Chapter 347

Setting other things aside, being able to find an area in the apocalypse with no eerie entities at all—that in itself is a “miracle.” Calling it a paradise on earth wouldn’t be an exaggeration.

But was that even possible?

Therefore, this mountain could only mean one of two things. First, somewhere nearby lurked a terrifying high-tier Eerie, and the high-tier Eerie energy it radiated kept the low-tier Eeries from daring to approach the mountain.

Second, that bottomless “cave” on the mountain was most likely the Eeries’ nest—all of them were hiding inside that cave.

As for why the Eeries in the cave hadn’t devoured each other and instead coexisted peacefully, that could only be figured out after going deep into the cave.

Out of caution, Tu Doupi first filmed the camp’s situation, then joined forces with Cai Hua to form a search-and-rescue exploration squad and entered the cave. And then… without any surprise, they lost contact.

After the teammates left behind at camp couldn’t reach Tu Doupi and the others, they immediately withdrew from the mountain area, finally got a signal, and transmitted the video back.

After restoring the video, the New Council saw Cai Hua’s map annotations and analysis of that mountain region, as well as Tu Doupi’s investigation of the cave’s surroundings and the deep mountains. They concluded that—setting aside that eerie cave—this “paradise” really was a very suitable area for establishing a main base.

Abundant resources, fertile land, not a single Eerie in sight across the entire mountain, and low-tier Eeries only active in areas far from the mountain.

With so many “advantages” combined, the New Council members felt that Heaven had not abandoned humanity—this was the last pure land left for mankind.

On top of that, among the several scout teams sent out, only Tu Doupi’s observation point had sent back “good news.” Right now, with the awakening of a Seventh-Tier Eerie causing a whole mess of problems, and word from the blockade zone that a high-tier Eerie had appeared with a rating approaching Seventh-Tier—

Obviously, Dajing couldn’t be stayed in for even a moment longer. So the New Council immediately convened this emergency meeting. The purpose was, before executing the evacuation plan, to send another team ahead to “scout the path.” Even if something went wrong after entering the mountain, the teams following behind could stop at the mountain’s edge, ensuring the civilians’ safety.

Of course, the New Council people would definitely stay within the civilian group to “command,” so it went without saying who these people were really looking out for.

Although Deng Yuqi was quite displeased with these newly appointed fellows’ “cowardice,” she had to admit this really was the safest approach.

If everyone retreated into the mountain area before the mountain’s situation was fully scouted, and an Eerie disaster broke out, they’d be attacked from both front and rear.

Ultimately, after discussion among Deng Yuqi and the others, they agreed to the New Council’s decision: dispatch a vanguard team to the mountain area to “clear the way,” and then Deng Yuqi herself would lead a combat unit to escort the civilians from Base 2 as the first batch of evacuees.

The reason Base 2’s civilians were chosen was that Base 1’s rebellion still hadn’t been fully resolved—remnants of the New God Cult and the Old Council were secretly causing trouble, and there was concern that bringing people over too early would create hidden dangers.

The people at Base 2 were basically all “hand-picked” by the Third Regiment’s commander, plus the families of team members—more reliable than Base 1.

Furthermore, the resources Fang Mingyue had risked her life to bring back could immediately be put into operation, paving the way for the evacuation plan and allowing action to begin right away.

The meeting continued until dawn the next day. After Deng Yuqi and the Third Regiment commander returned to their department, they immediately held a team meeting to select vanguard candidates.

Just as the meeting reached the personnel arrangement stage, a soldier rushed in urgently: “Re—report!”

A captain glared at the soldier: “Which squad are you from? Can’t you see we’re in an emergency meeting? What kind of behavior is this, panicking like that?”

Fang Mingyue coldly swept her eyes over that captain and let out a cold snort of displeasure: “Captain He, don’t you know what ‘special circumstances call for special handling’ means? The front lines are still fighting Eeries right now. If the battlefield situation at the front changed, would we have to wait until after our meeting to hear about it?”

Captain He was left speechless. Originally, he should have gone to the front lines with the main combat team, but when faced with the Eerie horde surging like a tide, he’d chickened out and claimed illness to dodge it.

Quite a few captains knew about this, so Captain He’s reputation had plummeted. His former glory was gone—this meeting hadn’t even notified him in the first place.

Captain He had shamelessly shown up to the meeting anyway, but everyone acted like they hadn’t seen him. Now, seeing a soldier enter the meeting room without following protocol, he’d wanted to seize the chance to assert his presence—only for Fang Mingyue to not give him any face at all and retort directly.

The key point was, her retort was completely justified. During a war against Eeries, there was indeed no need to observe such trivial “rules”—no rule was more important than the battlefield situation.

Captain He didn’t know how to respond for a moment and could only look awkwardly at Deng Yuqi, forcing a smile: “Commander, you see…?”

Deng Yuqi couldn’t even be bothered to spare Captain He a glance. She looked directly at the soldier who’d been reprimanded at the door and asked: “What happened?”

“Sh—Shen Ge, Shen Ge, he—he’s back,” the soldier said, still catching his breath.

He was today’s sentry patrolman, responsible for monitoring the Eerie movements in the blockade zone. While on patrol, he’d seen a modified combat vehicle burst out from the Eerie horde and arrive at the metal defense wall’s gate.

The city defense soldiers were about to ask for the newcomer’s information when a figure rushed out of the vehicle, cutting down the Eeries besieging the defense line all the way, then leaping over the several-meter-high defense wall and arriving at the concealed watchtower.

The soldiers on the watchtower were scared stiff—if this had been an Eerie, they’d already be dead. Fortunately, someone immediately recognized Shen Ge.

“Where is he?” Fang Mingyue, upon hearing Shen Ge was back, immediately rushed toward the door and asked the soldier.

The soldier swallowed hard, finally catching his breath enough to say a complete sentence: “In—in the infirmary. He—he’s badly injured.”

Deng Yuqi looked at the other captains in the meeting room and said: “Meeting paused. Captain Liu is responsible for the remaining matters—handle the front-line support issue first. The Eerie Hunters Corps has already reached a consensus with me. Although the evacuation plan is important right now, assisting the city defense team in holding the defense line is equally important. Captain Liu, understood?”

“Yes, Commander,” Captain Liu immediately responded.

Deng Yuqi and Fang Mingyue left the meeting room and headed straight to the infirmary. It was currently a period of war against the Eeries, and the infirmary was packed with people.

Shen Ge’s status—not to mention the Exploration Corps, even the other teams now regarded him as a hero. When the infirmary saw he was severely injured, they immediately convened a panel of experts for consultation.

When Deng Yuqi and Fang Mingyue entered the operating room, they’d expected to see a crowd of medical staff bustling around an unconscious Shen Ge. Instead, they found Shen Ge sitting in the doctor’s work chair in the office, one hand holding a red apple he was biting into, while his other arm was gone from the elbow down. His left leg was bloody and flesh-torn, the skin and flesh at the front of his knee completely shaved off—bone was visible.

Moreover, Shen Ge’s body, from face to torso, had suffered severe injuries in many places, leaving horrifying wounds.

And with this kind of “battle record” that would have killed an ordinary person a hundred times over, Shen Ge was letting several doctors and nurses bustle around him stopping bleeding, stitching, and bandaging—while he sat there like nothing was wrong, calmly biting into his apple and eating.

The scene was too bloody (and gross)—several young medical staff had fainted beside him, and other doctors and nurses were resuscitating them.

“Oh? You’re here?” Shen Ge saw Deng Yuqi and Fang Mingyue appear at the door and raised his half-remaining right arm to wave.

Then he realized his right hand was gone, so he raised the hand holding the apple and gave a little wave: “Morning. You guys eaten yet?”

“…”

“…”

Deng Yuqi’s eye twitched. Her expression became subtle, and for a moment she didn’t know how to “respond” to Shen Ge’s enthusiastic greeting.

Fang Mingyue was “scared stiff” by Shen Ge’s current state. Calling Shen Ge a “miracle of life” right now was not an exaggeration at all.

It wasn’t until a nurse screamed and hurriedly pressed gauze against Shen Ge’s wound: “Mr—Mr. Shen, please stop moving! The wound’s split open again!”

“Split open?” Another nurse looked at this “miracle of life”—more accurately, these wounds had never stopped bleeding in the first place. It was all relying on Shen Ge’s special constitution to “self-heal.”

A doctor suggested: “Mr. Shen, I recommend you immediately go to the emergency room and cooperate with surgery. Otherwise, we—uh, this—”

Just as the doctor was speaking, another blood vessel in Shen Ge burst. In a surgical setting, this condition would basically mean declaring the patient dead, but Shen Ge very calmly instructed the nurse to apply gauze to stop the bleeding first, then directly stitch the wound with a needle. And eerily, when the nurse—fighting off fainting—stitched the wound, it mysteriously stopped bleeding.

Deng Yuqi and Fang Mingyue came up to Shen Ge. The former tentatively asked: “Shen Ge, are you… really okay like this?”

Shen Ge swallowed the last bite of apple and waved his hand: “A mere fatal wound. Nothing to worry about.”

A mere, fatal wound, nothing to worry about?

As soon as those words came out, the entire office went silent. One sentence, eight characters, three phrases—separately everyone understood them, but strung together…

Listen, does that even sound like human speech?

Clearly the word “common sense” couldn’t be applied to Shen Ge. Deng Yuqi had figured that much out, so she asked: “How did you… end up like this?”

“It’s a long story…” Shen Ge sighed.

Deng Yuqi felt something was off and tentatively asked: “A long… story?”

“Yes, at least as long as it takes for my wounds to finish being treated,” Shen Ge said very seriously. Then he turned to the medical staff and said: “Thank you all for your help. I have some important matters to discuss with the commander next. Please step out for a moment. My injuries are fine—a mere fatal wound, not worth mentioning.”

“…”

“…”

The medical staff had no idea how to respond. They all looked at Deng Yuqi, and after seeing her nod, they “fled” the office as if escaping.

It wasn’t that they were unwilling to treat this shelter’s “hero”—it was that they feared if they stayed any longer, they’d never be able to treat future patients properly again.

How could someone with wounds deep enough to expose bone still calmly chat and eat apples, while their muscle tissue visibly self-healed before your eyes?

Sure, everyone’s constitution was different, but this couldn’t even be called “human” anymore. Even ordinary Eeries didn’t have such terrifying healing ability.

After all the medical staff had left, only Deng Yuqi, Fang Mingyue, and Shen Ge remained in the office.

Deng Yuqi asked with a subtle expression: “Although it’s quite inappropriate timing, I really want to ask an off-topic question—is the ‘me’ in your world still alive and well?”

“Listen to you, cursing yourself like that. Don’t worry, she’s alive and well—just a bit busy with work,” Shen Ge said.

Deng Yuqi said flatly: “Mainly I think if the ‘me’ on your side hadn’t been angered to death by you, she probably wouldn’t have made it to doomsday.”

“…” Shen Ge was stunned. He genuinely hadn’t expected this world’s Deng Yuqi to have such attack power.

But joking aside, Shen Ge still truthfully recounted what had happened—how he’d stayed behind to block the Eeries and buy time for Fang Mingyue and the others to retreat.

After Shen Ge found the “bottom” inside the Eerie’s stomach, he was frantically hunted by the Sixth-Tier Eerie, which seemed to want to stop him from entering the lowest-level laboratory.

After dodging the dense black tentacle attacks, Shen Ge discovered there was another door in that secret chamber. Just as he was trying to figure out how to open it, the “upper-layer” Sixth-Tier Eerie and the Alien Queen—affected by the Eerie energy storm—began fighting more and more fiercely. Both sides abandoned their previously restrained behavior, as if realizing this was their last chance to devour each other, and unleashed their full power trying to consume one another.

The Sixth-Tier Eerie had originally only intended to create an emergency food source, but never expected to produce an Alien Queen with strength approaching Sixth-Tier that had “fused” with most of its body—greatly increasing the difficulty of devouring it.

Meanwhile, the Alien Queen had planned to hide and develop quietly until she was capable of devouring the Sixth-Tier Eerie, then turn the tables in one go. Who knew a troublemaker like Shen Ge would pop up, triggering spatial tears that pushed both high-tier Eeries to the brink.

Now only one path remained before them: either devour the other and seize absolute control of the body to complete Seventh-Tier mutation and disperse the Eerie energy storm, or wait for the Eerie energy storm to tear their bodies apart.

Obviously, both Eeries simultaneously chose the former—wanting to use this final opportunity to devour the other and become the “King” of Dajing in one stroke.

But at this time, Shen Ge was still at the bottom layer looking for a way into the “secret chamber.” Unexpectedly, the two Eeries fought so violently that the Eerie energy distortion storm grew worse and worse, spreading to the “lower layer” and tearing space apart.

Shen Ge desperately escaped through a spatial rift. He’d originally planned to find a place to hide and wait for the Eeries to decide a winner, but his injuries were too severe—and he happened to come across the combat vehicle Fang Mingyue had left behind, so he drove it all the way back to the blockade zone.

Fortunately, Shen Ge’s constitution wasn’t human. His half-human, half-Eerie body made his brain and heart the only two vital points. In other words, as long as his brain and heart weren’t destroyed, his flesh and blood could rapidly “self-heal” by consuming large amounts of system points for repair.

In fact, this was the first time Shen Ge had used this ability since the system completed its upgrade and gained the “healing” function. He genuinely hadn’t expected system points to be consumed like a flood discharge—he’d even complained that the “heal everyone, deduct the points from me” kind of show-off line was unrealistic in the face of this black-hearted system.

Of course, none of that was the point. The point was that the situation at the blockade zone was not looking good.

“Now there’s good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?”