Chapter 44

More and more refugees are coming along the highway.

In two weeks, more than two hundred people have entered the camp under construction, becoming new team members.

In contrast, more than a hundred people have chosen to leave.

Those who stayed were mostly women and children, as well as elderly people who were physically weak. The long journey had left them very tired, and the meals and beds made them feel the atmosphere of home, as if they had come back to life from a hell filled with corpses. Although not everyone agreed with the rules set by Su Hao, they did not want to argue over trivial matters, nor did they want to try the life of wandering again.

Almost every day, a few strangers pass by on the highway.

Due to hunger and fatigue, they all come to the camp. The questions they ask are mostly about food and safety, as well as information about the surrounding area, directions, and the locations of other cities. Some people want weapons, or offer to help for free. Some even take out bundles of banknotes from their backpacks and bluntly offer to hire Su Hao and other team members to provide protection along the way.

Everyone has their own way of life, whether in times of disaster or peace. This is what is called "individuality."

The rapid increase in team members has significantly accelerated the construction of the camp. The tall and thick walls are already taking shape, the foundations for two additional residential buildings have been dug, and the concrete base for the underground floors has been poured. To provide sufficient power, Su Hao added two small solar power generation units to the camp.

Supply trucks from the city still make a round trip every two days. However, the number of vehicles has increased from two to six as the team has expanded. Su Hao fairly distributes food to everyone willing to participate in labor. The rations include candy, alcohol, and cigarettes. These items naturally arouse the envy of outsiders who are unwilling to enter the camp. They gather outside the camp, unwilling to leave but also unwilling to go in. Each time the supply convoy arrives from the city, it causes a stir among these people. They look at the convoy with envy, jealousy, hatred, and greed, watching the trucks enter the camp, unload, and leave.

As more and more people gather outside, and with a nearby river, a small settlement gradually forms. It is very dirty and chaotic. The population is highly mobile, often completely empty one day and filled with new outsiders the next. Various information is exchanged here. Some people think they should return to the city, some think they should join Su Hao's team, and others stubbornly believe they should continue north.

Where there are people, there are disputes.

When someone tried to sneak into the camp at night to steal food, Su Hao's long-suppressed anger erupted again.

He killed two intruders.

The bodies were not buried according to custom but were instead hung high on wooden poles, nailed to a position more than fifty meters from the camp gate. This brutal and bloody act intimidated all the outsiders with ill intentions and attracted dozens of zombies. The howls and screams echoed around the camp for the entire night.

The next morning, when the people inside the walls woke up from their sleep, they found that the bustling settlement outside was completely empty, leaving only garbage and blood, and a few mangled corpses.

On August 11th, Old Song led the rotating personnel to the camp with the supply convoy. He very seriously informed Su Hao that in a few months, the food supply might face a shortage.

The team members have increased to nearly three hundred.

Su Hao injected everyone with the immune agent, though no one knew that this substance was actually his blood. The team still follows the rotation system between the city and the outside, divided into ten small teams, searching for supplies in the city and looking for new food sources in the wild.

Tao Yuan obtained a few hand-guided tractors from the city's agricultural supply company. After the mature crops in the fields around the camp were harvested, the survivors immediately began plowing and planted hundreds of acres of potatoes, as well as a considerable amount of cabbage and radishes.

Winter wheat will not be planted for another month, but Su Hao has already reserved a large amount of farmland. The nearby river makes irrigation very convenient. If everything goes well, the winter harvest should be enough to sustain the consumption for several months.

Perhaps because they have developed a sense of belonging to the team, many newly joined survivors no longer stick to labor hours. They have become more diligent than ever. Many people voluntarily cultivate wasteland near the walls, though the furrows are crooked and there is no real farming technique. Gradually, green sprouts began to appear on the land where wheat had just been harvested. There were pumpkins, green beans, and some people even fished in the river and hunted in the mountains during their free time, often filling the kitchen with the rich aroma of meat or fish soup.

Cao Rui and the twin sisters found a chicken farm in the suburbs. After killing over a hundred zombies gathered there, they rescued more than thirty surviving hens from the cages. The chicken farm was large, and from the number of cages, it was estimated that it could have housed thousands of chickens. The zombies, driven by hunger, did not discriminate in their diet. They would not hesitate to eat any kind of meat. If Cao Rui had not shot the zombies that were about to tear open the cages, they would have chewed the chicken bones clean, leaving nothing behind.

The poor hens were huddled in the corners of the cages, trembling. They were all brought back to the chicken coop set up in the camp. That day, every team member gathered outside the chicken coop, smiling. The survivors looked at the hens with ill intent, imagining the deliciousness of eggs and roasted chickens.

Liao Qiu found three piglets in a village outside the city. He spent two days building a spacious pigpen in a corner of the camp. He declared to everyone: "The 'Protection of Minors Law' will apply to these small, fat creatures. They must be fed the best feed and not be treated as pets. Of course, this will not last forever. Once they have enough offspring and grow fat, Liao Qiu is actually very willing to share ribs soup, braised pig ears, stir-fried liver, and sautéed kidneys with everyone."

Daily life is monotonous but also exciting.

Besides labor, everyone must participate in combat and shooting training on time. This includes nine-year-old Yang Lulu. Su Hao requires everyone to be able to use weapons like sticks to fight zombies and to hit a zombie's head from fifty meters away.

This requirement is not excessive. Becoming a first-stage enhanced person only requires ten milligrams of silver bone. In other words, as long as you kill five zombies, split open their buttocks with an axe, and suppress the intense nausea and vomiting, you can become stronger.

Su Hao tried taking more silver bone. He found it to be a waste. His body, which had reached the fifth stage of strength, showed no further reaction. Helpless, he could only focus on collecting more decayed bacteria hormones and silver bone. Thanks to the increased manpower, the quantities of these two substances have reached an extremely large scale.

Even he couldn't explain why he trusted the newly joined team members so much.

...

As the sky just began to brighten, the construction site inside the camp walls was already bustling. The concrete mixer drum kept turning, and the evenly mixed concrete was directly pumped into the underground steel foundation. The two low-temperature cold storage units transported from the city yesterday were lifted by a crane and slowly placed into the unfinished basement. In the distance, the large gap in the wall had been closed, and people began installing the heavy steel gates. These gates were found in the heavy machinery factory in the north of the city. They were essentially huge steel plates, over twenty meters wide, over fifty meters high, and twenty-five centimeters thick. There were dozens of such steel plates in the factory's warehouse. According to the survivors' speculation, they were originally intended for military use.

Su Hao walked to the window with a steel grid and glanced at the steel gates being installed in the ground slots by the crane, a smile appearing at the corner of his mouth. He turned around and walked to the desk filled with various experimental instruments.

This is Building No. 1. According to Su Hao's requirements, this building is used for special purposes. Especially on this floor, all the rooms have been renovated for use as a hospital and laboratory.

In the spacious laboratory, only Su Hao and Zhou Chen were present. The latter was hunched over an electron microscope, observing something. Along the walls on both sides, there were various instruments such as constant temperature incubators, protein decomposers, and electronic mixing bases. On the cement workbench in the middle, there were densely packed glass measuring cups, flasks, and test tubes.

All these items came from major hospitals, chemical raw material companies, or optical instrument stores in the city.

Su Hao could never explain his peculiar sense of trust in the newly joined team members—from the group of survivors rescued from the bathhouse, including Chen Kun, to later members like Dong Guoping and Chen Erzhu, and even the outsiders who joined for food and shelter. He felt an inexplicable sense of intimacy and warmth. This feeling was not one-sided; Su Hao could also sense the same feeling from the others. It was as if they were old friends or family members, or even more intimate.

This was not normal.

He observed secretly for a long time and finally discovered that this feeling was not directed at everyone but had very specific conditions.

It was his blood.

Su Hao once thought it was an illusion. To verify this hypothesis, he consciously injected the immune agent into some of the newly joined outsiders. The results showed a strong difference in the way he treated those who were injected and those who were not. The former were very close, while the latter felt like strangers.

This body combined the best human genes from the future. However, Su Hao did not believe this was the true cause of the issue. According to his knowledge, the master-servant relationship between humans largely depends on the brain, and the cellular affinity caused by blood relations is minimal, at most five percent. The situation he experienced was very unique, with no similar or close cases in human biological research history. However, apart from his experience of traveling through time, there was indeed a unique point.

He had taken the prototype agent.

Zhou Chen stared intently at the microscope, his jaw muscles twitching, and his face showing extreme excitement. Except for Su Hao, he was the only one in the team qualified to conduct such research.

"You... You should come and see this."

Zhou Chen raised his head, his eyes flashing with fear and shock. His forehead was covered in sweat, and he looked at Su Hao as if he had seen a ghost. This strange appearance made Su Hao very uncomfortable. He walked over, patted Zhou Chen's back, and the latter immediately moved away from the table, letting Su Hao take over the electron microscope.

Bending down, lowering his body, and bringing his eyes to the eyepiece, Su Hao saw a dense mass of cells. It felt like a crowd of tadpoles in a nearly dry puddle, thousands upon thousands, frantically moving and darting around each other.

On the slide under the lens was a drop of blood squeezed from Su Hao's fingertip, with added nutrient solution and the blood of another outsider who had not been injected with the agent.

"The number of red blood cells exceeds the normal value by five hundred percent, or even more. The significantly increased oxygen supply can greatly enhance physical movement and muscle expansion. This is the most significant physical difference between enhanced people and ordinary people, as you mentioned. I have calculated the unit content of white blood cells and other cells, and they all show a dramatic increase. But this is not the most critical factor. I think you have already seen... those black particles. I don't know what they are, and I have never seen them before."

Zhou Chen stood by, explaining. He felt his scalp tingling, as if the shocking image was still flickering before his eyes. Su Hao was clearly not concerned. His eyes did not leave the lens, and he casually "hmm"ed, then immersed himself again in the microscopic world magnified countless times.

Among the dense red blood cells, there floated the black particles Zhou Chen