Surviving the Game as a Zombie - Chapter 71

As the seasons changed, the daytime temperatures gradually rose. Tang Yu took an enthusiastic stroll through the nearby fields. The soil had been fertilized and loosened, and here and there, she could see small potato sprouts emerging.

In the past two days, the team responsible for water and electricity had set up bamboo pipes to divert water from the small creek into the paddy fields, where Granny Mei and her group were planting rice seedlings. The seedlings had been sprouted from husked rice seeds found in A-City. After nearly twenty days of cultivation, they were now ready to be transplanted into the fields.

This was the camp’s first rice crop. The quantity wasn’t large, and since it was already the season for planting mid-season and late rice, they would have to wait nearly half a year to see a harvest. No one held high expectations for a bountiful yield; a meager result was foreseeable. For the next year, they would still have to rely on the rice and flour scavenged from the city.

But it was a good start. If they didn’t take this step toward self-sufficiency, the supplies in the city would continue to dwindle, and the survival pressure on these NPCs would only grow greater in the future.

Under the sun, the seedlings glowed a beautiful, tender green, a delightful and verdant sight. To ensure proper spacing, Granny Mei had stretched a string across the paddy field. The group followed this line, planting the seedlings in the water-filled field. Once a row was finished, they would move the string to plant the next.

To say “plant” wasn’t entirely accurate. It was more like Granny Mei and the others were “pressing” the seedlings into the soil. They moved with extreme speed, holding the roots of a seedling between their fingertips and giving it a light push into the earth. The seedling would stand upright, neat and tidy, like a column of soldiers with their heads held high.

Seeing Tang Yu on the ridge, her eyes wide with curiosity, Granny Mei spoke to her.

“If you were a bit stronger and more skilled, you could stand at the edge of the field and toss the seedlings, like throwing stones. They’d land and stand up on their own. But seedlings planted that way are crooked and don’t look nice. For our first crop of grain, it’s better to be meticulous.”

Tang Yu’s eyes sparkled. She nodded and clapped from the ridge, giving Granny Mei a thumbs-up. Without Xiao Li around to translate, their communication wasn’t as smooth, so Tang Yu used body language to convey her meaning.

In the eyes of the aunties, these actions made their Village Chief Tang seem exceptionally lively and cute, completely without airs.

They had never imagined that they would one day find a zombie adorable.

The ingredients team had more free time in the mornings, so Tang Yu fulfilled her duties as village chief, strolling around with her hands behind her back, looking left and right. Whenever the aunties saw her, they would tease her a bit, regardless of whether she would respond.

When it came to professional matters, Tang Yu couldn’t be of much help. Everyone has their specialty, and although the aunties were ordinary NPCs, they were far more capable at this kind of work than Tang Yu.

So, Tang Yu acted as a cheerleader, occasionally giving a thumbs-up or applauding from the side, which always brought hearty laughter from the group.

Once she had made her rounds, Tang Yu returned to the village to check on Xiao Li. Under Jin Ye’s careful watch, Xiao Li’s spirits were recovering quickly. Although her body was still very weak, she remained in a good mood.

Zhou Zhou would occasionally come over to chat. Her small earthen hut was right next to Tang Yu’s group, and her small yard was filled with various herbs she had dug up, all laid out on the stone slabs to dry in the good sun. She spent the entire morning in her room, tinkering with who-knows-what. From time to time, she would emerge with a strange medicine for Tang Yu and Jin Ye to take, claiming it would boost their resistance.

However, not long after taking the medicine, both Tang Yu’s and Jin Ye’s body temperatures soared, their ears burning hot and red. Only then did Tang Yu realize this was no resistance booster; Zhou Zhou was definitely using them as test subjects.

When confronted, Zhou Zhou showed no remorse. She said she was developing a new antibiotic, explaining with a harmless smile, “It’s more suitable for a zombie’s constitution, you know.”

Tang Yu and Jin Ye both expressed their disbelief. Although there were no other reactions besides the elevated temperature, they refused to take any more of her strange little pills. Undeterred, Zhou Zhou turned her attention to the naive Lu Lu.

Fu Mengqing, who had been brought back to the camp, was assigned to the tool group as an apprentice. She was very deft with her hands and learned quickly, making a rather standard-looking bamboo basket in just half a day.

In the evening, when the weather had cooled, Tang Yu took this basket and went with Aunty Zhu up the mountain to find ingredients for the next day.

The rice and flour in the camp’s warehouse were being consumed quickly. More than half of the potatoes and sweet potatoes had been set aside as seed potatoes to sprout, leaving their remaining rations less than abundant. According to the original plan, these past few days should have been when Tang Yu and Jin Ye went to the city to search for supplies. But plans couldn’t keep up with changes; their injuries had forced them to abandon any intention of leaving the village.

However, Aunty Zhu wasn’t worried about the food situation. Thanks to the efforts of the tool group, many iron racks and bamboo cages had been made. Combined with ropes and leaves, these things could be fashioned into very effective traps. The amount of meat on their dinner table had noticeably increased these past two days.

The most frequently caught prey were pheasants. When Tang Yu followed Aunty Zhu to the back slope of the mountain, several pheasants had already stepped into traps and were hanging upside down from branches by tightened ropes. One of them had been eaten by some unknown beast, leaving only a bare, broken frame.

The other few were still alive. The two of them went forward to inspect them, and Aunty Zhu was overjoyed. She grabbed one of the chicken’s legs and said, “This one looks like a domestic chicken.”

It was a thin hen. From its appearance, it still had some features of a domesticated chicken, but it wasn’t exactly the same, looking like a crossbreed between a domestic chicken and a pheasant.

Tang Yu understood. This must have been a domestic chicken originally raised in the village. After the zombie outbreak, some surviving poultry had scattered into the mountains and forests, becoming semi-wild.

Tang Yu had seen abandoned, separate enclosures for chickens, cattle, and pigs in the village.

Aunty Zhu cradled the chicken as if it were a treasure, saying, “We won’t eat this one. We’ll raise it. If we can catch other domestic chickens in the future, we can have eggs.”

Things like eggs had become incredibly hard to find in the year since the zombie outbreak. Aunty Zhu never thought she would have the chance to eat one again.

Tang Yu’s eyes lit up as she nodded. Her thoughts went further: if domestic chickens had appeared here, there might be other farm animals nearby that hadn’t wandered far. If they could find pigs, or even an ox for plowing, that would be even better!

They immediately got to work. Tang Yu entered the hen into her “Material Search” system, then walked a circle around the mountain. The basic skill proved to be quite useful; it actually led them to five more semi-wild chickens in a patch of weeds.

Tang Yu was in charge of blocking their path while Aunty Zhu skillfully caught the chickens. The two of them, half-bent over, chased and cornered the birds on the mountainside. They ended up covered in dirt, but the result was delightful—they took the whole brood back with them.

Along the way, they also dug up some wild vegetables and picked some ripe loquats and green plums, filling their bamboo basket to the brim.

Aunty Zhu and Tang Yu returned at sunset, their baskets full. Aunty Zhu told everyone she met how brave Xiao Tang was at catching chickens today. At the dinner table, she even gave a full imitation, like a parent showing off their child, which made Tang Yu blush crimson.

Time in the camp passed leisurely and peacefully. In the blink of an eye, seven days had gone by.

The matter of building a road for the village was finally put on the agenda. Road construction was a difficult task, but the group didn’t make it too hard on themselves. They planned to initially use hoes to clear a dirt path to the reservoir, clearing away the weeds and leveling the uneven yellow earth, just enough for a small van to pass through.

Later, when they had the right conditions and tools, they would build a grander concrete road.

This made the task much simpler. In the past two days, a long section of the dirt road at the village entrance had been cleared. Because it was a downhill path, they occasionally encountered steep, large rocks, so they simply went around them, digging where the ground was flatter.

On the seventh day after her return to the village, Tang Yu’s back no longer hurt. She would run around the village every morning to maintain her basic physical training, and even with larger movements, the injured area no longer ached. She was recovering quite quickly.

Scabs were gradually forming on Jin Ye’s leg, and new flesh was even growing underneath.

When Zhou Zhou learned of this, she insisted that her new medicine was responsible, an assertion Tang Yu and Jin Ye vehemently denied.

Tang Yu counted on her fingers, calculating how much longer it would be until her weapon was forged. During this time, she had Li Chengjian go to the blacksmith’s residence to inquire once, and the progress was steady.

Tang Yu was greatly looking forward to seeing Startling Dragon again. If all went well, Startling Dragon should be upgraded. Even if it couldn’t be upgraded, it was fine as long as it was returned to her intact. Her mindset was very positive.

However, what Tang Yu hadn’t expected was that she wouldn’t be waiting for her weapon’s upgrade, but for something else entirely.

Just as the beams of the first wooden house in the village were being set, Tang Yu and Jin Ye happened to be observing nearby. The roof structure was the simplest A-frame, with six thick, dried logs as posts, three horizontal beams laid across them, and then dozens of smaller beams placed on top to form the roof frame. The wooden joints used a mortise and tenon structure, secured with bolts, making it very stable.

Originally, mortise and tenon joints were an extremely difficult task for amateurs. However, Jin Ye had used other houses as a reference, carefully studied the structure, and drew detailed diagrams for the tool group. After a few tries and sacrificing a few logs, everyone started to get the hang of it.

The moment the wooden frame of the house was erected, a notification sound echoed in Tang Yu’s mind. She froze for a moment, then quickly looked at Jin Ye.

Jin Ye had clearly received the notification as well. The two of them opened their game panels and saw that the long-term camp-building mission had changed. Their camp had leveled up, and they were simultaneously rewarded with fifty mission points.

“Camp Scale: Level 2

Camp Name: A Close and Loving Family.”

Below that were the names of the twenty-two members of the camp.

In addition, new information appeared.

“Camp Unity: 99

Camp Prosperity: 10

Camp Favorability: 100

Camp Activity: 95

Current Development Direction: A friendly and healthy small-scale camp.”

Tang Yu hadn’t realized before that the camp could be upgraded. When building her camp, all she had thought about was how to make life better for everyone. Therefore, these fifty points were a pleasant surprise.

Tang Yu quickly asked Lu Lu, Xiao Li, and the others, and found that every player within the camp had received this upgrade reward.

When they first established the camp, they had received twenty points. This upgrade gave them fifty, which meant that the more they leveled up, the greater the rewards would be. Everyone was beaming with joy.

Lu Lu said she had also triggered a new camp mission. It was likely because she had been staying in the camp and had a very high participation rate in camp affairs, which gave her an additional twenty-point reward.

This result was very gratifying. Lu Lu was unwilling and unsuited to leave the village, so it was for the best that she could also achieve growth within the village, especially since her strengths and interests lay in this area.

After the initial joy, Tang Yu and Jin Ye compared notes and discovered that only the camp founders could see the new camp statistics. Such stats were extremely helpful for managers to judge whether the camp was thriving.

The other stats were within expectations, but the “development direction” item gave Tang Yu some insight. A friendly-type community didn’t receive extra rewards, which meant the game wouldn’t guide all players toward building friendly communities. She thought about the state of development at North Stream Camp and guessed that violent, autocratic camps were also permitted and would not be punished or rewarded for it. The kind of ecosystem a camp developed was entirely up to the manager’s own choice.

Tang Yu didn’t know if the camp upgrade was triggered by the construction of the wooden house or by the accumulation of other tasks like irrigation, road repair, and farming. She pondered for a moment and decided not to delve deeper, letting things develop naturally. After all, the necessary construction in the village still had to be done. If they discovered that simply building houses could accelerate upgrades, everyone would subconsciously prioritize points, start looking for shortcuts, and only do things that would level them up, their minds completely preoccupied with it.

Other camps might be suited for that path, but Tang Yu’s camp was not. They had so many aunties who didn’t rely on points to live; what the aunties needed more was tangible comfort in their survival. To achieve that, developing irrigation, farming, and stockpiling food step by step were all essential.

At that moment, Tang Yu made a decision: she would place the members’ positions before points.

She couldn’t predict how this decision would affect the camp’s development, nor did she notice how her own mentality had changed at that moment.

The cause and effect of the world are interlinked. If Tang Yu hadn’t brought the aunties back with her in the beginning, they might have walked a completely different path of development.