262: Chapter 262 Zombie Camp

On the very night the Rift Campaign ended, the first transport fleet carrying Yao Beast carcasses arrived.

One hundred and thirty-seven heavy trucks formed a long dragon, their beds crammed with the carcasses of Horned Wolves and Iron-backed Pigs, and blood trickled out from the gaps in the tailgates, dragging long dark red marks across the road.

The fleet did not stop at the Forward Base of the Yaowu World, but drove straight through the main road and turned towards the portal.

The golden pillar of light was exceptionally blinding in the night.

The fleet drove in one after another, disappearing into the golden light one by one.

Then they entered the Zombie World directly, without any pause.

Passing through the blue portal, the air suddenly felt wrong.

The wind in the Yaowu World was clean, carrying Spiritual Qi, and breathing it into the lungs felt warm.

The wind in the Zombie World was rancid, sticking heavily to the skin, and the smells of rotting flesh, corpse fluid, and mold swirled together to coat the mouth and nose, making breathing feel viscous.

The sky was wrong, too.

It was grayish, pressing down very low, with no sun in sight, making it impossible to tell day from night.

Three months ago, when Su Mingyuan first stepped into this world, beneath his feet was still a cracked asphalt road surface, in the distance were half-collapsed city ruins, and nearby were car wrecks rusted into scrap iron, with not a single living thing in sight.

Now, on this side of the portal, a military base had sprung up overnight.

The general commander of the base, Li Yunlong, was a man Su Mingyuan poached from the army engineering corps.

When he first arrived, he had tens of thousands of men under his command, but three months later, those tens of thousands had turned into eight million.

Eight million people were stationed under this gray sky, using reinforced concrete and skyfall steel to forcibly build a city upon the ruins.

The official name of the base was "Panshi Hub Base", but everyone called it the New Zombie City.

The New City covered an area of over twelve hundred square kilometers, sixty kilometers east-west and twenty kilometers north-south, in a strip shape spreading out along the direction of the portal.

The core area was the Command Center and the logistics warehouse cluster, where thousands of off-white buildings enclosed a square courtyard, their rooftops bristling with antennas operating twenty-four hours a day.

Outward from there was a ring of barracks, training grounds, machinery plants, and ammunition depots.

The outermost three concrete walls were twelve meters high, strung with electric fences on top, with a sentry tower every fifty meters, where searchlights and heavy machine guns stood by around the clock.

The eight million people were organized into forty-eight construction divisions and thirty-two garrison divisions, working in three shifts day and night without stopping.

The construction divisions built roads, constructed buildings, laid pipelines, and erected power grids, while the garrison divisions stood guard, patrolled, and cleared out the roaming zombies in the surrounding area.

Over the past three months, that original wasteland had completely changed.

But the New City was only half of it.

The other half was twenty kilometers north of the New City, and also the place in the entire Zombie World that people least wanted to approach.

Zombie Concentration Camp.

When Li Yunlong first heard about this plan, he frowned for a long time.

He had spent his whole life doing engineering, working on bridges, tunnels, and underground projects, but doing a job like "building a prison for zombies" was a first.

The final plan came from Tianheng, and the line of thought was very straightforward — zombies would evolve by eating meat, and evolution would produce crystal cores, which were strategic resources urgently needed by the Main World.

Then feed them.

Fence them in, throw in meat, let them eat, let them grow, and when they grew large enough, go in and harvest.

This was essentially no different from raising pigs.

The difference was that if a pig ran away, it would cost money at most, but if these things ran away, people would die.

Therefore, when Su Mingyuan received the blueprints, he only made one demand — use skyfall steel, nothing else could withstand it.

Thus, the walls, foundations, and gates were all forged from skyfall steel.

The raw ore transported from the Giant World was remelted, rolled, and welded in the smelter of the Zombie World, turning into something that had never appeared in human history.

Looking down from the air, the concentration camp looked like a grayish-black flower blooming on the wasteland.

The center was a circle with a diameter of two kilometers, the main camp area, which was the place with the highest density of zombies.

Six partition walls made of skyfall steel radiated outward from the center of the circle, cutting the main camp area into six sector blocks, numbered Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, and Ji.

Each block could be independently sealed off; if something happened in one sector, the gate would be closed without implicating the other five.

Outside the main camp area was the first wall.

Fifty meters high, thirty centimeters thick, poured entirely from skyfall steel.

The wall surface had been treated and polished as smooth as a mirror, without any protrusions or gaps.

Zombies did not know how to use tools, but high-tier zombies could climb walls, and this wall was aimed precisely at them.

With a fifty-meter-high skyfall steel mirror surface, no known zombies could climb over it at present.

Outside the first wall was a fifty-meter-wide no-man's-land; the ground had been hardened and was as flat as an apron, not even growing a single blade of grass.

Further out was the second wall, with the same specifications.

The space between the two walls was called the "Interlayer", used for mecha patrols.

Three hundred mechas were divided into six groups, corresponding to the six blocks, with fifty mechas per group, further rotated in three shifts.

At any given moment, there were at least one hundred mechas moving around in the interlayer.

The forty-four-meter-tall steel guys moved slowly along the curved passageway, their footsteps dull and rhythmic, passing through the walls into the camp area with a thud, thud, thud.

The zombies inside would behave a bit more docilely when they heard this movement.

Although zombies did not know fear, a certain instinct let them know that provoking the big guys outside would bring them severe trouble.

Outside the second wall was the observation platform, a circular concrete elevated platform equipped with telescopes, thermal imagers, and rows of surveillance screens, watched by duty officers twenty-four hours a day.

Most of the time, there was nothing much to see.

The zombies walked slowly and swayed inside, occasionally pushing each other, hitting the wall and bouncing back, then continuing to walk.

Until feeding time.

As soon as feeding time arrived, the mechanical arms on top of the wall began to operate, the sound of gears meshing transmission down from a height of fifty meters, and the zombies below all stopped in their tracks.

Hundreds of thousands of grayish-white heads raised up simultaneously, looking in the direction of the top of the wall.

The feeding ports were on the wall at the top of each block, with skyfall steel chutes extending from the top of the wall to the ground at a forty-five-degree angle and a width of six meters.

Feeding happened twice a day, at eight in the morning and four in the afternoon.

The transport trucks pulled the carcasses onto the feeding platform, and as the hydraulic tipper tilted, the carcasses tumbled down the chute with a rattle, smashing onto the ground, the muffled sound of shattering bones mixed in with the roars of the zombies.

What was being fed today were the Horned Wolves and Iron-backed Pigs cleared out from the rift.

When the tipper of Area A tilted, the carcasses of more than one hundred Horned Wolves rolled down, the dried blood stains on their gray fur still remaining, and their curved horns striking sparks against the chute.

The moment the carcasses hit the ground, the zombies in the entire concentration camp moved.

The gray figures that had been swaying aimlessly swarmed uniformly toward the feeding point; they were not fast, but the sight of more than one hundred thousand corpses turning simultaneously made one's scalp tighten.

The ones that arrived first pounced forward and tore into them, their fingers digging into the abdominal cavities of the Horned Wolves, dragging out the internal organs along with the ribs and stuffing them into their mouths.

Those in the back could not squeeze in, so they lay on the periphery gnawing on hind legs and tails, their teeth crunching loudly against the bones.

A large one squeezed to the front, grabbed the head and body of a Horned Wolf with both hands, and forcefully snapped it in half, its spine poking white and rigid from the broken section.

It hugged the half-section, retreated to the side, squatted down, and ate slowly, the range of motion of its lower jaw so huge it no longer looked human.

On the observation platform, the duty officer stared at the screen, with little expression on its face.

Having watched for a year, it had long since gotten used to it.