Chapter 147: The Outskirts

Lin Dong smiled with narrowed eyes.

"Don't be nervous. Come here and let me give you an injection."

"An injection?"

Su Xiaorou was even more surprised. Looking at what Lin Dong held in his hand, she quickly understood what it meant.

Although she didn't know what that thing was, it was still much better than being eaten.

So, she slowly walked over.

Lin Dong picked up a vial of "Evolution Serum" and directly stabbed it into her fair neck. The pain of the needle made Su Xiaorou frown.

Yet she could only grit her teeth and endure it.

As Lin Dong pushed his thumb down, the orange-yellow liquid sank into her body. Feeling a scorching heat flowing through her, Su Xiaorou felt as if she were burning, her skin turning reddish while her head began to itch.

This was the precursor to the condensation of the brain pellet, and the serum had begun to take effect.

"All right," Lin Dong said.

Even though Su Xiaorou evolving to the brain pellet stage wouldn't serve much purpose, nor did he expect her to have any combat capability, the key was that she would be great at doing manual labor...

......

Over the next few days, Jiangbei City returned to peace. Nothing major happened, and everything developed in an orderly fashion.

Tek Corporation had fallen silent, its official website completely blank without a single announcement issued, no longer as arrogant and domineering as before.

As for the official shelter, it occasionally took some action, though infrequently, and not within the urban area, mostly targeting the suburbs.

"Bad news: The suburban search team was attacked by unknown monsters, and five of them went missing. The specific causes remain unclear. All teams going out on missions must exercise extreme caution."

Over the past few days, this was the only announcement on the shelter's official website.

The comments below were mostly filled with mourning.

Because after going missing in the apocalypse, the outcome could well be imagined.

Beneath the announcement were photographs of the five missing personnel—three men and two women. The team leader was a burly man with a square face and dark skin, who looked very honest and reliable.

"Personnel going out can search for rescue based on the photographs..."

The official note beneath the photos stated this, though one could tell it was merely a perfunctory gesture, just casually mentioned, because everyone clearly knew that those people were mostly doomed.

Lin Dong glanced over it roughly and didn't take it too seriously.

However, it could be seen that there was still quite a bit of human activity in the suburbs.

Since there were not many zombies there, it was definitely much safer compared to the urban area. At most, there were mutant beasts, mutant plants, or some other small-scale monsters.

Lin Dong was planning to find some humans to inject with the G-virus and create a few biochemical monsters. Therefore, he intended to head out of the city and take a stroll in the suburbs...

Lin Dong's figure faded, and he vanished on the spot.

Soon, he reached the edge of the city and walked outward along a highway.

The highway leading out of the city was the most congested, filled everywhere with abandoned vehicles, some crashed into each other or overturned on the side.

Some had even exploded, leaving behind blackened, burned wreckage.

These were the traces left behind by people fleeing when the apocalypse descended. Judging from the tragic scenes of the vehicle collisions, one could tell how panicked they had been at the time.

Yet after three months, the bloodstains had been washed away by rain, and some vehicles were covered in rust, their undercarriages overgrown with moss.

Large rats would occasionally scurry through the cars with squeaking sounds, having built their homes right here.

Lin Dong walked all the way forward and completely exited the city.

The vegetation on both sides was lush, verdant, and overgrown with weeds, revealing a vast open wilderness to the side.

Lin Dong swept his gaze across the area.

Soon, he spotted something amiss...

Out on the wilderness lay the wreckage of a transport plane, as if it had made an emergency landing there, its nose driven deep into the mud.

Judging from the degree of corrosion on the airplane, Lin Dong estimated that the accident was not very distant in time and must have happened recently. Thus, he decided to go over and take a look.

Although he had come out to find humans, stumbling upon something novel required investigation—what if he happened to discover some treasure?

Strange things were abundant in the apocalypse.

This gave Lin Dong a feeling akin to "treasure hunting."

He walked out onto the wilderness, slowly approaching the plane wreckage. From a distance, he spotted several human corpses, which seemed to have crawled out of the crashed aircraft.

Getting closer, he discovered that those corpses had decayed extensively, large patches of flesh having sloughed off to reveal gleaming white bones, emitting a foul stench.

"They've only been dead for a few days..." Lin Dong muttered, realizing that this accident indeed hadn't happened long ago, perhaps three to five days at most.

"Oh?"

Yet he quickly noticed a detail: these corpses were all wearing white lab coats, appearing to be research personnel.

Moreover, their cause of death was identical—their abdomens had been torn open with huge holes, and their ribs were flipped outward, as if something had crawled out from inside their bellies!

"Could they have been killed by parasitic monsters?" Lin Dong analyzed in his mind.

He walked over to the downed transport plane and peered inside to see if he could find anything, but was disappointed to find it completely empty, with mud-covered footprints inside—obviously, someone had beaten him to it and cleaned the place out.

These were footprints left by humans.

Nowadays, human supplies were scarce, acting like "locusts sweeping through a territory," stripping everything bare wherever they went. Of course, suburbs this close to the urban area wouldn't be missed.

However, beside the plane wreckage lay the corpse of an elderly man, also in a state of decay, his white lab coat stained pitch-black by blood, completely losing its original color.

The large hole in the old man's abdomen still looked startling, with his ribs splayed outward and several of them broken.

Yet in the hand of this corpse, something seemed to be clutched—a slip of paper.

"What is that?"

With a wave of Lin Dong's hand, a long blade appeared, and with a swift slash, he severed the old man's wrist, sending the paper in his palm flying out as well.

Lin Dong used the tip of his blade to flip and pin the crumpled slip of paper mid-air.

This piece of paper was likewise stained with blood, but under the sunlight, the handwriting amid the stains could be faintly discerned.

There were seven large characters written on it:

"Don't trust anyone..."

The handwriting was not neat; instead, it was extremely distorted. One could tell that when the old man wrote these words, his pen-holding hand was trembling violently, most likely due to the excruciating pain in his body.

He probably breathed his last immediately after finishing these words.

Clearly, they had encountered some kind of unexpected crisis before the crash.

For ordinary people, the dying words on the paper would definitely serve as a thought-provoking warning, but in Lin Dong's eyes, they were utterly useless.

Because he didn't believe anyone to begin with...

After tossing the paper aside, Lin Dong continued walking, and before long, a village appeared ahead.

Looking from a distance, it consisted entirely of low-lying brick-and-soil houses or self-built two-story small buildings.

Along the village path lay numerous decaying skeletons, with the surrounding buildings in complete disarray and utter ruin. On the windows of some houses, dried, blackened bloodstains remained.

The entire village was eerily quiet, without a single sound.

Yet Lin Dong quietly sensed his surroundings.

He seemed to perceive the presence of human breath.....