Finally, New NPCs?

In truth, she had no choice at all.

Xia Yan knew perfectly well that with only one leg left, even getting out of this street would be difficult for her, let alone returning to Boulder City.

Besides, what would she do if she went back?

She had been a mercenary for quite some time, but she had barely saved any money. A decent neural-link bionic prosthetic could easily cost over ten thousand chips, while even a cheaper mechanically driven prosthetic would still cost more than a thousand.

That was practically the price of a chemically powered exoskeleton.

Even selling herself wouldn't be enough to afford one.

Either go with these people, or wait here to die.

The choice really wasn't that hard.

Sitting on the edge of the jolting wooden cart, bouncing up and down alongside sacks piled high around her, Xia Yan sighed silently.

Perhaps this journey was the last bit of freedom she had left.

Other than taking her back to bear children, she truly couldn't think of any use she might have to the man before her.

A skill?

Work?

Ha.

After thinking it over, all she had left was this body, which still had a little value.

She had heard it hurt a lot. She wondered if that was true...

"We're here."

The voice from ahead interrupted at least two hundred thousand words' worth of imaginary nonsense.

Snapping out of her daydream, Xia Yan abruptly raised her head and discovered that, at some point, these people had brought her to a small grove.

At the center of the woods stood an open space dotted with wooden stakes, and in that clearing rose an unfinished concrete wall.

Beside the concrete wall stood rows of kilns sending up wisps of smoke. Farther back were earthen pits for smoking meat and racks for smoking fish.

The air was filled with the smell of roasting meat, while the clanging of tools rang in her ears.

Some people hammered at stone with mallets, some worked bellows to feed air into the furnaces, while others carried stones, laid walls, or chopped down trees.

The place looked like a large construction site.

Primitive and bustling.

These people... were all his subordinates?

As she looked at everything before her, Xia Yan's pale face was filled with shock. She made a rough count and found quite a few people here—at least a dozen or twenty within sight—all dressed in matching blue uniforms.

And the instant she saw those clothes, it took her less than a second to guess their identities.

Vault residents!?

I never heard there was a Vault nearby.

But...

What are they doing?

Xia Yan was confused.

Vaults were not uncommon in Clear Spring City. Some had opened years ago, while many remained sealed to this day, waiting for their unlock date to arrive.

The Vaults doing well could occasionally become a force of their own, while the ones doing poorly had mostly become food for mutants or aberrations.

Xia Yan remembered that there seemed to be a Vault not far from Boulder City, but the survivors inside were rather xenophobic. They were unwilling to interact with outsiders and extremely cautious. Let alone undertaking major construction on the surface, they rarely even came out of the Vault.

But does a wall like this even mean anything?

It was certainly sturdy enough—bullets probably couldn't penetrate it—but no matter how sturdy the wall was, could it be stronger than a Vault door?

Those things could even block gamma rays.

"...You're people from a Vault?"

"Yes." Chu Guang glanced at the injury on her leg. "I thought you'd passed out."

She had been obediently quiet the entire way, without making a sound.

Chu Guang had been paying most of his attention to the surroundings and hadn't paid much attention to her. He had assumed that she had passed out from blood loss.

He hadn't expected her to still be awake.

"I'm not that fragile."

Xia Yan lifted her chin. Her brows and expression were both stiff, as though filled with lead. She felt that this might make her look a little more spirited.

At least she wouldn't seem timid.

Unfortunately, no one paid any attention to her forced show of toughness. In fact, no one had noticed it at all.

"I can tell." Chu Guang withdrew his gaze from her mangled severed leg and said casually, "Your wound is healing a little faster than an ordinary person's."

Using Vault 404's attribute template, her Constitution was at least 8, with an error margin of roughly ±1.

An ordinary person, even without excessive blood loss, would have been burning with fever and unconscious by now.

Yet this woman was somehow still holding on. Aside from cold sweat on her forehead, a pale face, and slightly muddled consciousness, she was doing surprisingly well.

Of course, it might have been because of her "talent."

Survivors in the wasteland were all more or less touched by mutation. It was hardly strange for them to possess physical traits beyond those of ordinary people.

Chu Guang looked at the two players and instructed them.

"Take the food to Tomato Scrambled Eggs and have him store it properly."

A few days ago, Chu Guang had told Brother Scrambled Eggs to build a granary capable of storing grain and meat.

If nothing had gone wrong, it should have been completed by now.

Whether the supplies were dried before storage or simply piled inside in whole sacks, Chu Guang trusted that the cook was more knowledgeable and reliable than he was.

Since players were around, Chu Guang could not be bothered with such trivial details.

The last time, just making smoked meat had been enough to wear him out. If he had to plan the granary himself, the food would probably mold or get eaten by rats before winter arrived.

Upon hearing the administrator's orders, Fang Chang and Ye Shi nodded in unison and accepted the task.

"Yes!"

"Understood!"

Chu Guang said nothing.

He reached out, lifted the female mercenary sprawled across the cart, and ignored her startled cry as he slung her over his shoulder like a sack of grain.

Then, with his other hand, he grabbed the backpacks Ye Shi had looted from the other three mercenaries and strode toward the sanatorium.

Ye Shi and Fang Chang watched in admiration.

That huge pile of equipment plus a living person had to weigh at least a hundred kilograms.

And he just picked it all up and walked away with one hand on each side. That was way too strong!

As he watched the administrator head toward the sanatorium, Old White, who had noticed the commotion, quietly came over.

"What happened? Who's that person our BOSS is carrying?"

"Ask Fang Chang. He's the only one who saw the whole plot. I just watched it for nothing." Either he had been looting bodies or serving as a hostage; Ye Shi felt like nothing but a tool and looked thoroughly depressed.

Fang Chang made a helpless expression.

"Don't look at me. This game doesn't even have subtitles. I couldn't understand what the NPCs were saying to each other during the cutscene... Just think of her as a newly added NPC."

He could more or less guess what had happened, but it was difficult to explain it all clearly. Better wait for the official site to update.

Old White stared blankly.

"Alright... but why was she so badly hurt?"

"Forget badly hurt—she nearly died," Ye Shi said with a sigh. "You have no idea what we ran into on the way back."

"What did you run into?"

"A Crawler!"

"Holy shit?" Old White stared at Ye Shi in shock and hurriedly asked, "You guys ran into a Crawler? What did that thing look like?"

The official site had information on Crawlers, but apart from a few vague written descriptions, there was nothing about their combat capability.

There was not even an illustrated entry to refer to.

Old White only remembered that the thing seemed to belong to the same category as Gnawers. Both were symbiotic mutants born from fungal infection, apparently connected to biological weapons, with their original ancestors now impossible to trace.

He had originally assumed it was just a monster from the setting, one the game company might not even have made a model for yet.

Who would have thought these two had actually encountered one?

"It was ugly as hell. It had four super long arms. When it was crawling, it was about half a person tall, but standing up it was probably around two meters. Not only was it ridiculously strong, it was fucking fast! The three of us fired a volley and didn't hit it once. In the end, the administrator was awesome—he swung a steel pipe and stabbed it to death in a few hits."

Ye Shi vividly described what had happened, though with his abstract storytelling style, he had basically explained nothing clearly.

Old White turned to Fang Chang for help, and the latter sighed.

"I can't explain it clearly in a few words either, but it was basically like Ye Shi said. That Crawler was absurdly strong."

"I'm guessing the new expansion didn't just update in-game events. It probably added more mutants, new NPC factions, and quests related to them. Let's talk about it after we log off... The administrator told me to take the cart to Brother Scrambled Eggs, so I'm going to turn in the quest first."

Though he really wanted to discuss Fang Chang's new discovery with him, there were only three hours left until dark. There truly was no time to slack off.

Old White sighed and nodded.

"Fine, go ahead... I'll go figure out the blast furnace for steelmaking again. Once you're done, hurry up and come help me!"

"Alright, see you later."

Elsewhere, inside the sanatorium.

The players working on the scaffolding all noticed the administrator returning from outside.

And, naturally, they noticed the woman slung over his shoulder.

"Holy crap, look, look! The Administrator's carrying someone over his shoulder!"

"Who's that???"

"A new NPC?"

"And she's a girl!"

"Finally, a new NPC! Bros, we're one step closer to the closed beta!"

"Ooooooh!"

The thought of getting one step closer to the closed beta had the players pumped up like they'd been injected with adrenaline, working even harder at hauling bricks and plastering walls.

Xia Yan, slung over Chu Guang's shoulder, felt her cheeks burn as though they were on fire. It wasn't just because of the position—it was also because of all those stares that made her feel as if thorns were pricking her back.

She couldn't understand what those people were saying, but she didn't need to.

She could guess. It was nothing more than filthy trash talk, just as filthy as the looks in those men's eyes.

She could picture it: like hyenas on the wasteland, they were using this method to fawn over and flatter the male who served as their leader, hoping that after he had enjoyed his prey, they might get a bone or a mouthful of broth.

And obviously, she was that tender, delectable lamb.

The more Xia Yan thought about it, the more terrified she became. Her clenched teeth began to chatter uncontrollably, and her eyes grew damp until tears even fell.

She suddenly regretted it. Rather than being humiliated and then thrown to the wolf pack to be torn apart, she would have been better off ending herself. At least she could have died with some dignity.

But her body wouldn't listen to her.

The elevator descended.

It arrived.

Chu Guang strode through the shelter's gate, passed through the airlock, and entered the residential hall. He tossed the pack stuffed with equipment aside, then threw Xia Yan from his shoulder onto a chair.

"Hiss—be gentler... What are you going to do?"

Sucking in a breath from the pain, Xia Yan stared nervously at Chu Guang as he approached.

"Behave yourself."

Too lazy to bother with her, Chu Guang casually pulled open a drawer and took out a silver-white metal tube. He flicked off the plastic cap with his thumb, then habitually tapped it with his index finger.

"It shouldn't hurt. Bear with it."