Chapter 313: Grain People

Zhang Tie looked as if he had seen a ghost, and he couldn't help but stumble back two steps.

Besides Lin An showing no reaction, the other two looked at Lin Ruolan with complex expressions, feeling as if they had misheard.

"How?"

Lin Ruolan let out a cold laugh, wearing an expression as if she had seen through several people:

"You lot, you 'Grain People', don't you just like playing this kind of trick?"

"Bored with the clean safety of the Safe Zone, you like to go out into the wilderness seeking excitement!"

She glared at Lin An with a vicious stare, and from her mouth full of yellow teeth she spat out a foul, nauseating stench:

"I've seen your kind before!"

"Stop pretending!"

"I've seen a woman who went around with your kind!"

"She traded a sack of flour in just two days!"

Her tone was sharp, wearing the expression of a dead pig unafraid of boiling water.

Gao Tian couldn't express his feelings, and instinctively he whispered a question into the team channel:

"Grain People?"

"What does that mean?"

"Lin Dui, I think this woman might be crazy..."

The disheveled woman, after speaking, seemed unable to suppress her craving for jerky, like an addict unable to resist pulling out beef jerky from her chest.

Lin An hesitated slightly, then replied softly in the channel:

"\"Grain People\" probably means \"rich people, \" right?"

"Although the apocalypse, or rather the catastrophe, in this instance world is not quite the same as ours."

"But having ample food in the apocalypse is indeed a symbol of status."

Gao Tian and Zhang Tie exchanged a glance and fell silent.

Lin Ruolan's words revealed a lot of information.

Slave-catching squads, the wilderness, being bored with cleanliness.

The chaos of this instance might far exceed our imagination.

Lin An saw through their thoughts and casually reminded them in the channel:

"Nothing special."

"Zhang Tie, you forgot what happened on the highway..."

Before he could finish speaking, he couldn't help but burst out laughing.

I had forgotten that after Zhang Tie was seriously wounded by the Scaled Beast, he never went back into that room, so naturally he didn't know what had happened there.

According to the system explanation, this place has been three years into the apocalypse.

The information the woman revealed is likely just the tip of the iceberg of this instance.

In the midst of thinking, Xiong Hanzi frowned disapprovingly and muttered to Lin Ruolan:

"Hey, ma'am."

"Look at yourself."

"Damn it, even if I were to kill zombies, Laozi wouldn't lay a hand on you!"

"Just honestly take us to the Safe Zone..."

"What do you mean, 'like this'!!?"

The woman, as if stimulated, suddenly sprang up from the ground and then frantically lunged at Zhang Tie, scratching and clawing.

"Don't you just like seeing us become like this?!"

"You bunch of beasts! Son of a bitch!"

Saliva flying, the woman's eyes bloodshot, Xiong Hanzi grabbed her head and held her down, unable to move, her arms flailing wildly in the air.

"Enough."

"Lin Ruolan, we're not the kind of people you think we are."

Lin An softly put an end to the farce.

Under his mental power detection, there was no sign of any living person within several hundred meters.

The entire building didn't even have any zombies.

The woman before us must be kept for now, and we need to obtain as much information as possible.

Zhang Tie, looking resentful, threw the woman to the ground, and the slick grime on his palm clung like oil.

"It's damn dirty."

Overwhelmed by the absolute power disparity, the woman realized she had no strength to resist, and after venting, she fell into calm.

Obviously, her mental state was extremely unstable.

After a moment, Lin Ruolan broke into a nervous, cold laugh:

"Stop acting."

"Do you despise me for being ugly?"

"I used to be a radio host! My photos are still in the room!"

"I became like this—isn't that exactly what you wanted?"

"Huh?"

As she spoke, the woman suddenly slapped her chest and shouted like a wild beast:

"Game!"

You guys just like wild game, huh!

Come on! I'll shout and cry! I'm not a tamed dog that stays silent!

The scene was bizarre.

Lin Ruolan, having taken off her clothes, had a well-proportioned figure, delicate collarbones, assuming one could ignore her dirty, flaking skin.

Lin An remained silent, merely releasing his mental power slowly, indicating that Gao Tian should search the room behind the woman.

Tamed dog, game meat...

He roughly guessed what was going on.

Moments later, Gao Tian ran out holding a stack of photo frames, his face strange.

Xiong Hanzi couldn't help but lean in to look.

The woman on the ground was sobbing, like a madwoman.

Damn it...

Zhang Tie picked up a travel photo, his gaze repeatedly comparing the 'madwoman' on the ground with the photo, his eyes rarely showing a hint of sympathy.

In the photo, Lin Ruolan had an elegant demeanor and a tall figure.

She wore a meticulously tailored sheath dress, her upper body a clean shirt.

In terms of looks and temperament, she was hardly inferior to a first-tier star.

In the remaining photos, either she was in work uniform, smiling while accepting an award, or they were artistic shots from a dance performance.

By comparison, it was almost impossible to link the woman on the ground with the person in the photos.

Inside the hallway, under the stimulation of his mental power, Lin An learned the general situation from the woman's mouth.

Just as he had guessed.

In Lin Ruolan's description, the zombies of this world were not strong, so humans quickly established a safe zone.

There were no mutants, no awakened ones.

Logically, technological weapons weren't weakened in power; clearing zombies to restore normalcy wasn't difficult.

But the order of societal collapse hadn't recovered, to the point that the speed of collapse was unimaginably fast.

This world was like the era of warlord fiefdoms; each faction, after occupying an area, strangely kept things as they were.

No one thought of restoring the world to normal.

People seemed to 'love' this world.

Against the backdrop of the apocalypse, the entire world is divided into three kinds of people.

Slave masters, slaves, and wildmen.

No civilians, no middle class, % of people are property.

Apart from a small number of slave masters and faction leaders in the upper class, everyone else is a slave.

And Lin Ruolan is a wildman who can't even be a slave.

The so-called wildmen are survivors living outside the safe zone; their status is comparable to that of wild animals surviving outdoors in the previous life.

During a search two years ago by what was called a rescue team but was actually a slave-capturing team, she hid.

Along with the other survivors hiding with her in this building, they died off one by one over the remaining time.

Until a few months ago, people with food who came out of the safe zone seeking fun pretended goodwill and gained their trust.

That group of people with food pretended to distribute rations, promising to keep them as playthings; many couldn't resist this 'temptation' and followed them.

However, that group of people with food merely wanted to watch them repeatedly collapse in hope and despair as a 'performance'.

Lin Ruolan personally saw that group of people with food, after they played various tricks on her friends, she hid in fright.

Two days later, the woman who had been played crazy returned with a bag of flour, then committed suicide.

No one could withstand the descent from hope to despair, then to total loss of dignity.

As for Zhang Tie asking Lin Ruolan why she decided again to give up resistance and let them 'play with her'.

She only said one sentence:

"That bunch of beasts only gave a bag of moldy flour, but you gave meat."

Before suicide, she wanted to eat a bite of meat.

That's all.