RotA – Chapter 18

After midnight, the outer districts were dark.

Even though the Sixth District was now a half-dead city, the pre-set program at the district power station still cut off all electricity to the non-core areas of the Sixth District on schedule.

Darkness and silence swallowed the entire Sixth District.

The armored vehicle’s headlights were the only light on this blood-colored long street.

It swept across this city that should have been clean and peaceful, faintly illuminating the monstrous shadows hiding in the blood-stained darkness before brushing past them.

The blood on the streets was thick, but there weren’t many bodies.

Cheng Shan had been right. The infection and mutation rate of these mutated beasts was terrifyingly high. It was likely that any human who hadn’t died completely had turned into a bloodthirsty beast amidst fear and despair.

Some of the mutated would wander here, searching for every hidden prey, while others would crawl in groups into the ventilation ducts or follow the main roads to other districts.

Those highly infectious mutated beasts had come out through the Fifth District.

The Sixth District would not be the only outer district to fall after the Fifth, but if the other districts had sufficient military strength, they might fare much better than the Sixth.

But on the road to escape the Sixth District, Chai Yuening suddenly felt a little lost.

In a daze, she even felt as if she were in the Fog Zone, with no people around, only man-eating beasts.

But this wasn’t the surface, much less the Fog Zone.

In the past, when she was in the Fog Zone, no matter how much danger she faced, she had a place in her heart she wanted to return to. No matter how thick the fog, it could never make her lose her sense of direction.

Unlike now. There was no fog around her, yet she was shocked to find she had no place to “go back” to.

The old armored vehicle continued to drive toward an unknown destination, and Chai Yuening quietly hid the confusion in her heart.

She didn’t want to pass this hopelessness on to the person beside her.

Especially not to the young girl huddled in the back seat with her knees drawn up, who looked to be less than twenty years old.

The young girl’s name was Jing Mu. She lived in the Ninth District and had worked incredibly hard to finally get into the City Defense Technology Department.

Her family was overjoyed for her, saying that being far from home was no big deal. No matter which district she was assigned to, as long as she performed well and worked hard, after a dozen or so years, she would eventually have a chance to enter the main city. Once she was in the main city, the quality of life would be completely different.

Jing Mu took her parents’ words to heart.

She had planned to bring her whole family to the main city once she had made a name for herself, but before her internship was even over, the City Defense Center where she worked was attacked by mutated beasts, and the entire Sixth District was almost instantly cut off from the outside world.

It was hard not to sigh at the unpredictability of life.

Chai Yuening thought for a moment and temporarily set their destination as the Ninth District.

If the Ninth District hadn’t fallen, she could at least deliver a child who had been away from home back to her family.

Without taking the train, the Seventh District was the closest and most direct route to the Ninth. It was a good opportunity to refuel and get some supplies from You Lan.

That woman could get her hands on anything; her prices were just a bit steep.

But in these times, when you might not live to see tomorrow, worldly possessions weren’t worth worrying about.

More than these things, Chai Yuening was worried about encountering a horde of beasts on the way to the Seventh District.

Fortunately, her luck held. After driving for half the night, she only ran into a few scattered beasts wandering about and didn’t encounter any large groups.

Leaving the district, the armored vehicle followed the road signs into the tunnel leading to the Seventh District.

The young girl curled up in the back seat had fallen asleep at some point. Her breathing wasn’t steady; her dreams were likely not peaceful.

Chu Ci, in the passenger seat, had been awake the whole time, staring blankly out the window.

But there was nothing outside the window.

Outside the districts, the underground city was nothing but empty tunnels.

These tunnels connected the various districts. There was nothing along the way, only road signs at the forks to indicate direction. They had once been the most important transportation routes in the underground city base, but now they had been replaced by the district trains. Aside from mercenary teams and the military, very few vehicles used these tunnels.

Chai Yuening always felt that Chu Ci had something on her mind, but she didn’t know if she was too afraid to say it, or if it was inconvenient to speak with someone else present.

Whatever the reason, they were all silent for the entire journey.

They arrived at the Seventh District just after four-thirty in the morning.

At a time when everyone should have been deep in sleep, the entrance to the Seventh District was lit by dim, yellow lights.

The isolation wall, which would not be raised except in an emergency, now completely blocked the road to all vehicles.

Before the distant armored vehicle could even get close, it was quickly locked onto in the darkness by high beams from several observation ports on the high wall.

Chai Yuening squinted in the high beams, slowed down, and finally brought the vehicle to a gentle stop about thirty meters from the isolation wall.

She jumped out of the vehicle, shielding her eyes, and shouted, “Chai Yuening, Captain of the Thirteenth Mercenary Team from the Sixth District! Two others on board, tested, no signs of infection!”

After her words fell, there was a brief silence, then the heavy iron gates of the isolation wall slowly opened to both sides.

Someone ran out from inside, followed by several others pushing a large infection detector, and approached them against the glare of the strong light.

The moment the high beams were turned off, Chai Yuening recognized that familiar, unctuous face—the Chief Security Officer of the Seventh District, Ban Xiangming, who always turned a blind eye and loved to smooth things over when trouble arose.

“Ah, Captain Chai, I knew you couldn’t possibly be in trouble!”

“Boss You said you’d lost contact and might be in danger, but I didn’t believe it for a second!”

“Who are you? In the entire Base, besides the military, only your Thirteenth Mercenary Team dares to enter a level-five risk zone. How could you be trapped by mutated beasts?”

“You’re an outer district hero who has contributed so many surface samples to our Base’s scientific research.”

Ban Xiangming’s face was wreathed in a friendly smile, sweet words flowing effortlessly from his mouth, yet he conspicuously maintained a distance of a full three meters from Chai Yuening, and his gesture for his men to come forward with the detector was not the least bit hesitant.

Chai Yuening didn’t doubt for a second that if she showed any sign of infection, this chief security officer would put a bullet in this “outer district hero” without hesitation.

Chu Ci and Jing Mu jumped out of the vehicle one after the other.

Ban Xiangming’s gaze immediately fell on the blood-stained bandage on Chu Ci’s hand, and his eyes instantly grew wary. “Captain Chai, the wound on that girl’s arm…”

“Cut by broken glass,” Chai Yuening replied coolly.

“How careless. It looks like she bled quite a bit, the wound must be serious.” Ban Xiangming’s gaze remained vigilant.

“Isn’t that what the detector is for?” Chai Yuening said, raising an eyebrow in a rhetorical question. “What? The detector isn’t working, so you need to remove the bandage to inspect the wound?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Ban Xiangming said with an apologetic smile. “Special times, special circumstances. It’s better for everyone to be cautious. Please understand, Captain Chai, don’t be angry.”

Chai Yuening said no more, simply standing beside Chu Ci as they both underwent the scan.

Standing before the detector again after a night had passed, she still felt an indescribable tension.

It was strange. No matter what kind of mutated beast injured her, Chu Ci never showed any signs of infection, yet she was terrified of that one-in-a-million chance, terrified that the security officer’s gun would suddenly be aimed at Chu Ci.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Chu Ci’s test results were completely normal, and Jing Mu showed no sign of betraying them, which allowed Chai Yuening to breathe a long sigh of relief.

The cleared armored vehicle finally drove into the Seventh District once more.

Destination: the black market in the northern part of the city.

Chai Yuening was as familiar as she could be with the road from the district entrance to the black market. After all, it was her final drop-off point for every side job she took, a route she traveled at least a dozen or two times a year.

Before entering the city, Chai Yuening asked Ban Xiangming about the current situation in the Base.

Ban Xiangming sighed and shook his head repeatedly. “It all happened too suddenly. The main city didn’t even have time to react before seven outer districts lost contact one after another.”

Chai Yuening couldn’t help but suck in a cold breath. “Seven?”

“Last night, the Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Districts lost contact in succession. It was as if it were all premeditated. The beast hordes had very clear targets: cut off communications, destroy city defenses. The districts that lost contact didn’t even have time to send out any news,” Ban Xiangming said. “The main city didn’t know what was happening, so they had no way to respond other than ordering each district to raise its isolation walls, strengthen external defenses, and report the latest situation at all times.”

“Fortunately, technicians in the main city detected that someone had activated an emergency mode, forcibly severing the connection between the Sixth District’s ventilation system and the other districts. This discovery made the main city realize that the beast hordes might be invading other districts through the ventilation ducts, so they worked through the night to cut hundreds of ventilation system connections between the districts…” Ban Xiangming shook his head with a soft sigh at this point. “Unfortunately, by the time the ventilation system connections were severed, of the ten outer districts, besides us here, only the Second and Ninth Districts hadn’t been invaded by the beast hordes.”

He remarked with some lingering fear, “I can’t imagine if the people in the Sixth District hadn’t sent a message to the main city in this way, whether we would still be standing here right now…”

Chai Yuening couldn’t help but fall into a thoughtful silence.

She subconsciously reached for her waist. The communicator that should have been clipped there was gone, lost somewhere.

She didn’t know where her scattered teammates were now, or if they were safe.

She only knew that she seemed to have done something incredible. The survivors would be grateful to her, the main city would be grateful to her, but this act hadn’t been able to protect the district where her teammates were.

“Captain Chai? Is there anything else you need help with?”

“Can you arrange two temporary residences for us?” Chai Yuening replied, snapping back to reality.

“Too many people have flooded into the Seventh District today, there might not be any vacant rooms. And it’s not a very convenient time…” Ban Xiangming thought for a moment, then asked, “How about I ask Boss You for you, Captain Chai?”

At that moment, Chai Yuening nodded.

You Lan was a warm-hearted merchant, at least on the surface.

Upon hearing that her “old friend” had nowhere to go for the night, she immediately offered to provide a place to stay, free of charge.

However, if time could be turned back, Chai Yuening would probably have chosen to sleep in the vehicle.

Because…

The moment she led the two young girls, holding two hotel room cards, and pushed open the first door, a fragrance that she couldn’t quite place but just felt wrong in every way wafted out to greet them.

The room was dimly lit with a pinkish-purple light. A round waterbed was covered with a smooth silk sheet, and two layers of thin, pink gauze curtains hung around it.

Paintings with strange implications hung on the walls. On a floral-carved coat rack next to a two-person swing hung two terrycloth bathrobes and all sorts of sparkling, dangling things that were hard to make sense of.

The bathroom had a bathtub that an ordinary family couldn’t afford, and the area around the tub was sprinkled with perfume-sprayed plastic flower petals.

Jing Mu took the other room card from Chai Yuening’s hand with a blushing face.

The moment the door closed, Chai Yuening pointed awkwardly at the large round bed and said to Chu Ci, “You sleep on it, I’ll sleep on the floor.”

Chu Ci: “The bed is so big.”

Chai Yuening: “I’m just afraid…”

Chu Ci: “Afraid I’ll infect you?”

Chai Yuening: “…?”

---

Author’s Notes:

A certain Boss You, who lives only in dialogue and wishes to remain anonymous: This is all I can do to help.