When Xu Anran woke up again, it was already dawn. She checked her phone and it was four in the morning. She got out of bed, went to the bathroom at the back of the car to change out of her dirty clothes from yesterday, took a shower, and after showering, she looked in the mirror. Feeling that long hair was too much trouble, she took out scissors and cut her hair to ear level. She then rinsed off the hair clippings and dried it with a towel.
By this time, her stomach was growling with hunger. She didn't want bread today, but wanted some soup. Xu Anran took out a packet of seafood noodles and cooked it in the car's small electric pot. She also took out a bottle of coconut juice, poured it into a cup, and added some ice. It tasted sweet and refreshing. Paired with the cooked seafood noodles with sausage and egg, it was simply too good to be true.
After eating and drinking her fill, Xu Anran lay back down on the bed and took out her tablet to check the surveillance cameras she had installed earlier. She started by looking at the ones in the residential area, seeing what had happened the previous night. She noticed that some of the people in the footage also possessed spatial rings belonging to monsters, and that they knew the monsters' weaknesses, allowing them to quickly eliminate them. Most of these people were soldiers, but the bespectacled man leading them and the burly man beside him didn't seem to be soldiers. However, there was another man who appeared to be a leader with them, seemingly their superior.
Although it's unclear whether these people are from official sources, it's evident they intend to use this residential area as a refuge. Xu Anran then reviewed surveillance footage from other areas and discovered that the class monitor led several classmates to escape by scaling the wall over the school's back playground around noon yesterday. They carefully controlled their noise, nervously observing their surroundings. Fortunately, no one noticed them, and they escaped. It's unknown what happened next; hopefully, everything will go smoothly for them.
After a short rest, Xu Anran resumed her intense training. Besides eating, sleeping, and training, she also checked surveillance footage daily to observe the outside situation. Another week passed. News and trending topics online featured reports of monsters; their existence was being discovered all over the world, and many humans were fleeing, pleading for help online. Some cities had already fallen, with very few survivors; the monsters were no longer hiding and were slaughtering humans. Other cities remained untouched; their armies, uninfiltrated by the monsters, had killed most of them, established safe havens, and notified nearby residents to seek refuge there. They warned people about the monsters' disguises and posted self-rescue guides online, including information on the monsters' weaknesses and methods for identifying them.
Xu Anran checked and found that the nearest shelter was in Pengcheng, which was about a five-hour drive away by highway. Considering unforeseen circumstances, it would take a maximum of eight hours to get there.
The city is basically under the control of monsters. She will be discovered sooner or later. It would be better to go and check out the area near the shelter. She plans to drive to the vicinity of the shelter and then hide the car. After observing the area by electric bicycle, she can decide whether to enter the shelter or not. If it looks good, she can go into the shelter.
On the night before her departure, Xu Anran had another dream:
In her dream, she was driving her RV to a highway exit when she saw an obstacle ahead. Without stopping, she prepared to drive through it, but she hadn't noticed rows of metal cones on the road. The RV drove onto them, and a tire blew out. The vehicle went out of control, swerving wildly. She kept slamming on the brakes and trying to steer, finally managing to stop without overturning. As soon as she opened the door to get out, she was surrounded by seven or eight people who pointed guns at her. They led her to a small house and forced her to go inside.
Once inside, she found that more than a dozen people were already locked up in the room. From them, she learned that they were all going to the shelter like her, but they had all been captured and locked up by the group outside.
The group outside were monsters in disguise. Every night they would choose one or two people from the house to kill and eat. Some of them were already in despair, their eyes lifeless, as if they had lost their souls. Others were still trying to find a way out. She tried various methods, such as climbing through the window and banging on the door, but all of them failed.
On the evening of the third day after she was captured, she was chosen by the monsters and taken out of the house. The monsters tied her up and cut off her thigh with a knife. She was in so much pain that tears streamed down her face and her whole body convulsed. Then they cut off her other leg and left her to bleed on her own. They then took her two legs and roasted them over a fire like roasting lamb legs.
Just as she lay on the ground, barely alive from blood loss, she heard a group of people approaching. They were incredibly fast; after a series of shouts, the monsters were all dead. She heard the footsteps of two people approaching, right where she was lying. The two men passed her, went to a nearby large tree, and picked up something that emitted a faint yellow glow. The two men were the burly man and the bespectacled man; their expressions showed that it was a valuable item, and they were very pleased.
At this point, she could no longer lift her eyes, and she became increasingly sleepy. She slowly lost consciousness.
Waking from her dream, she thought she couldn't go to the shelter now; it would be too dangerous for her to go alone. The group of people in the neighborhood in her dream were also going to the shelter, and she should go with them. But before that, she thought she could first go to the place where she was killed in her dream and look for that glowing thing.
After making up her mind, she packed her things, started the RV, and drove it to a place some distance away from the obstacle. By then, it was already evening, and the sun was setting in the west. After observing that there was no one around, she drove the vehicle off the road, found a small grove of trees, parked it there, and then covered the vehicle with a camouflage-style car cover.
Then, she took out her electric bicycle from her spatial storage and rode it for a while before getting off, putting the bicycle away, and walking through the forest for about half an hour until she reached the vicinity of the cabin. She took out her binoculars to observe and saw that two or three of the monsters were sitting by the roadside, while four or five others were standing next to the cabin, and two more were in the roadside bushes, in very well concealed positions.
Xu Anran planned to wait until the last rays of the sun had faded and it was completely dark before searching for the object. After waiting for over an hour, it was completely dark, and the monsters lit their lamps. Xu Anran used night-vision binoculars to observe the area around the wooden house. After searching for a while, she finally spotted something faintly glowing near a large tree some distance behind the wooden house, not far ahead of her. The light was not bright and easily missed if one wasn't paying attention. Xu Anran cautiously approached.
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