5: Chapter 5: Forty-two million RMB!!!

Su Mingyuan held the gold nugget in his arms, his head full of numbers.

Thirty to forty jin. Calculating by purity, even if it's only ninety percent gold, at international gold prices—

Wait, no, with the current energy blockade, gold prices have long gone crazy.

Yesterday he glanced at the news, and the domestic gold buyback price had already surged to 2,800 yuan per gram.

Thirty to forty jin... calculating by thirty jin, one jin is five hundred grams, so fifteen thousand grams.

Fifteen thousand times twenty-eight hundred—

Forty-two million RMB!!!

"Take it. I must take it with me. Even if I die of exhaustion, I have to carry you back—"

Before he could finish his sentence...

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the bushes on the opposite bank move.

Su Mingyuan's voice stopped abruptly.

He instinctively lowered his body, hugging the gold nugget as he squatted back into the water, with only half his head exposed.

The bushes rustled again.

This time he saw it clearly—there was a human silhouette.

From behind that patch of waist-high bushes, it slowly, step by step, walked out.

Su Mingyuan's heart leaped into his throat.

A person.

The distance was about two to three hundred meters.

He couldn't see the face clearly.

Su Mingyuan's first reaction was fear.

Because the way that "person" walked was completely off.

Like a drunkard, or a person with crippled legs, yet not quite either.

Its knees seemed to bend in directions they shouldn't, every step clunking stiffly against the ground, its head dangling limply to one side, swaying mechanically with its stride.

Reeling and stumbling, yet it wouldn't fall.

Su Mingyuan tightly hugged the gold nugget, his brain racing.

What if that "person" charged over to snatch the gold nugget? Should he kill him first?

As soon as the thought arose, Su Mingyuan shivered.

"What am I thinking?"

He gritted his teeth and released his grip on the shovel.

That was a person.

No matter how weirdly it walked, no matter how absurd this place was, before confirming the other party was a threat, he had no right to harbor murderous intent.

Kill someone just over money?

Then how would he be any different from Jiang Wanting?

"Su Mingyuan, you're crazy broke, but don't go so crazy you lose your humanity."

He scolded himself, took a deep breath, and slowly stood up from the river.

He still held the gold nugget in his arms, with the shovel tucked under his armpit.

He cleared his throat and called out tentatively toward the figure across the river:

"Hey—!"

The voice echoed across the open plain.

The figure stopped.

Its tilted head slowly turned around, facing his direction.

The distance was too far to see facial features clearly, but Su Mingyuan inexplicably felt a chill down his spine—

That movement didn't look like "turning around upon hearing a sound."

It was more like... locking onto prey.

"Hello!" Su Mingyuan called out again, his voice carrying a bit of apprehension, "Can you understand what I'm saying—"

Halfway through his sentence, another figure walked out from the bushes on the left, equally hunched, equally tilting its head.

Then on the right, on the hillside, down on the riverbank, one after another, as if a signal had been triggered, "things" all over the hills moved toward him at the same time.

He swept his gaze around rapidly and roughly counted—no fewer than a hundred.

Cold sweat instantly broke out all over his back.

"Fuck... thank goodness I didn't attack..."

If he had really attacked and alerted the other party's helpers, he would probably be dead meat by now.

Those figures drew closer and closer.

The nearest one was already less than a hundred meters away.

At this distance, Su Mingyuan finally saw its face clearly.

His eyes shrank violently.

These were zombies!

Ash-grey skin covered in black markings, eyes murky and white with no pupils, jaw dislocated, revealing dark purple gums.

No breathing, chest completely still, but it was running, and getting faster and faster.

When over a hundred of these things surged toward him, all his chuunibyou fantasies about zombies vanished into thin air, leaving only one instinct—run.

Su Mingyuan took one last look at the gold nugget in his arms.

Forty million, his capital to turn his life around, all his hope.

But life was more precious than money.

"Lord Gold Nugget, I'll come back for you later!"

He threw the gold nugget onto the ground, grabbed the shovel, turned around, and ran.

Behind him, a dense "he-he" wheezing sound rasped like a hundred leaking bellows starting up at once, echoing across the wilderness.

He sprinted wildly, heading toward the place where he had previously landed from the teleportation.

After running two hundred meters, he looked back and saw over a hundred ash-white figures spreading out as they surged over like a grey tide, the foremost few only thirty or forty meters away from him.

Having not eaten a proper meal for two days, his stamina was hitting rock bottom, and his speed was dropping rapidly.

Over a hundred zombies—where could he run?

Open land, no buildings, no cars, not even a tree he could climb.

Just as despair was about to swallow him whole, the soles of his shoes stepped onto a patch of slippery ground.

Looking down—a thick, black liquid.

It was petroleum.

The crude oil dug out by that shovel stroke earlier had already spread into a sizeable black oil marsh.

With a "click" in Su Mingyuan's head, a string connected.

Petroleum—combustible!

He skidded to a halt and frantically rummaged through his pockets.

Left pocket, right pocket, back pocket—his fingers touched a cold metal shell.

A 1.2-yuan disposable lighter printed with an advertisement for "Want Want Gift Pack."

But it still wasn't enough; the oil marsh was too thin.

He rushed to the oil outlet and swung his shovel to dig fiercely three or four times, doubling the size of the hole. Crude oil gushed out like a pulled plug, spreading along the grassy slope to a dozen meters away.

"He—he—"

The sounds grew closer and closer.

The foremost one was less than fifteen meters away.

The first batch stepped into the edge of the oil marsh, crude oil coating their ash-white calves, but they showed no reaction and continued to charge forward.

Ten meters, eight meters, six meters—Su Mingyuan smelled the foul stench of rot mixed with rust.

Five meters.

Enough.

Su Mingyuan flicked the wheel of the lighter.

"Click."

It didn't light.

He glanced down at the crude oil beneath his feet, then looked at the lighter in his hand. Gritting his teeth, he rolled his coat into a ball, his thumb furiously flicking the wheel—"Click!"

Sparks burst forth, licking the edge of the fabric, and a small cluster of flames leaped up.

The sleeve soaked in crude oil instantly caught fire, and the entire jacket burned in his hands.

Then, Su Mingyuan flung the burning clothes outward with all his strength.

The ball of fire landed right in the center of the oil marsh, like a spark tossed into a powder keg—

"BOOM—!"

A wall of fire erupted from the ground, blue-orange flames spreading madly along the oil trails. A heatwave blew against his face; Su Mingyuan stumbled back two steps, his eyebrows and the ends of his hair instantly singing and curling.

That patch of grassland turned into a sea of fire.

The ones charging at the front were swallowed head-on by the wall of fire.

They didn't scream or struggle; they just continued to drag their mechanical footsteps forward.

But the temperature of burning crude oil exceeded a thousand degrees. Their ash-white skin rapidly carbonized and peeled away, and their joints snapped like concrete with burned-through rebar, clicking broken as their torsos collapsed, crashing to the ground.

The ones behind kept surging forward, but crude oil continuously flowed from the widened hole, and the sea of fire burned ever larger. Over a hundred grey figures charged into the flames one after another, only to fall, carbonize, and turn to ashes one by one.

The "he-he" noises grew weaker and sparser, until the last one fell in the flames and completely went silent.

The fire was still burning, thick smoke covering half the sky.

But the wilderness was finally quiet.

Su Mingyuan leaned against his shovel, panting heavily. He waited for more than two hours, and only after confirming that none of those things were moving did he slowly walk down to check.

The ground was a stretch of scorched black.

Those monsters had all burned into ash-grey powder that scattered with the wind, leaving no corpses, no bones, as if they had never existed.

He walked a circle around the scorched earth, when the tip of his shoe suddenly kicked something.

Looking down, there was something particularly out of place in the pile of ashes.

About the size of a peanut, roughly oval-shaped, its surface smooth to near perfection.

Su Mingyuan didn't think much of it, casually picking it up and stuffing it into his pants pocket.

Right now, only one thing occupied his mind—forty million RMB, he couldn't lose it.

Turning his head toward the riverbank, he took off running over.

In the upper right corner of his vision, blue numbers ticked quietly.

[00:10:53]

He had to hurry.