The course of events was growing increasingly bizarre.
The harsh, blinding sun made Gu Xi's already foggy and heavy head spin.
'Unless this is all just some bizarre, fantastical dream I'm having from a drunken stupor...' Gu Xi shut her eyes for a moment, then let her gaze fall back to the booklet in her hand.
The booklet was only a few pages thick, and Gu Xi finished it quickly.
So thirty years really had passed. But the beautiful world she had once yearned for, the one she had bled for in battle, had never come to be. Although human society had restored order, it now faced a new food crisis:
—not long after the zombies were completely eradicated, flora and fauna underwent a second, large-scale mutation.
After this second mutation, the plants were no longer aggressive. However, their bodies now contained a bizarre energy that humans could neither digest and absorb nor expel through metabolism.
And if this energy accumulated beyond a certain threshold in a person's body, they would turn into a mindless monster, every bit as dangerous as a zombie.
The food crisis once again posed a grave threat to humanity's survival.
Therefore, in recent years, while the government marshaled its forces to eliminate the dangerous mutant animals, it also vigorously promoted agricultural development.
Numerous policies were enacted to encourage people to leave the safety of the established bases, clear wild land for farming, and attempt to find and grow crops with low mutation coefficients that were safe to eat.
Gu Xi closed the booklet, her gaze once again falling on the patch of dark green at the base of the high wall in the distance, lost in thought.
...
Half an hour later, as Gu Xi walked out of the camp's main gate, she sensed someone was following her.
He was a young, gaunt man.
He had well-defined features, with thick brows and large eyes, but his face was very pale, and his steps seemed unsteady and feeble.
Seeing her turn to look, the man smiled. "You just got to camp and you're already leaving. Mr. Zhou was a bit worried, so he asked me to follow along and see how you're doing."
Mr. Zhou was the scar-faced man from before.
He looked intimidating, but he was actually gentle and always eager to help others.
He and a few others were the ones who had found Gu Xi unconscious in the ruins last night and brought her back to the camp.
Gu Xi knew the man meant well, but after glancing at his pale face and unsteady gait, she thought for a moment before refusing. "Thank you, but that won't be necessary. I'm just going for a walk..."
Having inexplicably lost thirty years of her life, Gu Xi felt an urgent need to see what the world outside had become.
"Please, let me tag along. You weren't in good shape when we found you last night..." At this, the young man smiled faintly, a telltale blush creeping onto his pale cheeks.
He avoided Gu Xi's gaze and walked ahead of her, trying to act casual. "This whole area is full of mutant plants. They say they don't attack people, but you can't guarantee there won't be... other situations."
"Besides, you're new here and don't know the area..." 'He couldn't in good conscience let a seemingly fragile girl like Gu Xi wander out of the camp all by herself.'
'Even though the army had cleared this area before the camp was established, the mutant plants these days grew so fast and thick, there was no telling what kind of dangerous vipers or beasts could be lurking within.'
Gu Xi watched the man pull a machete from the cloth bag at his side and start clearing a path for her, his steps unsteady. She fell silent for a moment.
"Thank you. My name is Gu Xi," she said, moving unobtrusively to his side. "And you are...?"
"Wei Heng." The young man tightened his grip on the machete. Noticing Gu Xi's gaze fall on the cloth bag at his waist, he smiled and explained,
"I know the mutation coefficients of the wild plants out here are all really high, and you can barely find any that are directly edible, but who knows? We might get lucky."
The higher a plant's mutation coefficient, the more of that strange energy it contained.
Any plant with a mutation coefficient of 5 or higher was considered inedible.
Gu Xi fell silent. She hadn't imagined that humanity's food crisis had reached such a dire state; it was as if they had returned to an age of famine.
After a long moment, she looked up at the lush green fields and mountains surrounding them as a small, tender green sprout quietly emerged from her fingertip.
Gu Xi had seen many mutant plants in her time, and had even personally hunted her fair share of high-level ones. But she had never imagined that the world would one day enter an era of all-encompassing plant mutation.
Yes, an era where every single plant was a mutant.
As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but a dense, lush expanse of mutant plants.
And green, the color that once symbolized vitality, hope, and life, was now enough to make one's blood run cold.
Wei Heng saw the look on her face and pressed his lips together, tightening his grip on the machete once more.
'The surrounding mutant plants were too overgrown. They might not be deadly, but the girl looked like a weak Wood Element user. What if a venomous snake or a fierce beast suddenly sprang out...'
Gu Xi was unaware of his thoughts. She walked beside him, silently observing the surrounding mutant plants while habitually activating her ability.
'True, the booklet from the camp said that wild mutant plants no longer actively attacked humans.'
'But to Gu Xi's senses, these mutant plants were suffused with a volatile energy that still made them very dangerous. If they were to suddenly lash out...'
Suddenly, she stopped in her tracks.
"Gu Xi?" Noticing she had stopped, Wei Heng followed her line of sight toward the forest to the northwest.
But he didn't see anything out of the ordinary.
"What's wrong?" he asked, his hand instinctively tightening around his machete.
"It's nothing." Gu Xi shook her head slightly, the fingertips of her dangling hand curling just a bit. "I just think it's a little strange. We're so close to the camp, has no one cleared the path?"
"What do you mean? This very path we're on was cleared just a few days ago..." Wei Heng said with a wry smile. "But these wild mutant plants have gone crazy. Their growth and reproduction rates are terrifying..."
He used his machete to brush aside the weeds before them, vaguely revealing a road surface buried under the thick vegetation.
It appeared to be a pre-apocalypse asphalt road, but the once-flat surface was now cracked beyond recognition, with signs of damage from the plants visible everywhere.
Gu Xi lowered her gaze to a weed beside her that stood half as tall as a person. After a long moment of silence, she decided to release her ability...
She wanted to test it.
The energy within these mutant plants was still somewhat unfamiliar to her, but...
But at that exact moment, a piercing alarm suddenly blared from over the camp.
The color instantly drained from Wei Heng's face. He grabbed Gu Xi's hand and, without a word, turned and broke into a desperate sprint back toward the camp.
Caught off guard, Gu Xi stumbled, a slight frown creasing her brow.
But seeing how pale he was, how he was gasping for breath and struggling to run, she simply opened her mouth and then closed it again, deciding not to ask anything.
When they made it back to the camp, Gu Xi saw that many people had rushed out of their dwellings and into the central open area. All their faces were deathly pale, their expressions exceptionally grim.
Many of them were repeatedly glancing up at the sky.
'What happened? Did a powerful mutant bird appear?'
'But that shouldn't be possible. The booklet said the government had spent thirty years focusing all its efforts on their extermination. Powerful mutant animals were supposed to be rare in the wild now...'
'Otherwise, they wouldn't be encouraging people to leave the safe bases to start farms.'
Gu Xi glanced at the young man beside her, who was half-squatting with his hands on his knees, panting violently. She dismissed the idea of questioning him and instead quietly pricked up her ears, beginning to discreetly gather information from her surroundings:
"What happened? Why did the alarm suddenly go off?"
"I heard the camp's sensors detected an Abnormal Energy surge in the forest to the northwest. After they sent a drone to check, they found the mutant plants over there are withering away in large swaths..."
"How could the mutant plants suddenly wither on their own? Did an Ability User Extermination Squad pass through?"
"It'd be a good thing if it was an Extermination Squad. What I'm afraid of is that the world is about to change again..."
"It could also be that a higher-level mutant plant has appeared in the area..."
This guess made the color drain from the faces of everyone in the camp.
As everyone knew, plants possessed a tenacious life force, and mutant plants were even more vigorous. Their rates of growth and reproduction were terrifying.
Since the apocalypse, the higher a plant's mutation coefficient, the more vigorous its life force and the faster its growth and reproduction. For vast swaths of high-level wild mutant plants to suddenly wither, there were only two possibilities:
The first was that, just like the sudden outbreak of the apocalypse more than fifty years ago, the soil and environment here had undergone some unknown change, making it no longer suitable for plant life.
The second was that plants with an even higher mutation coefficient had appeared nearby, silently robbing the existing mutant plants of their ability to survive.
But either of these scenarios would make it a nearly impossible task for the pioneers in the camp to successfully grow edible crops with a lower mutation coefficient in the vicinity.
Ever since the apocalypse, farming had become an exceptionally difficult endeavor.
Wild mutant plants covering the mountains and plains would steal the living space of crops with lower mutation coefficients, and any environmental change could affect the crops' mutation coefficient...
The seedlings you plant with such high hopes could be devoured at any moment by weeds that pop up out of nowhere. And even if you protect them with the utmost care, they might still mutate beyond the edible coefficient before they can even be harvested, rendering them completely useless!
At that thought, everyone fell silent.
Gu Xi leaned against a wall and glanced to the side at Wei Heng. Seeing that he still couldn't catch his breath, she thought for a moment and decided to let it go.
Just then, the roar of helicopters suddenly sounded in the distance.
Soon, several helicopters flew over the camp.
When she caught a clear glimpse of a familiar insignia flashing on the body of one of the aircraft, Gu Xi narrowed her eyes.