Chapter 89 - 82: Muddy Path

Chapter 89: Chapter 82: Muddy Path

The dark green SUV, like a great beast escaping a mire, rumbled away from the edge of Cyan Pine Ridge Town. In the rearview mirror, the small town, shrouded in silt and the stench of death, rapidly shrank and finally disappeared.

Xu Mo gripped the steering wheel firmly with both hands, his eyes scanning the path ahead. The so-called "road" was long since unrecognizable. Most of the time, he drove by relying on his sense of direction and his judgment of the terrain’s elevation.

The flood hadn’t just brought silt; it had also left behind a crisscrossing network of gullies and treacherous patches of mud. Thankfully, the SUV was a high-performance machine with a high chassis and plenty of torque, allowing it to navigate the seemingly impassable sections time and again without major incident.

It was relatively quiet inside the vehicle, with only the steady rumble of the diesel engine and the noise of the tires rolling over different surfaces.

Inside the cabin, the new-car smell of the interior hadn’t fully dissipated. It mingled with the stench seeping in through the cracks in the windows—a mixture of earthy mud and a faint hint of rot—creating a scent unique to a journey at the end of the world.

Xu Mo kept his speed down. For one, the road conditions were complex and demanded caution; getting high-centered or stuck would be a huge problem out here in the middle of nowhere. For another, Xu Mo was also on the lookout, scanning his surroundings for any potential threats—be they from the environment or from living creatures.

About two hours after leaving town, Xu Mo encountered his first real obstacle. A small bridge that should have spanned a dry river gully was now broken in the middle. Only a few twisted steel rebars connected the two banks, making it completely impassable. The river, having surged during the flood’s peak and then receded, had left behind a wide riverbed covered in pebbles and sand.

Xu Mo stopped the SUV and observed the situation carefully. The riverbed looked fairly solid. Although there was a lot of loose rock, it shouldn’t be a major issue for the SUV. He shifted into a low gear, carefully drove off the embankment, and entered the riverbed.

The tires made a CRUNCHING sound as they rolled over the pebbles, and the vehicle jostled slightly. Just as Xu Mo was driving through the center of the riverbed, the corner of his eye caught a glimpse of a depression to his right—what was once a patch of reeds. The shallow water collected there was murky and foul.

Suddenly, the surface of the murky water erupted.

A black shadow shot out from the puddle like a bullet fired from a gun, hurtling straight toward Xu Mo behind the driver’s side window.

It was a fish, about eight inches long, with a streamlined body. Its speed was astonishing. Its open mouth was packed with small, sharp teeth that glinted coldly in the sunlight.

Faced with this sudden attack, Xu Mo’s pupils contracted, but his reaction was lightning-fast. In the instant before the fish’s head was about to hit the window, Xu Mo’s right hand remained steady on the steering wheel, but his left shot out of the open window like a striking viper. His fingers, like an iron clamp, precisely snatched the flying fish at the point where its head met its body.

His hand felt a slick, cold surface. He could feel the violent twitching of the fish’s muscles and the hardness of its scales.

Xu Mo’s brow furrowed, and his five fingers suddenly clenched.

SQUISH!

With a sickening squelch, the part of the fish’s body near its neck was crushed open by Xu Mo’s grip. Gory blood and shattered organs spurted out from between his fingers, splattering onto his hand and the window frame. The fish’s head, still attached to a ragged piece of spine and a bit of flesh, remained in an aggressive, open-mouthed pose, twitching slightly in his grasp.

By this time, the SUV had steadily climbed onto the embankment on the far side of the riverbed. Xu Mo stopped the vehicle, pushed open the door, and got out.

He opened his hand, looking at the still-vicious fish head, packed with fine, sharp teeth, and the small, mangled piece of body still attached.

The head was relatively intact. Its dead eyes stared blankly at the sky, its mouth still frozen open in its attack, revealing the sharp teeth within. The cross-section of the remaining body was a bloody mess, but he could see thick, tightly-packed, bluish-gray scales. The blood was dark red, no different from what Xu Mo knew of fish, just a deeper shade.

"Even little things like this..." Xu Mo muttered to himself, his brow furrowed slightly.

Xu Mo hadn’t expected that a fish less than a foot long could have mutated so ferociously, even daring to attack a moving vehicle and the person inside.

The fish head in his hand still vaguely resembled some common pre-apocalyptic freshwater fish, but its thick Scale Armor, sharp teeth, and suicidal aggression had made it completely unrecognizable. It had become a new, hostile species.

"Looks like from now on, I can’t let my guard down around any body of water, not even a small puddle." Xu Mo casually tossed the remains of the fish head into the nearby grass.

’Could he eat this fish?’ Xu Mo wasn’t sure. ’Although the blood is a normal red, who knows if its muscle tissue or organs have accumulated toxins or unknown parasites? Without professional testing equipment, the risk of rashly eating the flesh of a mutated creature is too great.’

Back in the SUV, Xu Mo tore off a piece of paper to wipe the blood from his hand and the window frame. A much stronger fishy stench now filled the air.

Once back in the vehicle, Xu Mo started the engine and drove onto the highway, continuing his journey. He couldn’t see the asphalt, buried as it was under a layer of silt, but the uneven rows of trees on either side told him he was driving on top of the road.

The floodwaters had likely just receded, and with no other survivors heading for Jiang City yet, Xu Mo’s SUV left the first fresh set of tire tracks on this road.

’These large trees look normal enough. It seems they won’t mutate.’

Observing the poplar trees lining the road, Xu Mo mused, ’If even the plants started mutating and becoming aggressive toward humans, the difficulty of survival in this world would jump up another notch.’

After this little incident, Xu Mo’s vigilance was at its peak. He wasn’t just paying attention to the road and potential large threats anymore; he now gave every inconspicuous puddle and patch of damp grass by the roadside a second look.

The world’s malice seemed to be everywhere, having even seeped into creatures that were once at the bottom of the food chain.

The appearance of these small, mutated fish meant the ecosystem’s collapse was even more complete than he had imagined. ’Perhaps,’ Xu Mo thought, ’when some semblance of order is restored in the future, dedicated scholars or institutions will reclassify and name all these bizarre new creatures.’

But for Xu Mo, right now, they all had only one name—enemy.

The diesel engine maintained its low, steady rumble. The dark green SUV, like a tireless, solitary steel boat, pushed forward with difficulty across the desolate and broken land. Its wheels rolled over caked mud, kicking up clouds of dust. Occasionally, it would run over loose rocks or dip into a shallow pit, causing the vehicle to jolt slightly.