“Hard to say,” Yan Fei said as he flipped through the data. They had already reviewed these images together last night, and before heading out this morning, they had temporarily copied them onto the tablets in each vehicle. Yan Fei had used his metal ability to secure the tablets to the dashboards, which held the maps, routes, and various files they prepared before setting out. Naturally, their cell phones held this data too, but the tablet screens were vastly larger, making it much more convenient to view while driving.

“Whether they jump into the sea or turn around, we’ll be able to tell in a couple of days.” Luo Xun shrugged. In any case, this vicinity was temporarily safe. They just needed to seize the time to construct their base and prepare for any potential emergencies.

Yan Fei’s hand suddenly paused, his brow furrowing slightly as he pointed at the image he was studying. “Look at this one. According to this layout, if this foreign zombie horde keeps moving along this trajectory, they will enter our country after a while, and they might pass right near our vicinity.”

Luo Xun hurriedly leaned over to study it closely. After a moment of thought, he let out a sigh. “The largest zombie tide in our country marched out, and now the foreign ones are coming here for a vacation… How exactly can these things be wiped out completely?”

“I wonder if they’ll eventually die off if they go long enough without eating humans?”

“No idea… but we can harbor some hope.” Luo Xun suddenly burst into a smile. “Once all the humans are eaten, the zombies who can’t secure human flesh will starve to death, and the world will finally be clean.”

Silence fell between the two for a brief moment. Perhaps heaven truly harbored such intentions? Look at the world outside now. The vibrant expanse of green had completely broken through the blanket of pristine white from a few days ago. Along the roadsides and on several buildings inside the city center, lush signs of life were beginning to emerge. Perhaps this world was merely cleansing itself, wiping out humanity to return a clean slate to the other living creatures.

The glass factory was located a significant distance from their current position. By the time they drove up to the coordinates, all they spotted were a few loose zombies loitering in the vicinity, surrounded by crumbling walls and ruined structures, anchored by a relatively intact factory facility.

“Those trucks over there look decent. I wonder if they can still be driven.” Luo Xun pointed at several trucks parked before the main gates of the factory. The tonnage of those vehicles was clearly larger than their own modified truck, and the build quality was excellent. If they could retrieve one or two to replace the truck they were currently driving, it would be a fantastic upgrade.

“We’ll go check if we can find the keys inside the trucks in a bit.” In truth, they had encountered numerous excellent vehicles along the road previously—like off-road vehicles with superior performance or large-tonnage trucks—but they had been forced to abandon them because there were no keys. They could only siphoned the fuel and stripped the metal components.

After dispatching the few loitering zombies, Luo Xun and the team drove up close to the large trucks. But before they could even step down to pull open the vehicle doors, a swarm of rats suddenly burst out from the cargo bed of one truck! Zombie rats!

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