Chapter 22: Arrival at the Rampaging Groundhog Prairie, Thornbush Trees

With a low, grating creak of wood, the cabinet before Zhang Ran slid open easily. The lock and its attached sliver of board, now unsupported, tumbled into the depths of the cabinet. By the dim torchlight, Zhang Ran peered inside. The wooden walls were mottled with gray mold and coated in thick layers of dust, while the bottom was smeared with a viscous, green paste exuding a pungent, musty odor.

In one corner, he spotted a thin stack of banknotes. Unlike ordinary paper, these had been specially treated to resist decay, and in the relatively dry confines of the cabinet, they were still well-preserved. Yet, in a world ravaged by nuclear devastation and upended social order, such currency had long lost its value—worth no more than a heap of waste paper. Zhang Ran had no interest in collecting them; he left them where they lay.

What truly caught his attention were the dusty pieces of jewelry arranged along the cabinet’s edge. Though their surfaces were dulled by grime, a faint golden gleam shone through upon closer inspection. He reached in and collected the lot. Years of accumulated dust had hardened into a crust as tough as dried earth. Wiping away the filth, a trove of golden jewelry emerged. Zhang Ran’s eyes brightened; he selected a gold bracelet and tested it with his teeth, a delighted smile breaking across his face.

“High purity gold—excellent!”

In the wasteland, though the old currency was worthless, gold remained a universally accepted equivalent, cherished by the elite and indispensable as a reagent in many pharmaceutical recipes—precious beyond measure. Since there were no gold mines nearby, Black Hawk Company’s purchase rate was exceptionally high: hundreds of Black Hawk coins for each gram. It was the treasure everyone hoped to recover from the wild.

According to his chip’s estimation, Zhang Ran had harvested about twenty grams of gold and fifty grams of silver. Once sold, this haul would fetch nearly ten thousand—or even more—Black Hawk coins, enough for him to upgrade to a superior melee weapon and acquire a reliable rifle.

He carefully stowed the jewelry in a designated pouch, tucking it deep in his pack. Then, gripping his military dagger once more, he moved on to the next room.

He cleared every room on the second floor, except the one with the shambling corpse. In the others, he found no more zombies, nor any valuable supplies besides a few iron tools. But with iron fetching only one Black Hawk coin per kilogram—a trivial sum—he had no incentive to collect them. The gold and silver jewelry alone far exceeded his expectations for this expedition, so he left the cottage satisfied, heading toward the distant habitat of the berserk ground rats.

After dispatching several aggressive mutant creatures, Zhang Ran finally reached his destination: an endless grassland, dense with waist-high wild grass. Neglected for years, most of the grass was pale yellow-green, casting a gloomy shadow across the landscape.

“I’ll name this region the ‘Berserk Ground Rat Prairie.’”

As he gave the area its name via his chip, Zhang Ran surveyed the prairie. Between scavenging the cottage and traversing the wilds, noon had quietly arrived—thirteen hundred hours. In the old world, this would be the hour of the sun’s fiercest blaze.

Yet before him stretched only a somber scene. Sunshine filtered through thick, gray clouds of radiation, casting a dim glow over the earth. Temperatures hovered around twenty degrees, and at night, the wilderness would plunge below freezing.

To survive such conditions, all mutant creatures had developed thick fur, as had the humans living in the settlements.

Across the mottled land, insects darted everywhere. Bathed in radiation, their bodies had grown much larger than those of Earth, and sprouted grotesque, mutated organs.

These insects and wild grasses were the favorite food of creatures like the berserk ground rat, making the prairie a frequent haunt for them. Of course, berserk ground rats were only one of the many species at the bottom of the food chain, sustaining corpse wolves, shamblers, rock scorpions, fire ants, and thousands of other mutants—forming a unique ecosystem in the wasteland.

Besides the myriad mutant beasts, mutant plants were also common. Some hundred meters ahead, Zhang Ran spotted a bizarre, towering plant. Its pale stem bore no leaves, but bristled with needle-like thorns dozens of centimeters long, stained with remnants of unknown blood.

This was the Thorn Tree, a common mutant plant of the wilderness. Though it couldn’t move, it had developed self-awareness, and could lash its branches to prey on nearby mutants, feeding on their blood.

For humans, especially Evolvers, the Thorn Tree held special value—it was a common source of potable water in the wild. When its bark was cut, a certain amount of thorn sap would flow out. Though the sap contained some harmful substances, ordinary people who drank it unfiltered risked diarrhea and fever; yet compared to surface water in the wasteland, it carried almost no lethal radiation, nor did it teem with viruses or toxins. It was a relatively clean water source.

For ordinary people, filtered thorn sap could be used as drinking water. For Evolvers, even unfiltered sap posed no harm. Thus, people seldom attacked Thorn Trees when they encountered them.

On the chip’s simulated map, the Thorn Tree’s location was specially marked as a water resource. Should Zhang Ran ever lack water, the chip could easily recommend this spot to him.