41: Chapter 41 Entering the Level One Hunting Ground: Flesh and Blood Wasteland!

Chen Chen lowered his head and gave Shen Wanxing’s forehead a light tap.

"Get up."

Shen Wanxing hummed, burrowing deeper into his arms with a frown, clearly unwilling to move.

Chen Chen pulled back his arm, hauling her out of the covers and tossing the assault jacket—which barely managed to cover the essential parts—onto her.

"Get dressed and come down for breakfast. Five minutes."

Shen Wanxing sat on the bed holding the assault jacket, her hair a bird's nest and her eyes half-open.

Her legs were pressed together, her knees covered in red marks.

She looked down at her condition, and her ears instantly turned beet red.

Chen Chen was already fully dressed and had climbed down the folding ladder to the first floor.

The first floor was the living cabin.

Shen Wanbing was sitting on the edge of the folding bed, folding a blanket.

Her movements were extremely orderly, the corners aligned meticulously.

She glanced up at Chen Chen.

Just one glance.

Then she quickly shifted her gaze back to the blanket, folding it with even more force.

The dark circles under her eyes were very heavy.

Jiang Yanxue was squatting at the base of the armored wall, wiping her Shadow Instant-Kill Blade for what must have been the hundredth time; the blade was so polished it could serve as a mirror.

When Chen Chen walked over, she didn't look up, but the speed of her wiping increased slightly.

"Morning," Chen Chen greeted.

Jiang Yanxue gave a soft "Mm."

Shen Wanbing said nothing.

The atmosphere in the cabin was subtle to the extreme.

Chen Chen knew exactly why.

No matter how good B-grade soundproofing was, it couldn't stand up to nearly three hours of commotion on that second-floor bed.

These two women likely hadn't slept a wink last night.

But he didn't plan on explaining anything.

Opening the storage compartment, he took out three boxes of high-quality self-heating steaks, six soft wheat breads, and four cartons of heated milk.

The heating packs boiled upon contact with water.

The steak fat sizzled in the aluminum foil boxes, and the rich aroma of meat mixed with the wheat scent of the bread, filling the entire cabin within thirty seconds.

Jiang Yanxue's nose twitched.

The hand wiping the blade stopped.

Shen Wanbing's movements in folding the blanket also slowed down.

Chen Chen placed the food on the folding table.

"Eat."

Shen Wanxing climbed down the folding ladder.

The zipper of her assault jacket was pulled all the way to the top, her neck tucked into the collar, and her walking posture was a bit awkward—she couldn't take full strides.

She shuffled to the table and sat down, taking a bite of bread, not daring to look at anyone.

Shen Wanbing swept a glance over her sister.

Her gaze lingered for 0.3 seconds on an uncovered red mark on the side of her neck.

Then she picked up the milk and took a sip.

Her expression management was practically perfect.

The four of them sat around the folding table for breakfast.

The steaks were cut, juices flowing. The bread was soft, and the milk was warm.

Out on the wasteland, more than half of the 880,000 survivors couldn't even drink clean water.

Some had their stomachs run through for half a moldy compressed biscuit.

Some squatted by the roadside gnawing on tree bark until their mouths were bloody.

Yet inside this Lv.10 mobile heavy fortress, four people were eating hot steak and drinking warm milk, with the temperature steady at twenty-four degrees and warm air circulating evenly.

This breakfast itself was the most arrogant provocation of the wasteland's laws.

Halfway through the meal.

The polar night curtain outside the window, which swallowed all light, began to loosen.

The pure black began to dilute from the edges as grayish-white daylight seeped in inch by inch.

The purple force field of the mental shielding device became transparent in the daylight and eventually retracted automatically into the roof.

The system’s ethereal female voice rang out across the entire server.

[The first round of the special environment 'Polar Night Hunting Ground' has ended. Daylight has returned to normal.]

[The advancement speed of the death black mist has returned to standard values.]

[Server-wide Survival Broadcast—]

[District 069 current survivors: 881,204 / 1,000,000.]

The bread in Shen Wanxing's hand dropped onto the table.

One million people.

In four days, nearly 120,000 had died.

When this number hit home, even the mood for chewing was gone.

Chen Chen opened the regional chat channel.

The screen was filled with despair.

"My f*cking car is gone!! The tires were bitten to shreds by monsters! I'm running on my own two legs now! The black mist is only three kilometers behind me! Someone save me!!"

"Stop shouting, brother, no one is coming. I watched with my own eyes as a family of three in the car next to me was dragged into the black mist; they didn't even make a sound."

"During that one night of Polar Night, my Sanity dropped to 30... my head was full of hallucinations, I almost bit off my own finger."

"Has anyone counted how many roads are left in the Novice Zone? All three branch roads on my side are blocked by a Corpse Tide."

"Hilarious. Before the transmigration, I was a VP at a listed company with an annual salary of eight million. Now I'm huddling in a scrapped van gnawing on raw meat. And the meat was carved off a two-day-old Aberrant."

"...I don't want to run anymore. I really can't run anymore."

Chen Chen scrolled through two screens and closed it.

120,000 lives.

Some were torn apart by monsters, some had their Sanity hit zero and became the walking dead, and some were robbed by their own kind and left by the roadside to be fed to the black mist.

And some people simply gave up.

Accustomed to being the elite before the transmigration, they couldn't even get a drop of clean water after.

The psychological gap was large enough to crush them directly.

Chen Chen felt no sympathy for these people.

Those who couldn't run would be eliminated sooner or later.

That was why he had to keep running, running to the end of this road, the end of this endless world...

He closed the channel and looked at the co-pilot seat.

"Distance of the black mist."

Shen Wanbing closed her eyes.

The blue gemstone of the concentration ice heart necklace glowed faintly, and her mental power was mostly restored.

Her Radar talent operated at low power for three seconds.

"Three hundred and twenty kilometers behind us."

She opened her eyes, her tone steady. "The black mist slowed down during the Polar Night, and since you didn't stop once, our buffer period is the largest in the server. At the current advancement speed, we have at least a forty-hour safety window."

Three hundred and twenty kilometers.

This number meant Chen Chen could calmly plan his next move without being chased by the black mist.

He pulled a blueprint out of his storage backpack.

The parchment scroll unfurled, and a blueprint of an armored structure so complex it made one's scalp tingle materialized in the air.

[A-grade RV External Armor Blueprint].

This was the top-tier loot Shen Wanxing had found when looting the Tyrant's corpse.

Once built, the defense values would quadruple; tanking a Tyrant-class monster would no longer be a dream.

However, in the material requirements column at the bottom of the blueprint, two lines of red text were quite glaring.

[Missing core material: Memory Damping Alloy * 200]

[Missing core material: High-level Aberrant Cartilage * 150]

It was unlikely that these two items could be fully gathered in the entire Novice Zone.

"We have to move forward."

Chen Chen put away the blueprint. "The resource pool of the Novice Zone is already running dry. High-level materials will only appear in the hunting grounds ahead."

He sat in the driver's seat.

The key was inserted and turned.

The engine of the Lv.10 mobile heavy fortress erupted with a low roar.

The thirteen-and-a-half-ton chassis sent a shockwave of pebbles through the hollow.

He stepped on the gas.

The six B-grade All-Terrain Self-Healing Tires kicked up earth as the RV charged out of the wind-eroded hollow and back onto the grayish-white wasteland highway.

Several kilometers ahead.

A crimson light screen spanned between heaven and earth, stabbing from the ground straight into the clouds, cutting the entire sky in half.

On this side of the screen was the grayish-white Novice Zone; on the other side was a thick, dark red.

The boundary of the Novice Zone.

One hundred and forty kilometers per hour.

The Sawtooth crash bar slammed head-on into the crimson light screen.

The light screen was not solid.

The moment the RV passed through, a layer of blood-red light film flowed across the windshield, and a line of distorted system text was forced onto his retina.

[Welcome to Level 1 Hunting Ground: Flesh Wasteland.]