Chapter 142 That should be considered extremely ironic...
"That's not called a sacrifice."
Coming to her senses, Fu Qing mentally corrected the system's words.
"—Who says I'm bound to lose?"
system:【……】
It screamed: [That's not the point!!]
Fu Qing's expression turned somewhat strange: "When the first 'Fu Qing' decided to commit suicide, I saw that you were quite happy."
Forget about stopping her, they were practically urging her to die faster.
[...] The system choked, then stubbornly said, "The situation is different now than it was then."
In the third life, not only did the timeline change, but it also underwent some changes.
Although Fu Qing is more assertive and difficult to deal with than Zhao Yunxiao, she is overly perceptive in areas where Zhao Yunxiao tries to hide things, and can exploit Zhao Yunxiao's weaknesses at the slightest provocation, threatening him with an expressionless face. The host-system dynamic has almost been reversed.
But it also has to admit that, just as Fangzhou's students trust their principal wholeheartedly, Fuqing even needs to take proactive measures to sever that infantile attachment...
It also relies on Fu Qing, who is its host.
As an ally, she was so reliable that even when she left, she would plan out a way for her teammates in advance.
This was true in my first life, and it is true now.
“What’s different?” Fu Qing countered. “This time, the authorities took timely measures as soon as the apocalypse arrived. Humanity has never been so well prepared. Moreover, Fangzhou’s students are already capable of handling things on their own.”
Fu Qing was even confident that even if the future host was a complete idiot who knew nothing about management, construction, or post-apocalyptic survival, and even if Fang Zhou disappeared and all that remained was ruins, the students would still be able to rebuild a new campus on the ruins.
“This time, with a new host, you won’t have to be bound to an athletic loser like Zhao Yunxiao anymore. I can even instruct Chief Tian before I leave to find the new host and protect them immediately if any trace of them is discovered. Wouldn’t that be better?”
She almost convinced the system.
Even if the host change is random, it would be difficult to find someone worse than Zhao Yunxiao.
Moreover, the current cheat system for managing the campus was tailor-made for Fu Qing to fulfill her wishes, and the system can easily switch back to the original cheat system after leaving her.
A powerful ally, a superior host, and the combined advantages of three lifetimes—that would certainly be ideal.
But for some reason, it just didn't want this ending.
However, in the time that followed, no matter how she tried different methods to persuade her, Fu Qing remained silent.
The system has no heart, otherwise it would probably be experiencing the feeling of utter despair by now.
News of the five students' injuries spread rapidly that evening.
In addition to Lu Yan, several parents of students who are doctors also rushed to the scene to participate in the surgery. Just in case, Tian Xuejun also helped to bring in military doctors and blood plasma.
The parents of the three children rushed over with pale faces, but after hearing what had happened, they comforted Fuqing instead.
Although the comforting voice was extremely weak.
"This is their own choice, they can't blame you."
"If anyone's to blame, it's us for being so useless... sending our children out to fight while we cowered in a safe place."
As she spoke, Yin Zi's mother began to cry with regret.
They have already tried their best.
For over a month, not a single parent could truly feel at ease staying on campus and enjoying the benefits of the shelter. Their entire hearts were with their children; every minute and second the students were fighting outside felt like an eternity of torment to them.
A group of middle-aged people who often sit in offices and suffer from various underlying health conditions persevered through dozens of days of grueling training. They sweated profusely on the playground, vomited repeatedly in the simulation chamber, wiped their mouths clean, gritted their teeth, and lay back in.
But it's still far from perfect.
Their physical fitness and reaction speed have declined drastically, making them no match for younger people. Their training time is also too short. They can handle rudimentary zombies, but when faced with evolved zombies, they immediately panic.
They couldn't help the students at all.
Fu Qing remained silent, saying nothing, but went to get paper cups and poured several cups of hot water for them.
The group sat down on a bench outside the operating room, comforting and encouraging each other, while Fu Qing stood in the corridor and watched over them the whole time.
Fortunately, Yin Zi and the others' surgery went very smoothly. They were very experienced, and their full gear protected their vital organs. Although their injuries looked serious, most of them were actually sacrifices of some of their defenses to avoid being bitten by zombies.
It's better to be injured than to be infected.
The three were admitted to the school hospital that night to recuperate. Compared to the physical pain and exhaustion, their mental exhaustion was even greater, and they quickly fell into a deep sleep under the influence of the medication.
After receiving the news, the students who were fighting abroad also came to visit him one after another after completing their missions.
Afraid of disturbing the three people's rest, they squeezed together in the corridor outside the ward, each craning their necks to look through the small window.
The curtains blocked their view, so they couldn't see anything, but each of them still stubbornly glanced at it.
After the "visit," they whispered to each other in comfort:
"It shouldn't be anything serious."
"I trust Dr. Lu's medical skills."
"Jiang Feng asked in the group how things were going, so I quickly replied to him and told him not to worry."
"Does anyone know Xiaotong's roommate? Please tell them..."
"Yin Zi has excellent grades. She dominated me during practice sessions, so she'll definitely be fine."
"What happened? Where's the zombie that hurt us? Did you kill it? If not, let's team up and get revenge!"
"You're not in a position to seek revenge. Get in line. Yin Zi's roommates are furious after hearing the news and have already formed a team."
"Everyone, disperse. I heard they called for rescue only after they had wiped out all the zombies."
Upon hearing this, the students in the discussion hissed, "That's ruthless?"
The rescue call came so late; if the group hadn't managed to clear out the zombies, they might have been dead by the time the rescue arrived.
It's unclear whether they forgot or, at that moment, they disregarded their own safety, putting aside any thoughts of seeking help and focusing solely on killing the zombies in front of them.
These people arrived in a hurry, and it was only after a while that they heard about the conversation between Yin Zi and the principal from other students present.
An unprecedented storm of anger swept across the entire campus.
Hundreds of discussion threads appeared on the forum in an instant.
[You beast! You animal! I'm so angry!]
[What's the point of targeting innocent civilians? If you've got the guts, come find me and let's fight one-on-one!!]
[I came back to rest, but what's the point of resting now? I feel like I can still kill.]
[This is disgusting...]
In normal evolution, only one mutated, evolved zombie can emerge from among countless rudimentary zombies.
However, if one is directly infected by an evolved zombie, the chance of becoming an evolved zombie is much higher.
In the past, devout believers always employed a strategy of overwhelming numbers.
With billions of people worldwide, even if the infection rate is very low, as long as the scale is expanded, the efficiency of producing evolved zombies will definitely be the highest.
However, the isolation policies adopted by China and the extremely strict defense and screening measures implemented in shelters have drastically reduced the rate of infection.
At least, it was far below their expectations.
That's why they had to change their tactics.
I understand everyone's emotions, but let's discuss this rationally. The place Yin Zi's team went to was a hideout of devout believers located using CCTV footage. But with so many people hiding there, the technicians investigating the surveillance didn't notice anything amiss. This means their plan has been in progress for at least a while, and we haven't heard a thing—that's the most terrifying thing.
I just have one question: Have any of you noticed a significant increase in the number of evolved zombies while fighting in the field recently?
As soon as the post was published, everyone was plunged into recollection, and then they were horrified to discover that the answer was actually no.
After a long pause, the poster finally posed a question in a somber tone.
[…If that's the case, where did all those evolved zombies go?]
*
Where have all those evolved zombies been hidden?
Fu Qing also wanted to ask this question.
Unfortunately, in her first life, she could have used her senses to detect the gathering of zombies within a certain area. A thorough search of the entire S City would have eventually yielded clues.
But that's impossible for her now.
Sun Wei led the publicity team and used the connections of Fangzhou Rescue Account to contact many non-governmental rescue organizations, and dug out the missing persons rescue information from the past month and checked them one by one.
Tian Xuejun then arranged for a group of people to go to various shelters to organize survivors from different areas, interview them one by one, and cross-reference their information in an attempt to find clues about the large-scale mass disappearances.
Another group of technicians urgently began to review surveillance footage from the past month—originally, they were only looking for believers and didn't need to go through so much old footage, but now they weren't willing to let a minute go by, determined to find out the origin of the victims and the whereabouts of the zombies.
The number of missing persons in the month following the apocalypse was in the tens of millions. Even with the emergency deployment of many volunteers and parents to help, the workload was still overwhelming.
The abandoned factory buildings weren't enough to house the staff, but the administrative building had enough meeting rooms and empty rooms, so Fu Qing simply let all of Tian Xuejun's people in as well.
Overnight, a vast sea of information flooded into Fangzhou.
Even before the apocalypse, countless people were lured into telecom fraud and pyramid schemes, disappearing without a trace and unnoticed, let alone after the apocalypse.
Nowadays, disappearance is almost synonymous with death and infection.
Unrecognizable corpses rot and stink in the streets, ashes pile up like mountains at the crematorium, and portraits are posted on the walls awaiting identification. The area of the photo wall continues to expand, but very few photos are ever taken down.
Life and death unfold every minute of every day on this land, yet the disappearances of thousands or even hundreds of people cause not a ripple.
Unless, someone notices them.
As dawn broke, the group had finally finished identifying all the victims from the two locations discovered by Yin Zi's team.
The group disappeared about a week ago. The entire survivor squad vanished together and was then mysteriously transported to a death location thousands of meters away.
The initial failure to detect the anomaly in the surveillance footage was not due to technical errors; most civilian surveillance systems are currently out of power, rendering much of the city's surveillance network inoperable. Given the believer's abilities and the suitability of his chosen detention location, it was entirely possible for him to bypass the surveillance cameras and infiltrate through blind spots.
These people had their phones confiscated, losing their means of communication with the outside world. They were left at the mercy of the believers, and even their relatives and friends believed that they had died in a zombie attack.
Tian Xuejun did not tell the relatives the truth, but only informed those relatives who could not attend that the body had been properly arranged and that they could go to a certain location to collect the ashes once the condition improved.
The person in charge of announcing the death looked grave, and the others weren't much better off.
Realizing that the believers' primary target was the spontaneously formed survivor squads, they investigated the whereabouts of at least three hundred squads in City S from the shelter residents.
The shelter is always open, and anyone who can get to the shelter's location will be accepted, so new residents are constantly bringing new information from the outside world.
Unlike the civilians who hid in their homes after the apocalypse and had almost no ability to fight zombies, most of the people who came to the shelter had been wandering outside for a long time and had their own fixed teams before entering the shelter.
After obtaining information about the hiding places of these teams from them, Tian Xuejun spent the next half day investigating these more than three hundred locations with the help of Fangzhou students.
To everyone's disbelief, more than half of the places were now deserted.
Only a very small number of the hiding places were cleaned up, showing that the evacuation was carried out in a calm and unhurried manner, which basically confirms that the team is safe.
The remaining dozens of hiding places were either littered with miscellaneous items, covered in bloodstains and signs of struggle, or simply had everything left on shelves and in backpacks, with bedding still on the ground, while the owners had vanished into thin air.
Aside from zombies that don't need to eat, it's hard to imagine anyone would simply discard those essential survival supplies in the apocalypse.
Adding up the confirmed number of survivors from the eliminated squad, everyone's hearts sank to the bottom.
There were over 8,300 people, including men, women, and children!
Based on information provided by residents of the shelter and evidence found at the scene, the time of disappearance ranges from one month ago to three or four days ago, a very long period.
S City has a resident population of approximately ten million. When you add in the short-term transient population who were stranded in the city during the outbreak, such as tourists, people visiting relatives, people seeking medical treatment, and business people, the number is even greater.
During such a chaotic period, more than 8,000 people disappeared one after another in just over a month, almost undetectable.
As this number was calculated, some people clutched their chests, feeling difficulty breathing.
Older people are even starting to look for quick-acting heart medicine.
"Our conservative estimate is that if only about one-tenth of them become evolved zombies, that would still be close to a thousand..."
It should be noted that due to the immense destructive power of the evolved zombies, many victims are already severely injured or killed before they even mutate. If the devout followers were to control the force with which the evolved zombies bite, instead of allowing them to attack freely as usual, the number of infected could very well double.
Although this method is troublesome, it can indeed mass-produce evolved zombies on an assembly line.
Not to mention, the survivor squad is only able to quickly count the number of missing persons because of its large number of members and scale.
There are many more survivors scattered in twos and threes, whose disappearances go unnoticed.
"try to find!"
Tian Xuejun suppressed her anger, her tone unusually cold and resolute.
"We'll dig three feet into the ground if we have to, we'll find them!!"
Just then, a man rushed into the conference room. He was running so fast that his glasses slipped down his nose, but he didn't bother to fix them. He was waving a printed and enlarged screenshot of the surveillance footage in his hand.
"A discovery!"
He slapped the screenshot in front of Tian Xuejun, not even bothering to maintain his manners, and said urgently, "When we were investigating the surveillance footage from the past month, we found someone who looks like the hooded woman at the hideout of a survivor."
"She was positioned in a blind spot of the surveillance camera, appearing for less than a second, and even then, only in profile, with her features completely obscured, making her unrecognizable to the machine. However, after comparison, we believe her body shape is highly similar to the target person—"
Tian Xuejun looked up abruptly, then quickly focused her attention on the paper.
Before he could figure it out, Fu Qing leaned over and glanced at it, then drew a conclusion.
It's her.
The screenshot was enlarged, and some of the edges were cut off. The hooded woman was standing in the corner, with only half of her body showing. With the low resolution, she was almost blurred into a color block.
She seemed to sense the presence of the surveillance camera, and in that brief half-second, she hurriedly looked up at the camera above her head.
From an overhead angle, the wide brim of the hat covered most of his face, revealing only a small part of his chin.
The time displayed in the lower left corner shows that this image was taken two weeks ago.
They had only exchanged blows once in the mountains late at night more than half a year ago. Logically, Fu Qing was not familiar with her, but with just one glance, that face clearly reappeared in his mind.
She was inexplicably certain that the face hidden under the hood was smiling.
The corners of his lips were turned up high, hidden beneath the fiery red lipstick applied down to his ears; it must have been an extremely sarcastic yet delightful smile.
—Just like she couldn't wait to see what kind of surprise and fear would appear on the face of the person sitting across from her in the future.
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