Chapter 41: Gathering

Chapter 41: Chapter 41: Gathering

"Ah..."

Xiang Yi let out a long, satisfied breath and finished off the entire pot of meat broth in short order.

He’d also found a rack to prop his wet clothes over the fire so they could dry out as quickly as possible.

He had no idea what was going on in the upper floors, and the last thing he needed was for those Abnormalities — or any surviving Scavengers — to come back down. He had to move out soon.

Still, while his clothes dried, he used the time to do a quick sweep of the campsite.

Food, medicine, spare clothing, sleeping bags, heating equipment, toiletries — all the basics were accounted for.

As long as nothing went sideways, he wouldn’t have to worry about survival for a good while.

He also turned up an intact personal terminal inside one of the tents.

It was a palm-sized electronic device. Xiang Yi had seen some of the prison staff use them before, though he’d never handled one himself.

It was only now, with the device actually in his hands, that the relevant memories began to surface.

A personal terminal was something like a smartphone, but more complex and feature-rich — in this era, practically everyone relied on one for their day-to-day life.

The terminal he’d just found was perfectly usable. The contents were password-protected, but he could use Spiritual Energy to wipe the data entirely and bypass the lock.

He had no intention of doing that, though.

The data already on it was exactly what he needed right now. Whatever these Scavengers had stored on their terminals might include something useful — information about Abnormalities, maybe even something that could help jog his memory.

Xiang Yi quickly packed everything worth taking into a large backpack the Scavengers had left behind, stuffing it alongside his own bag.

He shouldered the pack and got ready to leave the hospital.

The danger wasn’t over.

While he’d been searching the camp, distant screams had still drifted down from the upper floors.

Some of the Scavengers had died up there. The Abnormalities could start filtering back down at any moment.

He had to go.

Xiang Yi made his way down to the ground floor and walked the short distance to the hospital’s main entrance.

He stopped dead.

Outside, the storm was still raging — darkness pressed in from every direction.

But the brief rest had done him good. His senses were sharp again, sharper than they’d been in hours.

And what he heard through that darkness was unmistakable: a heavy, shuffling mass of footsteps, slow and dragging, coming from just beyond the doors.

His vision was completely blocked by the swirling grey-black dust, but the sounds were close — dangerously close. One step out the front door and he’d have several Abnormalities on him at once.

He immediately turned and headed for the other side of the building, aiming for the back exit and the perimeter wall.

But the moment he reached the back of the hospital, he heard it — the same slow, dense shuffling, coming from just beyond the wall.

They were out there too.

"This..."

Xiang Yi fell back into the main building.

He moved along the perimeter of the ground-floor lobby, checking every direction.

Every exit. Every wall. Abnormality footsteps, all of them.

East, south, west, north — it didn’t matter which way he tried. Any attempt to leave the hospital would put him right in their path.

And whether it was because of something he’d done earlier or simply bad timing, they were drawing closer by the minute.

Xiang Yi returned to the ground-floor lobby.

The situation outside was worse than he’d thought.

Every corpse in this entire abandoned district seemed to be converging on the hospital.

There was no safe route out. No way to slip away without being seen.

He was still turning it over in his mind when slow, wet footsteps echoed from the back of the hospital.

An Abnormality had already gotten inside. At the front, the footsteps were getting louder, getting closer.

He was surrounded.

Forcing his way out would draw a mob of them. Staying in the lobby was a death sentence. Going up was the only play that had any chance of keeping him alive.

Xiang Yi immediately stashed the large backpack in a hidden corner on the ground floor — too bulky to move with — grabbed only his own bag, and sprinted for the stairs.

He hit the second floor and immediately saw the problem: two wandering corpses were blocking the staircase leading up.

And on the third floor, the stairwell was crawling with more of them. If a fight broke out here, he’d be pinned between the ones above and the ones below with nowhere to run.

The lobby downstairs was already filling with the sound of footsteps. He absolutely could not afford a straight-up fight right now.

He cut over to the hospital’s other staircase.

Blocked. More wandering corpses, clogging the way up.

The blood he’d left behind when he changed his bandages, and that chunk of rock — those had kept the things lingering in the area.

That left him one option: the iron fire escape bolted to the outside of the building.

The problem was that the door connecting to it was a heavy iron fire door, and it was sealed shut.

If he wanted to get to it...

Xiang Yi moved to the room closest to the fire escape and leaned out the window.

He’d have to jump.

He could theoretically go outside from the ground floor and climb up from there, but even as he stuck his head out he spotted an Abnormality already drifting along the base of the hospital wall.

It was an animated skeleton — just bone and a thin layer of desiccated skin clinging to it, caked in mud, like something that had clawed its way out of a grave.

Going around outside was out of the question.

This was the only way.

Xiang Yi climbed up onto the windowsill, steadied himself against the wall, bent his knees slightly, and launched himself toward the fire escape.

He hit the outer railing hard. The rusted iron was slick with rain, and flakes of corroded metal crumbled away beneath his palms.

He dropped half a meter, his grip slipping, until only one hand was still hooked around the railing.

He didn’t fall.

But the impact had been loud — loud enough to carry dozens of meters through the rain.

Xiang Yi hauled himself up with a hard pull, muscles straining, fingers locking around the railing.

The whole time, he was terrified the rusted metal would give way entirely.

A six-meter drop wouldn’t kill him, but the Abnormalities below had already picked up on the noise and were starting to climb the fire escape after him.

Inside the stairwell, the ones on the third floor had heard it too — they were now slamming against the iron door that connected to the fire escape landing.

He had to keep going up. All the way to the top. The roof.

The roof could only be reached by the fire escape ladder. These Abnormalities were a nightmare to deal with, but they couldn’t fly.

Xiang Yi climbed all the way up to the tenth-floor landing of the fire escape.

He stood at the very top of the structure, planted his right foot on the railing, and pushed off.

Both hands caught the lip of the roof. He kicked off the wall with his left foot, swung his body up, and rolled onto the rooftop.

The moment he was up, he found himself staring at five people in rain ponchos, stationed at different corners of the roof, all of them watching him with sharp, guarded eyes.