Chương 40: Thank You for Freeing Him

After systematically luring the zombies out of the inner room and dispatching them one by one, Vince gained a total of 45 Max HP. The reason for the odd 5 points was that after killing the first four zombies, his Health Bar had capped out. [300/300] The fifth zombie he killed only yielded a meager 5 points. Scaling my HP is getting harder... But thinking it over, it made perfect logical sense. His HP pool was now exactly on par with a regular zombie.

Just like in any video game, once you reach the same level as the mobs you're farming, the "EXP" yield naturally suffers from diminishing returns. Furthermore, upon hitting the 300 HP milestone, he could distinctly feel his physical strength undergo another significant evolution. The ten-plus-pound galvanized steel spear in his hands actually felt a bit light now.

It was also worth noting that because five of the zombies he killed in this area were former gas station employees, aside from the usual food and crafting materials, they dropped a massive amount of [Diesel] and [Gasoline]! Among the loot was even a [Gasoline (Medium) x1]! Vince had seen the [Gasoline (Small)] drops before; they were just standard 10-liter metal jerry cans.

With a thought, he extracted the [Gasoline (Medium)] from his spatial inventory, only to be shocked as a massive, 100-liter industrial oil drum thudded onto the pavement. From "Small" to "Medium," the volume had multiplied by ten! Note to self: absolutely ransack every gas station I come across in the future. Fuel that can be stored directly in a spatial inventory without taking up physical weight is an incredibly precious survival resource.

After storing the oil drum back into his inventory, Vince began pulling away the overturned display shelves blocking the door to the inner breakroom. With the door finally exposed, Vince hesitated for a second before tapping the wood lightly with the butt of his spear.

"Is anyone alive in there?" A full minute passed without a response. The room behind the door was dead silent. Just as Vince raised his boot, preparing to kick the door off its hinges, two heavy metallic clangs echoed from inside as bed frames were tossed to the floor. An instant later, with a click, a college-aged girl poked her head out through a narrow crack in the door.

"Hello..." Vince leaned his spear against a nearby shelf, preparing to flash a friendly smile and greet the girl—who was currently sitting at a miserable [49/100 HP]. But before he could even raise his hand, the eye-watering, suffocating stench wafting through the crack in the door hit him like a physical blow, forcing him to stumble three steps backward....

After letting the survivors out of the cramped room, Vince led the group of four outside into the open air of the gas station forecourt to let them—and the stench—air out. The group's physical condition couldn't be called good, but they weren't going to drop dead anytime soon either. Everyone was hovering around the halfway mark on their Health Bars. Seeing the five zombie corpses strewn haphazardly across the pavement, the four survivors stared at Vince, utterly speechless with shock.

When the disaster first broke out, a single zombie had bitten one of their classmates. Even with two fully grown boys pulling with all their might, they hadn't been able to pry the monster off, ultimately forced to watch helplessly as their friend was eaten alive. Yet now, this bizarrely dressed man had slaughtered five of them single-handedly. Was he even human...? You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. Is he even human?

While the two boys were still frozen in a daze, the girl was the first to snap out of it. She excitedly took a few steps closer to Vince to strike up a conversation.

"O great hero... Dage, did you kill all of these?" A nauseating wave of concentrated urine and feces immediately assaulted Vince's nose. He subconsciously furrowed his brow and took another half-step back. The girl instantly realized her mistake. They had been trapped in that tiny, unventilated room—which they had also been using as a toilet—for days. They had gone nose-blind to it, but it didn't take a genius to figure out they smelled like they had just been dredged out of a septic tank.

Offering an incredibly awkward, apologetic smile, she silently stepped back. Vince walked a wide half-circle to position himself upwind before finally stopping to chat with her and figure out their backstory. These kids had monumentally terrible luck. They were students from Linjiang University who had gotten trapped here.

"Did you guys receive the emergency text from the Quarantine Zone?" Vince asked.

"We did!" Hearing the question, one of the boys eagerly jumped in. He pulled his phone from his pocket and pressed the power button, but the screen remained dead black; it had run out of battery long ago. He offered an embarrassed smile, put the phone away, and introduced the group.

"My name is Cody Chu. This is my younger sister, Zoe Chu, and my classmate Seth Xu..." Three of the four trapped survivors were Linjiang University students. Because it was summer vacation, the original group of three boys and two girls had rented a car for a road trip to the scenic Jishan County. Unfortunately, the apocalypse erupted right as they were stopping for gas, trapping them here. Two of their classmates had been infected and turned.

The remaining three students, along with two gas station employees, had fled into the main convenience store hall in a panic, using the heavy tempered glass doors to keep the undead out. They ate, slept, and relieved themselves inside that hall. Thankfully, a gas station convenience store was essentially a miniature supermarket stocked with snacks, drinks, and instant food, allowing them to barely hold out until today.

But early this morning, a loud, rhythmic chug-chug-chug sound suddenly erupted from the equipment room at the back of the station. The deafening mechanical noise drove the wandering zombies outside into an absolute frenzy. After repeatedly slamming their bodies against the storefront, they actually managed to shatter the tempered glass doors and swarm the main hall.

One of the male gas station employees sacrificed himself to cover the retreat of the female employee, allowing the remaining four to fall back and barricade themselves inside the tiny inner breakroom. There was no food or water in that inner room. If things had continued, even if they resorted to eating their own waste, they wouldn't have survived another two days. They never expected that a ruthless survivor capable of soloing five zombies would suddenly appear and casually save their lives....

Vince wasn't particularly interested in the tragic details of their harrowing week. He didn't need to use much imagination; ever since the outbreak, tragedies exactly like this were playing out on every corner of the globe. It wasn't worth getting sentimental over. The fact that they had been trapped in a place fully stocked with food and water and survived this long meant they were already luckier than 99% of the population. However, one specific detail in their story caught Vince's attention.

"You said a loud noise suddenly started up in the back room this morning?"

"Yes, exactly!" the girl named Zoe Chu chimed in.

"It went chug-chug-chug, sounding exactly like a car engine. It was super loud!"

"Then why did it stop?" Vince asked, his brow furrowing.

"It only rang out for a little bit this morning. Half an hour, tops..." Recalling the terrifying moment the zombies breached the glass, Zoe still looked traumatized. Her voice trembled slightly as she spoke.

"Otherwise... otherwise those zombies definitely would have broken through the inner door too..." Vince's frown deepened. The entire power grid in this area had failed simultaneously this morning. A mechanical engine noise starting up the exact moment the power went out could only mean one thing: a backup power supply or a heavy-duty generator. He looked past the three students toward the middle-aged woman sitting silently on a concrete curb, staring blankly at one of the zombie corpses.

As a gas station employee, she had to know what was in the back room. Vince walked over, leaning down slightly to ask, "Excuse me, Ma'am. What's in the back room? Is it a generator?" The woman didn't react at all. It was impossible to tell if she had gone deaf or just completely lost her mind.

"Dage, she's been a bit mentally broken..." Cody Chu, the most mature-looking of the three students, stepped forward to answer Vince's question.

"She... there was another older guy who worked here. He was trapped in the hall with us. When the zombies broke through the glass this morning, he was the one who shoved the display shelves in front of the door to block them..." Recalling the desperate flight for their lives, Cody lowered his eyes. He pointed a trembling finger at the zombie corpse on the ground.

"That's him..."... Hearing this, Vince fell silent. Just as he was about to open his mouth to say something, the woman seemed to finally register Cody's words and reacted. She reached out a trembling hand and gently stroked the grotesque, distorted face of the zombie corpse. Tears fell from her eyes, washing away the grime on the corpse's cheek and leaving dark red streaks in the blood. She didn't look up. Her voice choked with sobs, she whispered hoarsely:"Young man... thank you..."

"Thank you for giving him peace..."

"Thank you..."