Chapter 324 - 164: Human Habitation

Chapter 324: Chapter 164: Human Habitation

The off-road vehicle continued forward. Xu Mo was no longer fiddling with the radio channels. His hands were on the steering wheel, his gaze fixed ahead as he focused on driving.

The weather was brutally hot. The scorching sun hung in the sky like a giant fireball, roasting the earth. The roadside weeds had long since withered. Their leaves were curled, their color changing from green to yellow, and from yellow to a dead brown, as if they had been scorched by fire.

Xu Mo glanced at the thermometer next to the dashboard. Thirty-eight degrees.

It was just past twelve noon; the hottest part of the day had yet to arrive. The hottest time of day wasn’t high noon, but between one and three in the afternoon. During that period, the sun’s angle was at its most vicious, the ground’s absorbed heat reached its peak, and the temperature could climb another two or three degrees higher than at noon.

Xu Mo estimated the temperature would reach forty degrees by then. He reached out and rolled the window down a crack, letting the outside wind blow in. The wind was hot, carrying a dry, earthy smell.

The road was quiet. No zombies, no Mutant Beasts, nothing. Those heat-averse creatures were probably all hiding in shady spots, waiting for the sun to set.

Xu Mo recalled the scene from last night by the river. Hundreds, if not thousands, of zombies had rushed into the water to drink frantically. They were attacked by mutant fish, then turned on each other, tearing one another apart until the banks were littered with the dead and dying. Those zombies must have reached some kind of limit to have rushed toward a water source so desperately.

’High temperatures seem to be more harmful to zombies than extreme cold.’

’Extreme cold, at most, makes zombies sluggish and reluctant to go out. High temperatures, on the other hand, can bake them into husks.’

As Xu Mo was pondering this, two figures appeared on the roadside ahead. He narrowed his eyes and slowed down to approach.

It was two zombies. One was lying on the ground, motionless—clearly dead. The other was hunched over it, its head buried, eating something.

Xu Mo kept one hand on the steering wheel while his other drew the TT-33 pistol from his waist, aiming the barrel at the crouching zombie.

"BANG!"

The gunshot cracked across the empty highway. The feeding zombie’s head exploded, and its body slumped sideways, tumbling off its companion and kicking up a small puff of dust.

Xu Mo parked the car on the side of the road and got out to investigate.

A wave of heat hit him in the face like an invisible wall.

Xu Mo walked quickly over to the two zombies and looked down. The zombie he had shot lay on the ground, half its head blown open. Dark, brownish fluid trickled from the wound, but only a little. The body wasn’t out of fluids—it was just too dry.

The other zombie, long dead, was in even worse shape. Its skin was completely cracked and dry, like sun-baked earth, covered in a network of crisscrossing fissures. Some of the cracks were so deep you could faintly see the desiccated muscle tissue within.

Xu Mo found a stick and prodded the two corpses. These zombies had clearly been dehydrated for a long time. Their skin was cracked, their muscles atrophied, and they barely had any blood left to spill. They must have been wandering this desolate wilderness for a long time, unable to find a water source, and were baked into this state by the sun.

"On a day this hot," Xu Mo muttered to himself, "you’d think you’d drink a little water before coming out."

’These zombies only have instinct, no reason. When they’re thirsty, they look for water. If they can’t find any, they just endure it until they can’t anymore, and then they collapse. The one that falls is eaten by its companion. The companion eats its flesh and might last a few more days, but in the end, it can’t escape the fate of being baked dry either.’

Xu Mo turned, went back to his car, started the engine, and continued on his way.

The two zombie corpses disappeared in the rearview mirror, but a question popped into Xu Mo’s mind: ’In the middle of this wasteland, why would there be two lone zombies?’

’Logically, zombies should gather in towns or wander along highways. He’d driven for dozens of kilometers through this area and had seen almost no buildings. Where did these two come from?’

Xu Mo thought about it for a moment, but gave up when no answer came to mind.

It was a little after two in the afternoon, when the sun was at its most vicious. As Xu Mo was driving, he suddenly noticed something strange in the sky up ahead.

It was a flock of birds.

They were circling above an open area, sometimes diving, sometimes climbing, a chaotic mass. Some birds had something in their beaks and were struggling to fly higher, but as soon as they gained any altitude, other birds would swarm them to snatch it away.

Xu Mo narrowed his eyes, slowing down as he drew closer. ℯℯ𝑙.

As the distance closed, the birds came into clearer view. They were all common carrion birds—crows, vultures, and some others he couldn’t name.

None of the birds were very large, and they weren’t mutated, but there were a lot of them—he estimated a hundred or more.

They circled, fought, and shrieked in the air, their calls sharp and piercing, like a flock of lunatics having a party.

Xu Mo’s gaze shifted from the sky to the ground. There was a pile of something there, a dark mass heaped together, covering a considerable area.

At first, Xu Mo couldn’t see what it was, but as the car got closer, the smell hit him—the stench of rot, a stench so thick it was nauseating.

Xu Mo instinctively held his breath, but quickly let it go.

The car pulled up beside the pile, and Xu Mo hit the brakes. He could see it clearly now. It was a pile of corpses. Zombie corpses.

The flock of carrion birds was startled by the off-road vehicle’s sudden appearance. With a great WHOOSH, they surged into the sky, a somewhat spectacular sight—hundreds of birds taking flight at once, blocking out a patch of sky before scattering to circle higher up.

Xu Mo ignored them, his gaze fixed on the pile of corpses.

The zombie corpses were piled up like a small hill, at least a hundred of them. Most were ordinary zombies, but here and there, he could spot a few Level 1 variants.