"Yu Lu! Come and lend a hand!"
"Yu Lu! We've run out of herbicide. Go to the logistics department and get two more bottles!"
"Yu Lu! Come and move some accelerant!"
"Yu Lu!"
"Yu Lu!"
The taciturn young man Yu Lu adapted quite well to the land reclamation team. On the first day of work, he moved corpses, weeded, pushed carts to load garbage, carried cement... He even handled the crystal core collection work, which many people disliked, with ease.
The crystal nucleus is a prismatic crystal that grows in the brain of a zombie, and its appearance is similar to a transparent garnet.
Although most of the zombies in G City had died from the artillery fire and their bodies had turned to ashes, there were still quite a few that had escaped in the corners of the city.
After the advance team kills this small group of zombies, they will leave their bodies in place until the pioneer team arrives to deal with them.
To obtain crystal cores, you must first break open the zombie's hard skull and rummage through a pile of sticky, blackish-gray brain matter. However, not every zombie can generate crystal cores, so sometimes you might spend an entire morning rummaging through its brain matter and still not find many crystal cores.
This job is disgusting and exhausting. Even wearing a mask can't block out the nauseating stench of a dead rat in a sewer. Plus, you can easily get infected with a virus if you're not careful. So, very few people in the pioneering team are willing to do this job.
Yu Lu was different. He looked thin and weak, but he was incredibly decisive and efficient. He chopped the corpse's head with his axe, twisted his wrist, and with a "crack," he performed a craniotomy on the zombie.
Wearing gloved hands, he stirred the brain matter around in the pile of brain matter, and after a whole morning, he actually managed to find two light-colored crystal cores.
It's important to know that the pioneering team doesn't have to hand over all the crystal cores they dig out of the corpses; they only need to hand over a symbolic portion. This can be considered a small perk the base gives to the pioneering team, since the crystal core mining rate is not high, and these hundreds of corpses might not yield even fifty crystal cores.
Therefore, these two crystal cores can be considered as extra income for Yu Lu.
As for the remaining corpses?
Of course, they were all sent to a temporary incinerator for burning. These days, there's no such thing as "the dead should be buried for peace."
"The young man is quite efficient at his work. I would say that young people are strong. They may look skinny, but they are much better at working than us older folks."
An elderly woman who was also touching the crystal cores watched with envy and couldn't resist taking off her mask to come over and chat with Yu Lu:
"You used to work on a land reclamation team?"
Yu Lu, his face covered by a large cotton mask, answered in a muffled voice, head bowed, seemingly unaccustomed to speaking to people:
"I used to be a chef, so I'm used to chopping bones."
He thought for a moment, then added, as if to:
"Zombie bones are a bit hard, and they feel a bit like pork bones when you chop them up. They're not ribs, but the second section of a pig's spine."
As soon as he gave this answer, several people turned to look at him. When they saw the grayish-white unidentified liquid stuck to the axe and the white bone fragments exposed on the back of the corpse's head, their faces turned green.
What kind of devil are you?
How will they ever look at pork bones the same way again?
The description is so detailed; what a ruthless character.
The older women who tried to talk to them didn't dare to say a word, and kept their heads down while working, afraid that they would vomit on the spot.
...
...
The pioneering team was provided with two meals a day. At noon, someone would drive a flying food truck to deliver the food. Before the truck even stopped, the pioneering team members would consciously take their lunch boxes and line up.
To Yu Lu's surprise, the food in the reclamation team was quite good. For lunch, each person had two palm-sized cornbreads and a bowl of pork and radish soup.
Of course, the flatbread was made of pure cornmeal, the kind that wasn't sifted, and the soup was a thin, clear broth that looked like it had no oil at all. The girl serving the food had a shaky hand, and when she did, only a few pieces of white radish were left in the spoon, which looked particularly pitiful.
"The new guy?"
The girl serving the food wiped her sweat and, noticing Yu Lu looking a little flustered since he hadn't brought his lunchbox, knowingly pulled out a clean set of tableware for him from the side.
"Use this for the next few days. You can return it to me when you get back to base after you buy new ones. These are all numbered, so don't even think about not returning them!"
Perhaps because he was a newcomer, there was a solid piece of pork bone in Yu Lu's bowl. It looked like it had been cooked for a long time. The whitish pieces of meat were half-cooked and half-lost on the bone, and the dry, lean meat had no color at all.
"Thanks."
Yu Lu, carrying his cutlery, found a flower bed to sit down and start eating. There were groups of people eating lunch nearby, including members of the reclamation team and the advance team.
—Although the advance team had special military rations, they would occasionally come over and eat with the reclamation team to change things up.
"Old Luo, how was your day?"
"Hey! Don't even mention it. I had bad luck today. I got caught by a mutated plant hiding in the underground parking garage. Luckily, I won't get a second infection, or I would be done for."
"Wow! There's meat for lunch today? The base is so generous?"
"I heard that the higher-ups are planning to designate this area of G City as an agricultural research base. Is that true?"
"Why do you care? Mind your own business. What does it have to do with us?"
"Hey, I was thinking that if this area really becomes an agricultural science base, shouldn't we be the first to buy a house here? If we wait for the base to allocate houses, it'll be a long time coming!"
"That makes sense. It's impossible to farm anywhere right now. It's better to be closer to the agricultural research base so we won't go hungry in the future."
A group of people were chatting animatedly, while Yu Lu sat to the side, listening to their conversation and slowly eating his pancake. He ate very attentively.
He would first soak the first cornbread in the soup until it was fully soaked, and then eat it along with the soup. He even ate the slightly bland white radish with relish.
This chapter is not finished yet. Please click on the next page to continue reading the exciting content!
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com