Explorer

In Siberia, summer temperatures could in fact rise above thirty degrees Celsius, but that was in the more southerly regions. Within the Arctic Circle, it was still cold enough that people had to wear winter clothing to move about outside.

But those accustomed to this weather could go out in nothing more than long sleeves and long pants. Several young people returning to their hometown from the city walked through a Siberian research base that had been abandoned not long ago.

The research base was not very large, and the group had roughly covered the whole place in a little over an hour.

Teapots, teacups, gas stoves, standing lamps, desk lamps, searchlights—it could be said that the evacuees had taken only the important things, leaving all the other daily necessities behind.

Though these household items were quite insignificant to the Red Empire, a manufacturing powerhouse, they were highly sought-after goods in their resource-starved little village within the Siberian Arctic Circle.

There were also filing cabinets, wardrobes, and cupboards. Most were wooden, while a few were made of iron.

The sturdier wooden cabinets could replace the old ones at home. The wobbly ones could be chopped into firewood for the winter. The iron ones could be dealt with separately.

They even found several rifles and pistols, along with a jeep that would not start.

Even more surprisingly, they found a food warehouse. It was not packed full, but flour, canned goods, and other supplies still filled nearly half the warehouse!

More importantly, the internal power and heating systems were still intact. Even without considering the supplies left behind, the research base itself was extremely valuable.

Unfortunately, they could not find any documents. It was as if every last one had been taken away.

If not for the mess throughout the base and the signs that people had rummaged through drawers and cabinets, one might have suspected that the personnel had only left temporarily and would return later.

All these signs gave the young people ideas about the base itself, rather than merely focusing on the supplies that had been left behind.

As their search moved deeper into the base, a very unusual door appeared before them.

Since there were no warning signs or conspicuous red lettering, there should not have been any lethal danger behind it.

The young people exchanged glances, then decided to open the door. Naturally, their attention turned to the wheel valve on it, which looked like the mechanism for opening the door.

Sure enough, the wheel valve controlled several bolts above and below the door. And since the base had been abandoned only recently, the valve had not rusted and turned without any effort.

When all the bolts had retracted, the large iron door opened with a shrill creak.

Before them was a bright, spacious room dominated by pure white, with no blind spots anywhere within it. The most conspicuous features were the glossy steel-gray sink and toilet.

Other than that, there was also a... person sprawled out in the middle of the room?

"Why is there someone here?" "Is this person dead or alive?"...

Countless questions spilled from the young people at once. Clearly, none of them had an answer.

Their reaction only showed, unsurprisingly, how nervous they were.

After all, anyone would panic upon suddenly finding a person in a base believed to be completely empty.

So they could only keep asking questions, hoping someone might answer them and ease their anxiety.

But who could possibly have the answers?

As the cycle of endless unanswered questions gradually died down, everyone looked at one another.

At last, someone brave enough stepped forward and carefully examined the person lying on the floor in the room in an odd posture.

The person was rather tall, but looked emaciated and obviously malnourished. His skin was a bloodless, deathly white. The hair on his nearly bald head appeared black. Nothing could be made out of his eyes, since they had rolled back until only the whites were visible.

His chest showed no obvious rise or fall, yet there was no pungent stench around him either.

The young man checked the person on the ground for breath, then felt his neck. In the end, he merely shook his head.

Seeing what he did, the others knew that this person had not survived.

"What do we do? Leave him here?" someone asked.

Everyone looked disgusted by the suggestion. One of them said, "I wanted to use this place as a secret base. Leave a dead man inside it?"

In the end, the young man leading the group, and also the boldest among them, said, "Come help out. Carry him outside and bury him. We can consider this a proper end to what happened here."

Among Russians and in the Western world, there was naturally no notion of laying the dead to rest in the earth. But when it came to disposing of a corpse, digging a hole and burying it was undoubtedly the cheapest and cleanest option.

Cremation required gathering fuel, while burial required either a sturdy enough coffin or a dedicated tomb to place the dead in. Both were more troublesome than simply digging a hole and burying someone.

If they simply discarded the body, modern hygiene awareness made it easy to imagine undesirable consequences such as rotting smells and plague. So digging a hole and burying it was still the simplest solution.

In this utterly fantastical world, where rumors of Mutants, Vampires, Werewolves, and zombies could be found everywhere, the dead were actually the least frightening kind—as long as they did not climb back up.

So once they decided to bury the corpse, none of the young people made excuses. Two took his hands, two took his feet, and two supported him at the waist from either side as they prepared to carry him out and find a place to bury him.

As for digging tools, they already had some close at hand. There were not enough for everyone to have one, but burying a corpse was no great problem. The only question was how deep to dig. Too shallow, and it would be easy for Beasts to dig him up and eat him; too deep, and it would waste effort.

But the dead man was even heavier than they had imagined. It took six grown men to carry him, and they were left panting from exhaustion. As a result, when they emerged from the underground research base, they failed to notice the slight changes occurring in the corpse as it was exposed to sunlight.

In Siberian summer, sunlight was exceedingly precious because it brought warmth. So the group did not deliberately avoid the sun as they traveled. They simply took the straightest route possible toward the small woods outside the research base.

Aboveground, the research base was disguised as an ordinary settlement. This ensured that satellites or any other aerial reconnaissance methods would never detect anything suspicious about the place.

Back when the base had been operational, even the vehicles entering and leaving had not used military trucks or expensive cars that had no business appearing in such a place.

With such a layout, there would naturally be the small church and cemetery every village was expected to have. The young people intended to bury the man there.

Even if government personnel returned, they would not count whether this cemetery—whether merely for disguise or actually in use—had gained one extra grave.

What they did not know was that under the scorching Yellow Sun, the suspected corpse in their hands was beginning to show signs of life again.