Chapter 210 — The Zombie Tide Is Here
After breakfast, the Otaku Team kicked off another day of labor. Every so often, someone would head up to the top floor with binoculars to survey the scene outside, while casually keeping an eye on the laptop downstairs for any new data or images intercepted from the satellite signals.
Although the basement wasn’t strictly pitch-black due to the constant illumination of the lights, a person spending extended periods down there would inevitably lose all sense of day and night.
Yan Fei utilized the remaining metal from their household stores to construct planting racks. A portion of the team mixed the sandified soil with water and nutrients to load into the racks, adding organic fertilizer generated from their earthworms, mealworms, quails, and rotting vegetable leaves and roots. Luo Xun led the remaining members to systematically plant the sprouted seedlings into the racks.
The soil at their base consisted entirely of sandified earth excavated from deep underground and thoroughly sun-dried. Moistened with water produced by Song Lingling and enriched with their organic fertilizer, it became the highest quality, completely natural, fertile soil.
As a side note, to prevent any zombie animals or mutated organisms from crawling up through the drainage pipes, Luo Xun and the team had modified the sewage system on their very first day of moving in, constructing a direct septic tank. Although the resulting aroma inside wasn’t particularly pleasant, the effect was highly successful, which was all that mattered, right?
The members primarily responsible for planting were Luo Xun and the two ladies, Xu Mei and Song Lingling, while little Xinran also helped out by planting greens. The puppy curled up beside the racks, occasionally propping its upper body up to snort puffs of breath at the soil inside.
The young men worked efficiently, rapidly mixing the sandified soil with water and fertilizer to fill the fabricated racks with earth. Afterward, they hauled out logs and sawdust, seeding them with the mushroom mycelium they had cultivated in advance, and placed them into the bottom drawers of the racks one by one.
Regarding the toxic mushrooms they had explicitly cultivated, because the yield was far too massive to be consumed under normal circumstances without encountering zombies, Luo Xun and the team had previously conducted an experiment—using crushed mushroom juice to irrigate a patch of the surrounding mutated farmland.
They had selected only a tiny plot to serve as an experimental patch. Remarkably, instead of withering and rotting away upon contact like other organisms, the mutated plants irrigated with the mushroom juice actually grew significantly better!
Previously, when they harvested crystals from the mutated fields, they would inevitably disrupt the soil moisture around the plant roots, leaving them worried about whether repeated disruption would harm the vegetation over time. Now that they had discovered a method to fertilize these mutated plants, they decisively gave the surrounding vegetation a thorough dousing.
Of course, Luo Xun hadn’t let his enthusiasm carry him away by spraying the mushroom juice across a massive area right from the start. Instead, he selected strategic coordinates and observed the plot almost daily, conducting various tests to ensure that the fertilized mutated plants wouldn’t grow into a severe threat to their safety. Otherwise, if they accidentally cultivated a patch of man-eating flowers that could tear through metal with their bare vines and devour humans, how could they possibly survive?
Judging by the current experimental results, the mutated plants irrigated with mushroom juice merely displayed a standard fertilized effect. Although their growth was highly vigorous, no secondary mutations had occurred.
Luo Xun and the team were thoroughly addicted to farming. The room specifically dedicated to growing grain was in decent shape, holding about two mu of land in total. They split it evenly, planting half with wheat and half with rice, which would be ready for harvest in a few months.
In the remaining rooms, aside from spaces set aside to grow other varieties of coarse grains, peanuts, and corn, they had set up vegetable greenhouses. Climbing vines crept along both sides of the planting racks, slanting upward until they would eventually weave together to completely blanket the ceilings.
Beneath these climbing crops, the lower planting racks were filled with a vast assortment of vegetables. Naturally, these included the fast-growing green leafy vegetables, longer-cycle varieties like chili peppers, and plants that required stakes, like tomatoes. The variety was immense, and every single room dedicated to growing vegetables was currently occupied by these thriving green seedlings, filling everyone’s hearts with joy.
However, the volume of dead wood at home was ultimately limited, and their metal supply wasn’t sufficient to construct planting racks for every single room just yet. They still needed to reserve a portion of metal upstairs to prepare for the oncoming zombie tide, so they temporarily focused their primary efforts on these core rooms.
On the morning of the eleventh, the very first thing everyone did upon rolling out of bed was grab their binoculars to survey the surroundings. Before turning in last night, they had already confirmed via the satellite photos that the zombie horde would indeed pass right through their region before heading north to siege the Southwest Base.
Before sleeping last night, Yan Fei and the guys had thoroughly sealed almost every section of the outer metal frame with solid plating, leaving only a room on the third floor—slated to become little Xinran’s study—open to view the outside, serving as their observation portal for the next few days.
“There’s no movement yet, they shouldn’t have arrived. Let’s go eat breakfast first,” Luo Xun said after a meticulous inspection of the wilderness outside. The sky was a vast, clear blue, with only a few wisps of clouds drifting along the horizon. The sun hadn’t fully risen yet, and the surroundings appeared incredibly serene and beautiful.
Confirming things were temporarily fine, everyone set their minds at ease and headed into the first-floor cafeteria to eat.
Because they were terrified of being detected by zombies passing outside, they had sealed the doors and windows tightly, using metal to thoroughly block out the sun so that not a single shred of light could escape or enter. Consequently, the first floor was pitch black, and eating in the cafeteria required turning on the overhead lights.
They didn’t dare expose the solar panels outside to let them generate power over the next few days, but luckily, they were highly affluent in storage batteries. Previously, when the weather was pleasant, they had systematically charged all their spare batteries to maximum capacity alongside their daily electricity usage. Currently, the remaining power in the household batteries was more than enough to sustain them like this for a month or two.
Breakfast consisted of millet porridge, pickled vegetables, and salted side dishes, accompanied by several fragrant scallion pancakes. Everyone ate in silence, preparing to return to the basement to continue their work right after finishing—the basement planting racks weren’t fully sorted yet, and some of the climbing seedlings had begun to shoot up over the past few days, changing almost overnight. They needed to manage the flailing vines, winding them around the correct supports, and tying up the exceptionally unruly ones with some string.
The “string” everyone used for this labor was no longer traditional thread or cotton cord, but rather the sun-dried rice and wheat straws they had stored. Since they didn’t raise livestock like pigs, cattle, or sheep, these straws didn’t need to be saved for animal feed. Once dried, they could be woven into small storage baskets, and teaching the little girl to make handicrafts out of them was actually quite nice.
While everyone was buried in their breakfast, a sudden thwack echoed from outside, as though something had slammed onto the outer metal wall.
The already quiet room fell dead silent. Almost everyone raised their heads simultaneously, exchanging glances before quietly, stealthily rising to their feet and slipping up the stairs to the third-floor observation room.
They didn’t even need binoculars. The moment they looked through the opening, everyone let out a collective, sharp gasp—the zombie tide was here.
Looking up, the sky was filled with wind-type zombies and various mutated zombies that had developed physical alterations, sprouting wings to fly through the air. Looking down, a thunderous, majestic army of walking zombies was marching past. Their sizes varied wildly, some monstrously huge and others compact, and their physical appearances had transformed into a myriad of shapes. Their single greatest shared characteristic was that every single zombie looked less and less like a human being.
Early in the apocalypse, the most visible difference between newly turned zombies and humans was their skin tone, along with the various wounds gaping on their bodies, and the vast majority still wore human clothing. But now, every single zombie was completely bald, their claws had lengthened, and some had even developed sharp, fangs. Crucially, not a single shred of fabric remained on their bodies, and they marched completely naked.
Many of them no longer walked upright. Some zombies, upon realizing that moving on all fours yielded far greater speed, had abandoned the habit retained from their past lives and shifted to crawling on all limbs—the forelimbs of these zombies typically grew thick and long, looking virtually identical to their hind legs.
The current zombies could no longer be simply classified as a variant of “humanity.” Instead, they closely resembled some uniquely mutated species of ape. Aside from the fact that they still didn’t breathe and displayed zero signs of life, anyone laying eyes on these creatures would question whether they were even the same entities that had emerged at the start of the apocalypse.
When this horde marched past the surrounding mutated farmland, their behavior differed from the zombies that had pursued Luo Xun’s group during their frantic escape. On that previous run, those zombies had been hot on their heels, charging headlong into the mutated fields because of their pursuit. Had it not been for the protection of the little baby, those zombies wouldn’t have explicitly charged inside.
This time, because the mutated farmland sat directly along the trajectory of the zombies’ march, even though this particular horde wasn’t exceptionally massive, the lead vanguard of the main column marched straight into the fields from the very beginning.
Some zombies at the front were immediately ensnared by the mutated plants, but the zombies behind them completely ignored their plight, trampling directly over the bodies of their fallen comrades and the thrashing vines, continuing their march forward until they were snared in turn.
Only after a substantial portion of the vanguard was fully ensnared did the trailing column of zombies begin to detour around the perimeter. Of course, during the detour, many zombies were still dragged into the farmland because they marched too close to the roadside mutated plants.
Observing the scene for a brief moment, Luo Xun whispered to the group, “Head down to the basement. Keep the noise to an absolute minimum.”
The sound everyone had heard just now was likely caused by a flying zombie passing by, accidentally dropping a pebble or a similar fragment that struck the outer metal wall.
As long as these zombies didn’t discover their existence, they wouldn’t explicitly assault this building. What Luo Xun and the team needed to do now was retreat to the basement as quickly as possible, carefully concealing their presence to ride out the next few days in peace.
The group kept their footsteps as light as possible, cautiously slipping down the stairs to the basement. They had left a tiny, electronic monitoring gadget in that third-floor room—the exact same peephole camera Luo Xun had mounted on their apartment door back then. It faced straight out the window, capturing the surrounding conditions and livestreaming the footage directly to a laptop placed in the basement. Luo Xun and the team could monitor the situation outside at any moment, fully prepared to wait out the storm until the perimeter became relatively safe before returning above ground.
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