Mutant Tribe!

Before leaving Water Caltrop Lake Wetland Park, Chu Guang first took Ye Shi to the mutated leech nest near the parking lot.

"We found those mushrooms in there." Ye Shi pointed at the damaged concrete pipe not far ahead.

"Good thing you didn't go inside."

Chu Guang patted Ye Shi on the shoulder.

"Let's go."

"That's not our target today."

He had heard that leeches could be used as medicine, but whether mutated leeches could be used that way was another matter.

The two carefully skirted around the mutated leech nest, avoiding the lush vegetation and concrete ruins as they tried to stay in the sunlight.

They headed east for a while.

Looking at the elevated highway and residential buildings ahead, Ye Shi, who was following beside Chu Guang, could not help asking,

"Aren't we going hunting?"

"Yes."

"Then why are we getting farther and farther from the forest?"

"The forest is up ahead."

"?"

Chu Guang did not explain further. He silently took the iron pipe rifle from his back, chambered a round, and his entire bearing changed.

Not far away stood a broken elevated overpass.

The marks left by time on its moss-covered concrete support pillars were hidden beneath the shadows of green plants.

Basin-sized rats lapped at muddy water pooled in a gutter. Upon discovering the two unwelcome intruders, they darted into the grass.

Ye Shi looked up, his pupils widening slightly as a trace of shock filled his eyes.

Beyond the broken overpass stood towering buildings covered in vines and moss. Thick roots had pierced the cracked concrete ground, while tree trunks rose from the middle of the road, overturning cars and bus stops that had long since become heaps of rusted scrap.

This green hell teemed with life, yet concealed deadly dangers capable of devouring everything.

The sight before him was so breathtaking that every frame seemed like a post-apocalyptic work of art. Ye Shi had even forgotten that this was the "game world."

And at that moment, he finally understood what Chu Guang had meant.

This was the real forest...

"From here on, we need to be careful."

As Chu Guang spoke, he disengaged the iron pipe rifle's safety and began advancing step by step.

Although this was only the far northern outskirts of Clear Spring City, still far from the city center, they could not afford to lower their guard.

High-rise residences, sewers, sky gardens, parking lots, drone hives, automated planting towers, maglev stations, and behind every window...

Every man-made miracle, once abandoned by civilization, became a natural greenhouse and breeding ground.

After the nuclear war, this land had indeed endured a long winter, but it had lasted less than half a century.

Nature's power had reversed everything.

The first to fall were the high-rise buildings. Moss began creeping upward from their shaded sides until it eventually covered every inch of them.

The low-rise buildings had not escaped either.

During the years of humanity's decline, a few torrential rains and one sweltering summer were enough to turn this place into a paradise for rampant fungi and flowering plants.

They provided abundant food for wild animals.

And after the urban drainage system collapsed, freshwater resources within the city were even more abundant than those in nearby Diamond Lake.

Wild animals and uncontrolled livestock began migrating from forests, lakesides, and farms into the more comfortable urban environment. Under the combined effects of radioactive substances, genetic weapons, and time, they evolved into savage, bloodthirsty mutants.

They were collectively known as aberrations!

Of course...

The dangers here went far beyond that.

After carefully moving along 76th Street for some distance, the surroundings remained silent. Just as Ye Shi was wondering where all the aberrations had gone, Chu Guang's voice came from beside him.

"Something's wrong."

Chu Guang suddenly stopped in front of an abandoned car.

Ye Shi immediately snapped back to attention and halted as well, nervously looking around, yet he saw nothing.

"What happened?"

Chu Guang's expression was grave.

"There are signs of survivor activity."

"Other survivors?!" Ye Shi froze for a moment. Mimicking Chu Guang, he lowered his voice, but he could not hide the excitement in his tone. "Are they natives of the wasteland?"

He was finally going to meet other NPCs!

He had waited so long for this moment!

Chu Guang glanced at him, knowing exactly what he was thinking.

"You really don't need to be so excited. This isn't something to be happy about."

"Why?"

"Because in a place like this, strangers are more dangerous than aberrations."

Without explaining further, Chu Guang crouched down and found a string of cans threaded together with wire behind the abandoned car's wheel.

The aluminum cans had been blown open from the inside. The jagged openings looked as though something had exploded inside them, and he could faintly smell the lingering stench of rotten eggs.

"Gunpowder with excessive sulfur, along with thumbtacks and metal shards..."

Chu Guang frowned.

Mutants?

Or raiders?

Ordinary survivors would not deploy tripwire mines near a settlement.

Such things were unlikely to hurt aberrations with keen senses of smell. In other words, they were meant for people.

Judging from the lingering odor, the explosion had happened recently—no more than five hours ago, perhaps even less.

Chu Guang turned back and asked,

"When you came out from underground, did you hear any explosions coming from the east?"

Ye Shi shook his head nervously.

"No."

"Wait here."

Watching Chu Guang put down the cans and stand up, Ye Shi asked anxiously,

"What are you going to do?"

"Scout the situation ahead."

"I can come with you—"

"You stay here."

Ye Shi wanted to insist, but when he met Chu Guang's gaze, the words in his throat were swallowed back down. In the end, he slowly nodded.

The pressure from someone with administrator privileges made him realize that the man before him was not joking around. If he pushed it, he might really get kicked offline...

After telling Ye Shi to hide beside the abandoned car, Chu Guang put away his rifle, pulled out the sharpened steel pipe from his back, lowered his body, and quickly slipped into a building beside the street.

When he had set out, he had indeed planned to use this player as bait, but the situation was different now.

The people ahead were other survivors, and quite possibly raiders or a mutant tribe. Bait had lost its purpose and would only alert the enemy.

Chu Guang's expression was grim as he gripped the steel pipe tightly.

This place was less than a kilometer in a straight line from Water Caltrop Lake Wetland Park, far too close to Vault 404!

Especially now, when the players were busy ramping up production. Even if vegetation and concrete obstacles blocked some of the smoke, dust, and noise, the people here would discover them sooner or later.

Leaving such dangers alone was always a hidden threat.

Chu Guang was prepared to kill.

If he judged that the other side might pose a threat, he would strike first without hesitation.

The ten-story building facing the street had a narrow emergency stairwell, and moss covered the cramped space.

Fortunately, there were no particularly dangerous aberrations inside.

Around the fifth floor, there were a few plump mutated rats. Perhaps because they thought they had strength in numbers, they bared their teeth at Chu Guang and recklessly charged toward him.

If he had turned his back and run, they would certainly have swarmed him. But this uninvited guest showed no fear at all, and their naturally timid instincts kept them from acting rashly. They only made tentative lunges and shrieked while baring their teeth.

Chu Guang was long used to this.

Without another word, he thrust the pipe forward and stabbed the nearest mutated rat to death.

Seeing how ferocious he was, the rats scattered at once and fled through the floor entrance, disappearing into the shadows.

"Looks like this isn't a rat nest."

"Probably only ten or twenty of them..."

Any more than that, and they would have been hard to deal with.

A swarm of mutated rats could give even fully armed mercenaries a headache, let alone someone like him with only an iron pipe rifle.

Chu Guang breathed a sigh of relief, shook the sharpened steel pipe, and flung off the fat dead rat along with its blood.

He went straight to the tenth-floor rooftop.

Using the steel pipe in his hand as a crowbar, Chu Guang pried open the rusted door and entered the rooftop terrace.

The wind on the rooftop was strong.

He walked to the rusted water tank and looked toward the residential complex to the east. What he saw confirmed his guess.

In an open space between the concrete buildings stood a camp made of wood, with torn cloth and construction debris blocking the view from outside.

Survivor strongholds in the wasteland generally fell into two categories. One occupied intact prewar buildings directly, while the other built new shelters amid ruins or on open ground, depending on the surroundings.

Raiders living in urban districts usually stayed in buildings and rarely constructed such primitive dwellings and fortifications.

Only mutants, averaging over two meters tall and weighing more than 150 kilograms, would build such wooden shacks even when ready-made buildings were available.

The wooden stakes at the camp entrance had been sharpened like beast fangs. Several dismembered corpses had been impaled upon them haphazardly, and dried blood stained the ground.

They ate everything.

Not just fungi and plant fruit, but even mutated flies, rats, and cockroaches.

Of course, what they loved most to eat was their former kin—

Two-legged people.

Scanning along both sides of the street, Chu Guang soon spotted a mutant sentry carrying a metal longbow on the roof of a storefront building at the end of 76th Street.

Its green skin looked just like the orcs in fantasy films. In truth, they were just as strong, savage, crude, and bloodthirsty as orcs.

Its two-meter-tall body and knotted muscles were covered in armor cobbled together from metal junk. The billboard used as a breastplate even bore the words, "Second one half price."

The two outward-curving steel bars mounted on its shoulders were bicycle handlebars ripped straight off a bike—highly effective against slashing and blunt-force attacks, since they could trap chainsaws or axes.

It was quite cyberpunk.

If Chu Guang and Ye Shi had continued forward just now, they would have encountered that mutant sentry's ambush by the intersection at the latest!

A faint chill of lingering fear rose in his heart.

Chu Guang's Adam's apple bobbed slightly. He shifted his gaze and continued looking toward the mutant camp in the eastern residential complex.

There were too many obstructions for him to see how many people were inside. Based on the camp's scale and his experience, he could only estimate that there were between twenty and thirty mutants.

"A small mutant settlement..."

Chu Guang's expression gradually grew more serious.

These bastards were not easy to deal with!

Almost at the same moment, a pale blue system window appeared in his field of vision.

Mission: Eliminate the mutant tribe on 76th Street

Type: Side mission

Reward: 200 reward points

Wait—

Missions could be triggered outside the vault too?!

Chu Guang was briefly stunned, then immediately tried to summon the system, but there was no response.

The pale blue mission window faded away as though it had never appeared.

It seemed he was right that the system could only be opened near the vault, but missions could be triggered anywhere outside it?

Still...

Two hundred reward points was pretty damn amazing.

Without hesitation.

Chu Guang immediately put away his weapon, turned around, and swiftly left the area with a bewildered Ye Shi in tow.

That was 200 reward points!

A side mission that summoned one hundred players only gave 100 points, while this one gave 200. Clearly, it would not be easy to complete.

There might even be a massive trap hidden in it!

Chu Guang was no fool.

He was not about to fall for something so obvious.

"Administrator, what exactly did you see?" Watching Chu Guang finally stop, Ye Shi panted as he rested both hands on his knees, unable to stop himself from asking.

Chu Guang, who had stopped to rest, answered casually.

"It was a mutant camp."

"Then we're... just leaving?"

"Otherwise what, pick a fight with them? Get tossed into a pot of boiling oil if we lose?" Chu Guang glanced at him. "Use your brain. We only have one gun."

And only one person who could fight.

Ye Shi closed his mouth and said nothing.

He had not thought things through earlier and had treated the mutants as NPCs in the game. But from what the Administrator had said, the mutants were probably a hostile faction?

And they ate people...

Ye Shi quietly filed away this information, intending to share it with the other players once he got back.

"Picking a fight with those beasts now isn't a good idea. We need to prepare more thoroughly, gather our strength, and steamroll them once and for all."

Chu Guang, already some distance away, cursed under his breath.

"Fucking bad luck... the mutant camp is actually on 76th Street, right across from the east entrance of the park."

"No matter what, we have to be careful!"

Their planned hunting route could only be altered!

Chu Guang led Ye Shi around 76th Street and headed north along the elevated highway out of the city for about half a kilometer before discovering an abandoned construction site.

The site was enormous. It looked like a recently begun housing development. One of the buildings had risen to around seventeen or eighteen stories, while several other huge pits were likely foundations still being excavated.

Most of the construction equipment had already been scrapped. A crane tower had even collapsed onto an unfinished building, forming a sloping ramp.

It was clear that the building quality had been fairly good.

Even the crane tower had been toppled by the shockwave from the nuclear blast, yet the concrete structure had only been smashed open in one spot. Its main frame had not even been damaged.

The steel piled around the site had rusted away, and the bagged cement had all hydrated and deteriorated, making it unusable.

However, to his delight, Chu Guang found a large amount of unused bluish-gray gravel here!

Chu Guang recognized it at once. This was limestone. If he remembered correctly, its primary component was calcium carbonate, making it perfect as raw material for producing cement.

"Good stuff!"

Chu Guang secretly rejoiced and pulled out his map, marking the location.

Refining all this limestone into cement would be enough to build two buildings without any problem.

As long as Old White's side unlocked the technology for producing Portland cement, they would not have to worry about cement raw materials for a long time to come!

Thanks to "Kakarot from the Future" for the Alliance Leader reward!! The new book is still a little young, so please support it with votes~~~ If you haven't invested yet, give it a shot. Trust me, it's rock-solid!