January 25
On the morning of January 25, after breakfast, Xiangzi split everyone into two groups. Most stayed behind at the lodge, while she led a small team out to search for supplies.
Those remaining at camp were busy building a wooden perimeter wall and repairing the iron fencing and power lines damaged in the fighting a few days earlier.
The search party set out with heavy packs and whatever weapons they could carry. Aside from Xiangzi, whose gear at least looked coherent, everyone else was dressed in a mishmash of whatever they could find—layers upon layers of windproof clothing, scavenged load-bearing rigs stripped off corpses the day before, helmets with holes punched through the outer nylon and even bullet scars still visible.
And each of them was armed.
Or at least, armed as best they could be.
Only Xiangzi carried a rifle, along with a fresh ballistic vest and helmet. The rest of the search team had much more makeshift equipment: blades, hatchets, a short spear—cold steel instead of firearms.
Ammunition was scarce, and there were not enough guns to go around. Handing valuable firearms to people who didn't know how to use them would be a waste. Worse, they might end up shooting one another. So cold weapons it was.
The loot they had stripped from those dead raiders yesterday had been mostly food. Medicine was scarce, and firearms and ammunition were even scarcer.
The guns themselves had been nothing worth boasting about. The few Howa Type 89 rifles those men carried were in miserable condition, the rifling in the barrels worn nearly smooth. The remaining usable parts had already been taken apart by Brent and set aside as spare components.
Their sidearms hadn't been found on the bodies at all. No one knew where they had hidden or discarded them.
As for ammunition, there had barely been any to begin with.
Though those men had once come from the Self-Defense Forces, they had used nearly everything they had in the battle the day before. Then Xiangzi's drone bomb had blown up the vehicle carrying the rest of their reserve. What little ammunition they'd had left was gone for good.
To make matters worse, the old convenient system-shop supply route was gone too. Now that everything had switched to a barter-based exchange model, Xiangzi found that if she wanted ammunition, she would have to trade electronics for it.
Fortunately, in the apocalypse, no one cared much about household appliances anymore. Almost every home had something she could strip for components.
So now Xiangzi had a full set of disassembly tools tucked away in her portable storage space.
She would just have to train up her scavenging and electronics-stripping skills the hard way—like grinding mechanics in Project Zomboid, by tearing apart every electronic device she could find.
At her waist, Huaxiu's voice suddenly crackled through the radio.
Xiangzi signaled the others to keep moving while she paused to answer.
"Can you hear me, Xiangzi? What's it like over there?"
This wasn't some shrinking potion at work, nor had Xiangzi recorded Huaxiu's voice in advance. It was simply the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt.
"This side is receiving clearly. No trouble for now."
"Got it. See you later, Xiangzi."
The receiver hissed with static. Xiangzi clipped it back onto her pack and strode forward to catch up with the rest of the party.
Because of yesterday's communication problems, she had become more determined than ever to get proper radios and field transceivers. They needed better ways to stay in touch. Relying on people to run messages back and forth on foot was absurdly inefficient.
The wired phones were inconvenient, and mobile phones were useless without a signal. The solar interference had already died down, but that didn't matter when no one was left to repair the ruined communications infrastructure.
What they needed were portable walkie-talkies.
So she had spent a long time digging through the system shop until she finally found something workable: one military field radio and a matching set of handheld transceivers.
The icy road was treacherous. Temperatures below freezing had turned every wet stretch into a trap. Luckily, they were in the mountains, where there weren't too many shards of hidden debris beneath the snow to slash open a foot.
"Watch your step. It's slippery," Xiangzi warned the people behind her. "Watch the ground. Don't step on the ice."
Even Xiangzi herself, lightened by her storage space, nearly lost her balance. If not for the heavy tread on her boots, she would have gone down hard.
After catching herself, she raised her voice and repeated the warning.
The five people following her weren't as lucky. They had only barely rested the day before. Even the ones who had escaped gunfire still carried bruises and scrapes. Nothing life-threatening, but enough to interfere with movement.
This wasn't Xiangzi mistreating them. The truth was simple: she needed manpower, and these five were the sturdiest among the refugees who had joined yesterday.
Not long after, they reached the cluster of ruined vehicles still jammed halfway down the slope.
That was why they hadn't driven.
Two wrecked vehicles—one at the front, one at the rear—had boxed in the ones that still ran. The entire path was blocked solid.
Xiangzi would have loved to drive, but there was no getting any vehicle through until the road was cleared. For now, their legs would have to do the job, however inefficiently.
After ten-odd minutes of walking, they reached the isolated little settlement at the foot of the mountain, a place of barely a dozen houses.
There were no infected in sight.
The silence was eerie.
They spread out and began scavenging.
For Xiangzi, it almost felt like a casual afternoon outing. She entered one house at a leisurely pace, searching room by room.
Bodies of the infected lay scattered around. The front door stood open, the place in shambles. It didn't take a genius to know the food was long gone.
Sure enough, the tables and beds were dusty, a thin layer coating everything. No one had been in here for quite a while.
But then why had the people leaving taken every last thing from the kitchen—bowls, chopsticks, condiments, everything? Were they planning to cook on the road or something?
It was odd, but Xiangzi didn't dwell on it. Those weren't her primary targets.
Fabric, electronics, wood, tableware, daily necessities—even the window screens could be taken.
Ordinarily she wouldn't have bothered with so many odds and ends, but the system shop had changed, and the sudden arrival of so many new mouths meant scarcity everywhere—especially clothing and cloth.
With water and power gone and no heating anywhere, fire was their only source of warmth. Their own lodge wasn't drafty, but the newcomers were nearly destitute. Most of them had only the clothes on their backs, and the building they were staying in had several broken windows.
Worse, there still weren't enough blankets or beds.
The resort simply had not been designed for this many people staying at once. Under normal circumstances, the village below was close enough, and Pigmyadai Town was only another ten or twenty minutes by car.
In the world before the end, transport had been convenient.
Now it was a brutal journey.
Even the bedding is gone?
Something about this house really is strange.
Xiángzi set the question aside and crouched by the television.
Might as well take it apart.
With a screwdriver in hand, she disassembled the set and extracted the electronic boards, slipping them one by one into her storage space.
On the bedroom wall hung a crooked family portrait. Xiangzi straightened it and brushed off the dust.
Three people: one man, two women.
"An honest-looking father, a kind mother, and a little girl with a pretty cute face. This probably used to be a happy family."
She didn't linger on it. There was too much work to do.
The others were stripping curtains off rods, tearing up sheets and blankets, digging through closets for clothes.
Then someone shouted from outside.
"Captain Takagi! Come quick—we found something!"
"What?" Xiangzi looked up. "What's going on over there, Takagi?"
The short man named Takagi Gen clearly hadn't expected her to remember his name so quickly. Surprise flashed across his face.
Then he hurriedly explained, holding up a few shriveled yellow chunks.
"We found a cellar nearby. It's packed with sweet potatoes and potatoes."
That got Xiangzi moving.
"Then bring me there. Now."
When she arrived, she saw four people already down inside, lanterns or flashlights shining as they scooped armfuls of potatoes and sweet potatoes into their packs.
They didn't care whether the potatoes had sprouted. Some had thick purple shoots growing out of them, yet they stuffed them into the bags anyway.
Xiangzi had half a mind to tell them to stop.
Then she remembered their future farming plans and held her tongue.
Besides, the food shortage was real.
After accepting the new refugees, plus the three from Saitou's family and her own six-person team, their numbers had swollen to thirty-five. That had slashed through her food reserves with terrifying speed. Without yesterday's spoils, they might have had barely a week left.
Fortunately, she still had nine blind-box pulls unused, and items like bread and flour weren't hard to barter for in the system.
So things weren't desperate yet.
Still, could these vegetables be contaminated?
She discreetly pulled out the detector and tested a few of the ugliest potatoes.
No problem.
Good.
She joined the others in filling pack after pack.
The weight of the bags was deeply satisfying.
"That's enough," Xiangzi said at last. "Head back. The packs are full."
"Don't stop now, Captain! There's still tons left, and we've got extra sacks outside!"
"No need to rush. We can always come back for more later. It's only a little after nine."
The cellar was large, and there was no way they could carry everything out in one trip. Xiangzi was ready to turn back—
Then something caught her eye.
"No. Wait. Something's off."
There was a trash bin in the cellar.
And what was in it didn't look a month old.
Back in the house, the missing bowls, bedding, and kitchen supplies had already bothered her. Now she had a cellar full of recently discarded garbage.
Someone was still living around here.
Maybe there was another hidden section beneath the cellar.
She stepped across the floor, testing it.
Most of it creaked like ordinary wood.
But when she walked over to an area where part of the potato pile had already been cleared away, the sound changed.
Different.
Hollow.
In an instant, she realized there had to be a second hidden basement.
Xiangzi prepared to move.
She had already spotted the door.
"Everyone, back away. Don't let a stray bullet hit you. Good timing, Saitou—take those two outside with you and watch the perimeter. If there's another exit, don't let whoever's inside slip away."
At that moment, Saitou Koinagawa had only just arrived. He hadn't come down with the main group earlier that morning, choosing instead to take another route.
Xiangzi had worried he might run into trouble, but Saitou had merely said that he had walked that path hundreds of times in his life. He had gone that way to check his traps.
As a hunter, he simply couldn't rest easy without inspecting them.
The world might be in ruins, but he knew some animals would still escape infection. There was food in the mountains, and someone had to know how to find it.
Even if the last deer, boar, or protected animal in Japan ended up on the dinner table—so be it.
When humanity itself was on the brink, who had the luxury to care about wildlife regulations?
"Anyone in there?"
Xiangzi knocked on the heavy door and pressed an ear to the floor.
No answer.
Which probably meant the owner was out.
But that didn't feel right either.
If someone had truly been living here these past few days, they would have heard the new neighbors arrive. They would be cautious. Since her map showed no one outside, then the person had to be somewhere nearby.
Just as Xiangzi was deciding what to do, the door opened on its own.
With a creak and the crack of strained wood, it swung inward so suddenly that she nearly stumbled down after it. A few potatoes rolled in ahead of her, dropping with soft thuds into the darkness below.
Before she even properly saw what was inside, Xiangzi reacted on instinct.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The others behind her flinched at the now-familiar gunfire.
Under the beam of her flashlight, someone inside was slowly trying to rise.
She took one look and knew this wasn't a normal person.
The moment she saw rootlike tendrils protruding from the figure's back, she opened fire again.
The infected collapsed on the spot.
Xiangzi took two others down with her as they climbed into the hidden chamber.
Looks like this really was the homeowner.
It was almost absurd. The "tentacles" sprouting from the infected's back turned out to be potatoes that had somehow infected him and sprouted right through him.
After a brief search, the hidden cellar yielded only a few daily necessities, a reeking trash can, and a full set of bedding.
So that was it. The missing household items had all been moved here.
"Let's go," Xiangzi said. "There's nothing else worth taking. Once we're back, put all this into the common storeroom. One-third can count as your personal share. The rest gets turned in for points."
The walk back was even slower than before.
The snow had begun to melt, turning the road to muddy slush. Their bags were heavier too.
But no one complained.
They had gone out, found supplies, and returned without incident. That alone felt like a victory.
When they neared camp, Brent—posted high above the entrance on watch—spotted the returning group first.
Xiangzi, meanwhile, noticed the great stack of thick logs piled nearby.
"They're moving fast," she muttered. "They've already cut down this much timber, huh?"
Join here to read ahead.
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The Uma Musume Who Became 30
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After Maxing Out Every Class 25
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