Chapter 38: Marine Evolved Creature Comes Ashore

Chapter 38: Chapter 38: Marine Evolved Creature Comes Ashore

Wei Chengdong invited Xiaqing into the living room and taught her how to disassemble, maintain, and use the handgun. "This is a fully automatic pistol made for special forces. On our team, only core members get to use it. Its stability and accuracy are top-of-the-line for a handgun. This is the detachable stock. Once attached, you can brace it against your shoulder for continuous fire..."

An hour later, Xiaqing left the village with a heavy basket on her back and another heavy one in her hand. To avoid anyone secretly watching her, she first detoured to an abandoned village in the southeast, gathering a large bundle of dry firewood before returning home.

After shutting the door tightly, Xiaqing quickly took off her Protective Suit. She spent a good while admiring her cool new automatic handgun before she started examining the three Protective Suits she had acquired.

The heaviest set was a fully enclosed, airtight protective suit with a face shield, which included the suit itself, gloves, boots, and an isolated respiratory protection device. It was suitable for high-risk, unknown environments where both respiratory and skin hazards were present. It was standard equipment for researchers with poor self-defense capabilities when they went outside the Safe Zone, and it wasn’t sold publicly—you couldn’t get one even if you had the points. Although wearing the airtight protective suit limited one’s vision and hearing, it was a true lifesaver in unknown, dangerous environments.

The second was a two-piece Protective Suit, which also included boots, gloves, a Protective Mask, and Night Vision Goggles. The style and color of this suit were the same as the one Tang Huai had given her, but a single touch revealed a significant difference. Xiaqing was certain this suit’s protective capabilities were at least three times stronger than those available on the market.

Xiaqing put on the form-fitting camouflage Protective Suit, stretching her arms and legs to get a feel for it. She confirmed that, compared to this one, the suit Tang Huai had traded her was utter junk.

Of course, the patched, one-piece Protective Suit she had just taken off was even worse junk in comparison.

She put the handgun in the front pocket of her protective vest, only to discover it wasn’t for rations but was specially designed to hold a gun. ’The design couldn’t be more thoughtful,’ she thought.

The next time she went to the Evolution Forest, she would wear this set.

Xiaqing took off the Protective Suit, stowing it away with delight, and finally inspected Sheep Leader’s gear. Besides Night Vision Goggles, protective goggles, a bulletproof vest, and a gas mask, Sheep Leader even had an infrared camera, a natural-light camera, and a walkie-talkie.

As she laid out each piece of equipment, Xiaqing felt a little reluctant to give such fine gear to her rough-and-tumble sheep. ’I should really go catch an Evolutionary dog to be my assistant,’ she mused.

Just as she was thinking about Sheep Leader, Xiaqing heard the fast-paced CLOP CLOP CLOP of hooves from the courtyard.

She had just hidden the gun when the doorknob on the front door was turned by one of Sheep Leader’s hooves.

BANG! The door was shoved open forcefully. Sheep Leader walked in, radiating anger, and squinted at Xiaqing.

Having spent over a month together, Xiaqing had figured out the creature’s temperament—it responded to soft tactics, not hard ones. Putting on a sweet voice, she said, "I went to cut firewood and just got back. You must be tired from patrolling your territory, Leader."

Sheep Leader pawed the ground with a hoof, lowered its head slightly, and brandished its large, spiral horns.

’Alright, the seductive soup isn’t working,’ Xiaqing thought. She switched to a more direct approach. "Want some rations?"

"Baa."

Sheep Leader immediately retracted its hoof, raised its head, and switched to a high-pitched, cutesy tone.

Xiaqing went into the kitchen efficiently. She chopped up some Asparagus Chrysanthemum and grass, then opened a metal cabinet and took out two compressed rations. She crumbled less than half of one block, mixed it into the feed, and placed it on Sheep Leader’s "dinner table."

Sheep Leader buried its head and began to eat. Xiaqing sat cross-legged beside it, eating her own rations with some mountain spring water while sharing her joy. "Leader, we really scored on this trade. We’ve got a gun now, and three sets of Top Level Protective Suits—the kind you can’t even buy with points. These three suits mean we both have three extra lives. Of course, I get two and you get one. And only I get to use the gun, hehe..."

Xiaqing took a big gulp of spring water to wash down the throat-scraping compressed ration and grinned like an idiot.

After quickly finishing the food in its bowl, Sheep Leader eyed the ration in Xiaqing’s hand.

Xiaqing immediately stuffed the rest of the ration into her mouth and swallowed it. She got up, washed Sheep Leader’s food bowl, put it away, and then strapped the handgun’s holster to her thigh. Turning back, she said to Sheep Leader, "You rest up. I’m going to check on the vegetable garden."

After she left, Sheep Leader CLOP CLOP CLOPPED into the kitchen. It pawed at the metal ration cabinet a few times, and only after confirming it couldn’t open it did it return to the living room. It nosed open the wardrobe and sniffed the Protective Suits Xiaqing had brought back. Realizing they weren’t food, it kicked the wardrobe door shut, lay down on the tatami mat, and continued to chew its cud while squinting at the metal cabinet in the kitchen.

Out in the vegetable garden, Xiaqing heard the commotion inside and let out a grin.

The vegetable seeds she had planted in the garden half a month ago had all sprouted. Because she had soaked the seeds in mountain spring water, her germination rate was twenty percent higher than that of the Lords of lands four, five, and six.

As for lands number one, two, and Land No. 7? The others hadn’t said, so Xiaqing didn’t know.

In an adjacent vegetable patch, the garlic and ginger sprouts were already palm-high. As long as there was no high-concentration Harmful Rain during the next two months of their seedling stage, she would have a harvest. The ginger was especially precious; she had only six plants in her entire territory and had to protect them well. She had later found over thirty more garlic plants, bringing the total to forty-four. She optimistically estimated she’d be able to eat garlic scapes in May.

The thought of fragrant stir-fried pork with garlic scapes and pork and garlic scape dumplings flashed through her mind. For that, she needed meat. Xiaqing followed the techniques Wei Chengdong had taught her, aiming at a large elm tree 150 meters away. In the hands of a Strength Evolver, the four-and-a-half-pound machine pistol felt as light as a toy gun.

Her excellent Visual Evolution allowed Xiaqing to clearly see that the large magpie perched on an elm branch had its eyes closed. After aiming at the magpie’s plump body for five minutes, she lowered the gun.

For one, she was afraid the noise would attract attention from the surrounding territories. For another, she only had three hundred bullets and couldn’t bear to waste a single one. She would wait until Luo Pei taught her how to shoot to do any target practice, since the bullets used for training wouldn’t be deducted from her 300-round supply.

That evening, Xiaqing and Sheep Leader ate their meal while listening to the radio.

The news broadcast, which usually reported only good news and never the bad, actually spent five minutes today describing the grim situation facing the southern Gui City Base after the evolution of marine life. This made Xiaqing’s nerves tense up again.

The great evolution of Blue Star’s land creatures was primarily caused by the influence of the Qiang and Yi Elements. The great evolution of marine life, however, was caused by the combined influence of nuclear-contaminated water and the Qiang and Yi Elements. Therefore, the danger and bizarreness of marine evolution far exceeded that of land creatures. This was the main reason why several of Hua Country’s major coastal cities had all fallen into ruin and been abandoned by humanity.

Who could have predicted that in the tenth year of the Natural Disasters, evolved marine creatures would actually come ashore, continually expanding their territory and threatening the Gui City Base.

The news didn’t mention a single word about crucial questions like how they came ashore, what species they were, or their primary methods of attack, which was incredibly frustrating. After the broadcast ended, Xiaqing immediately turned on her walkie-talkie and tuned it to the Lord frequency, just in time to hear Kuang Qingwei muttering about the marine creatures coming ashore.

"There are only six bases in the southern Gui City region, and three of them are already under threat. If the Safe Zones of those three bases fall, a huge number of refugees will definitely flee north. Do you think they’ll make their way to us?"

This was the very same question that worried Xiaqing the most.