Chapter 222 — A Massive Downpour
Lightning suddenly tore across the sky, followed by the faint rumble of thunder. Though the sound wasn’t deafening, it echoed with absolute clarity in the dark night. Luo Xun and Yan Fei reacted instantly, hurriedly preparing to shield their vehicles from the rain, while the figures by the campfire of the other squad in the distance were also bustling about.
However, those two were not busy putting out the fire to prepare for the rain, nor were they rushing to wake up their companions. Instead, they were busy rolling around together…
Luo Xun and Yan Fei didn’t realize what the people over there were doing at first; they were purely focused on their own rainproofing chores. It was only after Yan Fei finished securing the truck roofs and the two of them monitored the outside conditions that they faintly caught sight of the figures constantly shifting by the campfire.
Luo Xun squinted for a good while before finaly discerning what they were up to. But because the distance was too great, he couldn’t tell if the pair rolling together was a man and a woman, or two people of the same gender. To think someone would actually be in the mood for an outdoor tryst while out in the wild fields during the apocalypse. If a zombie wandering around for a midnight snack happened to stumble upon them, who knew if the fright would trigger some other kind of complication?
As he was curiously watching the late-night entertainment of the sentries in the distance, another bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, illuminating their immediate perimeter almost entirely. Before long, a magnified, sharper rumble boomed directly overhead. It startled the two busy lovers, and it also startled the spectating Luo Xun and Yan Fei.
“What happened? What’s going on…” Wang Duo rubbed his eyes sleepily as he sat up, looking around in bewilderment. Xu Mei and Song Lingling, who had just turned in, also sat up to ask.
“It’s just thundering outside; it’s probably going to rain,” Luo Xun explained, before comforting everyone. “Go back to sleep. We’ve already taken care of the truck roofs, so it shouldn’t be a major issue.”
Song Lingling added somewhat sleepily, “I think I hear thunder outside?”
“Right, it’s thundering. The rain hasn’t started yet.”
“Since we have so much metal around us here, is there a chance we’ll get struck by lightning?”
…
Luo Xun snapped his head around to look at Yan Fei, and Yan Fei also silently did some self-reflection. He immediately channeled some metal from the surroundings to fabricate a lightning rod that extended deep into the earth.
They had pre-installed these fixtures at various coordinates back when they were constructing their base. The main structural shell of their base was made entirely of metal, after all. If they unluckily encountered a severe thunderstorm, a single stroke of bad luck could theoretically blow the entire base sky-high. It was just that because they were currently surrounded by city buildings, they had temporarily overlooked this point.
By the time Yan Fei finished setting up the lightning rod, an explosive clap of thunder boomed outside once more, waking the remaining members inside the metal house. There was no helping it; the commotion this time was far too massive.
Luo Xun didn’t urge everyone to go back to sleep for the time being. Instead, he joined the others in peering through the viewing window to monitor the conditions outside. The lovebirds by the campfire in the distance had also realized things were going south. Following that last clap of thunder, they rapidly yanked up their pants, organized their gear, and rushed to wake up their teammates inside the trucks.
Regrettably, before those people could finish packing—and right before the next flash of lightning struck—the sharp, heavy patter of raindrops came splish-splat-splashing down from above.
The raindrops were immense, every single drop creating a loud metallic ring as it struck the metal roof. Before long, the individual drops fused into a single, roaring sheet of downpour. What left everyone feeling even more apprehensive was that massive claps of thunder still detonated intermittently outside. Raging winds whipped through the rain, and the downpour appeared to grow increasingly dense after every single boom.
“Is there a chance our spot will get flooded by the rain?” Li Tie asked, rubbing his eyes with a trace of unease.
Luo Xun pulled out the tablet computer from his pack, pulling up the local map to check their coordinates. Hearing the question, he offered a distracted reply, “Let me see if I can figure out which areas have higher elevation and which ones are lower…”
They were currently in the city center, and there was no guaranteeing whether the urban drainage infrastructure could still function normally after the onset of the apocalypse. With such a massive downpour crashing down, if the area they were parked in happened to flood, their trucks and the hardware they scavenged on this run would all be thoroughly soaked.
Even if Yan Fei could use metal to seal off all the cargo beds completely—ensuring the vehicles wouldn’t be submerged inside out—once the roads flooded severely, their journey back would become exceptionally treacherous.
“Can’t tell,” Luo Xun let out a helpless sigh after a long while. Although the map was highly detailed, it didn’t explicitly list the elevation levels for the various sectors of the city. But even if he couldn’t verify it immediately, Luo Xun knew from common sense—the drainage along the relatively older streets in the city center was likely poor, whereas the newer commercial districts would probably be in better shape.
“Should we just drive through the night?” He Qiankun suggested hurriedly, seeing how intensely the storm was raging outside.
“…It’s probably not very safe,” Luo Xun rubbed his chin, turning to look at Yan Fei beside him. He felt highly conflicted himself; the primary issue was that they were still a significant distance from their new base. Right now, they hadn’t even touched the perimeter of City A’s Southwest Base yet, meaning a long trek still awaited them before they could return home.
“Let’s wait until daybreak before setting out. If an emergency crops up on the road, how are we supposed to see clearly in the dark?” The group chimed in to discuss the matter, everyone appearing to chase away their sleepiness instantaneously as they huddled together to chat.
The campfire in the distance was finally extinguished completely under the relentless downpour. Those survivors also appeared to retreat into their respective vehicles to endure the rest of the night, harboring zero inclination to drive through the storm.
Luo Xun and the team waited a bit longer before finally coaxing the others back to sleep, and the two of them resumed their watch.
Yan Fei deployed an additional metal shield layer over the roof to block out the deafening roar of the rain. He also extracted metal from the roadside ruins to slightly raise the overall height of the metal house, ensuring the rushing rainwater outside wouldn’t flood the interior.
Almost no one managed a good night’s sleep. Tossed and turned amidst the disruptive din of the rain, the frequent flashes of lightning, and the booming thunder, they finally endured until daybreak.
When Luo Xun and the team rolled out of bed in the morning, they took a turn to survey the surroundings under the dim light outside. The heavy downpour still showed zero signs of letting up, the dense sheets of rain completely veiling their field of vision. Water had indeed accumulated on the pavement, the floodwaters currently submerging the entire rubber section of their tires.
After grabbing a quick bite to eat, the group used a temporary metal corridor Yan Fei fabricated to cross back into their respective vehicles. The sealing on the trucks was excellent, leaving the interior containers completely bone-dry. Once Yan Fei and Luo Xun scrambled back into their own car, Yan Fei reshaped the metal house they had occupied into a vehicle shell, merging it back into the convoy to hit the road together.
The tires sliced through the flooded pavement, kicking up massive, roaring sheets of water. In contrast, the water displacement from the dummy metal cars was relatively small. When they rolled past the spot where the other squad had camped the night before, they found the location completely deserted, knowing those survivors had likely hit the road the absolute moment dawn broke.
Because the heavy rain severely obstructed their vision—making it exceptionally difficult to evaluate the condition of the asphalt ahead—their overall driving speed didn’t increase much throughout the entire day. Around dusk, as they rolled past a specific fork in the road, they spotted a queue of vehicles attempting to execute a U-turn on the street leading toward the Southwest Base. The water accumulation on that thoroughfare was incredibly deep, and because the elevation of the street leading to the Southwest Base was relatively low, several cars with lower chassis had become waterlogged and stranded inside.
A water-type superpower user nearby was currently attempting to manipulate the floodwaters surrounding the stranded vehicles, while several strength-type users were half-submerged in the water, forcefully hauling the cars outward.
Luo Xun and his team cast a distant glance before continuing straight along the highway leading south. It would take them at least two or three days of hard driving to return to their own small base under these conditions, and there was no telling whether the drainage infrastructure at their home was effective or if the sealing on their facility was completely secure. If they returned only to find that all their basements and underground tunnels had been submerged under water… then they might as well give up on living.
On the way out, navigating through the city center had consumed a full three days, and before that, it had taken them close to two daylight periods just to reach the urban core. Forcing their way through the rain on the return trip made the journey ahead feel infinitely long, the relentless downpour making driving exceptionally grueling.
Fortunately, they possessed a water-type superpower user in their convoy. Whenever they repeatedly faced difficulty discerning whether a flooded stretch of road ahead had collapsed, Song Lingling could step up to investigate. Ultimately, Xu Mei and Song Lingling’s car simply shifted to the absolute front of the convoy to lead the way, leaving Zhang Su’s vehicle to bring up the rear. Song Lingling parted the floodwaters along the asphalt, manipulating the accumulated runoff to clear a safe path for the convoy.
In this manner, although the process became vastly more tedious, their meticulous caution handily spared them from running into numerous hazards in advance.
One had to realize that although the pavement in many sectors of City A appeared decently constructed on the surface, due to the vandalism of zombies after the apocalypse and the structural damage inflicted during superpower battles, a great number of streets were no longer stable.
If the earth beneath the asphalt remained solid, it would be fine; at worst, the driving would be rough and the street would be littered with loose gravel. But unluckily, the earth beneath a significant number of roads had been hollowed out completely, leaving nothing but a single superficial layer of asphalt covering the void—something completely invisible under normal circumstances!
Once a massive rainstorm struck like this, the pavement in those hollowed sectors would collapse into sinkholes. If a survivor squad out on a mission drove over those spots, it was highly possible for an entire vehicle to get thoroughly trapped inside!
Consequently, a journey that was originally estimated to take a mere three days was forcibly stretched into five days by Luo Xun and the team.
During the final three days, the heavy downpour had actually ceased, but the accumulated floodwaters on the roads remained, continuously testing everyone’s driving maneuvers and flood-resistance capabilities.
It wasn’t until noon on the fifth day that the group finally caught sight of the familiar farmland and the iconic mutated vegetation once more, leaving everyone feeling a profound sense of relief and deep sentiment inside their hearts.
The elevation of this peripheral sector was relatively high; at the very least, the water accumulation along the highway had essentially drained away completely, leaving only a few uneven potholes holding loose puddles. In contrast, the roadside fields and the open wild appeared to have transformed into actual wetlands overnight. The moment the sun broke through the clouds and struck the flooded fields, the brilliant, shimmering glare almost blinded the group.
“If someone happened to tumble into those fields, they would definitely be drowned straight to death, right?” Han Li’s teasing voice crackled through the walkie-talkie.
“Maybe you can go for a swim inside. Want to step down and give it a shot?”
“You go ahead. Heaven only knows if some kind of mutated predator has suddenly bred inside there.”
“Were these fields anywhere near this deep previously? How did it practically turn into a lake after just a single rainstorm?”
As the group was chatting and joking around, a sudden, chaotic sound of flapping wings and splashing water echoed from the distance. Raising their heads, everyone stared in utter bewilderment—those fields that had transformed from farmland into wetlands… or perhaps a marsh? In any case, floating atop those “ponds” were actually wild waterfowl, leisurely flapping their wings!! And their numbers appeared remarkably substantial!!
Thank you for reading 🙂 I hope you all liked my translations. If you enjoyed my work, please consider buying me a Ko-Fi 😉
