3.12

A black sedan at the speed of 180 mph drove through the entirety of a corner as it drift turned both expertly and haphazardly. Feng Mian felt like she was seeing her life flashing before her eyes through the window instead of the barren road.

Ye Junli white-rimmed knuckles clutched tight as his hands deftly oversteered the wheels; the clicking of clutch kicking into different gears resounded in the quiet car every now and then. His face was taut and Feng Mian could see the blue veins surfacing his pale hands from the tightness of his grip.

Feng Mian's voice quavered. "Are we going back to the base?"

"No," he answered throatily.

There was inexplicable anger in his heart when he found out that Team A had come back without 119 in tow and without waiting for permission, he had dexterously hitched into one of the base's recon cars and driven away faster than Bao Cheng could order the gatekeepers to close the entryway. Luckily, 119's tracker had been kept with him.

The tracker is satellite-based but it could only detect the approximate location and was not able to pinpoint 119's exact coordinate. When he arrived in the area, Ye Junli encountered signs of a zombie riot and followed the trails left behind by dead zombie carcasses.

The masses of the rotting bodies kept him hopeful of 119's plight.

The clues led him straight to the scene of drowned and electrocuted zombie hordes on a hillslope. He climbed and saw a scribble of writing that he recognised immediately.

Armed with a silencer muzzled gun, he tenaciously ripped through every door on the 9th lane. As long as he saw a zombie, he would shoot, but he refused to slow down his pursuit even by a bit.

When he entered the clothing store, he had nearly misrecognized 119 for a zombie.

Those entrancing golden eyes made him stand and stare even as his breath were ragged in feverish stress.

He called out to her without caution. "119?"

119's head tilted to the side, for a moment she had forgotten who the person in front of her was.

"... Hao Junli?" The roof of her mouth tasted like dry sandpaper. Her lips were still caked in blood

Feng Mian had obviously lacked the ability to discern in her cloudy state of mind. Ye Junli ignored the lifeless zombie laying on top of her lap and directly walked inside. He stopped right in front of the electrical barrier that gleamed cyan.

The sparks formed shadows of Hao Junli's figure that stretched towards the exit door.

"Let's go." His voice still had reminiscence of enervation.

Feng Mian stared at the outstretched hand holding out to her. "Ye Junli?"

He hummed.

"... I lost the snacks." Her voice unintentionally drawls out the last syllables as if whining.

"Okay."

"What do we eat?"

"There's snacks in the car."

"Oh," she said perfunctorily.

Feng Mian dislodged the zombie on her with a push and his hollow head made a 'thump' as it hit the marbled floor. She rose to her feet unstably and made a beeline towards him.

Without a care for the electrical field, her feet knocked the rods obstructing her path and they tumbled like dominos. Ye Junli snagged a fresh shirt from one of the hangers and used it to wipe the traces of blood off her face, his demeanour gentler than how it usually would have been.

His eyes however had a dangerous gleam to them that the dark surroundings caught on. Like an inch of a knife about to unsheath.

Ye Junli plucked several more clothing items from their racks and threw them in the car. A navy hoodie was slid on Feng Mian's torso in one go and she was buckled into the car passenger seat in less than a minute before they took off.

In the span of the hellish car ride, Feng Mian gained some form of clarity. She realised that they were not heading in the direction of Z City's base.

"Where are we going?"

"A warehouse. My secret base."

Feng Mian's head whipped by ninety degrees. "Ah? You have a secret base?"

"A secret lab." Ye Junli handed her a peculiar brass looking seal stamp.

"I'm not the only one with a tracker. Your collar's lock is magnetic, this is the key," he explained.

She felt around for a stump in her collar and sure enough, there was an area that felt harder and protruded slightly from the leather. The key was inserted into the socket and the collar opened with a click.

The system prompt went out.

[SYSTEM PROMPT: Side mission 'get out of the experiment facility' accomplished.

Reward: 100 000 points.

Task completion rate: 33%]

Feng Mian threw the piece of tracking collar out the open car window. The wind carried it for a meter before it landed, abandoned on the forlorn sand cracks.

System 555 made an appearance after staying quiet for so long. "Congrats Xiao Mian. You have 210 200 points at your disposal. Let's work hard to complete this world!"

"Yo, you were quiet for so long I forgot you existed. What happened? Were you scared oh baobei?"

System 555 let out a loud humph, but after remembering its' host spine-chilling spazzed out look from before, it couldn't refute. "A bit ba. You looked really scary just now Xiao Mian."

There was pregnant silence between them. "Me too. I saw my reflection and was also scared."

She hesitated to ask. "Baobei, in the future planes… would it also be this scary?"

"I also don't know. The systems won't know until the task is issued by the headquarters. If we're lucky, we can fight for the better roles for our hosts, but most of the time it's just luck," 555 answered honestly.

Ye Junli once again drifted slapdashed into another corner.

Feng Mian yanked onto the handle and yelled out, "Wei! Slow down! This grandma is about to fly out the window!"

***

The car parked in front of an old warehouse. Feng Mian estimated that the warehouse was around 40,000 square feet but the massiveness of it was mostly shrouded by the overgrown weeds and wild plants around.

They were between the boundary of City Z and City Y so there were no scouts patrolling the area.

Ye Junli walked up to the front aluminium door and pinched open a canister that secretly hid an iris identification scanner. A green light beeped and the door was immediately opened.

"It's empty," Feng Mian noted. There was nothing but open space and scraps of metal in the warehouse.

"Not here."

Ye Junli tapped his feet into one particular floor tile and it gave out a dense sounding whomp that was different from the rest of the tiles that hardly made a sound when stepped on. His nails dug into a crack and the tile was lifted up in one swoop.

A bunker.

Inside of it was all sorts of equipment and monitors Ye Junli used to expedite his research and until recently, no one had any notion that this place had existed.

On the white counter were unknown chemicals with peculiar colour compounds occupying bottles of test tubes, and the shelves were stocked with glass jars filled with deracinated zombie parts. There was also a row of zombie nuclei kept in one corner.

Feng Mian had only seen this sort of science lab in horror and sci-fi movies. Seeing that Ye Junli wasn't too concerned with her probing around, she poked and prodded at the glass specimens.

"What do you do here?"

Ye Junli sat on his swivel chair languidly. "Experiments."

"What kind of experiments?"

He looked at her thoughtfully, his eyes flickering under their dark lashes. "An experiment… to make humans undergo evolution."

Ah? Wasn't that her side task?

Ye Junli is no longer just spiking up awakening values, he's also taking up her side missions. 555 lamented, if Feng Mian was an official task taker, she would be jobless under his performance.