Chapter 148 - 107: Barrett and the Crossover

Chapter 148: Chapter 107: Barrett and the Crossover

’It should work next time.’

By the time he finished, it was already late at night. Outside the fortress, the tireless, low roars of the zombies were like a ceaseless background noise. Xu Mo didn’t rest right away. Instead, he moved to an observation port at the edge of the fortress, one with a relatively wide field of view.

Tonight, Xu Mo wanted to try and understand the secret of the zombies’ periodic "refresh," a phenomenon that had been going on for over half a month.

In fact, he had tried observing with the lights out on previous days. But perhaps because the observation port wasn’t in an ideal position, or perhaps because his timing was off, he had never captured the details of how they "disappeared." He had only confirmed that the number of zombies did indeed drop sharply at some point late at night. The process felt as if it were shrouded in an invisible black veil; he knew the result but not the cause.

During this time, Xu Mo had also used his walkie-talkie to discuss this shared puzzle with the guards stationed in other fortresses.

"How’d they disappear? Heh, it’s pitch-black out there. One minute a whole swath of them is gone. Who knows how they slip away?" This was the typical response, tinged with a detached numbness that came from it being a routine occurrence.

"I think I vaguely saw them moving away, but I can’t be sure. It might have just been the group on my side." Someone offered this vague clue, but it couldn’t be confirmed.

It was precisely this shared sense of the "unknown" that prompted tonight’s informal, collective, coordinated observation.

A few of the fortress guards who frequently chatted on the channel had agreed: around the estimated "refresh" window, they would each find an advantageous position, observe the horde’s movements as meticulously as possible, and immediately report any unusual findings over the regional walkie-talkie.

At first, it was just an agreement between a few guards. But as more and more people joined in, it eventually turned into a coordinated, all-hands observation effort for everyone stationed in the Red Star Industrial Zone.

Through these days of frequent "radio-wave socializing," Xu Mo had gained a clearer understanding of the entire observation post network’s layout. The cluster of fortresses was divided into large zones designated by the first twelve letters of the English alphabet, A through L. Within each zone, the fortresses were then numbered from 01 to 12.

This meant that, in theory, there were one hundred and forty-four forward observation fortresses in total, from A-01 to L-12. They were like cold, silent coordinates on a map, scattered in a massive, near-circular formation around the periphery of the core ruins in the Red Star Industrial Zone, forming a vast and intricate surveillance network.

Merely comprehending the manpower, resources, and determination that this number represented was enough for Xu Mo to re-evaluate the importance Jiang City placed on the situation.

Moreover, the main reason everyone was so invested in the observation was because, in their conversations, every single person had mentioned seeing one or two Level-1 mutated zombies near their fortress.

By the most conservative estimate—one mutated zombie per fortress—the number of Level-1 mutated zombies currently active in the Red Star Industrial Zone already exceeded 144.

If the command center’s data was correct, with the ratio of regular zombies to Level-1 zombies being roughly 200:1, then the regular zombie population needed to support at least 144 Level-1s would be a horrifying figure close to thirty thousand. And that was just the number within the observation range of their fortresses, during a single "refresh" cycle.

The periodic appearance of at least thirty thousand zombies in the Red Star Industrial Zone was a massive problem. Perhaps this was the very reason Jiang City had built the observation fortresses here.

The coordinated observation hadn’t officially begun yet. The walkie-talkie was silent, save for the faint hiss of static. Xu Mo peered through the cold eyepiece, watching the shadowy figures below the fortress writhing and roaring in the faint night glow.

’How exactly will they leave?’ His mind was filled with all sorts of theories.

’Will they recede like the tide, turning in unison without warning and marching stiffly back into the depths of the ruins?’

’Or will they be summoned by some silent command, disappearing in orderly waves into the shadows of the crumbling ruins?’

’Or, even more bizarrely, will they just melt into the darkness, fading away into thin air?’

Xu Mo knew that his comrades in the other fortresses were, at this moment, most likely just like him—hidden in their respective concrete bunkers, filled with the same curiosity, vigilance, and a thread of imperceptible unease. They were all waiting for the moment the mystery would be unveiled, or at least for a clue that would reveal the tip of the iceberg.