Chapter 251 - 142: Electrofishing

Chapter 251: Chapter 142: Electrofishing

Xu Mo saw the surface of the water churn and boil violently. It was not from heat, but from the intense electrolysis and physical disturbance caused by a powerful electric current passing through the water.

A faint, indescribable smell—a mix of something scorched and fishy—filled the air.

The heart-pounding scene lasted less than ten seconds.

The humming stopped, and the electric arcs vanished.

The river’s surface, which moments before had been teeming with hidden currents and lurking danger, suddenly fell into an eerie calm.

Then, under the sunlight, silvery-white, grayish-black, and strangely patterned things began to slowly surface, turning belly-up on the now somewhat murky water. They were the corpses of fish.

More and more fish corpses appeared on the surface, packed so densely that they nearly covered the entire treated section of the river.

Some of the fish were as small as a palm with fine scales, while others were up to half a meter long with large heads and wide mouths. There were even more species Xu Mo had never seen before, with bizarre forms—some had bony spines, others had abnormally developed fins. Without exception, they all showed no signs of life, bobbing gently with the current.

Xu Mo did a quick visual sweep. In this hundred-meter stretch of river, countless dead fish had floated up. Among them, he estimated there were over a hundred that were longer than a foot and possessed obvious offensive potential.

And that was not even counting the ones that were stunned and sank to the bottom or were too small to float up. The efficiency was staggering.

The workers and soldiers on the bank seemed accustomed to this sight and methodically began the next phase of the operation.

Several men in rubber waders and thick gloves pushed two sturdy-looking, flat-bottomed boats into the water and began scooping up the floating fish carcasses with long-handled nets.

Xu Mo noticed they seemed to be sorting the fish as they scooped them up. The particularly large or unusually bizarre fish were carefully placed into separate plastic containers, obviously to be taken back. ’Will they be used as research specimens? Or do they have some other purpose?’

Meanwhile, the vast majority of ordinary or merely slightly larger mutated fish were roughly scooped up, netful by netful, and dumped directly into the tarp-lined bed of a waiting truck on the bank.

The fish carcasses piled up, quickly forming a small, slime-dripping mountain in the truck bed. The fishy stench was overpowering.

Nearby, two men who appeared to be handling logistics and records were chatting as they made notes. Their voices were not loud, but Xu Mo heard them clearly:

"...This area is actually pretty tame. I heard they used this method over at the old reservoir to the west a few days ago. Man, the stuff that came up in one go was way weirder than this. Some of them could even fight back with short electric bursts. It was a real pain to deal with."

"If you ask me, if this stretch of river wasn’t connected to a water intake upstream and they weren’t worried about contamination, it’d be way easier to just use a strong poison. One pass along the river, and every fish, turtle, shrimp, and crab would be belly-up. It’d even kill all the weeds. Cleanup would be simpler, too. The way we’re doing it now, we still have to fish them out. What a pain."

"Get real. If they used poison, how would anyone drink the water? Besides, the water body’s recovery period would be too long, and it would require constant monitoring. Zapping them might be more trouble, but it’s a physical method. In a few days, the current will flush it out, and things will be back to normal. It doesn’t mess with the big picture. The higher-ups want to control a threat, not create a new one."

At the word "poison," Xu Mo’s brow twitched again.

’That’s right, poison. If you don’t care about the ecosystem and just want total annihilation, that is indeed a more "thorough" approach.’

Xu Mo felt his perspective broaden once again. When survival trumped all else, many peacetime taboos and considerations could be re-evaluated. The range of available methods was far broader and... colder than he had imagined.

Watching the fish carcasses being continuously tossed into the truck bed, Xu Mo asked a supervisor who was passing by and directing the loading, "What happens to these...? Are they buried?"

The supervisor glanced at Xu Mo, noted his patrol gear, and pointed to the truck bed. "A portion goes to the research institute. The rest is hauled to a designated processing plant outside the city to be turned into organic fertilizer. We’re reclaiming new farmland outside the city, and we’re desperate for fertilizer. You can’t eat this stuff, but it’s high in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and organic matter. Just recycling waste."

’Recycling waste...’ Xu Mo fell silent. These mutated creatures, which had been potentially lethal threats just a short while ago, had become fertilizer to nourish crops in the blink of an eye. ’The resource cycle of the apocalypse... connected in such a cruel and pragmatic way.’

Xu Mo and Zhang Yun stood guard and observed for about half an hour, until the cleanup of this river section was mostly complete and the crew began packing up their equipment, preparing to move to another section downstream.

By then, most of the floating fish carcasses had been cleared from the river’s surface. The water, though still somewhat murky, had resumed its flow. Only the fishy stench in the air refused to dissipate.

"Let’s go," Xu Mo said to Zhang Yun. Their patrol mission had to continue.

The two of them turned and followed their designated route, leaving the riverbank that had just witnessed a silent "massacre."

After they had walked some distance, Zhang Yun let out a long sigh and said in a low voice, "I can’t believe that’s how they handle it. It looks pretty simple."

"Simple?" Xu Mo shook his head. "Not at all. Those high-powered generators, specialized cables, and electrode equipment aren’t things just any survivor team could pull together. The preliminary intel gathering, the strategic planning, the operational support, and the follow-up processing we just witnessed... every single step requires enormous organizational capacity and resource allocation. Nothing about it is simple."