Chapter 1075: The Canyon at the Border of Hui-1 and Hui-3

Fifteen minutes later, the lead wolf returned, and the old wolf and the handsome giant wolf stood up as well. Xia Qing ran with the pack for twenty minutes, and only after her stamina gave out did she climb onto the handsome giant wolf's back to keep moving.

The team of one person and six wolves wound through the mountains, stopping and starting, because the pack was constantly watching for changes around them. As a result, the team didn't run into any large groups of fierce beasts, but the number of aggressive evolved plants they encountered was already too many for Xia Qing to count—she even ran into three rare evolved plants.

More than three hours later, when the team came across a herd of herbivores Xia Qing didn't recognize, the northern wolf pack caught two animals and the old wolf caught one, and they started eating.

Taking advantage of this time, Xia Qing also took out her简易 tent and crawled inside. She had just finished handling her personal needs and was about to pack up the tent when she heard the roar of a helicopter approaching from afar.

She immediately crawled out of the tent and found that the wolf pack had already carried their respective prey and hidden under a massive boulder. Even little wolf sister knew to press her body tightly against the rock wall, staying perfectly still to avoid detection by the helicopter's radar waves.

In the eleventh year of the Catastrophe, not only were humans rapidly adapting to the environment—the evolved forest animals were as well.

After the helicopter flew over this stretch of mountain forest, Xia Qing took out her phone, found a communications satellite, confirmed the longitude and latitude coordinates of her location, and then compared them against the offline map on her phone. She discovered that following the wolf pack, she had actually run into the evolved forest at the border of Hui-1 and Hui-3—Hui-3 Mountain No. 26!

South of the Hui-3 Mountain No. 36 area is Hui-1's Mountain No. 29.

This location was a straight-line distance of 320 li from Xia Qing's territory!

She'd freaking followed a pack of wolves winding through the mountains and somehow ended up several hundred li away!

Based on the time and the sun's position, Xia Qing confirmed that the helicopter just now had been flying over Hui-3. This was a patrol helicopter dispatched by the Hui-3 base. The purpose of the patrol was to prevent members of the Blaze and Extinction teams who had fled in all directions after the great battle from escaping into the Hui-3 base's evolved forest.

Xia Qing felt a little more at ease. She put away her phone and tent, and after the wolf pack finished eating, they continued on their way.

After heading south for another 20 minutes, the old wolf led the northern wolf pack and Xia Qing into a long canyon flanked by towering peaks and jagged, grotesque rocks.

Based on the terrain, she judged that this was already the border area between Hui-1 and Hui-3.

Xia Qing quickened her pace to catch up with the old wolf and asked in a low voice, "Fourth, are we almost there? Going any further is very dangerous."

Wolves carry no identification, so wherever they go they fall into the category of large animals that humans are forbidden to provoke. But Xia Qing carried a Hui-3 identity badge, so entering the Hui-1 base's evolved forest without official permission made her an intruder. If she ran into people from Hui-1, let alone having her supplies robbed, even if she was killed, they wouldn't bear any legal responsibility.

The old wolf said nothing and walked northeast along the valley for ten-odd minutes. Along the way, after dodging another helicopter radar sweep, it tried to climb into a crevice over four meters off the ground that was hidden by a few shrubs.

Xia Qing lifted it in, then crawled in after it. The lead wolf left the handsome giant wolf and the broken-waist wolf to guard the cave entrance, and led the black wolf and little wolf sister to follow.

This terrain reminded Xia Qing of the cave she and the lead wolf had crawled through a few days ago when heading to the sniper position at Hui-3 West District Mountain No. 37. The difference was that this cave sloped downward, and the inside was dry.

One very unusual thing was that there were actually no wild animals in this cave.

There were only two possible explanations for this: either there was something toxic here that small animals didn't dare linger near, or this was human territory that had been cleared out. Xia Qing glanced at the air toxin detector on her arm, confirmed the air was non-toxic, and felt the latter possibility was more likely.

She had the old wolf fall back, and she herself put on low-light night-vision goggles and took the lead up front. Because this cave very likely contained monitoring equipment and traps set by humans—the old wolf was indeed very clever, but it wasn't familiar with human technology.

Because at the end of this cave were her own kind, and those of her own kind might be the old wolf's enemies. For the old wolf to consider them enemies, they had to be either humans who had attacked it before, or the blue-skinned wanderers that Yang Jin had captured a few days ago.

Xia Qing leaned more toward the latter.

On the old wolf's first day out, when it returned to Territory Three only in the evening, Xia Qing had repeatedly shown the old wolf the video of Yang Jin capturing wanderers at Mountain No. 47, and the video of her and the lead wolf fighting the wanderers at Mountain No. 37, so that this old wolf would understand the outward characteristics of this group of wanderers. Besides that, Xia Qing had also shown it the wanderer backpacks she had captured, so the old wolf would know this batch of wanderers carried very powerful drugs, and that it had to be very careful when encountering them.

The old wolf might have discovered that there were too many wanderers here for it to handle on its own, which was why it had returned to the territory to find Xia Qing.

If that was the case, then Xia Qing was about to…

Strike it rich!

A few days ago, from the personal supplies and backpacks of the nine wanderers she had successively captured, she had obtained a total of 9 walnut-sized and 5 pigeon-egg-sized high-grade Yi stones, 7 high-grade Yi stone fragments, twelve points cards totaling 57,600 points, over 74 evolved Bai Mao grass roots, and various weapons and poisons.

If this was the blue-skinned wanderers' lair, then the supplies here would definitely be no less than what those nine wanderers had on them!

Would Xia Qing feel guilty taking their supplies?

Of course not!

This gang had committed countless evil deeds—they were wanted criminals on Hui-1's bounty list; this gang used cruel methods to control evolved wolves and evolved giant lizards, and had even tried to hunt the evolved wolves and evolved tigers of the Hui-3 western evolved forest; these people had been hired by Xia Qing's enemies and had triggered a beast tide in an attempt to flatten her territory!

After crawling forward for nearly forty meters, the terrain inside the cave leveled out and the height was only a little over forty centimeters. Xia Qing put her backpack in the crevice, crawled forward for another twenty-plus meters, and clearly felt the surrounding rock walls had become smooth.

This feeling…

Xia Qing reached up and touched the powder on the rock wall, then rubbed it between her fingers, and knew what kind of place this was.

This was…a chimney. The powder on the rock wall was soot!

In the evolved forest, the smoke from cooking with firewood was the equivalent of a signal flare, directly revealing one's position to the enemy. So whenever a fire had to be lit, smokeless treatment was absolutely necessary.

There were many ways to handle smoke. If one was on flat ground, people would choose a spot and dig a pit for a stove, and dig multiple horizontal smoke-dispersal and exhaust channels behind the stove. To ensure the smoke wouldn't rise, the exhaust channels would be covered with dirt or branches.

If one was inside a mountain, people would use a similar principle, finding a spot with smoke-dispersal channels to cook, using the mountain's cracks to let the smoke dissipate. The stoves built in the hidden valley at Mountain No. 50 and in this canyon used this method. Those shrubs at the exit of this mountain crevice should have been planted by humans, for the purpose of blocking the cave entrance and dispersing smoke.

Anyone who would light a fire to cook was undoubtedly human. No wonder there were so few animals in this mountain crevix—animals weren't stupid. In this hot weather, none of them would choose to live in a cave that belched black smoke two or three times a day.