Chapter 286 - 151: Luochuan City

Chapter 286: Chapter 151: Luochuan City

After the tenth floor, the pursuers finally began to thin out.

Xu Mo didn’t stop. He continued upward, climbing all the way to the sixteenth floor before finally stopping on a relatively clean fire escape landing. By now, the blade of his Mountain-Cutting Saber was caked in thick, blackish-red gore, its original metallic gleam almost completely obscured.

Xu Mo glanced down at himself. His combat suit was soaked in the black blood of zombies from the collar to the hem.

Suddenly, Xu Mo remembered something.

"The Triangular Spike..." he muttered to himself with a hint of regret. "I really should’ve brought it."

Against fast, agile targets like nimble zombies, the Mountain-Cutting Saber had enough power, but its wide swings consumed a lot of stamina. The Triangular Spike was different—light and swift. It only required a straight thrust and a pull, a clean and efficient motion, which was especially suited for the narrow confines of a stairwell.

Thinking back on it now, it was the wrong choice.

But regret was pointless. He hadn’t brought it, and that was that.

Xu Mo took a spare gun-cleaning cloth from his tactical vest and began to wipe the gore off the blade.

After a five-minute rest, he continued upward.

Sixteenth floor, seventeenth, eighteenth... Xu Mo was no longer content with just fleeing upward. He began to actively search and clear out the remaining zombies on each level.

Nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first.

By the time Xu Mo stepped onto the twenty-second-floor landing, he could no longer hear any pursuing footsteps behind him.

Xu Mo pushed open the fire door leading to the twenty-second-floor office area. Inside, it was completely silent.

After a few minutes of checking the entire floor, Xu Mo had a general idea of the layout. It was a defunct tech company. The cubicle area was scattered with moldy documents, shriveled plants, and overturned office chairs. The door to the boss’s office was ajar, and inside lay a desiccated corpse in a suit with a hole through its skull. It wasn’t a zombie, just a human who had died in the early days of the cataclysm.

No living things, no zombies.

Xu Mo walked back to the floor-to-ceiling window, leaned against a support pillar, and slowly slid down to sit.

Only then did he feel the exhaustion.

It wasn’t a physical exhaustion that his Iron Bone Realm body couldn’t handle, but a mental weariness, a languor that rose slowly like the tide.

He had been fighting almost nonstop from ten in the morning until the afternoon. When the adrenaline rush faded, it was naturally followed by mental fatigue.

Taking out his canteen and having a couple of sips of water, Xu Mo fell silent.

’Just how many zombies did that one gunshot alert?’

Xu Mo didn’t know. He only knew that with the current density, the idea of driving his SUV straight through Luochuan City was completely off the table. Forget crossing it—even approaching from the outskirts would trigger a relentless life-or-death chase. The number of zombies here far exceeded that of Mori Town, the proportion of Level 1 Mutants was higher, and there were also Level 2 Mutants lurking about—creatures he had yet to encounter head-on, but which he knew existed.

’Take a detour.’

’There’s no other choice.’

Xu Mo calmly accepted this conclusion. There was no need for despair—the plan had always accounted for two possibilities. He had simply eliminated one and was now shifting to the other.

Detouring through the mountains or hills would be fraught with its own unknown risks, but at least he wouldn’t be facing this ocean of the dead.

He just needed to rest and then find a safe escape route before nightfall.

But night fell faster than Xu Mo had anticipated. When he awoke from a brief state of meditation, a grayish-blue dusk already filled the world outside the window. Xu Mo glanced at the time—6:47 PM. In summer, the days were long; it shouldn’t have been getting dark at this hour.

Walking to another window facing west, Xu Mo saw thick, dark clouds piled up on the western horizon, obscuring the sunset that should have lasted past seven.

"It’s going to rain."

Xu Mo frowned. Rain didn’t have much of an effect on zombie activity, but it would add a lot of trouble to his escape, especially since he needed to cross the alerted urban area on foot.

Returning the way he came was no longer an option. Xu Mo needed another path—one more hidden, more roundabout, but that would lead to where he had hidden his vehicle.

Returning to the window again, Xu Mo surveyed his surroundings.

His vehicle was hidden in an abandoned warehouse to the northwest. The straight-line distance wasn’t far, but a large, complex swath of the city’s outskirts lay in between, an area with derelict residential districts, scattered commercial buildings, and a tangled web of streets.

He had to find a route that avoided main roads as much as possible and passed through areas with a relatively low zombie density.

As dusk deepened into inky blackness, Xu Mo pulled his gaze back from the floor-to-ceiling window.

Based on his observations, he had roughly mapped out a route for himself.

The wind began to howl outside. It was about to rain.

Listening to the wind, Xu Mo frowned, his mind turning to another question.

’This city was once home to several million people. The vast majority of them turned into zombies and now wander here freely. Are there any other living people in this city right now?’

Xu Mo had no answer. He just wondered if there were other survivors in the city, if they too might be standing at a window somewhere, watching the same rain about to fall.

Xu Mo didn’t dwell on it further. Instead, he turned, found a desk, shrugged off his backpack, and took out something to eat.

Xu Mo chose not to head back during the night. Night was the domain of zombies and mutated creatures. Although his eyesight was far superior to that of an ordinary person, there was no need to engage in a chase with all sorts of zombies in the dark. He just had to wait for dawn, for the light to once again become an advantage for the human side.

At night, the whole of Luochuan City was like a slumbering behemoth. Only the occasional shriek of a Mutant Beast from afar, or a small-scale commotion that erupted in some district for a few minutes before abruptly ceasing, broke the silence. That could be two groups of zombies encountering each other, or perhaps a Mutant Beast straying into a horde’s territory.