Before leaving Linghu Wetland Park, Chu Guang first took Night Ten to the mutant leech nest near the parking lot.
"Those mushrooms, we found them there." Night Ten pointed to the broken concrete pipe not far ahead.
"Fortunately, you didn't go in." Chu Guang patted Night Ten on the shoulder and continued on, "Let's go. That is not our goal today."
It was said that leeches could be used as medicine, but he didn't know if mutant leeches had the same effect.
The two carefully avoided the mutant leeches' nest, the lush vegetation, and the concrete ruins, walking in the sun as much as possible.
They walked towards the east for a while.
Looking at the viaducts and residential buildings ahead, Night Ten who was following Chu Guang couldn't help asking.
"Aren't we going hunting?"
"Yes."
"Then why are we getting further and further away from the forest?"
"The forest is in front of us."
"?"
Chu Guang did not explain much. He silently took off the iron barrel rifle from his back, loaded the bullet into the barrel, and his aura instantly changed.
Not far away from them was a broken viaduct.
The traces of the years on the moss-covered concrete load-bearing column were hidden by the shadow of the green plants.
A mouse as big as a washbasin was drinking the muddy water in the gutter and stone pit, and when it found that two uninvited guests had broken in, it rushed to one side of the area.
Night Ten's head jerked, his pupils slightly dilated, reeling back in shock.
Behind the broken viaduct were tall buildings covered with vines and moss. The thick roots pierced the cracked concrete ground and the tree trunks rose up in the middle of the road, overturning the car and bus stations that had long since been turned into iron slag.
In this green hell, there was a lot of vitality, along with a hidden murderous intent that wanted to swallow everything.
The world in front of his eyes was too shocking, every frame looking like an artist's realistic interpretation of a post-apocalyptic world. So much so that Night Ten even forgot that this was the "game world".
At this moment, he finally understood the meaning of Chu Guang's words.
Here was the real forest...
"We have to be careful from here."
While talking, Chu Guang released the safety of the iron-barreled rifle and explored step by step.
Although this could only be regarded as the northern outskirts of Qingquan City and was far from the core city, they still could not let their guard down.
High-rise residential buildings, sewers, three-dimensional gardens, parking lots, drone hives, CNC planting towers, magnetic levitation stations and many more things...
All man-made miracles had become natural greenhouses and seedbeds after being abandoned by civilization.
After the nuclear war, there was indeed a long cold winter on this land, but it only lasted less than half a century.
The force of nature reversed everything.
The first to fall was the high-rise buildings. Moss started to creep up along the backlit sides, eroded upward, and eventually covered their whole bodies.
And those non-high-rise buildings were not spared either.
In those years of human decline, only a few pouring rains and a sultry summer could make this a paradise for the barbaric growth of fungi and angiosperms.
They provided abundant food for wild animals.
After the urban drainage system was paralyzed, the freshwater resources in the urban area were even more abundant than the Linghu Lake next to it.
Wild animals and out-of-control poultry began to migrate from forests, lakes, and farms to cities with a more comfortable living environment. Under the triple effect of radioactive materials, genetic weapons, and time, they evolved into fierce, bloodthirsty creatures.
They were collectively called mutants!
Of course……
There was much more danger here than that.
They walked cautiously along the side of 76th Street for a while, and the surroundings were quiet. As Night Ten was thinking about where the mutants had gone, Chu Guang's voice suddenly sounded in his ear.
"We got a situation."
In front of a scrapped car, Chu Guang suddenly stopped.
Night Ten recovered immediately, stopped, and looked around nervously, but saw nothing.
"What happened?"
Chu Guang looked solemn.
"There are traces of survivors' activities."
"Other survivors?!" Night Ten froze, lowering his voice like Chu Guang, but couldn't hide the excitement in his tone, "Are they the aboriginal people on the wasteland?"
Finally meeting other NPCs!
He had been waiting for this moment for a long time!
Chu Guang glanced at him, knowing what he was thinking.
"You don't need to be so excited, this is not something to be happy about."
"Why?"
"Because in such a place, strangers are more dangerous than mutants."
Without explaining much to him, Chu Guang knelt down and found a string of cans strung with wire behind the scrapped wheels.
The aluminum can was opened outwards, and it looked like something had exploded from the damaged section, and there was still a faint smell of rotten eggs.
"Excessive sulphur gunpowder, as well as pushpins and iron pieces..."
Chu Guang frowned.
Mutant humans?
Or marauders?
Generally, survivors would not deploy tripwire mines near settlements.
It was hard to hurt mutants with a sensitive sense of smell with this kind of thing, so in other words, it was for humans.
Judging from the residual scent, the explosion time should've been short, at most five hours or less.
Chu Guang turned his head and asked.
"When you came out of the shelter, did you hear the explosion from the east?"
Night Ten shook his head nervously.
"No."
"Wait for me here."
Looking at Chu Guang who put down the can and got up, Night Ten asked anxiously.
"Where are you going?"
"Checking the situation ahead."
"I can go with you—"
"You stay here."
Night Ten wanted to insist, but after seeing the look in Chu Guang's eyes, he stopped and finally nodded slowly.
The pressure from this man's eyes made him feel that the NPC in front of him was not joking, maybe he would really be kicked off the line...
After instructing Night Ten to hide next to the old car, Chu Guang put away the gun, pulled out the sharpened steel pipe from his back, and sneaked into the building on the side of the street shortly.
Although he did intend to use this player as bait when he came out, the situation was different now.
What he faced now were other survivors, most likely marauders or mutant human tribes. The bait had lost its meaning, and it would only serve to alert them.
Chu Guang's expression was solemn, and he clenched the steel pipe in his hand tightly.
The straight-line distance from Linghu Wetland Park to here was at most 1 km. It was too close to Shelter 404!
Especially now that the players were engaged in production. Even if the smoke and sound generated were partially blocked by plants and concrete barriers, they would be discovered by people here sooner or later.
This was a hidden threat.
Chu Guang was ready to eliminate this threat.
Once he judged that the other party may pose a threat, he would do it without hesitation.
In the ten-story building along the street, the safe passage was very narrow, and the small space was covered with moss.
Fortunately, there were no particularly dangerous mutants here.
After arriving at the fifth floor, a few fat mutant rats scurried about. Probably because they felt that they had numbers, they bared their teeth at Chu Guang aggressively.
If Chu Guang ran away with his back to them, they would have swarmed up already. But this intruder was not afraid at all, so that they who were timid dared not act rashly, and only dared to tentatively snarl.
Chu Guang was already used to this.
Without saying anything, Chu Guang directly thrust the pipe forward, piercing the nearest mutant rat and immediately killed one.
Seeing that this guy was so fierce, the rats immediately fled, rushing to the entrance of the floor and disappeared into the shadows.
"It doesn't seem to be a rat den."
"It should only be about ten or twenty..."
If there were a little more, these guys would've been difficult to deal with.
Swarms of mutant rats would be tricky even if they were heavily armed mercenaries, not to mention he who only had an iron-barreled rifle.
Chu Guang heaved a sigh of relief and shook the fat mouse and the blood stains off the sharp steel pipe.
After arriving directly at the tenth floor, Chu Guang used the steel pipe as a crowbar, pried open the rusty door panel, and entered the rooftop.
The wind on the roof was strong.
He walked to the rusty water tank and looked towards the resident community in the east. What he saw confirmed his conjecture.
In the open space in the middle of the concrete building, there stood a wooden camp, with rags and construction waste blocking the outside view.
The survivors' strongholds on the wasteland were roughly divided into two types. One was to live directly in a house that did not collapse after the war, and the other was to set up a camp on the ruins or open space, depending on the surrounding conditions.
Marauders living in urban areas usually lived in buildings, rarely building such primitive dwellings and fortifications.
Only mutant humans with an average height of two meters and a weight of more than 150kgs could build such a wooden shack when there was clearly a ready-made house that could be used.
The wooden stakes at the entrance of the camp were sharpened, like wild beast fangs, with a few broken corpses clumsily draped on them, and the ground was covered with dried blood.
They eat everything.
Not just fungi, the fruits of plants, and even the meat of mutant flies, rats, and cockroaches.
Of course, their favorite food was—
Two-legged humans.
Looking at both sides of the street, Chu Guang saw a mutant sentry carrying a metal longbow on the roof of the shops at the end of No. 76 Street.
Its green skin resembled the Orcs in the fantasy movie, and it was, in fact. as strong, savage, ruthless and bloodthirsty as them.
It was two meters tall and its muscles were wrapped in armor made of metal trash. Chu Guang could even see the "second half price" on the billboard that served as a breastplate.
The two turned-out steel bars inlaid on the shoulder pads of the armor were directly detached from a bicycle's handlebars. Those things had a miraculous effect in dealing with melee weapons' attacks, and it could jam a chainsaw or an axe.
It could be said to be quite cyberpunk.
If Chu Guang and Night Ten continued to move forward just now until they reached the intersection, at most, they would be ambushed by the mutant sentry!
Thinking of this, a wave of lingering fear washed over him.
Chu Guang's Adam's apple moved lightly. He shifted his gaze and continued to look at the mutant camp in the residential community in the east.
Due to too many obstructions, he couldn't see how many people were inside. He could only roughly judge from the scale of the camp based on experience. The number of mutant humans should be between 20 and 30.
"A small mutant colony..."
Chu Guang's expression gradually became solemn.
These guys were not easy to deal with!
At almost the same time, a light blue system pop-up window appeared in his field of vision.
[Mission: Destroy the mutant human tribe located on 76th Street.
Type: Sideline
Reward: 200 reward points]
‘Wait--'
‘Can tasks be even triggered outside of the shelter?!'
Chu Guang was taken aback for a moment and immediately tried to call out to the system, but there was no response.
The light blue mission pop-up window disappeared, as if it was never there in the first place.
It originally seemed that the system could only be called out near the shelter, but missions could now be triggered anywhere outside the shelter?
But……
These two hundred reward points were a bit ridiculous.
Without any hesitation, Chu Guang immediately put away his weapon. He went downstairs, returned to Ning Ten, and quickly left the area with a dumbfounded Night Ten.
That was a 200-point reward!
The sideline mission for summoning a hundred players was only given 100 points, but this reward was given 200. Obviously, this mission was not so easy to complete.
Maybe there was a big trap inside!
Chu Guang was not stupid.
He wouldn't be fooled so easily.
"Administrator, what did you see?" Looking at Chu Guang who finally stopped, the panting Night Ten couldn't help but ask.
Chu Guang, who stood still to rest, answered casually.
"It's a camp for mutant humans."
"Then we... just leave?"
"Otherwise, do you suggest we fight with them? Then get eaten by them?" Chu Guang glanced at him, "Think with your head, we only have one gun."
Not to mention that only one person between them could fight.
Night Ten closed his mouth and said nothing.
He hadn't reacted just now. He'd previously thought that the mutant humans were the NPCs of this game. Now he's heard the Administrator say that these mutant humans should be a hostile force?
And cannibals...
After secretly remembering this information, Night Ten planned to share it with other players after returning.
"It's not a good idea to provoke the beasts now. We need to be more prepared and then defeat them in one fell swoop, so we can get it done once and for all."
Chu Guang cursed as he walked away.
"Such bad luck... The mutant human's camp is on 76th Street, directly opposite the east gate of the park."
"In any case, we have to be careful!"
...
The original hunting route could only be changed!
Chu Guang took the Night Ten around 76th Street, walked about one mile north along the viaduct out of the city, and found an abandoned construction site.
The area of the construction site was very large, and it should have previously been a real estate that had just started construction. One of the buildings covered 17 or 18 floors, and the other large pits should be foundations that had been dug.
Most of the equipment used in the construction had been scrapped and the tower crane had been smashed into the unfinished building, forming a slope.
It could be seen that the quality of this house was still good.
Even the crane tower was knocked down by the shock wave of the nuclear explosion, but the concrete building was left with only a gap from the smash, and the main structure was not even damaged.
The steel piled on the construction site had been corroded, and the cement in the bag had also been hydrated and deteriorated, making it no longer usable.
However, what was surprising was that Chu Guang found a lot of unused blue-gray stones here!
Chu Guang recognized it at a glance. This thing was limestone... If he remembered correctly, it was mainly composed of calcium carbonate, which could be used as a raw material for cement.
"Good stuff!"Chu Guang was overjoyed in his heart. He took out the map, and made a mark on it.
He would have no problem building two buildings if he could smelt all these limestone into cement.
As long as Old White unlocked the technology to make calcium carbonate into cement, they would not have to worry about raw materials for cement for a long time in the future!
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