The wind roared on, gravel outside pelting against the tent with a rattling clatter.
Seeing the wolfish hunger in Ning Zhe's eyes, the man chose to yield: "What you're after, it's in the iron box on the table!"
"Clang!"
At his words, Lin Xun rifled through the things on the table and quickly found a matchbox-sized crystal cube etched with strange patterns. "Brother, got it!"
"Whish!"
Ning Zhe raised his arm slightly, about to bring it down on the man's head.
"Wait! Let me say something, all right?" Seeing Ning Zhe's move, the man spoke rapidly. "You're just refugees, this chip is useless to you. But I work for Black Horse Company! You've heard of Black Horse, haven't you? We control over sixty percent of the domestic water market, we're the biggest water-dealing company in the northern wasteland! If you're willing to give the chip back to me, I can bring you into a stronghold and get you registered as city-dwellers! What do you say?"
"Gulp!"
Hearing this, Lin Xun swallowed hard, his body trembling with excitement.
To rise above the barren refugee zone, to cross the barrier separating the two worlds and become a city-dweller inside a stronghold, this was the long-cherished dream of tens of millions of refugees.
According to rumor, the strongholds held resources beyond counting, unlimited drinking water, a hundred times better than the refugee zone.
"Thump!"
Without a word, Ning Zhe brought his arm down hard, knocking the man out cold.
Minutes later, Ning Zhe and his group of six vanished into the blowing sand like ghosts, quickly putting distance between themselves and the camp.
The wind died down. Scattered plants across the desert gave off a faint glow, and the ink-dark sky above blazed with stars, the Milky Way clearly visible. But this group, driven by the struggle to survive, had no heart to spare for beauty that had nothing to do with staying alive.
At the mouth of a cliff pass, Ning Zhe turned to Li Dongbao beside him. "Dongbao, can you confirm these people we're trading with are reliable?"
Li Dongbao gave a simple, honest smile. "Don't worry. The one who contacted me this time is my own cousin. His parents died of sickness when he was little, and it was my parents who raised him. Back then, just to earn enough to feed one more mouth, my dad sold his blood and my mom sold her milk. With that kind of bond between us, how could there be a problem?"
Seeing the certainty on Li Dongbao's face, Ning Zhe asked no further. The six of them were as close as brothers; Li Dongbao would never lie to him.
"Brother Zhe, there's something I really don't understand. That man back there clearly promised, if we just gave him back the chip, he'd take us into the city. Why did you turn him down?" Lin Xun had been mulling it over the whole way, still unable to let it go. To avoid causing any bad feeling in front of the others, he chose to ask Ning Zhe privately.
"Strongholds are magnificent, but the peace they offer was never meant for us. Even if we got in, we'd only be its builders, never the ones who get to enjoy it. Besides, I don't trust a word that man said. With a blade at his throat, of course he'd bow to us, but the moment we stepped into the city, we'd become nothing but a mouse in his hand."
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Ning Zhe kept his eyes fixed ahead, his voice calm and steady as he went on. "Life in the city might not really suit us anyway. Everyone says it's some paradise where everyone's equal, but how could there possibly be any paradise on this wasteland? Better to survive out here in the wasteland than go in and live as a caged slave. At least out here, a man's life is still his own."
"None of us have ever been inside a city, how do you know everyone in there is a slave?" Lin Xun asked, eyeing him sideways.
"All these years, the only ones who ever go in or out of the strongholds are people of importance. Have you ever seen an ordinary person come back out?" Ning Zhe shot back.
"Ahh... what a shame. I really thought you'd agree to that man's terms and take me into the city. If you had, you could've seen Sister Xiaoyu again too. Honestly, after all those years we lived together in the refugee village, I never would've guessed she was actually the daughter of some big shot in the city, or that mercenaries would come take her into the stronghold."
Having said this, Lin Xun suddenly looked at Ning Zhe. "Brother Zhe, I bet Sister Xiaoyu's forgotten all about you! Otherwise why would there be no word from her at all, and no one sent to bring us into the city? All that talk about childhood sweethearts, it's all nonsense!"
"Don't talk nonsense. Xiaoyu isn't like that." Ning Zhe's expression stayed calm. "In times like these, a lot of things are beyond anyone's control."
The group pressed on through the night and soon found themselves deep in a canyon, standing before a fork in the path.
"Brother Zhe, we're here. Up over that slope ahead there's a wooden cabin, our contact is waiting for us there!" Li Dongbao studied the lay of the land to get his bearings, then pointed toward the fork on the left.
"Let's go. Everyone make the trade quickly, then we head straight back to the refugee village, no spending the night out here." Ning Zhe, hearing a wolf's howl echo through the canyon, nodded warily and took the lead. But after only a few steps, he suddenly stopped short, a look of pain crossing his face.
"Ah-Zhe?!"
"Brother Zhe! Are you all right?!"
Seeing the state he was in, the others all crowded around him.
Ning Zhe had already collapsed to the ground. His face was drenched in cold sweat, his body temperature frighteningly high, and his black pupils were faintly tinged with a beast-like red glow. The sight of him was utterly bizarre and terrifying.
"Damn it! Is that strange illness acting up again?" Seeing Ning Zhe like this, Lin Xun barked at the others, "Water! Get water, now!"
"I've got some!" Li Dongbao, seeing this, tore the water skin from his belt.
"Get his shirt off! Use the water to bring his temperature down!" Facing Ning Zhe's sudden collapse, Lin Xun issued orders to the others with the ease of long experience.
Fumbling in the chaos, the others stripped off Ning Zhe's shirt, revealing his powerfully muscled body and the scars that covered it, especially the massive claw marks raking from his left shoulder all the way down to his right hip, a sight gruesome enough to make anyone flinch.
The temperature swing across this desert was extreme, daytime surface heat climbed past fifty degrees, while at night it dropped to nearly freezing. When Li Dongbao poured the water over Ning Zhe's body, faint wisps of steam actually rose off his skin.
On this wasteland, nothing seemed more precious than water, and no one was willing to share their precious water with others. For refugees who might go three or five months without washing their faces, pouring water over their own bodies just to cool down was an extravagance almost beyond imagining.
But when it came to using water on Ning Zhe, everyone did so without a second thought.
Ning Zhe was the unspoken leader of this band of hunters, not only because he was the one who kept them fed, and not only because he was the strongest among them, but because in the refugee zone around Stronghold 87, he was the only person who had ever hunted a bear.
Warped by radiation, the bears of today were nothing like the creatures of the old world: massive in size, with bodies like tempered steel, all but unstoppable. Even a fully armed transport convoy from a stronghold wouldn't dare provoke one lightly.
No one knew how Ning Zhe had done it. All the others saw was him dragging a massive bear's corpse back on a sledge, then collapsing at the entrance to the settlement, drenched in blood from head to toe.
It was Lin Xun who sold the bear's hide to trade for the medicine that saved Ning Zhe's life.
Ever since then, Ning Zhe had been left with this strange affliction that struck without warning. Every time it flared up, his eyes turned blood-red, his body temperature spiked, and he looked utterly monstrous. Not even the best doctor in the settlement could figure out what was wrong with him.