Chapter 38: Marine Evolved Creatures Come Ashore

Wei Chengdong invited Xia Qing to the living room and taught her how to disassemble, maintain, and use the handgun. "This is a fully automatic handgun made exclusively for special forces; in our battle team, only core members get to use one. Its firing stability and accuracy are top-tier among handguns. This is a detachable stock—attach it and you can shoulder-fire on full auto…"

An hour later, Xia Qing left the village carrying a heavy back basket in one hand and a heavy basket in the other. To guard against anyone watching in secret, she first wandered around the empty village at the southeast corner, picked up a big bundle of dry firewood, and only then returned home.

After shutting the door tight, Xia Qing swiftly stripped off the protective suit, played with the cool submachine handgun she'd just gotten for a good while, and only then began inspecting the three protective suits she'd traded for.

The heaviest set was a fully enclosed airtight protective suit with a face shield, including the suit, gloves, boots, and an isolated breathing apparatus—suitable for high-risk unknown environments where respiratory and skin hazards exist simultaneously. Standard issue for scientific researchers with weak self-protection abilities when leaving the safe zone, and not sold publicly—even with points you can't buy it. Though the fully enclosed airtight suit limits vision and hearing, it's a genuine life-saver in unknown dangerous environments.

The second set was a split-type protective suit, also including boots, gloves, a protective mask, and night-vision goggles. The style and color of this suit were the same as the one Tang Huai had given her, but the moment she touched it she could clearly feel a marked difference. Xia Qing dared to assert that this suit's protective ability was at least three times stronger than anything on the market.

Xia Qing put on this fitted camouflage protective suit, stretched her arms and lifted her legs to test it thoroughly, and confirmed that the suit Tang Huai had traded her was garbage compared to this one.

Of course, the patched one-piece protective suit Xia Qing had just taken off was even more garbage in front of this one.

She tucked the handgun into the front pouch of the protective vest, only to discover the pouch wasn't for rations but was specifically designed to hold a gun—the design was simply too thoughtful.

Next time she went to the Evolution Forest, she'd wear this set.

Xia Qing took off the protective suit and tucked it away happily, then finally inspected Sheep Boss's protective suit. Besides night-vision goggles, protective eyewear, a bulletproof vest, and a gas mask, Sheep Boss even had an infrared camera, a natural-light camera, and a walkie-talkie.

After laying out each piece of equipment one by one, Xia Qing was a bit reluctant to let her rough guy Sheep use such fine gear—she really wanted to catch an evolved dog and bring it back as an assistant.

The moment she thought of Sheep Boss, Xia Qing heard the rapid clatter of hoofsteps coming from the yard.

She'd just hidden the gun when the door handle of the front door was turned by Sheep Boss's hoof.

"Bang!" The door was shoved open hard, and Sheep Boss strode in with fire in his eyes, squinting at Xia Qing.

After living together for over a month, Xia Qing had figured out this fellow's temperament—he yielded to softness but not to force. She pinched her voice and asked, "I went to chop firewood, just got back. You must be tired from patrolling your territory, boss."

Sheep Boss pawed the ground once, lowered his head slightly, and flashed his great spiral horns.

Alright, sweet talk wasn't working. Xia Qing switched to hard currency: "Want some rations?"

"Baa."

Sheep Boss immediately tucked in his hooves and raised his head, switching to a cutesy bleat.

Xia Qing nimbly went into the kitchen, chopped up some Chinese toon sprouts and grass, then opened the tin cabinet and pulled out two compressed ration blocks, crumbled less than half a block into the feed, and set it on Sheep Boss's dining table.

Sheep Boss buried his head and started eating. Xia Qing sat cross-legged beside him, washing down rations with mountain spring water while sharing her joy with him: "Boss, we came out ahead on this trade. We've got a gun, and three top-tier protective suits—the kind you can't buy even with points. These three suits mean three more lives for the two of us. Of course, two for me and one for you, and the gun is mine to use only, hehe…"

Xia Qing gulped a big mouthful of spring water to wash down the throat-scraping compressed ration, grinning like an idiot.

After Sheep Boss quickly finished his trough, he fixed his eyes on the ration in Xia Qing's hand.

Xia Qing immediately stuffed the whole ration into her mouth and swallowed, got up to scrub Sheep Boss's feed basin clean and put it away, then strapped the handgun to her thigh with its lanyard, turned back to say goodbye to Sheep Boss: "You rest, I'm going to check the vegetable garden."

After she went out, Sheep Boss clip-clopped into the kitchen, pawed at the tin ration cabinet a few times with his hooves, confirmed he couldn't open it, then went back to the living room, pawed open the wardrobe and sniffed the protective suits Xia Qing had brought back, found they weren't food, kicked the cabinet door shut with one hoof, flopped down on the tatami, and continued squinting at the kitchen's tin cabinet while chewing cud.

Xia Qing, out in the vegetable garden, heard the commotion inside the house and grinned.

The vegetable seeds she'd sown in the garden half a month ago had all sprouted. Because she'd soaked them in mountain spring water, the germination rate was twenty percent higher than that of Lords Four, Five, and Six.

What about the plots of Lords One, Two, and Seven? They hadn't said, so Xia Qing didn't know.

The garlic shoots and ginger shoots in the adjacent vegetable bed were already a palm's height tall. As long as no high-concentration blight-rain fell during the seedling period over the next two months, she'd have a harvest. Especially the ginger—she had only these six plants in her entire territory, and she had to protect them well. Later she discovered over thirty more garlic shoots, making forty-four in total; optimistically, she'd be eating garlic scapes by May.

The thought of fragrant garlic scapes with pork and garlic scape meat dumplings flashed through her mind—she'd need meat for that. Following the action essentials Wei Chengdong had taught her, Xia Qing aimed at a big elm tree a hundred and fifty meters away. A four-catty submachine handgun in the hands of a strength-evolver was like a toy gun.

Her excellent visual evolution let Xia Qing clearly see the fat magpie perched on the elm branch had its eyes closed. After aiming at the magpie's plump body for five minutes, she still put the gun away.

First, she feared the sound would carry and draw the attention of surrounding territories; second, she only had three hundred rounds and couldn't bear to waste a single one. She'd wait until Luo Pei taught her to shoot, because the practice rounds wouldn't count against the three hundred.

In the evening, Xia Qing and Sheep Boss ate while listening to the radio.

The news broadcast, which usually reported only good news and no worries, today actually spent five minutes on the grim situation facing the southern Guicheng base after marine life evolved, putting Xia Qing's nerves on edge again.

The great evolution of Blue Star's land creatures was mainly driven by the two elements Blight and Yi; the great evolution of marine life was caused by the combined influence of nuclear-contaminated water and the two elements Blight and Yi. Therefore, the danger and sheer bizarreness of evolved marine life far surpasses that of land creatures. This is also the main reason several of Hua Nation's coastal megacities were entirely abandoned as ghost cities by humanity.

Who could have imagined that in the tenth year of the catastrophe, evolved marine creatures would actually come ashore and keep expanding their territorial range, posing a threat to the Guicheng base.

The key questions—how they came ashore, what species came ashore, what their main modes of attack were—the news didn't mention a single word, which was truly frustrating. After hearing the news, Xia Qing immediately switched on the walkie-talkie to the lord frequency and heard Kuang Qingwei muttering about the marine creatures coming ashore.

"Southern Guicheng only has six bases, and three of them are under threat. If those three bases' safe zones fall, there'll surely be a flood of refugees fleeing north. You think they'll come our way?"

That was exactly what worried Xia Qing most.