Chapter 53: News Report

Chapter 53: Chapter 53: News Report

All three large backpacks were packed full.

Xiang Yi didn’t linger at the hospital any longer. He called Shi Tie over and the two of them headed toward the edge of the abandoned district.

On the way, Xiang Yi made a small detour, and near the outskirts of the commercial street he found a metalworking shop.

After a bit of digging around, he managed to turn up a welding torch with a matching fuel canister, along with some metal materials that hadn’t already been scavenged.

Once he got back, he figured he could try welding together a table and a few chairs from the metal sheets and steel rods — anything to avoid the misery of having to eat sitting on the floor.

With Shi Tie clanking and rattling along beside him, Xiang Yi made his way back to the substation.

He did a quick sweep of the place to see if there was anything like a portable generator lying around.

There wasn’t, of course — it was a substation, not a hardware store. He gave up and headed back down to the basement, found the iron door, and squeezed into the narrow passage.

He didn’t forget to reset the obstacles outside before he left, making sure nothing looked disturbed.

After another grueling forty-plus minutes of walking,

Xiang Yi finally pushed through an identical iron door on the other end and stepped back into the sewer.

He set his backpack down and made his way alone through the waterway to the sewer’s exit toward the city.

Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten. The silhouette of a vast and imposing city was slowly taking shape before him.

He didn’t dwell on it, though. No point staring — he had no way of walking into the city right now regardless.

He’d only come out to fetch some water from the lake. While he was at it, he climbed a nearby rise to get a better look at the building next to his hideout — the one wrapped in chain-link fencing.

What he’d mistaken for a small hill the night before turned out to be a mountain of junk built from all kinds of scrapped machinery and mechanical parts.

The whole compound was some kind of salvage and recycling depot.

He’d seen enough. Xiang Yi crawled back into the sewer and sealed up the entry hole he’d cut earlier.

He peeled off his tattered protective suit, pitched his tent, unrolled his sleeping bag, and burrowed inside.

The exhaustion from back-to-back hours of intense activity came crashing down on him all at once.

He didn’t even have time to run through everything that had happened before he was out cold.

He had no idea how much time passed.

Xiang Yi woke up.

Unlike the last time he’d gone under, this wasn’t unconsciousness — his mind and body had actually gotten proper rest.

That didn’t mean he was fully recovered, though.

His head still throbbed with intermittent sharp pains, and there wasn’t a single part of his body that didn’t ache in some way.

He wrestled himself out of the sleeping bag and got to his feet.

He looked at the three massive backpacks, then over at Shi Tie, motionless in the corner.

He decided to get started on what he should have done last night — or rather, in the early hours of this morning.

Everything in all three backpacks needed to be sorted out.

He couldn’t just leave it all piled up in a heap. It had to be organized by category so he could actually find things when he needed them.

It took a little while.

Xiang Yi tended to the Blood Crystals on his wounds, re-applied ointment, and rewrapped everything with fresh bandages.

Then he finished sorting through the rest of the gear and got all the equipment and devices set up in their proper places.

The floodlight with its built-in battery cast the sewer in a bright, even glow.

But when Xiang Yi went to reopen the exit leading toward the city, he found it pitch black outside — he’d slept straight from dawn all the way to nightfall.

He had no idea what this planet’s rotation period was. Going by how last night had felt, he’d estimated around ten hours of darkness — roughly the same as Earth.

Under the cover of night, Xiang Yi slipped out to the lakeshore for a quick wash, then headed back into the sewer.

He powered up his terminal and pulled up the website for the local news channel.

Now that he had internet access, he was going to make full use of it and look into a few things he very much needed to know.

The site’s homepage was playing a live feed.

A reporter stood in front of a building with soot-blackened walls and a massive gash torn through its side.

"It has now been twenty-four hours since the cargo ship went down. Rescue operations are ongoing, and according to preliminary figures from rescue personnel, the casualty count has already exceeded five hundred."

"The government has yet to officially classify the incident, but evidence that a patrol ship opened fire on the cargo vessel is unambiguous. Was this a tragic accident caused by a system malfunction — or a premeditated act of murder?"

"There are rumors circulating that the crash was ultimately triggered by an Abnormality incident. We have submitted a formal inquiry to the Abnormality Response Division, but have received no reply as of this time."

This wasn’t actually what Xiang Yi had come to look for.

But since he’d stumbled onto this story, he went ahead and pulled out the paper map he’d found back at the camp.

He spread it out on the ground.

It was enormous — nearly three square meters once fully unfolded.

The map was centered on the city.

From what he could tell, the urban area covered roughly eighty thousand square kilometers.

Going by cities of similar scale that he could remember, the population was probably somewhere in the range of twenty to thirty million.

A section of the area outside the city had been specially marked. That was almost certainly where the scavenging crew had been heading to search for signs of Abnormalities.

It wasn’t too far from the city, which explained why the crew had gone on foot.

Then again, they might have left their vehicle parked somewhere on the edge of the abandoned district and he’d just missed it.

Either way, it didn’t concern him. What was on the news mattered a lot more.

Xiang Yi found a pen.

He drew a line from the far southeastern corner of the map all the way to a point slightly northwest of the city’s center.

The line cut through the abandoned district to the southeast of the city, passed the lake on the city’s outskirts, and ran straight to that point northwest of center.

The line ended at a location marked on the map as the Rongge Hotel.

That was the building Xiang Yi’s ship had slammed into when it went down.

The very same site the news was broadcasting right now.

Xiang Yi drew several concentric circles on the map around the building.

Back when he used to go out on fieldwork, he’d sometimes talk shop with rescue crews after various accidents. At some point the conversation had turned to crash recovery operations — specifically aircraft crashes.

He knew roughly how wide a search radius rescue teams typically used when looking for victims’ remains after a crash.

If the prison authorities weren’t convinced he’d died in the wreck, they’d start their search within that radius and work outward from there.

Only once they’d come up empty inside the circles he’d drawn would the search teams start thinking about other possibilities.

That meant he had a window — a period where no one would be actively hunting for him.

But it wouldn’t last long. Searching for a body in the middle of a city was a hell of a lot faster than searching out in the middle of nowhere.