Chapter Ninety-Two They Are Still Alive.

At dawn, the first light of morning had just begun to bloom.

It had been ten days since the heavy freight rail line was completed.

Around the outskirts of the base, rows of tents had been erected. Inside them, workers were distributing food and hot water to refugees arriving from every direction.

The ragged refugees, dragging bodies worn to the bone, took the food with trembling hands.

The workers handing out the meals wore kind smiles as they offered words of comfort.

The perimeter of the base had become as lively as a crowded market.

Meanwhile, the soldiers of the Xuanlu Order stood within the camp, gazing down from above. If anything unusual occurred below, they would immediately suppress it with force.

They had no intention of going down to maintain order, because it was far too dangerous. Even without supernatural powers, such a chaotic crowd would be unsafe for even elite troops.

At present, Xuanlu’s inspection capacity could no longer keep pace with the number of refugees. Before the heavy rail line was finished, only a few hundred to around a thousand people arrived at the base each day, and Xuanlu could still screen them all. But as time passed, the number kept rising, until now ten thousand people were reaching the base every day.

In just ten days, fifty thousand refugees had gathered around the perimeter.

Once the trains began running, Xuanlu’s transport capacity was used to its fullest, reaching nearly six thousand tons a day.

After subtracting ammunition, materials, and the many kinds of supplies occupying transport space, the remaining thirty percent used for food alone could feed more than three hundred thousand people, more than enough to sustain every refugee there.

Yet in reality, Xuanlu was faced with one difficulty after another. Inspection, administration, lodging, and countless other problems all required time to resolve. Management needed manpower. Stationing the troops and familiarizing them with their tasks took time. Building houses took time.

Inspection was not the problem. They could simply open more than a dozen checkpoints and receive vast numbers of people in a short span. But the base was not prepared to accept so many.

In the end, Xuanlu had no choice but to slow the screening process and leave a large number of refugees outside the base, ensuring only their food supply and issuing some blankets for warmth. As for everything else, Xuanlu bore no responsibility. If they could not survive, they would simply be hauled out and burned.

Xuanlu was not running a charity. It had no duty to guarantee their safety, nor the capacity to do so. Better that some should die than the base lose its basic order and security.

What needed to be done now was to use the increased transport capacity to bring in huge quantities of materials and begin road construction.

Once the roads were built, the modern army would be able to move unimpeded, with the strength to sweep away every dissenter in the eastern frontier. At the same time, it would allow the next phase: building factories and finding suitable sites for stone quarries, cement plants, mining operations, and thermal power stations.

When the most basic infrastructure was complete, industrial upgrading could begin, and the new world would become self-sufficient.

Only then would it begin to support the homeland in return, using the vast majority of its transport capacity to move resources.

“It’s time for the shift change.”

The soldier on guard checked the time. Just as he was about to descend from the watchtower, a line of figures suddenly appeared at the edge of the horizon.

“More refugees.”

At first, the soldier saw nothing unusual in them. In recent days, refugees arriving here had been too many to count.

He raised the binoculars in his hand and aimed them at the approaching crowd.

The same stumbling gait, the same tattered clothes. They looked no different from the refugees below.

His gaze swept roughly across the group, and then his brows drew together. He felt as though he had just seen something, and looked again.

“This is...”

As he adjusted focus, he saw, amid the refugees, a number of people carrying children in their arms.

What mattered was not the children, but their bodies. They were no longer human. Their flesh had rotted to an extreme degree.

Even from such a distance, the soldier could faintly make out bodies missing chunks of flesh everywhere.

How could such bodies still move?

The thought flashed through his mind, and in the next instant he snapped back to reality and slammed the alarm beside him.

A shrill siren split the sky, instantly drowning out the uproar below.

A few minutes later, the great gates of the base slowly opened, and armored infantry vehicles roared out.

The bewildered crowd had not yet recovered when shadows suddenly rose from within the base, and one helicopter after another surged over the barricades, racing toward the distance.

The people below stared in terror at these iron monsters, some screaming, others collapsing to the ground, and some even fainting outright.

Xuanlu had no time to care about their reactions. There were far more dangerous matters to deal with. The refugees who had just arrived were clearly wrong.

As they drew nearer to the crowd, the situation became increasingly clear.

These people were profoundly strange, like soulless walking corpses. Ordinary people, faced with helicopters and armored vehicles, would flee in fear or at least stand frozen in place.

Yet these people continued to lurch forward in silence, completely ignoring the helicopters circling overhead.

The strangest sight of all was the cluster in the center: those carrying children in their arms. Or rather, they could no longer be called people at all. Not a single patch of flesh on them was whole, and they were even more horrifying than ghouls.

At least a ghoul still had an intact body. These bodies, by contrast, looked as though something had gnawed them apart, with missing flesh here and there.

What was most absurd was that such severely decayed bodies could still move. This completely defied the structure of the human body. Without muscles, how could they move? Were they perhaps driven by bone alone?

Indeed, a world with supernatural power was utterly unreasonable.

“This is Xuanlu garrison. Stop immediately and submit to inspection.”

The crowd below continued to move forward, as though they had not heard the helicopter squad’s warning at all.

“I repeat. Stop immediately and submit to inspection, or we will consider using force to stop you.”

The crowd below kept advancing.

Seeing this, the soldier with the radio on the helicopter narrowed his eyes slightly and turned to pick up another handset.

“This is the helicopter unit. The target has not ceased movement. Requesting permission to fire.”

[Conduct a warning strike. In the event of an unexpected situation, fire is authorized.]

The gun turrets and machine guns on the armored vehicles below slowly adjusted their aim. The helicopters reduced their circling speed, their barrels trained on the crowd beneath.

Ratatatat!

A rain of fire spilled from the helicopters. The people below fell like wheat before the scythe, and before long, more than a hundred were lying on the ground.

The advancing crowd suddenly stopped.

All of them stood motionless in place.

Their eyes were vacant, their expressions wooden, like puppets.

The sight immediately put everyone on edge. All heavy firepower was readied. With the slightest movement, the torrent of artillery would purify them to the last.

The base’s firepower was nothing like what it had been in the royal capital. Moreover, the surrounding land was all wasteland, and Xuanlu had no restraints here. Even if another corpse tree like the one in the royal capital appeared, Xuanlu was confident it could deal with it in a thunderous blow.

They would make sure the enemy learned what true firepower justice meant.

One second, two seconds, three...

Time passed by drop by drop.

The eerie refugees all stood frozen. Then, from the center of the group, the rotting corpses began to move. With stumbling steps, they walked out from among the people.

At this moment, the sword was already at the bowstring, and a thunderbolt strike was imminent.

More than a hundred rotting corpses stood at the front of the crowd, gazing into the distance. The rising sun had a blinding brilliance.

With a dull thud, every corpse suddenly dropped to its knees.

The sound of bones breaking rang out, and their gaunt, ruined bodies seemed like candles in a gale, ready to shatter at any moment.

That single kneel meant they would never rise again.

Their arms trembling faintly, they lifted the children in their arms high overhead.

The children, all very young, had their eyes closed, their faces sallow and drawn, and breathed with steady regularity.

“They... are still alive.”