Chapter 40
Lou Tiannan and others did not have a smooth journey to South District 1.
Because the further they went to the southern area, the more zombies they saw, so they were forced to stop.
“Hehe——”
“Huh—”
Perhaps they smelled the breath of living people, even though Lou Tiannan and others were hiding in a sanitation room full of garbage, zombies gradually gathered nearby.
Lin Bai glanced at the crack and said without turning his head, "If you don't hurry up, Xiya will be fed to the zombies."
Xiya, who was holding the doll, looked up confusedly: "?"
Zhou Yu poked his head out of the pipe and said while retching, "Is this the only passage underground?"
Lin Bai's eyes didn't leave the zombies outside the building. He said indifferently: "If you can find another one, there will be more than one."
Zhou Yu was discouraged and couldn't find it.
"It's okay, come down quickly." Song Yan's voice came faintly from the pipe.
"You two go down first, I'll follow behind." Lou Tiannan gestured to Lin Bai and Xiya to go down first.
Lin Bai reached out and picked up Xiya, preparing to hand her to Zhou Yu first.
Looking at Zhou Yu, who was emitting a foul smell and had stains of unknown liquid on his body, Xiya's tender face wrinkled into a bun. She used her hands and feet to lock her hands on Lin Bai's neck like a koala, clearly expressing her resistance.
Zhou Yu's heart ached when he saw this: "Okay, okay!" He sneered and told Xiya: "You will become a smelly and dirty child soon!"
After hearing this, Xiya turned her head and made a face at Zhou Yu, then carefully put the doll into her arms to protect it, and held her bag against her chest. These were all her treasures.
Seeing that Xiya was able to hang on to her tightly, Lin Bai did not reach out to hug her. He lowered his head and said to Zhou Yu, "Get off."
Zhou Yu withdrew his head into the pipe in frustration.
Seeing Zhou Yu enter the pipe, Lin Bai pulled Xiya with one hand and jumped into the pipe.
Every urban area has a sanitation station, and underneath the sanitation stations are extensive underground pipes used to transport groundwater and urban garbage. These urban garbage will be collected and processed in different underground garbage treatment centers.
Some of these garbage disposal centers are located in the city, while others are located in other urban areas. In the central and southern regions, which were extremely prosperous cities before the end of the world, their garbage disposal centers are generally far away from the urban areas.
They were lucky and found the sanitation room before the zombies discovered them, but the underground pipes underneath were interconnected and no one knew where they led to, so they could only walk in the dark.
Fortunately, the underground garbage pipes in the prosperous urban area are built strong and spacious, so Lou Tiannan, who is nearly 1.9 meters tall, can walk upright in them. Of course, there is garbage below his knees.
There is a special automatic exhaust system in the pipe, but it has probably not been used for a long time, and the smell inside can make people faint.
Lu Jia and Song Yan walked in front with flashlights, and turned on the manual exhaust system on the top as they walked, which made the situation a little better.
Shortly after getting off the pipe, Xiya said to Lin Bai, "Mom, I can go by myself."
Zhou Yu, who was walking in front, heard it and said, "With your short legs, if you come down, all this garbage will drown you."
Xiya glanced at the garbage in the pipe. What Zhou Yu said was indeed right. Someone next to her stretched out a hand and said, "Let me hold her."
It’s Lou Tiannan.
Lin Bai handed Xiya to Lou Tiannan. Xiya hugged Lou Tiannan's neck and said crisply, "Thank you, brother."
Lou Tiannan stopped lifting his legs, stared at Xiya with gray eyes and said, "You can't call me brother."
Lou Tiannan's voice echoed in the pipe.
The people in front heard it and turned around in confusion. In the dim light, Lou Tiannan's expression was unclear. His low and hoarse voice echoed in the pipe: "I am about the same age as your mother. We are of the same generation. You have to call me uncle."
"Uncle?" Xiya was only half-understood. She couldn't figure out what seniority was. The one with white hair was called grandpa, the one with a beard was called uncle, and Lou Tiannan looked young without a beard, so she always called him brother.
Zhou Yu reacted quickly, slapping his thigh and saying, "Hey! It's true! Xiya, if you call us brother, your mother is one generation older than us. Lin Bai has been taking advantage of me for so long, and I'm only realizing it now."
"Who took advantage of you!" Lin Bai didn't understand why Lou Tiannan was so concerned about seniority at this moment. Do all elitist Alpha males care so much about their seniority?
The stalled team quickly continued walking in the pipeline.
"Then Xiya can't call me sister anymore, she has to call me auntie." Song Yan said as they walked, "I'm only 22 years old and I'm already an auntie."
Zhou Yu joked: "It's okay to continue calling you sister. She calls me uncle, and you can follow her and call me uncle too, hahaha..."
Song Yan raised his hand and made a pistol gesture, saying, "Bang!"
The little episode livened up the atmosphere in the pipe, and the five adults and one child walked forward bit by bit in the dark and smelly pipe.
After walking for a while, everyone was numbed by the odor from the pipe. Zhou Yu glanced sideways at Lin Bai and said, "Why don't you have any expression at all? Aren't you feeling uncomfortable?"
Lin Bai, who had already shut down his olfactory system, said: "It's not uncomfortable." Because I can't smell.
Zhou Yu gave Lin Bai a thumbs up with great admiration.
The team walked for a long time, and Song Yan in front stopped and asked, "How should we go?"
They came to a fork in the road with five pipelines and didn't know which one to take.
Someone suddenly said, "The second one on the left."
Song Yan and the other two who were walking in front turned around to look at Lin Bai. Zhou Yu asked, "Are you talking nonsense, or are you serious?"
"you guess."
Guess what? The three of them turned their gazes to Lou Tiannan. Lou Tiannan glanced at the five pipe openings and said, "Go to the second one on the left."
After entering the classification pipe, the pipe entrance became much narrower. Song Yan and Lin Bai, who were slightly shorter, had to lower their heads to walk, not to mention strong men like Lou Tiannan, who could only move forward with their backs bent.
Not long after walking, we arrived at another fork in the road, but this time the pipes were divided into different sizes, and the five numbers Ⅰ, Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ, and Ⅴ were marked on the pipes from small to large.
Lin Bai said without hesitation: "Go to the one with number Ⅰ."
Zhou Yu said, "Are you sure? The one in port 1 is half the size of port 5."
"Listen to her." Lou Tiannan said.
So everyone entered the pipe at entrance Ⅰ again.
This time, Xiya wanted to come down and walk by herself. Since the entrance of the pipe was narrow, everyone had to crawl to get out. Lou Tiannan didn't let her and tied her to his chest with a belt.
The further Zhou Yu walked, the more uncertain he felt. Is this path really the right one?
Until Song Yan, who was in front of him, passed by a place and suddenly said, "Look down."
The special transparent material plate allowed them to see two large pipe openings in the space below, with the bright characters IV and V marked on them. Below the pipe openings were rows of blades, and some large garbage that had not been dealt with in time was stuck on the blades. Although they had stopped running, the sharp light made everyone feel a chill in their hearts.
"It turns out that there is a garbage cutting center below. Fortunately, I didn't take the V pipe!" Zhou Yu reacted and saw that the garbage that had not yet come down from the pipe mouth also showed signs of cutting. It seemed that there were cutting knives inside the pipe mouth. If he had taken that path, he would have been half dead.
Now no one dared to question Lin Bai's directions. At the next few forks in the road, they went in without hesitation.
After half walking and half crawling in the pipe for more than an hour, Lin Bai stopped when she saw that there was another fork in the road ahead. She knocked on the wall of the pipe.
It was the echoing sound of "dong dong dong".
"Have we arrived yet?"
"kindness."
"But now that we're here, how do we get out?" The pipe walls look thin, but the material used is actually very strong. If they break it forcibly, it will make quite a noise and will definitely attract nearby zombies.
Lin Bai pointed to one of the pipes at the fork in the road and said, "There's a valve leading out from there. Turn it and a vent will appear. That's where the sanitation robots will use to monitor the garbage."
Zhou Yu and others went to see the pipe that Lin Bai pointed out, and were dumbfounded for a moment: "It's so small!" They could only fit their heads in, and their shoulders couldn't fit in.
"She can go in." Lin Bai said.
"Who is she?" Zhou Yu followed Lin Bai's gaze and saw Xiya.
Lin Bai said to Xiya, "Can you go?"
"Yes, I can!" Xiya nodded a little excitedly and excitedly. Her mother gave her a task!
After Xiya agreed, Lin Bai said to her, "Climb over here and you'll see a vent. There's a round gate on the right. Just circle it clockwise. But before you do that, make sure the vent is open. If it is, there might be zombies or other bad guys. If you can't defeat them, crawl back quickly."
"Okay! I understand!" Xiya nodded obediently.
Lou Tiannan put Xiya down and gave her a flashlight. Xiya glanced at Lin Bai and then crawled into the small pipe.
Zhou Yu was a little worried and asked, "Is she okay?"
Lin Bai glanced at him and said, "Why don't you go?"
Okay, Zhou Yu, shut up.
Song Yan was a little worried about Xiya, so he squatted by the pipe opening and listened to the movement over there.
"Mother?"
Xiya's voice suddenly came from inside the pipe.
"Hurry up." Lin Bai spoke to the pipe expressionlessly, and then the pipe became quiet.
As time passed, Zhou Yu and Lu Jia couldn't help but squat at the mouth of the pipe worriedly, looking at the dark pipe. They were very worried about Xiya, after all, she was only a seven-year-old child.
"Is this pipe so long? Why is Xiya still not moving?" Song Yan said as he called Xiya's name into the pipe, "Xiya, are you okay?"
There was no response from Xiya in the pipe, but instead there were some unknown ding-dong sounds.
"Is she safe?" Song Yan said worriedly, but she saw Lin Bai wiping the stains on his body with the towel in his bag. Song Yan couldn't help but ask, "Aren't you worried about Xiya?"
"What's the point of worrying?" Lin Bai's answer seemed very unkind. "I'm not with her now."
Lou Tiannan's eyes moved. What did he mean by "not by her side now"? He thought Lin Bai's words were very strange.
"That being said..." Song Yan knew that what Lin Bai said made sense, but he still felt that Lin Bai's indifferent attitude was a bit cold-blooded.
Lu Jia, who was standing by, had long known that Lin Bai was indifferent, but he didn't expect that she would be so ruthless to her own daughter. For a moment, his impression of Lin Bai became even worse.
Lou Tiannan looked at the time. Nearly twenty minutes had passed. It was too long, and Lin Bai was leaning against the pipe with his eyes closed, not saying a word.
"We--" Lou Tiannan just opened his mouth to force his way in when he heard a slight movement sound in the pipe above his head.
Then a faint light came into the pipe, and the vent above the pipe was opened.
Zhou Yu and others looked delighted, Xiya did it!
They jumped onto the ventilation platform and hurriedly headed towards the pipe where Xiya entered.
At the end of the platform, in the light coming through the vents, they saw Xiya.
Xiya's hair was disheveled, her body was covered in dust, and she was huddled up in a ball, holding a valve that was almost as big as her head with both hands and trying hard to turn it. When they turned their sight, they saw two zombies lying on the ground beside Xiya, and they couldn't help but gasp.
There were traces of fire burns on the zombie's body, and red and white blood plasma was slowly flowing out. It was obvious that it had just died.
"Xiya..." Song Yan called out softly.
Xiya's small body trembled, and she turned her head to see several people standing on the platform. Her eyes suddenly turned red.
Lu Jia used a vine to lift Xiya up. As soon as Xiya got on the platform, she ran straight to Lin Bai, hugging Lin Bai's legs and shaking violently.
Lin Bai sighed, squatted down and picked up Xiya, patting her on the back and saying, "It's so dirty."
Xiya buried her face in Lin Bai's neck and finally sobbed, "Wuwuwuwu mom - I'm scared - there are zombies wuwuwuwu -"
"Then why don't you come back?" Lin Bai asked her.
"I want to help my mother, wuwuwu, I can help my mother... wuwuwu..." Xiya hiccuped, her childish words sobbing but full of seriousness.
Lin Bai patted her head unskillfully and said, "Not bad."
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