The Reborn Otaku’s Code of Practice for the Apocalypse – CH250

Chapter 250 — Digging Traps

Seeing Luo Xun wrinkle his brow over how to heat the mushroom juice inside the traps, Yan Fei quickly comforted him. “We can always dig standard tunnels. We can discuss the exact mechanics down the line; the construction difficulty isn’t that immense. We need to focus on digging out the traps first.”

“Right, once we clear these next few days of chores, we’ll focus straight on digging out the traps.” Although Luo Xun hesitated for a tiny moment, he rapidly sparked back into focus. “In a few days, the crops at home will hit a full-scale harvest window. Once we sort out that workload, we’ll pool our collective energy into tackling the traps.”

The recent weather grew noticeably colder day by day. Ever since entering September, every single autumn downpour and every autumn gale caused the external temperature to drop significantly. It was currently October; although they could comfortably sit here to soak up the sun right now, the actual temperature the moment one stepped outside was quite chilly.

The migratory flocks had flown overhead for nearly a full week, the avian columns thinning out and scattering during the latter half of the trek. Throughout this week, those two silly wolves had excitedly trotted back on two separate occasions, hauling back a combined total of four mutated bird carcasses.

Luo Xun and the team performed craniotomies and defeathering procedures on the birds before helping to preserve the migratory carcasses. Evaluating the various colors of the crystals harvested, everyone harbored deep doubts regarding whether these four large birds had truly been captured by these two blockheads, or if they had unluckily succumbed to alternative predators, leaving these two to handily scavenge the remains.

However, because the prey items themselves were exceptionally fresh, and the fatal wounds lining the birds’ necks were indeed authentic teeth marks, perhaps these two creatures had actually made a bit of developmental progress, gaining the capacity to hunt elemental mutated predators on their own.

Harboring a trace of profound suspicion toward the two dimwitted wolves, Luo Xun and the team systematically butchered and froze the large birds. These two frauds would intermittently clamp their jaws around loose prey, hides, or alternative bizarre items they deemed highly precious to haul back home, analogous to massive bone shanks. Left with no alternative, Luo Xun and the team had explicitly excavated a separate independent “bedroom” along the tunnel tracks specifically for them, permitting them to store their favorite trinkets inside while giving them a proper spot to sleep at night.

Naturally, this “bedroom” was something Luo Xun and the team had casually carved out during a window when their metal reserves were immensely abundant, and they had resolved to expand the spatial footprint of their basement floors anyway.

Presently, every single tier of their subterranean complex featured an additional batch of newly structured “rooms,” utilized either to store reserve cargo or to cultivate fresh crops. After all, now that the “household membership” had expanded, their daily consumption of vegetables and grains naturally scaled up alongside it.

Within a few days, the very first batch of household grains was ready for harvest. This specific batch comprised entirely the crops they had systematically transferred from their old residence inside the city walls when they exited the gates early on. Although the disruption midway had slightly compromised their initial growth cycle, looking at the dynamics currently, the final yield was remarkably decent.

The secondary batch of grains was estimated to hit its harvest window around November or even December. Fortunately, their base framework had been thoroughly and beautifully remodeled by this point, leaving them with absolutely zero dread toward the fast-approaching winter season; the thermal insulation functionality of their complex was absolutely premium!

On this run, the grains yielded mapped onto roughly half paddy rice and half wheat, rounded out by a specific fraction of premium mutated paddy rice!

Those golden wheat ears along with the clean fragrance of raw grains thoroughly packed the entire planting room, leaving anyone who panned their gaze over the layout in an excellent mood. Combining the two crop varieties delivered an operational footprint of roughly one acre. They mounted their specialized automated harvester onto the rack frameworks and threw open the power switch, allowing the machine to systematically execute an automated harvest while handily bundling the rice and wheat straw along the way! Talk about being practical to the absolute extreme.

One had to realize that when the previous vegetable crop hit its massive harvest window, they had to rely entirely on manual labor to pluck the yields! Reminiscing about the tragic, grueling state they were in when laboring to harvest grains inside the city walls last winter, and comparing it to the assistance delivered by high-tech machinery currently, their current situation was simply blissful to the absolute extreme!

However, although the physical harvest and the bundling of the straw required zero manual effort from their ranks, transporting the harvested grains downstairs, flash-drying the crop, and de-husking the yields still demanded their personal interaction. Once they locked into managing these jumbled tasks, the timeline remained immensely time-consuming.

Tinkering with their household grains, they ground what required milling into flour, de-husked what required peeling, and germinated what required sprouting. By the time they successfully nurtured a pristine batch of fresh seedlings, completed a comprehensive soil overhaul, administered fertilizer, and packed the vacant racks with the fresh seedling arrays, the calendar had seamlessly rolled onto October 21st.

Early this morning, after cross-referencing the latest satellite imagery to verify that the immediate perimeter bore zero anomalies, Luo Xun and the team finally stepped past the gates once more, embarking on their field excursion to construct the traps.

The autumn sky was crisp… No, the ambient temperature currently ran exceptionally low. This was especially true since the autumn wind was intensely biting, causing the surrounding trees, flowers, and wild grass to wither and shed across the landscape, leaving the pathways heavily blanketed in golden-yellow leaves and dried grass. As Luo Xun and the team passed the perimeter of the ponds, they caught that the waterfowl had thoroughly vanished from the tracks, and even the density of terrestrial mutated animals had begun dropping aggressively, leaving a landscape defined by absolute desolation, with loose leaves layering the water’s surface.

On this field run, the group explicitly drove a single electric truck. Prior to stepping past the gates, they had already mapped out the exact operational range for the traps—looping a massive perimeter around the mutated farmland flanking their base. Yes, true to form, the absolute volume of scrap metal they had harvested and carted back from their past excursions was precisely that immense!!

Yan Fei indicated that provided the timeline remained perfectly abundant, he could comfortably encircle the entire perimeter with a continuous network of traps. However, harboring a trace of anxiety that the local base administration might deploy an official metal-type column out to execute a field run or enjoy a holiday lately, they resolved to maintain a low profile, simply encircling their immediate perimeter with a single loop of traps for the time being.

Although they merely drove a single combustion vehicle on this excursion, the truck was systematically trailed by a column of four independent “tenders” forged entirely from solid metal! These assets comprised the mandatory materials required to assemble the traps.

Reaching their target coordinate, they completed a thorough sweep of the perimeter before little Xinran stepped up to kick off the excavation. Currently, to a level-five class like little Xinran, the chore of digging pitfalls couldn’t possibly be any more elementary. Within a brief moment, a perfectly squared, massive sinkhole spanning a depth of roughly three meters alongside lengths and widths of six to seven meters was neatly excavated. Yan Fei rapidly channeled the raw material from one of the metal tenders, seamlessly forging a massive structural “crate” to line the interior flush against the dirt. The steel walls of this crate were explicitly engineered using a hollow, layered framework.

Anchoring the structural lid, layering a protective sheet of sand and topsoil, and drenching the surface with fresh water, a massive metal trap casing was smoothly finalized.

Across this trap network, Yan Fei explicitly refrained from deploying elements analogous to steel spikes or floor daggers, because through their numerous comparative experiments, they had systematically verified a core parameter—as long as that mutated mushroom juice made direct physical contact with flesh, it would instantaneously launch an absolute corrosion process, meaning prior structural lacerations were completely irrelevant. Under those dynamics, why should they expend extra physical effort to manufacture internal spikes? Simply filling the cavities with mushroom juice down the line would work perfectly, wouldn’t it?

Managing a single trap from the initial excavation straight to the final topsoil layering and watering consumed barely half an hour from start to finish, exhausting half a tender’s worth of metal. Luo Xun completed an efficiency calculation, turning to note to the group with a smile: “Evaluating our current velocity, as long as our squad finalizes roughly ten individual units daily, we can comfortably wrap up the construction of the entire trap network before November hits.”

“We can actually manage a few more,” Yan Fei noted after executing a calculation of the reserve scrap metal they had stockpiled for backup.

“Yeah, let’s evaluate the dynamics as we go. From here on out, our squad will execute two field runs daily—one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We’ll construct as many as our reserves permit before late November.” After all, once the timeline penetrated into November, the ambient temperature would inevitably plummet along a sharp trajectory, making regular field excursions completely unviable for them—lacking the dense cover delivered by the lush summer trees and roadside vegetation, their physical movements across the open grounds would turn immensely exposed. If a passing satellite handily captured their silhouettes during a macro scan, it would inevitably draw unwanted tracking eyes to their coordinates.

Previously, Luo Xun and the team had actually unearned their own group’s silhouettes across a specific intercepted photo file. At that exact moment, they were executing a field run to harvest scrap metal at a relatively detached coordinate. It was profoundly fortunate that when the satellite completed the image capture, they were traveling along a highway track far away from their actual base, meaning even if an outside organization caught the data, the structural threat remained minimal.

The group rapidly locked into a high-intensity routine. Starting from this specific day, the Otaku Team systematically rolled out twice daily—once in the morning and once in the afternoon. During the morning shift, they would head out the absolute moment their household crops were fully tended to, generally operating for roughly two hours before doubling back to consume lunch. Following their midday rest, they would roll back out at two in the afternoon, logging three hours of labor before returning to join the dinner table.

With the group venturing out so frequently, it naturally enticed those two wolves—who normalized frolicking in the wild throughout the daylight hours anyway—to trail along right beside them. The puppy accompanied these two predators to play unrestrictedly across the immediate perimeter, while alternative members of the crew divided their focus—one faction anchoring the security perimeter to maintain watch, while the alternative team monitored little Xinran and Yan Fei as they systematically excavated the pits and assembled the traps, casually checking out the three idiot dogs frolicking a short distance away from time to time.

The pitfalls Luo Xun and the team deployed were primarily clustered across sectors completely devoid of wild mutated vegetation. While they would still mount traps behind coordinates anchored by the mutated thickets, the absolute density wasn’t anywhere near as concentrated as alternative zones.

Speaking up to this precise point, Luo Xun was currently agonizing over an alternative strategic parameter—cultivating the Devil’s Vine.

In truth, this strategic thought had stabilized inside his mind early on, but during that past duration, the grain reserves stored at their home ran far too sparse, barely sufficient to satisfy their household consumption, let alone being sacrificed to cultivate a crop of Devil’s Vines?

Later on, the jumbled chores demanding their attention multiplied substantially, and cultivating a flora of that tier wasn’t anywhere near elementary to manage. A survivor had to meticulously monitor the growth cycle at a moment’s notice, maintaining absolute caution during the planting process, as they could under no circumstances plant them too close to the wild clusters of Devil’s Vines. Yet if they opened up too much clearance from the wild strains, it would paradoxically compromise a fraction of the defensive synergy. In short, it wasn’t until right now—following their household grains hitting a secondary monumental harvest window—that Luo Xun let the thought spark into an active plan once more, resolving to give it an experimental run once next spring rolled around. However, they still required evaluating the exact cultivation logistics—how exactly were they supposed to plant them to successfully shield their core base without accidentally compromising the movement tracks of the mutated wildlife?

A full ten days slipped past in a flash. Aside from successfully finalizing a comprehensive loop of traps encircling their perimeter, they had explicitly extended several additional defensive rows trailing directly toward the southern trajectory.

However, these traps could at most impact the ground columns of an oncoming zombie force. Regarding airborne threats, they would still require brainstorming alternative methodologies to counter them down the line—provided these zombies truly possessed the capacity to sniff out the scent of raw human flesh to lunge straight toward their base walls.

Over these few days, the external climate parameters true to form turned increasingly frigid day by day. The ambient evening temperature had already dropped cleanly below the freezing mark, forcing the interior of the complex to finally and thoroughly activate the water-heating system.

Yes, the entire subterranean framework of their base—and even the structural walls—were fitted with an integrated network of water pipes, perfectly sufficient to maintain a stable baseline temperature across the entire complex, ensuring the indoor plants and livestock wouldn’t absorb a single shred of thermal degradation from the cold external currents.

Honestly, the climate control output delivered by this new base was vastly superior to the primitive framework they had engineered back when they resided inside the city walls. After all, apart from the single high-rise building they active-lived in, the remaining sectors comprised an seamlessly integrated block of solid metal vaults, making temperature control exceptionally elementary to manage!

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