Chapter 247 — The Otaku Zoo
The ground was littered with “corpses”… Well, not exactly littered, but a few of the animals were exceptionally large, making the scene look rather dramatic.
And it wasn’t just this immediate area; not far away by the edge of the ponds—and even floating inside the water—were mutated animals lying dead or dying.
“Heavens, look at all this meat!” He Qiankun said, his eyes gleaming with a radiant excitement as he blurted out the words that voiced everyone’s inner thoughts along with Zhang Su.
“Heavens! If we leave this out for another two days, it’s going to get so rancid out here that we won’t even be able to step past our front door!” Luo Xun, on the alternative hand, instantly envisioned the impending aftermath.
The two men, who had simultaneously shouted out their true sentiments, exchanged a quick glance before stepping forward to examine the condition of the carcasses.
Could the meat of animals that had been pelted to death in the wild, sat exposed through the blistering August heat for three full days, and been washed by the rainstorm for three full days still be eaten?
Certain sections were fine, but the meat flanking the open wounds and internal organs was completely out of the question.
Some had succumbed early on, dying the absolute moment the hail struck them, while others had merely sustained heavy injuries at the time, hanging on for a day or two before finally kicking the bucket, so those carcasses were in slightly better condition.
Fortunately, although the vast majority of the meat was no longer fit for human consumption, they could still gouge out the crystals from these animals and skin the specimens whose fur remained perfectly intact. What Luo Xun and the team evaluated as a stroke of pure luck was that before they released those two wolves this morning, they hadn’t fed them anything. Consequently, now that the pair had unearned this hoard of relatively fresh animal meat, these two gluttons could comfortably gorge themselves.
Luo Xun and the team picked and sorted through the pile. After harvesting the crystals and skinning the hides, they selected a few cuts of relatively fresh meat to pack along to bring back home later. Following that, they piled the remaining carcasses into a detached corner that wouldn’t block the road—after all, various scavengers were bound to circulate through the perimeter, and although humans wouldn’t touch this meat, those wild predators certainly would. Furthermore, this specific coordinate sat far away from their core tracks and wouldn’t be passed when entering or exiting the base. Even if the meat turned rancid and decomposed down the line, the structural impact on their daily life would be negligible.
By the time they finally wrapped up processing the bulk of these animals and drove their vehicles out to transport the harvested crystals and meat back home, Luo Xun—who had remained outside to evaluate the structural layout—walked over to the edge of the ponds. Verifying that the immediate perimeter bore zero signs of dangerous predators or mutated plants, he finally stepped flush against the bank for the first time.
These original fields had completely transformed into authentic ponds by now. Currently, several dead animals drifted across the surface, and Luo Xun was consulting Song Lingling to brainstorm how exactly to haul those carcasses onto dry land—leaving them to rot within the liquid would completely contaminate the entire water source. Although their household refrained from plying this water, those two wolves were bound to drink from these ponds; what if they drank from a tainted source and ruined their stomachs?
Right while they were talking, little Xinran suddenly bounced up with vibrant excitement: “Fish, fish! There are fish in the water!”
Hearing this, Luo Xun and the team were caught off guard and hurriedly panned their gaze into the depths. Luo Xun had previously hypothesized that these marshes might host fish, but because a heavy density of mutated animals had consistently swarmed the banks, they had strictly refrained from drawing near out of safety parameters, handily forcing the parameter right out of their minds.
“Test them to see if they possess an elemental superpower,” Luo Xun’s eyes flashed with excitement as he immediately directed his instructions to the surrounding superpower users.
Wind blades and water currents were cast out, and the fish darted frantically through the depths without displaying a single anomaly. Xu Mei subsequently unleashed a small fireball to drift and hover across the surface for a brief moment, failing to detect a single elemental mutation from the fish either.
Luo Xun simply asked Song Lingling to step up and harvest a specimen—plying a water-type superpower to snare fish inside a liquid environment was exceptionally elementary. She didn’t even require mounting an active strike, directly manipulating the currents surrounding the fish to “cradle” its bulk along with the water straight up into the air, levitating the rig smoothly right in front of the group.
Having exited the open water, the fish visibly panicked inside the floating sphere, its operational clearing having plummeted substantially in an instant. Fearing it might flip out and escape, Zhang Su explicitly condensed the atmospheric envelope surrounding the water sphere, locking the fish safely inside the boundaries.
The fish’s external contours appeared perfectly normal, and its size… hovered within the standard baseline as well. If its current physical bulk mapped onto the absolute maximum length this grass carp could achieve after fully maturing, then it counted as standard; if it intended to continue expanding in mass unrestrictedly down the line, that parameter remained highly unclear.
“It scales to roughly two pounds or so. The size is remarkably decent.” Luo Xun rubbed his chin, evaluating the specimen left and right. “Dispatch it to see if its skull houses a crystal.”
The absolute moment the words left his lips, Zhang Su deployed a wind blade to ruthlessly slice the fish’s head clean off…
Staring speechlessly at Zhang Su, who had arched his brows to look back at him, Luo Xun shook his head with resignation. Reaching down to retrieve the fish head, he wedged his pocket knife inside to pry open the skull—true to form, its head similarly housed a crystal, except the absolute mass was exceptionally compact, matching the standard non-attributed transparent variety.
“Harvest a batch to pack back home; they’ll be perfect to populate our little stream!” Luo Xun’s mind sparked into a flurry of ideas, and he turned to note to Song Lingling, “We can casually expand and widen the river track running through the above-ground greenhouse along the way. Our household still houses a lingering reserve of river pebbles, which can be paved straight into the bottom!”
“Exactly, exactly! Plus, there’s a patch of vacant open ground flanking the rear of our residential block; it’ll be perfect to excavate a small pool structure!” Li Tie and the young men excitedly threw out their own strategic ideas as well.
“Brother Luo, what’s the move with this fish?” He Qiankun, who had long since been craving a fish dish, pointed a finger at the specimen Zhang Su had just “hacked into two halves” and asked.
“Cart it back. Tonight, we cook Sichuan boiled fish!” Their household stashed an immense abundance of chili peppers! Furthermore, the Sichuan peppercorn trees they had planted were growing beautifully; they had harvested a small batch last autumn, and a secondary yield would stabilize before long. The household peppercorn reserve was perfectly sufficient to handle the dish!
Yan Fei and the alternative members drove the trucks back to their coordinates. Originally, they had rolled out explicitly to pick up the rest of the crew—Yan Fei and the guys having only just carted the harvested meats and hides back to the base containers. Who would have thought that the absolute moment they rushed back, they would have to busy themselves with snaring fish?
With Song Lingling and Zhang Su anchoring the extraction line, harvesting the fish was exceptionally effortless. What left Luo Xun and the team even more astonished was that this water remarkably housed freshwater shrimp and compact crabs as well!! Conducting a meticulous scan along the mud flanking the banks, they even unearned the explicit tracks of crawfish.
Luo Xun and the team hypothesized that these aquatic species had likely been cultivated alongside the original paddy rice crops early on. It was merely that after the apocalypse struck and the farmland fell completely desolate, several heavy rainstorms had systematically fused the individual irrigation channels of the fields together, causing the various aquatic populations that might have originally been reared separately to mingle and nest together within this unified network.
Catching sight of these pristine assets, Luo Xun and the team sprinted to the alternative flooded marshes nearby to conduct a thorough search. True to form, nearly every single body of standing water in this vicinity hosted a heavy density of aquatic life, which handily explained why the migratory waterfowl kept congregating near these coordinates in rising numbers.
Right while they were busy transporting the harvested seafood back into the complex, the puppy suddenly burrowed out from some unknown thicket, wagging his tail with absolute excitement toward Luo Xun. He bounded erratically toward a specific coordinate while barking to signal the group.
The crew recognized his mannerisms instantly, knowing he was bound to have unearned some alternative asset once more. Completely past the point of scolding him over the thick layer of mud he had managed to smear across his fur from god knows where, they trailed in a rapid column right behind his paws.
The puppy guided the group straight to the coordinate where the two massive wolves had anchored themselves. The moment the pair caught sight of the team, they began wagging their tails in a mannerism structurally identical to the puppy’s. Flanking their massive bulk, the crew discovered several lame-legged juveniles—specifically, small goats and tiny deer.
These few animals were visibly newborn calves, as their external silhouettes bore clear structural distinctions from fully matured goats and deer. When the crew was organizing the mountains of carcasses previously, they had crossed paths with adult goats and deer, but those meats had mostly rotted past redemption, suggesting those remains likely belonged to the biological parents of these tiny creatures.
Catching the display, and verifying that the young animals carried absolutely zero risk of hostility, Luo Xun and the team simply loaded them onto the vehicle beds to cart back home together.
The electric trucks drove back and forth for a full four or five trips before Luo Xun and the team finally halted their operations to retreat inside the base proper together. As for those two wolves—they simply left them to frolic unrestrictedly in the wild for now; if they genuinely desired to retreat inside the complex down the line, the pair was bound to howl at the front door to signal the family. In contrast, the puppy had grown completely wild playing alongside them; the absolute moment the crew boarded the vehicles to steer the convoy back toward the main tunnel gate, he came trotting back with an elegant stride, sliding smoothly inside along with the trucks.
“And here I was explicitly stating that if he failed to return in time, I would simply abandon him to survive as a stray in the wild.” Before boarding the truck just now, Luo Xun had spent a good while searching for the puppy to no avail, harboring a fair amount of anxiety inside his chest, never anticipating that the creature would seamlessly double back on his own.
Yan Fei was well aware that his partner merely wielded a sharp tongue to mask a deeply tender heart, offering a soft smile without breaking his bluff.
The harvested fish were placed alongside the water straight inside the metal storage vats Yan Fei had fabricated. Once carted inside the residence, Luo Xun dug out the massive glass aquariums he had stockpiled before the world ended, shifting a fraction of the fish and shrimp inside to populate the tanks.
As for the crawfish and compact crabs they had snared, those were temporarily transferred straight into the baskets they had woven out of rice straw.
Currently, they had to busy themselves with restructuring the “little stream” running through the greenhouse—which had originally been engineered purely to stabilize the ambient humidity index—requiring it to be deepened and widened significantly. Granted, an artificial stream of this tier couldn’t possibly be engineered to a cartoonish depth parameter anyway; Luo Xun and the team merely cleared a clearance depth of half a meter, scattering a layer of river pebbles across the bottom to prevent the fish from churning the topsoil and turning the water murky. True to form, they excavated a pit across the vacant open ground flanking the rear of the residential block, channeling the water track through the cavity to seamlessly loop a functional “moat” structure around the entire greenhouse layout.
That specific patch of vacant ground sat directly beneath the elevated structure where Luo Xun and the team had originally “suspended” their fleet of agricultural vehicles. However, because several massive trucks were anchored directly above that coordinate, although the crew knew with absolute certainty that the structural anchors bore zero risk of failure, staying active beneath those massive weights still left them feeling a trace of silent anxiety, causing them to leave that sector completely empty. Right now, it was put to perfect use.
Structuring the pool and releasing the fish, the group subsequently climbed up onto the greenhouse roof after finalizing these chores. Thoroughly siphoning away the lingering rainwater, they brought out a fraction of the sand and dirt they had systematically stockpiled inside the base alcoves to spread across the roofing to air-dry.
By the time these operations wrapped up, dusk had already settled over the complex once more. Originally, their daily agenda for today was structured around releasing the two wolves, tending to their agricultural fields, and sun-drying the sand before turning in for early rest. Who would have thought that the sudden discovery of the fish would consume over half of their day? It truly proved that a survivor’s plans could never outpace the chaotic shifts of the post-apocalyptic reality.
Nevertheless, the asset that left everyone intensely excited was that although a significant block of time had been delayed, their harvest for today was monumentally abundant. Setting aside the three small goats and two tiny deer for the moment, the mere volume of fish, shrimp, and crabs they had carted back today was perfectly sufficient to send everyone’s spirits skyrocketing.
Utilizing the grass carp they had dispatched initially, supplemented by an additional two specimens processed subsequently, Luo Xun engineered two massive basins of Sichuan boiled fish. That brilliant, shimmering red oil, the pristine white, tender fish meat, and the rich, savory broth caused this squad of young men—who hadn’t tasted a single bite of fish for two full years—to almost lick the platters completely clean!
Among the fish harvested today, the absolute majority mapped onto herbivorous strains analogous to grass carp, common carp, crucian carp, and silver carp. Luo Xun’s household lacked alternative assets, but an endless assortment of fresh vegetables and plant trimmings was immensely abundant. Crucially, when they ventured outside today, Luo Xun had explicitly targeted specific strains of wild grass lining the roadsides that could be repurposed to feed the rabbits, systematically digging them out root and all. Carting these wild flora back, he prepared to cultivate them to ensure they could be planted across the third subterranean tier to maintain the rabbit warren, while simultaneously supplying the young goats, tiny deer, and these herbivorous fish populations along the way.
Eating and drinking their fill, the daylight had thoroughly faded into the dark. Right as the group prepared to wash up and retreat to their individual bedrooms to rest, a sudden, muffled torrent of wolf howls echoed from the exterior wild.
Exchanging a synchronized glance with one another, they discerned that the two wolves had anchored themselves right by the entrance of the secret tunnel, visibly attempting to double back inside to “stay overnight.”
“Sigh… our household has truly transformed into a literal zoo.” Luo Xun let out a helpless sigh, yet could only resign himself to his fate as he walked down the tracks to throw throw open the main gate for those two frauds.
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