18: Chapter 18 Contact Jiang Yanxue, Multifunctional Storage Backpack!

Shen Wanxing loosened the straps at his waist and wiped the corners of her eyes.

There were no tear stains, but her hands were still shaking.

Chen Chen patted the top of her head and turned to push open the armored vehicle's door.

Outside were three corpses and two wrecked cars.

He first walked toward the wreckage of the sedan that had been run over by the RV.

The gunman's upper body was still stuck in the deformed car door frame, while his lower body had lost all recognizable shape.

Chen Chen crouched down and rummaged through his inner pockets.

Three Primary Vehicle Core Fragments.

An empty water bottle.

And a piece of paper folded several times.

The paper was rough and yellowed, with crooked lines drawn in charcoal.

Chen Chen unfolded it to reveal a hand-drawn architectural floor plan.

In the top left corner, three characters were written: "Military Factory."

The markings on the map were quite rough, but the key information was clear at a glance—the factory area was divided into an outer zone and a core zone.

The outer zone was covered in dense crosses, with a note beside them: "Large number of Aberrants."

The location of the core zone was marked with a red circle, and two lines of text were written inside:

"Jiang Yanxue, trapped."

"Cannot enter, waiting for reinforcements."

This bunch of Black Dragon Society scum was indeed after Jiang Yanxue.

First setting an ambush on the road to wait for fat sheep, then bringing weapons to the military factory to "rescue" the young lady.

Chen Chen folded the sketch and tucked it into his tactical vest pocket.

After looting the bodies, it was time to dismantle the cars.

The two civilian sedans were smashed to pieces, but the Power of Rules didn't care about the condition.

"Dismantle."

A white light flashed, and the two piles of wreckage turned into materials scattered on the ground.

Inferior sheet metal, general mechanical parts, and some other miscellaneous junk.

Chen Chen glanced at the storage space in the rear compartment—the 60 cubic meters were mostly full; adding more would encroach on the living area.

These sheet metals and parts were tasteless to eat but a waste to discard.

He couldn't take them.

He walked back to the vehicle and looked at the passenger seat.

"Post a message on the regional channel." Chen Chen tapped the dashboard,

"Just say we need storage items that can hold goods, like backpacks or space bags, blueprints are fine too. Anyone who has them, private message me to negotiate."

Shen Wanbing opened the channel, tapped her fingers on the virtual keyboard a few times, and sent the message.

Chen Chen restarted the engine, bypassed the debris on the road, and continued pushing forward along the branch road.

They drove for less than five more minutes.

The sky changed.

It wasn't the gradual darkening of a sunset, but rather as if someone had taken a piece of black cloth and draped it directly over the sky.

The grayish-white light was swallowed up within thirty seconds, and the wilderness plunged into pitch blackness.

The clock on the dashboard showed—4:00 PM.

"What the hell? The daytime is only eight hours long?" Chen Chen cursed.

The system broadcast sounded right on time.

[Night has fallen. The Death Black Fog's advancement speed is halved. Nighttime monsters' total attributes are increased by 50%.]

Shen Wanbing's brows knitted together as she quickly processed the data in her mind.

"The day-night cycles in different regions might be different. The main road has twelve hours of daylight, but this branch road only gives us eight."

She paused, "The upside is that the Black Fog is slower, giving us time to breathe. The downside is that the nighttime duration is extended to sixteen hours, doubling the monsters' active period. The window for scavenging supplies has been compressed by a full third."

Chen Chen checked the data behind them.

The Death Black Fog was 88 kilometers from their current position.

After the speed was halved, it was advancing at 4 kilometers per hour.

88 divided by 4 is twenty-two hours.

That was enough.

They were less than a kilometer away from the military factory.

But breaking in at night was equivalent to throwing their lives away.

The headlights switched to high beam, the beams scanning the road ahead.

Three hundred meters to the left, a square concrete structure stood on the gravel ground.

The walls were cracked, the iron door was crooked, and only half of the watchtower on top remained.

An abandoned outpost.

Chen Chen drove the RV into a gap in the outpost's perimeter wall; it was shielded by walls on three sides, leaving only one entrance in the front.

The position was good; it could hide most of the vehicle.

He killed the engine.

He pulled a mental shielding device from his storage space—that palm-sized, matte black disc, its central purple crystal emitting a faint, cold light in the darkness.

"Activate."

The disc hovered above the RV, silently unfolding a layer of invisible force field that enveloped the entire vehicle.

[mental shielding device activated, lasting until dawn. Within the force field, one is immune to all low-level mental pollution and sanity erosion.]

Chen Chen set the interior thermostat to 26 degrees.

The life support system ran very quietly, and warm air diffused evenly from the ceiling vents.

Outside, in the distance, came the intermittent roars of Aberrants.

Beyond the metal walls was the vast night and who knew how many pairs of crimson eyes.

Inside the cabin, the warm yellow overhead lights were on, the temperature was comfortable, and supplies were abundant.

It was absurdly disjointed.

Chen Chen leaned back in the driver's seat and opened the regional channel's private chat function.

He typed in the search bar: Jiang Yanxue.

He found her.

Behind her ID hung a gray Black Dragon emblem.

He took a photo and sent it directly.

The photo showed that solid black Black Dragon Society elite token, the coiled dragon pattern clearly visible under the overhead light.

Message status: Read.

Three seconds later, a reply popped up.

[Who are you? Where did you get the token?]

The tone was harsh, interrogative.

Chen Chen typed: [Your people set up a roadblock to rob people on Highway Branch 29, and I ran them over. I looted the token off a corpse.]

The other side was silent for a dozen seconds.

[How many people?]

[Three. One bald guy, one with a crew cut, and one short, fat guy. The bald guy called him Brother Long.]

This silence lasted longer. Nearly half a minute.

[... Dragon Scar and his squad. I messaged them three hours ago, and they said they were on their way.]

Chen Chen could imagine the expression on the other side of the screen.

The elite squad sent to provide support had been dealt with like a roadside stall before they even arrived.

He continued typing: [They weren't coming to rescue you. They planned to use weapons to subdue you and then take turns with you. Their exact words.]

The interval between the other side's replies grew even longer.

[... What exactly do you want?]

The tone had changed.

The interrogative stance had mostly been withdrawn.

[Information on the Military Factory's core zone. Distribution, quantity, level, and weaknesses of the mutated monsters. And what valuable supplies are inside. You give it to me, and I'll pull you out of there.]

[You're alone?]

[A 7.8-ton Lv.5 heavy armored RV—is that enough?]

Another ten seconds of blank space.

[... How can I trust you?]

[You have no choice. Your men are scattered, and your elite squad is wiped out. You're trapped alone in the core zone and can't get out. The Black Fog waits for no one.]

A long wait.

A minute later, a long message came through.

[Inside the core zone, there are three elite-level Aberrants, distributed in workshops A, B, and C. The one in workshop B is a mutated spider type that can spin webs to block paths; it's the most troublesome. Workshop A contains a large amount of military-grade steel and ammunition components, and workshop C has an undismantled military armored personnel carrier. There are about thirty low-level Aberrants in the outer zone, and the number may double at night.]

[I am currently in the second-floor command room of workshop A. The door can hold, but the speed of the Death Black Fog won't allow me to survive past tomorrow.]

Chen Chen took a screenshot to save it.

Finally, he typed a line: [I'll come to pick you up in a few hours. Stay alive until then.]

He sent it and closed the private chat.

Shen Wanbing had been watching the chat log the whole time without interrupting.

She only spoke after he closed the panel.

"Military armored personnel carrier." She grabbed onto a different key point,

"If we dismantle it, there will be a lot of C-grade or even B-grade military parts. The material shortage for the heavy machine gun will likely be covered."

Chen Chen nodded.

He walked to the rear compartment and dug out three boxes of self-heating hot pot from the pile of supplies.

He added water and heated them up.

The aroma of boiling beef tallow once again occupied the entire cabin.

Halfway through the meal, Shen Wanbing's virtual panel flashed.

She put down her chopsticks and opened the private message list.

"Someone replied."

She scrolled twice, filtered out spam, and stopped on one message.

"A player named 'Scavenger Old Six' says he has a D-grade Multi-functional Storage Backpack. It has 36 storage slots, calculated by slot, and each slot can hold 99 items of the same type."

"What does he want?"

"100L of fuel."

Shen Wanxing, who was nearby, nearly spat out her hot pot:

"100 liters?! Why doesn't he just rob someone!"

Chen Chen chewed on a beef roll and thought for two seconds.

One hundred liters of fuel was a lethal number for anyone else.

But he had two hundred liters of strategic reserves stacked in the rear compartment, and the fuel tank was still half full.

A 36-slot storage backpack meant that in the future, when getting out of the car to scavenge, they wouldn't have to run back and forth to carry things to the car, increasing efficiency by several times.

"Trade."

Shen Wanbing operated the trading interface, and 100L of fuel was transferred out.

A dark gray backpack appeared out of thin air in the storage space.

It was made of military canvas and had quick-release buckles on both sides.

Opening the main compartment, it was divided by the Power of Rules into thirty-six neat, transparent slots, with a light blue capacity number floating in each: 0/99.

Chen Chen slung the backpack onto his shoulders to test it.

The fit was good and didn't affect his combat movements.

He categorized and stuffed the scattered core fragments, hemostatic bandages, and spare crossbow bolts into the slots.

It was much cleaner.