The Trembling World

Chapter 86: Time is Ticking

If any change to Yin He’s system would cause her to suddenly attack him, then that would be a pity.

After killing the tentacle colossal zombie, Liu Gan returned underground to search around. Unfortunately, Liu Gan wasn’t able to find any high-technological machinery that would have any use in the apocalyptic world. Even if there had been any, he couldn’t easily transport them out of there. This time, his scouting had no profitable outcome.

On top of that, The Trembling World had a serious lockdown on guns. Other than the player’s starter hand grenade, Liu Gan hadn’t been able to find any deadly weapons, like a gun. However, Liu Gan was in possession of a gun, which Jiang JinYuan had pulled from the workstation nearby, and it was used to knock out Yin He.

Meanwhile, Yin He had started disassembling spare parts from a pile. After tidying up, she bundled them up into a small backpack that she wore on her back. According to her, these components were good backup items for fixing her body.

“Once you receive a magnetic attack, you faint. This type of weakness is quite obvious…” Liu Gan told Yin He as he held up the electromagnetic gun, pointing it at her. He was hinting that other people would take advantage of that knowledge and use it against her, and she would automatically lose all her combat prowess.

“That is because the gun is fine tuned to a set frequency that will cause my nanomites to become temporarily disabled within my body. The fine tuned frequency is like a password. Only when the set frequency reaches the nanomites will it make me faint. Other people don’t know this set frequency, so even if they fired electromagnetic attacks, it wouldn’t affect me,” Yin He explained the process to Liu Gan.

“If it’s like that, then there’s no need to worry.” Liu Gan nodded. Now that he had found a beautiful bodyguard and his body had no apparent weakness, he had no more worries. When he went to sleep, they could trade off standing guard, so he no longer had to worry about trivial matters like someone sneaking up on them.

“You’re a robot, do you need to sleep at night?” Liu Gan asked Yin He, thinking about the issue of standing guard at night.

“I require rest only if one of my body parts which contain machinery gets injured, so that my body’s nanomites in the injured parts can regenerate. Other than that, I don’t need to rest,” Yin He explained to Liu Gan.

“Did you get injured when the two of us were fighting?” Liu Gan asked Yin He.

“As long as my body doesn’t have more than ten injuries, they won’t interfere with movements. The nanomites within me start regeneration right away. Right now, there’s only an hour left until I am completely repaired.” Yin He nodded.

“Oh? So according to what you said, generally you don’t need to go to sleep? And our conversation is actually restful for your system?” Liu Gan was trying to gauge the extent of the damage to Yin He’s system..

“Yes.”

“Good, good.” Liu Gan nodded, very satisfied. Now he wouldn’t even have to get up to stand on guard, and he could even have a full night’s rest. During these apocalyptic times, besides the basic necessities – food and water – it was very important to have a good sleep.

…

By the time Liu Gan and Yin He had arrived back to the ground floor, the building’s backup energy had stopped generating electricity. Outside, the sky had darkened, and a torrential downpour was endlessly beating against the windows.

“It’s getting late. It should be around 7 o’clock or so. Looks like we have to stay here for the night. It was a dark night, without any lighting out. Should we go around to scout for a better location to sleep, then discuss plans when tomorrow comes.”

Liu Gan once again used the probing scanner to get a detailed floor map around him, then he set it so that he could look through each and every floor.

The front door of the ground floor was wide open. Nearly every window was broken, with shattered glass on the floor. The zombies outside could freely enter the building. It seemed that quite a large number of crippled zombies were near the shattered windows. It was highly possible that the recent corpse tide had caused most of them to get trampled on.

The zombies within the building were mostly clustered around the ground floor. Above the third floor, the amount of zombies gradually lessened. The further up you went, the less zombies you were likely to meet. With that many zombies on the first floor, it was impossible to clear them all, and it wasn’t necessary to clear them. In order to find a peaceful location to sleep, the only solution was to head up to another floor.

Judging from the scan result, within the laboratory building, fifth floor and above had the greatest decline in the amount of zombies, and consisted of messy office space, filled with scattered cubicles. If he chose a floor that was too high up, then escaping would be problematic. If it was too close to the ground floor, then any sudden movements or sounds they made would be heard by the zombies below. So the ideal floor was the fifth one.

Liu Gan and Yin He arrived on the fifth floor, both standing in front of an office’s doorway a company. Judging from the company logo.trademark of the logo, this had to be one of San Xing Corporation’s many departments, but this one seemed to be the headquarters of a department. The entrance to the office was obstructed. After Yin He entered, he found a single zombie inside, just standing there blankly. It heard movement and it looked over to Yin He, but didn’t react.

Under the command of Liu Gan, Yin He quickly used its arm to place the zombie in a headlock, and then dragged it out of the room by its neck. After the zombie got attacked, it tried to bite Yin He, but Yin He’s grip was too tight. With a little added pressure, she was able to render the zombie motionless and then lay it on the ground.

Yin He looted the zombie’s body, and pulled out an identification card. Then, he placed the zombie’s body at the end of the corridor, opened up the window, and dumped the body out through it.

The chances of other players and local survivors reaching this building weren’t high. However, just in case, Liu Gan had to make sure to not arouse the suspicion of any passersbys, so he had Yin He dispose of the body.

Even though he had Yin He by his side, Liu Gan’s combat strength far exceeded typical players and local survivors. However, he still wanted to maintain a cautious attitude. He didn’t want his own negligence to cause some series of unfortunate events.

It wouldn’t be similar to that time, a year before, when he went mountain climbing at Mt. Everest and lost his sleeping bag, which lead to him losing his limbs. This type of tragedy definitely wouldn’t happen again.

Yin He returned to the office space and scouted once more. Her results were the same as Liu Gan’s PDA scan – this office only had one zombie.

The office space had only one inner office. Inside it was a lounge, and it also had a simple bed. It seemed to be clean on the outside. Evidently, that department’s chairman had become a zombie and hadn’t gone back into the lounge to rest.

For safety reasons, Liu Gan opened the room’s air vents and stuffed pieces of broken parts from chairs and tables inside, clogging them up. This way, no matter how unusual the variant zombie was, it wouldn’t be able to sneak into the room in the middle of the night. No sneak attack through the air ventilation would be possible.

Even if the variant type zombies decided to break through the improvised barricade from the air ventilation, it would create a loud enough noise to alert Yin He, who would be on guard duty, or to even wake Liu Gan up from his slumber.