Chapter 50: Danger, My Financial Sponsor

Antonio and Dean, who were guarding the supplies, saw Lu Weiyi and Gu Qingji return safely, asked about the situation, and became more cautious about the rest of the journey.

That night, just as Gu Qingyue had said, except for Lin Yimu and Gu Qingyue who knew how to cook, everyone else went out to pick vegetables and cleaned the houses as well.

Every household in the countryside has grain stored, and all kinds of fruit trees are planted in the yard. There is no space to store the bags of wheat and corn. Ripe apples and pears are hanging on the branches, and ripe cherries are about to fall to the ground. Li Zhuang felt a little distressed when he saw it, and kept saying, "Out of sight, out of mind." He went out to inspect, and when he came back he actually brought back two watermelons, saying there were three or four acres of watermelon fields nearby...

After a sumptuous meal that night, they began to rest. Lu Weiyi volunteered to guard the second half of the night, and Lin Yimu naturally followed the young master.

Lu Weiyi sat for a while, then used the excuse of going to the toilet to quickly walk around the village and put those things that he couldn't take away directly into the space. As for the fruit trees and watermelon fields, they would definitely be taken away with their roots.

While he was happily enjoying the joy of the harvest, in a small county hundreds of miles away, Zhuang Mingxu was facing an unprecedented difficult situation.

In a completely enclosed small house, Zhuang Mingxu sat on the ground in a mess, his legs limp, blood oozing from his knees, quickly soaking his pants. His forehead was covered with cold sweat, and the child in his arms was crying breathlessly. The veins on his hands as he held the child were exposed, and it took him a long while to squeeze out the words from between his teeth, "Don't cry."

There were a group of men standing in front of him. The leader had a crew cut, wore a black vest, camouflage pants, and held a stick in his hand. His sturdy arms were covered with tattoos. He didn't look like a good guy. He looked at Zhuang Mingxu and said, "He's a man, but--"

He poked Zhuang Aiyi with a stick and saw Zhuang Aiyi shrank back in fear. This successfully attracted Zhuang Mingxu's attention and he laughed, "If you don't behave yourself, I'll break his legs. I just don't know if he can withstand a single blow of the stick."

"With his tiny arms and legs, he would have died right away if his stepbrother had hit him with a stick like that."

“That’s right…”

Amid the responses from several men, Zhuang Mingxu simply hugged the child tightly in his arms, with his head slightly lowered and no expression visible.

On the eleventh day of the apocalypse, Zhuang Mingxu finally set out for Wutong City.

There were three brothers who retired from the army with him, Ning Yuan, Wu Yue and Qin Jin. Before the end of the world, Qin Jin was on a business trip and lost contact. Wu Yue stayed in Qingyuan. He took Ning Yuan with him, as well as two subordinates from the company and the driver Zheng Xin - he was the only one who had awakened his superpowers.

The two subordinates were brothers Li Mingli and Li Mingyue. Their home was in a small county town on the way from Qingyuan to Wutong City. They thought they could go back to see their family, but as a result, they were caught up in the act.

Their journey went smoothly at the beginning. Lin Yimu had left unique marks on the road after the earthquake, so the journey was not difficult, and they brought enough supplies. The bad thing was that on the third day after they went out, the two brothers gradually awakened their special powers.

The early superpowers are indeed not as strong as the later ones, but in terms of combat effectiveness, they are not inferior. They can strengthen the physique and as long as the superpowers can be output on any weapon, zombies can be killed with one blow. As more and more zombies appeared, after being rescued twice by three psychics, Zhuang Mingxu vaguely felt that the brothers' mentality seemed to have changed, and they wanted to seize the initiative.

Ning Yuan also noticed it sensitively. He mentioned it to Zhuang Mingxu privately. Both of them wanted to back off and make plans after meeting Lu Weiyi.

As a result, when they arrived at Dongshui County, the hometown of Li Mingli and his brothers, they found that the entire county had been controlled by a force, and Li Ji, a cousin of Li Mingli, was the leader here.

He used to be a murderer. Immediately after the earthquake, he took a few people, robbed the prison guards' weapons, and escaped from prison. He secretly returned to Dongshui. A few days later, zombies came and they dominated the area.

When Zhuang Mingxu saw this situation, he immediately worried that something might happen. While Li Mingli and his brothers were meeting their relatives, he asked Ning Yuan and Zheng Xin to leave secretly. It would be difficult for him to leave with a child. If they didn't have any extra thoughts, there would be no difference between one person and three people. If they really wanted to do something, Ning Yuan and Zheng Xin leaving would provide them with a way out.

Zhuang Mingxu's worries were right. The Li Mingli brothers just mentioned a few times in front of Li Ji the rich supplies they had prepared at the base, which made Li Ji interested. Without any courtesy, they directly ordered the man to be arrested. Zhuang Mingxu did not think of resisting at first. With Zhuang Aiyi around, his first thought was to delay time and wait for reinforcements. As a result, not long after, Zheng Xin, who had left with Ning Yuan, came back.

Only then did Zhuang Mingxu realize that this man had colluded with the Li Mingli brothers at some point in time, but was still playing a double-faced role in front of them.

Upon learning that Zhuang Mingxu had taken precautions at the first moment, Li Ji broke his kneecap on the spot. If he had not been worried that he might be needed to seize the supplies in Zhuang Mingxu's hands in the future, Li Ji would have planned to kill him to prevent future trouble.

Seeing that Zhuang Mingxu had no intention of resisting, Li Ji did not waste time and left with his men. Just when everyone was about to leave, Zhuang Mingxu looked up at Zheng Xin, who was following at the end, and asked, "Where's Ning Yuan?"

Zheng Xin paused and continued walking forward. As the sound of a door closing came, he heard, "...bitten by a zombie."

If Zheng Xin looked back at this moment, he would definitely see Zhuang Mingxu staring at him with eyes as dark as an abyss with no bottom, as if it could completely swallow him up in the next moment.

**

The group got up early in the morning at daybreak. Gu Qingyue made wraps with eggs and flour, and stuffed them with various vegetables, so that they could eat them on the road at noon. We had a bowl of millet porridge with the freshly found pickles and a few wraps per person, and that was it for breakfast.

After the meal, Lu Weiyi and a few others packed up their things, while Li Zhuang and Antonio went to drain the water.

Before they had finished packing their things, Antonio came running back and asked Lin Yimu, who was watching over the night, "Did anything happen last night?"

"No, what's wrong?" Lin Yimu came from a military background, so his alertness must be no problem. If he said no, then it definitely was no.

"The melon that Dean ate yesterday was delicious. I wanted to go to the watermelon field to see if there were any left. But when I got there, I found that they were all gone."

Lu Weiyi's heart skipped a beat and he cursed Antonio silently, looking calm and even frowning.

"What do you mean 'all gone'? Picked by someone?" Gu Qingji didn't understand what he meant.

"Everything in the entire field is gone, not even the grass." Antonio looked puzzled. There are many things in the apocalypse that are hard to understand, but often not understanding means danger.

"How could this be? There was no noise at all last night." Lin Yimu looked at Li Zhuang who was walking towards him slowly in disbelief.

Li Zhuang shrugged. "Not only that, the apple trees, pear trees, and cherry trees that we didn't pick yesterday have all disappeared."

“Some of the vegetable gardens are empty.”

"The food that couldn't be taken away and the big jar of pickles were also gone."

Rather than being secretly picked up by someone else, Li Zhuang believed that it was someone among them. After all, those things were obviously things they could not take away or did not want, and it happened last night.

Li Zhuang's eyes kept sweeping over the four people who were on guard last night. Antonio and Dean definitely didn't know about it, otherwise they wouldn't have taken the initiative to run there so early in the morning and been discovered. As for Lin Yimu and Lu Weiyi, Lin Yimu's eyes were too calm, and Lu Weiyi habitually didn't express his opinions, so nothing could be seen at this time.

"Since they were able to take these things away quietly without us knowing, they must be someone we can't afford to offend. Since we can't figure it out, let's just leave here quickly."

In the end, it was Lin Yimu who made the final decision. He pointed to the map and said, "Our next stop will be Beiping Town. Before the apocalypse, this was a town formed by the merger of several villages. It is about the size of a small county town. There will probably be a lot of zombies in there, so we need to be careful."

"Can't we just go to Lijia Village on the edge? Even though it's a detour, there will definitely be fewer zombies." Gu Qingji pointed to a village road nearby.

"No," Lu Weiyi denied it directly. Gu Qingji looked at him, but he didn't say the reason.

Lin Yimu on the side explained, "...I took this road when I came here and left a mark." If someone else comes, the probability of meeting him here will be greater.

"Also, there are two gas stations here, we'd better go in and get some gas."

Gu Qingji nodded and said nothing more.