Chapter 52: Complete Harvest

Chapter 52: Chapter 52: Complete Harvest

Xiang Yi worked his way through the tents one by one.

He kept tossing anything that looked valuable out to Shi Tie, directing it to stack everything into separate piles on the open ground nearby.

He had to hand it to the scavenger crew — they’d come out seriously well-prepared.

It took Xiang Yi the better part of half an hour to thoroughly ransack every tent and pull out everything he considered worth keeping.

By the time he was done, seven distinct piles of supplies had accumulated on the clearing outside.

The first pile was made up entirely of compact, portable rations.

Energy bars, compressed hardtack, dried field rations — that was basically all there was to it.

The only thing with any real flavor was some dried jerky, the same stuff that had been simmering in that broth earlier.

Nothing spectacular in the taste department, but to Xiang Yi right now, every last piece of it was lifesaving gold.

The total remaining food supply was enough to keep the twenty-odd members of the scavenger crew fed for about three days.

Roughly three hundred jin in total.

For one person — namely Xiang Yi — that stretched out to a full two months.

So he wasn’t about to leave a single crumb behind. If it could fit in a bag, in it went.

An 80-liter mountaineering pack, stuffed until it couldn’t take another thing.

Then he had Shi Tie hoist it onto its back, nice and steady.

The second pile was all drinking water — clean, purified, the counterpart to the food.

What remained looked like enough to last the crew four or five days.

In the end, Xiang Yi decided to leave the water behind. It was too heavy, and it ate up too much space.

The same volume that could carry two months’ worth of food would only hold one month’s worth of water.

Besides, he was living in a storm drain by a lake — sneaking out at night to fill up was hardly a problem.

Space was limited. Every bit he could save was worth saving.

He moved past the water and turned his attention to the third pile.

Clothing.

The scavenger crew had packed for every scenario the wilderness could throw at them — lightweight breathable layers, heavy-duty down jackets, everything in between.

The climate on this planet was anything but mild, as far as Xiang Yi could tell, so having options mattered.

What he had his eye on most, though, was the single hazmat-style protective suit in the entire camp. It wasn’t anywhere near the quality of his own ruined one, but it was still a protective suit.

A little awkward to move around in, sure, but in terms of actual protection it blew ordinary clothing completely out of the water.

Aside from the suit, he grabbed two of each type of clothing he found.

After compressing everything down as much as he could, the clothes filled roughly half of the second 80-liter pack.

He also found Shi Tie’s tent, and inside it, a set of oversized clothing that had probably belonged to it.

Shi Tie’s previous outfit had been shredded by bullets, so Xiang Yi threw a thick jacket over it, then layered a rain poncho on top, covering it from head to toe.

He added a face mask and a pair of dust goggles for good measure.

Shi Tie’s current state — that half-dead, barely-animate look — was honestly a little unsettling.

A bit of disguise went a long way, if only to stop Xiang Yi from startling himself every time he glanced over.

The one thing he couldn’t fix was the faint smell of rot clinging to Shi Tie — no amount of layering covered that. He’d have to see if Ning Ye could bring some air freshener or cologne out next time.

With the clothing sorted, Xiang Yi shifted his focus to the fourth pile.

It wasn’t a big pile, but every item in it was medical supplies.

The first aid kits were well-stocked across the board.

Alcohol, tourniquets, bandages, sterile dressings, medical tape, suture kits — everything you’d need to handle trauma wounds.

Antibiotics, anti-diarrhea meds, fever reducers, anti-inflammatories — the disease side of things was just as covered.

There was no way he was leaving any of it. He consolidated everything into as few kits as possible, maximizing what he could fit, then force-fed the whole lot into the backpack.

That filled up about two-thirds of the remaining half of the pack that the clothes hadn’t taken — leaving just a little miscellaneous space to play with.

The fifth pile was almost entirely tools.

The portable outdoor kind: binoculars, entrenching tools, rope, the usual survival staples.

There was also a solid collection of lighting gear he hadn’t picked up on during his earlier search — glow sticks, flashlights, a compact spotlight.

And a few pouches of that powdered ignition material Shi Tie had used on instinct back when it was building the fire — the stuff that combusted on contact with wood.

If it was useful, Xiang Yi wasn’t going to walk away from it.

He dug a tool belt out of the clothing pile and strapped it around Shi Tie’s waist, clipping on every tool that would fit. When the belt ran out of room, he started hanging things from the carabiner loops on the packs Shi Tie was already carrying.

Whatever couldn’t be clipped on anywhere got packed into the remaining space in the second bag.

The sixth pile.

Camping gear, mostly — two of the tents he’d dismantled along with their poles, plus a pair of sleeping bags.

He didn’t take all of it, just pulled out the pieces he’d actually need later, bundled them together, and set them aside as their own separate parcel.

The last pile was everyday household items and miscellaneous junk that didn’t fit neatly into any category.

Realistically, a person only ever needs one or two sets of that kind of thing, and Xiang Yi had already packed himself to the limit — there wasn’t room for much more.

So from this pile, only two things were actually worth taking.

One was the dead-battery portable heater he’d spotted earlier. The other was a reconnaissance drone, complete with its controller.

Both got stuffed into the small backpack already holding the Blood Crystal Worm Eggs.

Xiang Yi found himself, once again, genuinely impressed by how thoroughly the scavenger crew had prepared.

They really had made it back in one piece.

But nobody could have predicted that an Abnormality of that scale would show up so close to the city, practically on their doorstep.

Even Xiang Yi, who’d only been passing through, had gotten dragged into it — nearly dying what, three times now?

But the outcome was good. It had been worth it.

Food, medicine, gear — he’d walked away with all of it.

Plus a fiercely loyal bodyguard, minor caveat being that it might try to eat him if it got hungry enough.

And a shaky, unofficial connection to someone operating in the local gray zone.

The biggest survival problem he’d faced since landing on this planet was now solved.

As long as whoever might be hunting him didn’t track him down, he could live in that storm drain without too much stress for a good long while.

But just sitting tight wasn’t going to cut it.

Hiding forever only ever ended one way — cornered and dead.

The next problem he needed to solve was how to get himself a legitimate identity.

Without one, there was no shot at getting passage off this planet — not legally, and not through most other channels either.

He needed to actively check on how far the prison’s investigation into him had progressed, and start actively looking for a way out.

Start from the very beginning. Earn his first paycheck.