Chapter 226: Fury!
Chapter 226: Fury!
Even those students who were filled with either hatred or jealousy towards Yue Zhong did not dare to leave the camp. Without the protection of Wang Jian, they would not even last 3 days outside, be it due to hunger or zombies.
Yue Zhong observed the people who had gathered again, before continuing to say,
“Since no one has chosen to leave, I will take it as you have agreed to become my citizens. Come forward to report your name and your occupation before the apocalypse, together with your current strength. If you have any talents to boot, you may even get better meals.”
After that, he released a huge amount of killing intent as he said coldly,
“Now, let me make it clear before you start to queue up. Whoever dares to cut the queue will be hauled away to receive 20 whips. If anyone dares to assault somebody else, you will be executed on the spot.”
Hearing those words, all of the survivors started to tremble and under the watchful gazes of the soldiers, they obediently formed 20 long rows. Not a single person dared to cause trouble, which miraculously dispelled the usual notion of Chinese people causing problems in queues.
The five policemen, Gu Manzi, Zhuo Yatong and Chen Ming proceeded to register the particulars of each survivor, with help from the 20 fine attendants of the villa.
Yue Zhong remained on top of the podium, gazing at the survivors below. To prevent any accidents, Yun Caiwei and Tong Xiaoyun were seated on either side of him, massaging his shoulders and legs to keep themselves busy.
The entire camp was busy all the way till evening; only then had all the particulars of every survivor been recorded.
At some time during nightfall, Xiong Zheng seemed to mull over something. He came up to Yue Zhong and said,
“Boss Yue, please come with me for a moment.”
Yue Zhong frowned as he replied, “What’s the matter?”
Xiong Zheng hesitated before replying with great difficulty, “I need your guidance, how should we deal with the factory? There’s still a dozen women and a few tonnes of meat inside.”
Yue Zhong pondered for a while before replying, “Bring me there to take a look.”
“Don’t follow this time.” Yue Zhong told the 4 ladies beside him.
“I want to check it out.”
“Me too.”
Gu Manzi and Tong Xiaoyun both exclaimed loudly. They wanted to prove themselves, to let Yue Zhong know that they weren’t women who were just concerned about the rivalry between each other.
Zhuo Yatong had a pale face because she could guess what the factory was for; she held the little loli Yun Caiwei tightly in her embrace, who wanted to go see as well.
“Suit yourselves.” Yue Zhong glanced at Gu Manzi and Tong Xiaoyun, and he did not speak any further.
With Xiong Zheng’s directions, Yue Zhong’s group arrived at a factory located in the corner of the villa quarter.
The moment they entered the factory, Gu Manzi and Tong Xiaoyun saw a scene that they would never forget in their entire lives. Women’s heads were hangıng up in rows, decapitated bodies were strung up in the air, their innards were hanging from metal hooks and the entire factory was filled with the nauseating scent of blood.
Their faces turning pale, Gu Manzi and Tong Xiaoyun covered their mouths, before running out of the factory and vomiting right outside. They had assumed that they had already seen the worst of humanity in terms of cruelty and insanity, but what they saw in the factory went way beyond their belief. At that moment, they knew that they had truly been very fortunate.
“Damn you, Lie Tianyang, I will definitely kill you!”
Yue Zhong had also thought that he was mentally prepared, but even he had fight back against the vomit rising in his throat. He began to harbor a strong killing intent towards Lie Tianyang, whose depravity was beyond human. If he appeared in front of Yue Zhong again, Yue Zhong certainly would not hesitate to give his it all and get rid of that beast.
Inside the processing factory, there were a few dozen female bodies that were hung up. At the same time, Yue Zhong and his team found a huge cage behind the factory, inside of which were 20 women full of fear and unease. A large number of them even seemed to have lost their minds.
“What do we do? Shall we kill them, Boss Yue?” Xiong Zheng asked with great difficulty.
Clear Wind Camp did not have ample rations to begin with, therefore Xiong Zheng was not willing to retain these 20 women to partake in the rations. To him, these clearly unsound women had no value and taking care of them would just require more resources.
Yue Zhong looked at those naked women with filthy bodies, some of whom might have gone crazy, and rejected Xiong Zheng’s proposal,
“No, bring them back and take good care of them. They are women so they still can help to give birth.”
Xiong Zheng hesitated for a moment, before pointing towards a storage facility and asking,
“What about those?”
Inside the storage facility, there were a few tonnes of human meat sausages. During periods of food shortage, if Yue Zhong and Xiong Zheng were to play dumb and distribute the sausages out, no one would ever know. Even if they were to find out, they would feign ignorance. Without meat, it was not like they would die from hunger, but they would not have much energy.
Lie Tianyang wanted to maintain the energy of his elite troops and so he constantly fed them the human sausages. Of course, there were members of the troops who could not accept or stomach such vile acts, and they would rather stay weak and hungry than eat human meat.
Yue Zhong said in a deep voice, “Bury them all.”
“Yes.” Xiong Zheng also heaved a sigh of relief and took his men with him to bury those sickening things.
The moment Yue Zhong left the factory which was filled with evilness, Gu Manzi and Tong Xiaoyun immediately grabbed hold of either of his arms, their faces pale. Only by doing were they able to gain a little bit of their courage back. Yue Zhong gently patted their backs to console them, before taking big strides to leave the place.
The second day, Yue Zhong started recruiting fighters from the survivors.
After the apocalypse, fighters received the best treatment and also possessed the strongest battle abilities. The moment Yue Zhong opened up recruitment, a lot of survivors fought with each other in order to volunteer first.
Amongst the 2000 survivors, there were about 1200 males, 1000 of whom were fully-grown men. Lie Tianyang wasn’t an idiot and had already selected a good number of strong and able-bodied men to be his subordinates or members of his Green Wolves Mount. The majority if the men left were either malnourished, weak or lacking in stature.
Yue Zhong was very careful with his selection and managed to choose about 450 males with great difficulty. A total of 400 people, together with Liu Erhei, Zhang Niujiang and Xiong Zheng, formed one of his battalions.
Liu Erhei, Zhang Niujiang and Xiong Zheng were Commanders, whilst Yue Zhong acted as the Direct Company Leader.
The other 50 males were given to Wang Jian for training so that they could become qualified policemen. Wang Jian was an upright and moral person, thus Yue Zhong assigned him to be the Chief Policeman of Clear Wind Camp.
With the open-minded and morally upright Wang Jian as the head of the police, the policemen trained by him would at least make Yue Zhong feel a bit more reassured.
Due to the shortage of manpower, the clever and meticulous Chen Ming was promoted to become the Officer for Internal Affairs within the camp. He was responsible for managing internal affairs, organizing personnel, the overall distribution of resources and a series of other jobs.
As for the palace itself and also the affairs of the women, Yue Zhong left it all to Zhuo Yatong. After all, she was a strong woman who had handled her own business prior to the apocalypse, therefore managing the affairs of the palace naturally wouldn’t be an issue to her.
(TN: in this case, the ‘palace’ can also be interpreted as the ‘harem’. Just think of it as all the affairs related to the villas and women~)
Under Yue Zhong’s orders, Chen Ming divided the remaining survivors into groups to strengthen the defences of the camp; at the same time, the survivors dug pits around the perimeter of the camp.
All those who were willing to participate in the digging could fill their stomachs. Under those attractive conditions, a huge number of the survivors joined the digging troops. Outside Clear Wind Camp, other than upon the main roads, huge pits were being dug out all over the place.
Back when Yue Zhong was at Qing Yuan County, Chen Jianfeng had made use of this tactic to great effect. At the time, there were at least a few thousand zombies that had fallen into the deep pits, never to rise again. Against intelligent humans, the pits were of no use, but they were extremely effective against zombies.
In the process of digging the pits, those survivors were engaging in strenuous physical activity- combined with the satiating meals, it was a form of training for their bodies as well.
Yue Zhong was building up a whole battalion of soldiers and adhered completely to military rules for their training. At the same time, he set unbelievably high levels for their training, which caused them all to be rather unhappy, except for the fact that Yue Zhong himself took the lead to do training 6 times more difficult everyday. In addition to the fact that they could eat their fill and even consume some of the delicious Type 2 Black-scaled Ferocious Boar meat, they would not have been able to continue.
Although the Type 2 Mutant Boar meat could not suddenly transform them into strong Enhancers, it was able to let them quickly recover their vitality, which had been greatly diminished by hunger and exhaustion. This gave their faces a little more colour and even their bodies began to recover their original strength.
After the high intensity training that lasted for 10 days, the soldiers of the battalion had completely recovered their original vitality and they even had a small increase in physical strength compared to what they had before the end of the world. Following this, the training intensity was reduced to a normal level, with the focus now being on the formation of troops and standing at attention..
It wasn’t that Yue Zhong did not want to carry on with the intense training and churn out a few elite troops. The reason was that there was the issue of rations. After continuing with the high-intensity training for almost 10 days, the original 20+ tonnes of meat kept in Yue Zhong’s storage ring had been reduced by 4 tonnes. This was done by just that battalion alone.
On top of that, with a huge number of survivors participating in the pit-excavating or the repairs of Clear Wind Camp, the original amount of rations in Clear Wind camp was rapidly running out just like flowing water.
Lie Tianyang had not chosen every single male to join his troops for the very same reason. It was not that he did not want to, but rather that he did not have enough rations to support the food consumption of the army. After creating the elite Green Wolves Mount and even using human meat as a food source, it could be seen that the problem of food was starting to worry him.
“If we maintain this rate of consumption, in a month’s time, our food source will be completely depleted.” Chen Ming was holding a document in his hands as he stood in front of Yue Zhong and presented his report.
He then suggested to Yue Zhong, “Master, should we stop the excavation and repair works? That way, our food supplies can be conserved for a longer period of time.”
Yue Zhong pondered a while before saying to Chen Ming, “Bring Xiong Zheng over.”
Chen Ming withdrew and brought Xiong Zheng over very quickly.
Xiong Zheng, whose skin had become darker due to the long hours he’d spent under the sun, was led by Chen Ming up to Yue Zhong. He immediately asked in a boisterous manner,
“Boss Yue, did you want me for something?”
Even though Yue Zhong wanted to mold these troops into proper soldiers, in such a short time, it was actually quite hard to eradicate their previous habits. After all, the whole troop was filled with ‘bandits’. Even Yue Zhong himself, the Battalion Commander, hadn’t received any complete and rigorous military training before.
Yue Zhong glanced at Xiong Zheng and asked directly,
“Where is the nearest granary around here?”
Upon hearing the word ‘granary’, Xiong Zheng laughed bitterly as he replied,
“Boss Yue, you’re thinking of opening up some of the granaries to alleviate the food issue, right? Lie Tianyang had the same idea before, so all of the granaries within the vicinity of Clear Wind Camp have already been opened by us. Other than perhaps clothes, dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent and other damned things like that, there’s not a single grain of rice left in those granaries.”
“The granaries have no food inside?”
When Yue Zhong heard this, he was surprised for a moment, but then he thought about the granaries that he had opened in Shanglin County; there had been a few empty granaries there as well, and this made Yue Zhong finally understand the problem. The food inside the granaries must have been completely sold off ages ago by the officials responsible for them, who had then rented out the empty warehouses for some extra income.
Yue Zhong stared at Xiong Zheng and said heavily,
“There should be a National Grain Reserve nearby for use in times of war. There should be food there.”
“There are indeed 2 huge granaries here, one of which is located towards the north. It is roughly 100 miles out in Xia Qi County itself, which has already been occupied by the SY County forces. There’s another one which is situated in the east, in Ning Guang County about 50 miles away, which is currently occupied by a force that calls itself the Ferocious Tigers.”
“After the Ferocious Tigers obtained this granary, they set up a military camp with a battalion’s worth of equipment. They have 2 Infantry Fighting Vehicles and countless machine guns. At the same time, they control a large amount of the goods, so a lot of survivors are willing to throw their lives in for them. There are around 10,000 survivors there and I’ve heard that just the number of their armed forces is over 2000. This is one of the biggest military forces out there other than the actual Chinese Army.
Xiong Zheng’s words made Yue Zhong furrow his eyebrows. The Ferocious Tigers had 2000 militants and a whole battalion with standard PLA (People’s Liberation Army) equipment- it was no wonder that Lie Tianyang did not dare to provoke them.
Although Yue Zhong had managed to recruit 400 militants, they had only gone through 10 days of training so far. They had not experienced war or witnessed bloodshed yet, and they were only equipped with old rifles from the previous Green Wolves Mount members. On average, each fighter only had a couple of grenades and if they were to be bombed, their morale would definitely go right down the drain.
Yue Zhong had only just started to form this battalion: if he were to meet a force like that which he had raised in Qing Yuan County, his forces would be completely wiped out. In terms of battle awareness, experience and fighting skills, his current battalion was simply incomparable to the others..
Yue Zhong pulled open a map, pointing towards an area in the northeast that had been crossed out and saying,
“Which places in this area haven’t you guys opened yet?”