Chapter 18: Pork Belly — Grilled Pork Belly, Grilled Pig Trotters, Grilled Ribs…

The next morning, just as dawn was breaking, Su Ze stood before the Mutated Wild Boar’s carcass, Kitchen Cleaver in hand—the edge already rolled—and fretted.

The boar had been bled out during yesterday’s hunt. Back then, he’d assumed Wei Fengtang and Qin Yu would need at least two or three days to pull themselves together before going down the mountain, so he hadn’t rushed to butcher it.

Who could have guessed Wei Fengtang would regain consciousness ahead of schedule and make the decision to descend with such decisive speed?

Escort them he must. The foot of the mountain was a good thirty kilometers away, the trail rough and winding—at Wei Fengtang’s pace, a full day’s walk. Never mind the assortment of mutated creatures along the way; even the naturally formed marsh pits alone were enough to kill a man.

Having resolved to escort them down, Su Ze settled the unconscious Qin Yu and Wei Fengtang, then spent the night butchering the Mutated Wild Boar. But no sooner had he split the belly and cleaned out the innards than that weather-beaten old Kitchen Cleaver gave out completely.

Su Ze gazed at the gutted Mutated Wild Boar, reluctance plain in his eyes.

Grilled pork belly, grilled pig trotters, grilled ribs… No. He couldn’t give up!

Su Ze’s eyes turned resolute once more. He flung the ruined cleaver aside, but the moment he turned around, he caught sight of Lin Xiuzhu taking down the tent.

Su Ze froze. A bad premonition flashed through his mind, and the words escaped him before he could stop them. “What are you doing?”

Lin Xiuzhu glanced at him, hands never stopping. “Aren’t we escorting Academician Wei down? All of this will come in handy on the road.”

Su Ze opened his mouth, then closed it again. It took him a good while to force the words out. “Just taking them down the mountain is enough…”

Lin Xiuzhu scoffed. “Down the mountain, and then what? The nearest village is several kilometers from the foot of the mountain. Who’s looking out for them in between? And even once they reach the village, there’s no guarantee they can get in touch with the military. Then what? A good deed should be seen through to the end, no? At the very least, we ought to deliver Academician Wei safely to the Military Region.”

Su Ze hadn’t thought that far ahead. He’d imagined dropping them off, coming back to a full Manchu-Han imperial feast, and he’d even been counting on Lin Xiuzhu to have wild boar served ten different ways ready by the time he returned. He glanced back at the Mutated Wild Boar and began seriously weighing the feasibility of dragging the carcass down the mountain.

Just then, Wei Fengtang and Qin Yu came over. Dressed in Su Ze’s clothes and freshly washed up, they looked much restored in spirit.

They carried fruits and roots in their hands and set them in a small pot beside the campfire, rinsing them with water Su Ze had drawn while watching Lin Xiuzhu put his eight tentacles to work in high spirits.

Watching Lin Xiuzhu dismantle a tent four meters square and roughly three meters tall and stuff the whole thing into a storage bag a bit over a meter long, Qin Yu asked Su Ze, baffled, “What is he doing?”

Su Ze sat on his rock and answered glumly, “Packing up.”

Qin Yu grew even more puzzled. “Is he coming down the mountain with us too?”

At those words, Lin Xiuzhu’s hands stopped. He tossed the tent’s storage bag into a chest with a resounding thump—the chest he’d just dragged out from under the single bed, apparently purpose-built for camping gear.

Qin Yu jumped, but Wei Fengtang seemed to grasp something. Smiling, he rose to his feet. “Little Lin, let me help you.”

“No need!” The two words came out stiff as boards. The next second, Lin Xiuzhu’s tone softened. “Please, just sit and rest. Taking these things apart and putting them back together takes technique. If you’ve never used them, they’re very hard to figure out.”

Wei Fengtang didn’t press. He offered a “you’ve worked hard” and sat back down, his eyes brimming with quiet gratification.

So the three of them sat by the campfire’s embers, watching Lin Xiuzhu deploy all eight tentacles, shuttling back and forth. A full two hours passed—the sun was nearly overhead—before he managed, barely, to fit most of the gear into that chest roughly two meters long, half a meter wide, and one meter deep.

Su Ze: “…”

So that was why the man had bought such a complete set of equipment and used it exactly once.

The camping gear was more or less stowed. Only the seasonings remained untouched for the moment. Lin Xiuzhu had instead used the small knife to cut a few strips of wild boar, planning to roast them for the road.

At the sight, Su Ze’s eyes lit up. He promptly borrowed that same knife, carved off big slabs of pork, and stowed them in his backpack—

The grilled ribs and trotters might be gone, but he was not letting grilled pork belly slip away!

Meanwhile, at the foot of Changling Mountain.

Xing Lyu watched the helicopter recede into the distance, then turned to give the order. “Check your gear. We enter the mountain in ten minutes.”

“Sir!”

Little Bear, Dazi, and Dayu answered in one voice and began swiftly checking their weapons and ammunition. Dayu above all—as the squad’s fire support and communications officer, he carried the most and the heaviest equipment. Little Bear and Dazi had long finished; he was still inspecting the automated device.

Little Bear, the shortest of them, watched from the side and nudged Dazi with his shoulder. “Say, you think that thing could carry me?”

Dazi glanced at the “thing” in question and arched a brow. “You’re welcome to try.”

“Better not. I hear those things run tens of millions apiece. Don’t want it coming through the mission just fine and then getting crushed under me.”

“It’s not actually that expensive,” Dayu said with an ingenuous grin. “You’re thinking of the R&D costs. Once it went into mass production, each unit’s only about a hundred-some thousand.”

“Still more than I could ever pay back…” Little Bear muttered.

What they were discussing was precisely the automated device Dayu was inspecting, officially designated the “Fully Automatic Auxiliary Strategic Transport Mechanical Device.” The name was such a mouthful that the whole force simply called it Little Square—because its shape was, quite literally, a cube.

Little Square measured one meter to a side, wore a tactical camouflage finish, and was built throughout of lightweight alloy. Mechanical feet modeled on crab legs studded its underside, letting it handle all manner of terrain with ease. Its core function was transporting supplies.

In the beginning, Little Square had been written off as the Academy of Military Science’s most useless brainchild. It could handle all kinds of terrain, but its load capacity was limited; it could follow special units behind enemy lines, but it made rather too much noise on the move; press it into frontline wartime resupply, and its speed couldn’t keep up, turning it into a live target on the battlefield.

In short, there was simply no use for it, and it gathered dust almost as soon as it was developed. Only when the first signs of the apocalypse appeared did Little Square win back attention and get rushed into mass production.

True, its speed couldn’t match a motor vehicle—but it could accompany soldiers on missions across any terrain. Granted, it wasn’t stealthy in motion—but against mutated creatures there was no need to hide its tracks; it could even serve as bait to draw them in. One cubic meter of storage wasn’t much—but it was enough to hold most man-portable heavy weapons, turning it into a mobile ammunition locker for the troops.

And Little Square had one particularly endearing quirk.

Having finished checking the weapons loaded inside, Dayu reached up and closed the top cover. Little Square chimed with a soft “beep,” and a black display screen lit up on the face toward Dayu, playing music as it listed every weapon and piece of equipment it carried.

“There’s a girl in the village named Little Fang, pretty and kind-hearted~”

Xing Lyu watched the display scroll past “RPG, Qty: 1,” “Grenades, Qty: 5,” “Instant Noodles, Qty: 10,” listened to “thank you for the love you gave me,” and finally lost his composure. “Who the hell did this?”

Little Bear and Dazi both stared, answering in unison, “No idea!”

Little Bear’s mouth ran ahead of him. “It didn’t do this last time we used it?”

Dayu chuckled. “Little Square got a system upgrade before we deployed. Probably a new feature.”

Xing Lyu ground his back teeth at that. Those bastards at the Academy of Military Science!

When the last of the weapons and ammunition had been displayed, the music cut off abruptly. Two white dots the size of quail’s eggs appeared on the black screen, accompanied by a double beep, signaling that startup was complete and it stood by awaiting orders.

Xing Lyu exhaled and gave the command outright. “Little Square, move out!”

At the order, the two white dots on Little Square’s screen became two half-circles, its expression shifting from adorably blank to stern in an instant. Six mechanical legs rose, and it advanced along its pre-set route toward the designated objective.

Xing Lyu’s four-man team fell in behind it in a 1-2-1 formation and stepped into Changling Mountain.

In the early going, with the road ahead unknown and the fate of the previous special squad hanging over them, the four maintained strict tactical formation, silent and wary. Any mutated creature they encountered drew four guns in the same heartbeat.

That is, until Little Square was unexpectedly swallowed up by a Mutated Plant. Xing Lyu held his teammates’ fire for the sake of observation—and then watched, wide-eyed, as the straw-mat-like Mutated Plant spat Little Square back out, drifted languidly to their feet, probed at them a few times, and slowly drifted away again.

“Something’s off! Why does it feel like the mutated creatures here are all so… so…” Little Bear dragged the “so” out forever without landing on the right word.

“Docile,” Dazi supplied. “Or, say, not all that aggressive.”

Little Bear smacked his gun barrel. “Not aggressive, my foot! Next to Mutants, the mutated creatures here are almost cute!”

“Don’t get careless,” Xing Lyu cautioned. “If this place were really so harmless, why did the helicopter sent to back up the special squad go down? How did a fully equipped special squad get wiped out to a man?”

At the thought of their fallen comrades, the slackening wariness of Little Bear and Dazi drew taut again. The four of them, plus Little Square, pressed on toward the coordinates.

Meanwhile, roughly twenty-five kilometers away, Su Ze’s party of four was also making for the foot of the mountain.

Lin Xiuzhu carried the camping chest with two tentacles, Su Ze had the backpack stuffed with Mutated Wild Boar slung across his back, and Wei Fengtang and Qin Yu traveled light. In two hours, they had covered… five kilometers.

Part of that was the rough, treacherous mountain trail, but the real crux was that the two scientists simply couldn’t keep up the pace.

Under normal circumstances, neither of them would have slowed the group like this. They were biologists who had spent years on field expeditions, their wilderness survival skills long since maxed out. Even Wei Fengtang, past sixty, looked thin but was actually corded with lean muscle, and thought nothing of scrambling up slopes or down.

But before yesterday, they had spent three days and three nights running from the Mutated Giant Bear, their bodies and minds alike crushed under enormous strain. One short night could never have restored them fully.

Fortunately, Wei Fengtang’s decision to descend had been firm without being frantic. At every rest stop, he even found the energy to poke about the flora, several times clutching some flower, blade of grass, bird feather, or tuft of beast fur while gazing at Su Ze with words caught on his lips—as if he ached to requisition that backpack for his precious samples.

At every such look, Su Ze hugged his backpack tighter without a word. No one was touching his pork belly!

And so the two groups drew steadily closer, but their destinations differed, and just as they were about to brush past one another, both made the same choice: to camp right where they were.