"W-we're back?"
Someone murmured in the channel.
Everyone looked out through the windows, and their gazes froze.
The familiar walls.
The familiar iron gates.
The familiar outlines of the factory buildings looked like the carcasses of giant beasts crouching in the moonlight.
The abandoned factory complex.
After traveling all day, they were back where they had started.
The air inside the vehicles suddenly grew as heavy as lead.
No one spoke. No one complained. There was not even a sigh.
They had all fought their way through the apocalypse, and they all understood...
This was simply the norm in Shanghai No-Man's Land.
On this land riddled with the Eerie, surviving a day's travel and returning to the starting point in one piece was already a stroke of luck.
But behind them, someone thought otherwise.
In the wilderness roughly thirty kilometers behind the convoy.
A figure covered in vines was crouching beside a road marker.
She tilted her head, her expression a mixture of confusion, exhaustion, and a little hurt...
Like a kitten whose owner had teased her with a feather wand all day.
The direction she sensed had clearly kept moving-south, east, west, north, and then...
Back to the starting point?
Had her mind not already grown muddled, she would surely have thought the fellow she sensed was toying with her.
She stood up and shook her head, vines rustling as they slipped down her shoulders.
Then she resolutely started walking in that direction again.
The abandoned factory complex.
They had already stayed here for three days.
Three days.
Long enough for a living person's presence to leave a deep enough imprint on this land.
And long enough for the nearby Eerie to slowly gather, following that presence.
Cao Xianming called up the Data Model, his fingers swiping rapidly across