This is apocalyptic

Chapter 87: Concentration

"What do you want to do?" Bai Xiao stared at the man with his scarlet eyes.

There was no emotion in those blood-red eyes. A foul smell came from under the short man's pants, soaking a spot.

Bai Xiao had never hated his keen sense of smell so much.

"We... I... make friends..."

"Then please answer your friend's question. Who are you? What is your relationship with the safe zone?"

"I...I..." The short man had a desperate look on his face. He looked at the transparent silk thread hanging from his mouth in horror. The zombie was drooling.

"Speak." Bai Xiao wiped his saliva.

"Safe zone...we sneaked out."

"Why did you run out?"

"The safe zone can't save us... they just make people work, and we run away..."

"Why can't it be saved?"

"It's impossible to save them. I heard people say that the end of the world is coming and they still don't have a solution..."

The short man stared at him intently, and suddenly laughed as if he had thought of something.

"Haha, the end of the world has really come! The zombies have awakened their intelligence..."

Bai Xiao looked at him expressionlessly.

"How big is the safe zone?"

"The end of the world is coming, the zombies are coming..." The short man was close to collapse. Facing the drooling zombies, he shook his head and dodged backwards.

——Zombies came out of the ruins with daggers in their hands and harpoons on their backs. The end of the world has come.

Bai Xiao realized belatedly what his actions meant to this person.

The lush weeds kept swaying.

Bai Xiao dragged the two corpses deep into the bushes while drooling.

He was like a zombie sneaking around picking up corpses to eat.

He had never been coveted by anyone in the ruins. Except for the human who knocked on his helmet, making a "dong dong dong" sound, he had never been attacked by another human.

Bai Xiao was very irritable. The tiredness, exhaustion, and constant hunger along the way eroded his will. At a certain moment, he saw these two people no longer as the same kind, but as food.

He managed to control himself at the last moment.

Looking back on this journey, when I met strangers, he was always the one I was wary of. He dared to travel long distances in the ruins and he was not dead yet. The people in the ruins were very wise. Those who couldn't even see this would not be able to survive in the ruins.

But after leaving the ruins, things were different. There was no such thing as a tranquilizer gun in the ruins. Perhaps it was the tranquilizer gun that gave them the courage, or perhaps it was the fact that they had succeeded many times before that made them full of confidence.

Only now they were two bodies.

Fortunately, they were two corpses, so there was no sight of zombies dragging them while drooling, which would have been scary.

The house covered with weeds seemed to be their temporary residence, with some food and dirty bedding scattered inside.

Bai Xiao searched everywhere but found no useful information. He also didn't know their identities and there was no identification to confirm their identities.

Maybe he shouldn't change his image, Bai Xiao touched his clean-shaven beard. Before, he was a dusty loner wandering in the apocalypse, wearing a helmet and carrying a harpoon. Now he has changed into new clothes, cut his hair and shaved his beard, and looks less fierce and more human.

Sitting in the dense grass, Bai Xiao looked at the white sky in the distance, not knowing whether he should continue moving forward.

Moving forward is civilization, moving backward is ruins.

For the survivors, that’s where the shelter ends up.

But for some people in the safe zone, the long-term comfort seems to have turned it into a cage.

Bai Xiao didn’t know whether this was the case with only a very small number of people, or whether the safe zone was no longer stable twenty years after the end of the world, and the increasingly severe situation led to the spread of doomsday theories.

Places where people gather are the most complicated.

He took out the map and saw that he had traveled a long way, away from the ruins without shelter, and came to the cleared land.

This is almost impossible to do alone. It has been twenty years since the apocalypse, and the remaining population is not enough to support additional safe zones. They can only concentrate and then expand outward.

Guarding the two corpses, Bai Xiao was surprised at how calm he was. Perhaps it was because he had buried a lot of bones and seen too many wandering zombies.

After resting here for a day, we didn't see any people. They probably did sneak out and wanted to live a free life before the end of the world.

People don't want to recall the zombies that have long since decayed. This land has been cleaned up many times. It is completely different from ruins. If you are careful, you can live under the protection of the safe zone without having to bear the responsibility of working.

After making sure that there were no other people, Bai Xiao packed his luggage, threw the two bodies here, and continued walking forward for three days, relying on the compressed biscuits he brought from the cellar. Then he saw farmland in the distance.

It is very similar to the farmland behind the barbed wire that I saw when I passed by Chenjiabao, but the scale is very different. The neat and orderly crops symbolize civilization and order.

Faint human figures can be seen in the fields in the distance. There are no zombies here, nor many large animals. Bai Xiao feels the quiet and peacefulness, looking into the distance.

They had not yet reached the safe zone, but the closer they got, the thinner the fog in Bai Xiao's heart became. Before setting out, he thought the shelter would be high walls, barbed wire, and a fortress, but after leaving the ruins, the appearance of the safe zone gradually emerged.

It does not have clear boundaries. It is not blocked by a high wall as imagined, or barbed wire and brick walls like Chenjiabao do not exist, because it is not full of zombies like the ruins. It has been cleaned up long ago. Maybe there were indeed high walls to resist the zombies many years ago, but after the zombies decayed and the safe zone expanded, the fortress was no longer necessary.

Thick smoke was billowing from the towering chimney in the distance. It was too far away to make any sound, but Bai Xiao knew that the place must be filled with the roar of machines.

No wonder Zhou Xu didn’t call it a shelter but a safe zone.

The shelter was used to resist zombies at the beginning of the disaster. Now, after mergers and expansions, it has thrived on this land, turned into a safe zone, restarted industry, and tried to return to that glorious and prosperous era.

If Bai Xiao had not seen Zhou Xu and those two people, and if he had not walked all the way out of the ruins, he would have thought that the crisis was over.

There were banners with slogans in the fields.

A breeze blew, and the fields seemed to have waves, which spread in circles away into the distance with the wind.

Bai Xiao sat down on the side of the road, looking at the tranquility. He could not go forward any further.

The zombies sat on the road, looking at the safe zone that they had found after a long journey and which was built by people after the disaster.

Lin Duoduo couldn't imagine it, and neither could he. People living in the ruins, whose thinking was limited to their own cognition, always thought that there should be high walls to block the zombies and barbed wire to enclose the safe area. They didn't expect it to be like this.

The survivors from Linchuan and those who migrated from other places gathered here. Most of the post-disaster population gathered here. Bai Xiao felt relieved when he thought that these were the places where countless survivors had migrated.

It is precisely because the survivors gathered here and the population was insufficient to rebuild other places that Linchuan became a ruin.

It absorbed enough survivors that there were only nine safe zones left after the disaster.

(End of this chapter)