Chapter 101: Statewide Lockdown
“Whirr—”
The jeep drove smoothly along the highway. The road was clear, the weather fine.
Lin Jiayao, resting in the passenger seat, drifted off to sleep and had a strange dream.
Perhaps due to her weakened mental state, she’d been sleeping almost constantly since getting in the car, too exhausted even to log into her zombies.
As she slept, her mental strength slowly recovered, and the dream…
It was… a nightmare.
She dreamed that upon opening her eyes, Huayibai, just like in Survivor’s Light, was sitting on her lap, its little feet dangling, waiting for her to wake up.
But as she reached out to touch Huayibai’s head, she saw, beside it, in the driver’s seat, her sister’s body, entangled in tendrils, lifeless.
“Gasp—”
The dream, so vivid, so real, jolted her awake, a cold sweat drenching her.
“Hoo…”
She glanced at her sister, still driving, and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Yao? Bad dream? The same one as before?” Lin Xiwan, noticing her sister’s reaction, slowed down.
“It’s fine… just a nightmare. Not about the Voodoo Cult.” Lin Jiayao shook her head, leaned back, and instinctively placed her hand on the armrest, activating Bone Spike Lurker.
Good, nothing unusual besides the sound of the engine… wait, is that chewing coming from the back? Did a rat get into the supplies?
Just as she was about to turn around, she heard her sister speak.
“Your sleep quality has been terrible lately…” Lin Xiwan pursed her lips, worried about her sister, then asked casually, “By the way, Xiao Yibai, before your team left Donghai…”
Huh? Xiao Yibai? Who’s Xiao Yibai?
Lin Jiayao stared at her sister, thinking she was still dreaming.
Then, realization dawning, she turned and looked at the back of the car.
A small figure sat on a box of supplies, its legs dangling, gnawing on an ear of corn, its little shoes neatly placed beside it.
“Oh, Yao, I forgot to tell you, this little one is Huayibai, an Awakened,” Lin Xiwan explained, slowing down further, a smile on her face.
“She was sent on a mission by Survivor’s Light before the lockdown. But after the lockdown, her team couldn’t return. They disbanded, and she was left wandering alone on the highway.”
The explanation… was weak. Although it wasn’t unusual for exploration teams to include children, especially Awakened ones, if Lin Jiayao had encountered a random Awakened child, she wouldn’t have trusted them so easily.
And her sister wasn’t usually this gullible.
What happened?
Had her sister been infected by the fungus?
But she couldn’t sense any spores on her.
“How did she get in the car?” Lin Jiayao asked, relieved that nothing bad had happened, but still suspicious.
“Well… I accidentally hit her with the car. Thankfully, her ability makes her body… flexible, so she wasn’t seriously injured. And then…”
Before her sister could finish, Huayibai dropped the corn cob, looked at Lin Jiayao, and shouted, “Mommy!”
“Ahem… so, yeah,” Lin Xiwan scratched her head, looking at her sister. “I found her when I got out of the car to use the restroom. She insisted you were her mother…”
“So I explained that you only have me, your closest family, and you couldn’t possibly be her mother. Then she thought for a moment and called me…”
“Daddy!” Huayibai chimed in obediently.
“So I figured, she seemed harmless enough, and I could drop her off at the next camp.” Lin Xiwan looked at her sister apologetically. “Sorry, I didn’t ask you first.”
Lin Jiayao: “…”
So, a single “Daddy” had swayed her sister?
She wasn’t going to question how Huayibai had managed to get in the car. She was more interested in its thought process.
“Why… did you call her Daddy?” she asked Huayibai, pointing at her sister.
“Isn’t Daddy the person closest to Mommy?” Huayibai blinked, her question innocent.
Lin Jiayao took a deep breath, clenching her fist.
She couldn’t argue with that logic.
“Children growing up in the apocalypse…” Lin Xiwan shook her head, sighing. “Their education… leaves much to be desired.”
“Indeed…” Lin Jiayao sighed.
Since Huayibai was already here, there was no need for explanations. But its intelligence seemed to be developing faster than she’d anticipated.
It had even fabricated a backstory, a surprisingly convincing one.
But this incident made Lin Jiayao wary.
Her sister didn’t understand fungal zombies, still clinging to the belief that “if it can talk, it’s human.”
That kind of thinking was dangerous in the apocalypse.
I need to tell her the truth soon. It’s a good thing it’s Huayibai… if it were another fungal zombie…
Actually, that might not be so bad.
“Sister… have you forgotten?” Lin Jiayao looked at her sister. “What Survivor’s Light said about…”
“Oh, you mean the fungal zombies?” Lin Xiwan, steering with one hand, ruffled her sister’s hair with the other. “Do you think I’m stupid? I made her write her own name.”
“Write…?” Lin Xiwan glanced back at Huayibai, a flicker of doubt in her eyes.
Indeed, according to both Survivor’s Light and the Voodoo Cult diaries, fungal zombies couldn’t think independently or write.
They just acted according to the host’s pre-infection memories.
That’s why the Voodoo Cult used diaries to detect infections.
When did Huayibai learn to write?
Now Lin Jiayao understood how Huayibai had tricked her sister.
Being able to write had convinced her sister it was a normal human child. If Lin Jiayao herself hadn’t encountered it before, she might have been fooled too.
“So, Xiao Yibai, where are you headed? If it’s on our way, we can give you a ride,” Lin Xiwan asked, smiling at Huayibai through the rearview mirror.
She felt bad for hitting her with the car.
And the little girl was quite cute, a little… simple, and taking care of it, teaching it things, watching it eat, it felt like having a daughter.
But she already had her sister to care for; she couldn’t take on another child, which was why she’d left the other two girls at the Qingzhou camp.
“Yibai is not going anywhere,” Huayibai shook her head. “Yibai will stay with Mommy.”
“But she’s not your mommy. There’s barely any age difference between you; how could Yaoyao be your mother?” Lin Xiwan chuckled, shaking her head.
Huayibai’s dangling feet stilled, and the corn cob slipped from its grasp.
It jumped down from the box, slipped on the half-eaten corn, and then, on its knees, crawled to the back of the passenger seat, peering over at Lin Jiayao.
“Mommy…” Tears welled up in its eyes as it looked up at Lin Jiayao, then, seeing Lin Jiayao look at it, quickly lowered its head.
“Doesn’t Mommy want Yibai anymore…?”
After a moment, seeing no reaction, it reached out and poked Lin Jiayao’s arm, then, when Lin Jiayao looked at it again, lowered its head, resting it against Lin Jiayao’s arm.
“Sigh…” Lin Jiayao couldn’t resist and gently patted Huayibai’s head.
Huayibai instantly cheered up, nuzzling Lin Jiayao’s hand like a kitten.
Lin Xiwan, watching this, couldn’t help but smile.
It was rare to see her sister so… flustered. If only she had a camera; she would capture this priceless expression of utter exasperation.
But why was this girl so clingy? They had just met, and she was already calling Lin Jiayao “Mommy” and Lin Xiwan “Daddy.”
So strange.
But besides that strange quirk, the girl was quite well-behaved.
And earlier, while her sister was asleep, she had asked Huayibai about Survivor’s Light, and its answers had been surprisingly detailed, even revealing some inside information.
She had always been fascinated by Survivor’s Light. Now, with this walking encyclopedia, she’d learned a lot.
But the more she learned, the more she regretted Survivor’s Light’s downfall. She hoped they would recover soon, once again becoming a beacon of hope.
Just as Lin Xiwan was about to correct Huayibai’s form of address, the radio crackled to life.
“Wait a moment.” She interrupted Huayibai, stopped the car, and turned up the volume.
To monitor the Voodoo Cult’s movements, she kept the radio tuned to their frequency; their flamboyant actions and communications were usually broadcast openly.
And now, finally, after a long silence, a message:
“Zzz… zzz…”
“V-B-03, V-C-01, V-C-011, V-C-020, V-C-031…”
“V-D-01… V-D-021…”
“Zzz… All sweep team leaders listed, immediately cease current operations. V-B-03 will assume command of an urgent mission…”
After repeating this message three or four times, the broadcast changed, a new set of instructions.
“Operation: Encirclement.”
“Phase One: Advance simultaneously from multiple highway entrances surrounding Guangdong Province. Purge Guangdong Province, leave no survivors.”
“Phase Two: Advance west from Guangdong Province. Kill on sight.”
“Time limit: None.”
“Repeating… Operation…”
“Zzz…”
Lin Xiwan’s brief moment of relaxation vanished, her heart plummeting.
“What… what do they mean…?” she stammered, turning to her sister. “Encircle and purge… the entire province? Have they finally lost their minds?!”
Before, they had only heard about isolated incidents of the Voodoo Cult attacking specific camps, but now, with Survivor’s Light in lockdown, they were planning a province-wide purge?
This was a declaration of war against all of humanity!
And the broadcast had listed over a dozen C-rank members, led by a B-rank Awakened.
A B-rank… what did that even mean?
Although Lin Xiwan had never encountered a B-rank Awakened, having gone through several evolutions herself, she understood the transformative power of these breakthroughs.
Suddenly, she snapped out of her stupor, started the engine, and slammed on the gas.
Run!
Escape Guangdong Province! They couldn’t stay within the encirclement!
“Voodoo Cult…” Huayibai, nestled against Lin Jiayao’s hand, looked up, murmuring the name.
“What is it? Have you encountered the Voodoo Cult before?” Lin Jiayao asked, sensing that Huayibai was much weaker now than in Donghai City.
She seemed to have been seriously injured.
“Yibai met the Voodoo Cult on the road. They had those… V… symbols on them.”
Huayibai, now kneeling behind the front seats, using the center console for support, looked at Lin Jiayao, her small face filled with anguish.
“They… they ‘boomed’ Yibai’s books!” she said, her arms outstretched, reenacting the explosion.
Huayibai had encountered the Voodoo Cult on the way here?
But she had been heading straight for Lin Jiayao. If she had encountered the Voodoo Cult, then they were likely targeting… her…
“What happened afterwards?” Lin Jiayao asked, needing more information.
“Um…”
Huayibai hesitated. “Then their boom-boom car went ‘BOOM,’ and they were all on fire… but Yibai’s diary also…”
Boom-boom car?
What’s a boom-boom car?
“You encountered a Voodoo Cult convoy? Which direction were they heading?” Lin Xiwan asked seriously, overhearing their conversation. “Are you carrying anything from them? Did you eat anything they gave you?”
Huayibai was about to mention eating their meat when she felt her mommy’s mental call and stopped.
“Yibai forgot,” she said, shaking her head.
“Alright… Yao, check the map. We have to leave Guangdong Province and get as far away from Chongyu as possible. Maybe we can go north…”
“Okay, I’ll take a look.” Lin Jiayao took out the map and started studying it, her heart pounding.
The entire province was about to be surrounded by the Voodoo Cult, led by a B-rank Awakened.
Both Mask and A4 were in Guangdong Province… what should I do?
She worried about her zombies.
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