88: Chapter 88: Only Blood Remains on the Outer Ring!

"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh~"

In the second half of the night, the blood veins at the entrance of the Camp Administration Room stopped crawling outward.

They stopped at the old safety line of the Assembly Clearing, curled into a small ball of dark red tumors, and gently pulsated against the muddy surface.

Jiang Ming did not push forward anymore; he withdrew all frontline rootlets from the unmanned area behind the door, coiling them in the shallow ditch, the bud points of decayed wood, and the inner side of the threshold of the newly occupied Camp Administration Room.

It was not that he could not continue charging, but that there was no need to.

The things inside the Camp Administration Room were more valuable than charging into the Central District to kill a few people.

He dragged the Old Accountant from under the ledger desk into the Drainage Shallow Ditch.

The ledger board was still nailed to his palm, with rootlets piercing through the back of his hand, skewering the entire hand and the wooden board together!

Since the devouring could not be separated, they were dragged into the depths of the mud layer together.

The wooden tag rack was shattered in the corner, and the scattered rotation tags were wrapped one by one by the blood film and sucked into the dark crevices beneath the threshold.

The blank wooden tags in the oilcloth bag were soaked through by hyphae, the writing on their surfaces completely blurred, turning into a clump of shredded wood fibers smeared with dark red mucus.

The corpses of the two Handymen in the Small Storage Shed were rolled out from under the overturned dry ration box by thick roots, and dragged together with the scattered dry ration cakes into the mud hole at the bottom of the shed.

The blood film in the corner of the shed wrapped the last bag of lime into a sticky, dark red cocoon, slowly pulling it down into the mud.

The Old Accountant's memories flooded in before the devouring ended.

Outer Ring daily water delivery schedule — once in the morning and once in the afternoon, from the Nan Gully water intake point to the Medical Shed.

When passing the old wooden stakes by the Reservoir, there would be a fifteen-minute handover window.

Stock of medical cloth in the Wounded Partition Shed — only half a roll of clean bandage left, two small packets of hemostatic powder, and a bottle of coarse salt that was running low.

Purified water storage location in the Central District — Ma Shoucai had moved all the purified water buckets into the cellar of the Central Main House, and the cellar door was beneath the kitchen cutting board.

Most importantly, there was a lateral path for carrying wounded, which bypassed the Assembly Clearing from behind the Wounded Partition Shed, hugging the extremely narrow alleyway between the back wall of the Camp Administration Room and the wooden fence, leading straight to the side door of the Central Main House.

Usually, only people carrying stretchers walked this path; no buckets or tags went through here, it was not involved in any shift-handover passwords, and very few people knew about it.

Jiang Ming picked out these sets of information from the memory fragments and archived them separately.

The water delivery schedule meant he could know in advance when someone would be isolated at the water intake point.

The depletion of medical cloth stock meant Lin Qiu would soon send people to risk rummaging through the old Medical Shed in the ruins.

The purified water storage location meant knowing where humanity's core survival resources were hidden.

And that lateral wounded-carrying path meant that when the wounded were transferred, they walked down a narrow, remote alleyway guarded by no one.

He then disassembled those common wooden tag shorthand codes in the Old Accountant's brain.

What was engraved on each rotation tag was not just names, but also fixed shorthand codes — a triangle plus a horizontal bar represented supplies, double circles plus numbers represented shift batches, and a square plus a dot represented the transfer of the wounded.

Combined with the wooden tag writing methods and channel secret codes he had already mastered, along with Blood Sound Mimicry, what he shouted out would no longer be just short sentences imitating someone's voice, but complete fake instructions that could be directly embedded into the Outer Ring's remaining command system.

It was not a fake voice, but a fake procedure.

Before dawn, Xu Baiheng held an impromptu meeting in the Medical Shed.

It was not a formal meeting of the entire lineup like the one in the Council Shed, but simply calling the people who could still move into the corner of the Medical Shed to squat and talk.

"Hoo~ hoo~"

Lin Qiu leaned against the medicine shelf, still clutching a piece of unused bandage in her hand, her nerves tightly strung.

Ma Shoucai shrank near the door, holding no ledger in his hand, only a short axe used for chopping firewood.

A few guards who could still move squatted at the entrance of the shed, their spear shafts horizontal across their knees.

The Handymen and running errands apprentices crowded at the back of the shed; some squatted, while others sat on the ground against the wall, their legs still wrapped in coarse salt cloth that Lin Qiu had bound for them after they were grazed by the blood film.

"Stop thinking about recapturing the Camp Administration Room."

Xu Baiheng squatted in the middle of everyone, his voice kept very low.

"The tags are gone, the buckets are gone, the lime is gone. We are not thinking about how to fight back right now; we are thinking about how to prevent more people from dying."

Lin Qiu answered quickly, as if she had already thought it through.

"Send the movable wounded to the center first. Do not leave a bunch of people behind the door; the more people left, the faster they die."

"There are only two packets of hemostatic powder left, the coarse salt is running out, and the bandages are not enough for another round of wound wrapping. Whoever still thinks they can rely on procedures to hold on is dreaming."

Ma Shoucai propped the short axe on the ground, his lips moved slightly, but no sound came out.

He had managed the supplies for so long, and now all the supplies were gone; he did not even have ledgers to flip through.

But problems popped up immediately.

Carrying the wounded required people, and guarding the door also required people.

Moving purified water required people, and watching the children also required people.

There were only so many Handymen squatting in the shed; split among three tasks, there was no one left to do the fourth.

Lin Qiu said to carry the severely wounded first, and a guard asked who would guard this street while carrying the wounded.

Another handyman said the water buckets were still by the Reservoir, and asked whether going to fetch water now would count as violating the safety line.

No one could make a final decision.

Every lifesaving matter just brought up was tripped up by another lifesaving matter.

Jiang Ming listened to this meeting from beginning to end.

Puppet No. 3 leaned against the broken wooden bed in the wounded corner, its eyes closed, its breathing steady, the old scar on its collarbone glowing with a dark red hue in the dim oil lamp light.

No one suspected that an unconscious wounded person was eavesdropping.

He softly tested a long sentence from the residual membrane in the puppet's throat —

"Carry the left side first, and send the water inside."

The volume was controlled so that a handyman at the back of the shed could vaguely hear it. That handyman raised his head and looked left and right; seeing no one making a sound, he lowered his head again.

Xu Baiheng stood up.

He walked to the entrance of the Medical Shed, crossed out all the old process records on the recording board, and wrote two lines of text in the blank space at the very bottom.

After finishing writing, he held it up for everyone to see.

"From now on, the Outer Ring enters silent operation. Everyone is not to shout, not to respond, and not to pass messages alone. Shift handovers use gestures, carrying people uses a fixed formation, and water bucket handovers rely only on wooden tags, not mouths. If there is no second person watching you receive the order with their own eyes, do not move."

Lin Qiu took the charcoal pencil from his hand and added a clause next to it: The mouths of the wounded must also be managed — severely wounded people sometimes talk nonsense, and those are not orders.

A few Handymen in the shed looked at each other; no one objected, nor did anyone ask how to operate it specifically.

They simply remembered this rule silently, because right now, besides remembering the rules, there was nothing else that could keep them from falling apart.

Jiang Ming also made the puppet's throat fall silent.

He re-tallied the coverage area of the wet film in the unmanned area behind the door — from the shallow ditch to the bud points of decayed wood, from the threshold of the Camp Administration Room to the corner of the Small Storage Shed, and then to the old muddy surface at the edge of the Assembly Clearing repeatedly soaked by blood stains, the film had connected across the entire region into a shallow living entity with weak contractile force.

Stepping on it would not only be slippery, but it would also gently stick to the soles of one's shoes.

This was not complete living land, but it was already a semi-formed frontline hunting ground inside the door.

After hearing Xu Baiheng's silent plan, he did not feel a trace of worry.

Humans stopped shouting, leaving them with only wooden tags and gestures.

Only the last few wooden tags remained in Lin Qiu's hands, and gestures had to be transmitted through a fixed formation.

A fixed formation meant people would walk fixed routes, and fixed routes meant he could bury roots in advance.

And the most fatal drawback of silence was hidden in its core logic: before acting, every single person had to first confirm whether the order they received was real.

This confirmation action meant taking one more step forward, or looking at one more person to the left.

It meant standing there waiting for a second person to nod — these extra actions would be seen crystal clear by him from the breach and behind the door!