21: National situation

At first glance, this number seemed significant, but the air was thick with the heavy sorrow and desolation of surviving a disaster. Zhang Lei stood by the second-floor railing, looking down at the moving heads below with a tight frown. He whispered to Jiang Xin beside him, "Brother Jiang, 425 people... if we count the citizens who came here for business that day, the entire administrative complex must have had over two thousand people, right?" There was an undetectable chill in his voice.

Jiang Xin nodded silently, his gaze as heavy as iron. Twenty percent—only a twenty percent survival rate! Behind this cold number were mountains of corpses and unspeakable tragedy. The cruel fangs of the apocalypse were displayed clearly and terrifyingly before them for the first time.

Simultaneously, the soldiers were carrying out another cold but necessary task: carefully removing jewelry that might contain gold, platinum, or gems—rings, necklaces, earrings—from the killed female zombies. Every piece was stained with the stench of filth and death. As for the jewelry worn by the survivors, Jiang Xin hadn't found a suitable excuse to confiscate it without causing panic yet. However, as the elite squad sent to Xinjie returned smoothly with a heavy harvest, combined with these "battlefield recoveries" and previous sporadic seizures, the funds on the virtual interface only he could see finally welcomed an exhilarating leap: 40,800!

The troops had also been tempered through continuous combat. Some soldiers who performed exceptionally well had already been promoted to "three-star" rank. And the two Military Dogs that had been charging into battle with the troops showed even more shocking changes!

Howling Heaven and its new partner—a second Military Dog named "Earthsplitter" by Jiang Xin—were currently lying quietly in a corner of the hall, but their size was far beyond what it used to be. Their shoulder height reached an adult's waist, and their weight had soared to 120 kilograms, as sturdy as two young calves! Muscles bulged beneath their short, stiff fur, containing explosive power. Occasionally, they would lift their heads, revealing ivory-white fangs like daggers, letting out low growls from their throats with eyes as sharp as tempered steel needles. A fierce pounce and bite from a three-star Military Dog was enough to instantly tear a normal zombie's throat or even snap its neck! Earthsplitter seemed satisfied with its new name; upon hearing Jiang Xin's call, it would immediately prick up its ears and wag its tail powerfully against the ground. (The author is bad at naming, everyone can post good names in the comments.)

Over the past two days, Jiang Xin had never stopped trying to capture information from the outside world. He kept tuning a dilapidated radio, intermittently receiving weak signals from official and civilian sources.

The news was suffocating:

Xijiang Province's standing military force was already weak. After the zombie tide, the remaining forces—including a small number of directly subordinate Armed Police and Provincial Military Region troops—totaled only a little over four thousand. Currently, within the entire Xijiang Province, only the provincial capital, Hongdu, had relied on these remnant forces to establish a survivor base, which was said to have arduously taken in tens of thousands of citizens. The radio repeatedly broadcast the call sign of the Hongdu Base, calling for survivors across the province to gather there for refuge. As for other cities... there was a dead silence, with no news of any large-scale bases being established.

The national situation was even more shocking. Those once-prosperous metropolises with populations exceeding ten million had almost all suffered total destruction. Official preliminary statistics showed a zombie transformation rate as high as seventy percent! This meant that on the land of Huaguo, which had a population of 7 billion, nearly 5 billion people had turned into the walking dead! This was a number sufficient to plunge any survivor into an abyss of despair. Thousands, or even tens of thousands, of surviving troops were like a pebble thrown into a raging sea when faced with zombie tides of millions or tens of millions; they would be submerged without a trace in an instant.

Huaguo, a land that had nurtured dozens of giant cities with populations in the tens of millions, was now enduring an unprecedented disaster. Among them, the four super-cities with populations over a hundred million—Kyoto, Magic City, Mountain City, and Deep City—had become the core of a living hell.

The radio transmitted intermittent official announcements mixed with heavy static: Magic City, the super-city that once shone with the light of the Pearl of the Orient and had a pre-apocalyptic population of six hundred million, had... completely fallen! The only remaining two hundred thousand plus troops of the Eastern Military Region, facing a sea of corpses that submerged the entire city and was nearly infinite, finally made an incredibly difficult and heartbreaking decision: to give up the rescue of Magic City. They retracted their forces and established a new survivor base in the relatively sparsely populated Yangtai City, doing their best to take in citizens who escaped from across the province, already numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

The voice in the announcement was heavy: "...Attention to all survivor bases... in first-tier and ultra-large urban areas... it has been confirmed that a large number of highly mutated zombie individuals with special abilities have appeared... repeat... highly mutated individuals are extremely dangerous..." Next, the announcement listed some confirmed types: the acid sprayers (Acid Throats) that Jiang Xin and the others had encountered, Agiles as fast as ghosts, Lickers skilled at climbing and ambushing... and even more terrifying types: "Tank" zombies (Fatty Zombies) as large as small trucks with skin and fat thick enough to resist large-caliber sniper rifle rounds; "Butcher" zombies that used cleavers, were similarly thick-skinned, and were extremely aggressive... Even more hair-raisingly, the announcement concluded: "...A large number of animal populations have been confirmed to be infected with the virus, transforming into highly aggressive 'Zombie Beasts.' The species and numbers are unknown, and the threat level is extremely high... All survivors must maintain the highest vigilance..."

Jiang Xin silently turned off the radio, and the office fell into a dead silence. The sound of artillery fire outside seemed to have grown more distant, leaving only the heavy breathing of the three people. On the tablet, the outline of the Yongjiang Ancient City, reflected in the faint light of the screen, seemed to have become the only fragile piece of driftwood they could desperately cling to in this ocean of despair.