Chapter 101-I Clean Up Garbage in a Wasteland World
Chapter 101 The Forsaken Village (V)
"Have we been here before?" Zhu Ning was still lost in thought when a commotion suddenly broke out at the front of the group.
"How long have we been walking—half an hour? Why haven't we gotten out yet?" someone else said over the channel.
Zhu Ning had been focused on conversation this whole time and hadn't paid much attention. Now she realized something was genuinely wrong. The village wasn't large, and they'd been moving at a brisk pace in their eagerness to evacuate—by all rights, they should have reached the village entrance by now.
But where was the entrance? Where was that old locust tree?
"Try again," someone said over the public channel. "Everyone stay calm."
"Walk it again, walk it again." Someone echoed, repeating the phrase over and over. People tended to repeat themselves when frightened—their subconscious dreading they might never find the way out.
They were halfway through the return journey. All they had to do was get out of the forsaken village and cross the tall grass to get home. Hope was right in front of them.
The group pressed forward. This time Zhu Ning didn't chat with anyone—she kept her eyes fixed on the houses to either side as she walked. She passed the house with the deity statue again, a goat's head resting on the eaves.
The statue stared at them through the window. There it was again—that faint, persistent sense of being watched, like something cold and viscous clinging to your skin. It reminded her of Chu Qing's gaze.
This house was the most distinctive landmark. Zhu Ning decided to use it as an anchor point.
The village really wasn't large. They were moving in one direction, and the big locust tree should have been straight ahead.
They moved faster this time. Twenty minutes at most should have been enough to reach the end.
People got lost in forests because the trees all looked the same, but here every house was different—they shouldn't be completely disoriented.
Passing these abandoned houses, she could see inside through the dust-coated windows. Zhu Ning deliberately looked at each one in turn, comparing them to what she'd seen before.
This one had an electronic keyboard. That one had paper-cut window decorations. This one had cross-stitch hanging on the wall. That one had an unfinished meal, bowls and chopsticks still on the table. This one had a toppled chair. That one had a baby stroller on the floor. And this one… had a strange deity statue inside.
Zhu Ning stopped. This was the third time she'd seen the statue. The sky had grown darker, and the statue lurked in shadow—its position unchanged, its expression unchanged, still staring at them with that same brooding gaze, as if it had been watching for a very long time.
The nameless statue watched them pass by, again and again, through the window.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat endlessly.
Psychic Contamination?
A chill crept up the back of Zhu Ning's neck. Were they lost?
She rolled her neck. Out here beyond the wall, everything abnormal was amplified. Jiang Ping had been right—the return trip wouldn't be peaceful. They'd already triggered it.
Zero or one hundred percent. No middle ground.
Jiang Ping was right beside her. She was about to ask him what to do—he had far more wilderness survival experience beyond the wall, and her first instinct was to seek advice from a senior.
"Ah, you're lost." Before Zhu Ning could turn around, Jiang Ping's voice came from behind her.
Her body stiffened. Something was wrong with those words. Jiang Ping's voice was flat and dark, carrying a faint edge of mania, as if he didn't care at all whether they lived or died.
You're lost.
He'd said you, not we.
Word choice reveals the subconscious. In Jiang Ping's mind, it was Zhu Ning and the other Cleaners who were lost—not him.
The Garrison Troops were leading the way. The Cleaners were sandwiched in the middle, following the Garrison's footsteps. Wherever the Garrison led, they had to go.
Jin Tao had been right. People who'd lived beyond the wall for a long time really weren't normal.
In that moment, Jiang Ping felt even more terrifying than the statue in front of her. He was standing just a meter behind her—she could see his feet in her peripheral vision.
Then she saw his feet move. He was walking toward her.
Zhu Ning looked at the window. With the sky darkening, the glass reflected their silhouettes. Inside the window was the eerie statue; the glass reflected Zhu Ning and Jiang Ping. Jiang Ping wore a blue protective suit—different from the Cleaners' suits, patterned with diamond-shaped stripes. His suit could activate a stealth mode, camouflaging him in nature like a chameleon to avoid detection by Contaminants. Now, bathed in the last light of the setting sun, he looked like some strange, alien creature.
As if Jiang Ping weren't human at all, but some kind of beyond-the-wall monster.
Zhu Ning watched the reflected figures in the window, unsure what Jiang Ping intended.
Kill her?
Make a move here? How would Jiang Ping explain it afterward? Was he really doing what Jin Tao had said—luring Cleaners to feed the Contaminants?
Zhu Ning ran the numbers in her head. Jiang Ping was alone, and he'd been holding a gun the whole time. If it came to firearms, she could use her metal manipulation ability.
But she didn't know whether Jiang Ping had a special ability.
Strike first? Zhu Ning's helmet had an internal camera recording this mission. She didn't want to make a move and hand the Sanitation Center any leverage against her.
Jiang Ping moved without a sound. He'd already closed in on Zhu Ning's back, and he raised one hand.
"Zhu Ning!"
Someone called her name. Xu Meng had appeared from somewhere, her shadow suddenly materializing in the window's reflection.
Xu Meng shattered the strange tension between Zhu Ning and Jiang Ping, forcing herself between them.
"What are you doing?" Xu Meng was nominally Zhu Ning's squad leader—she was supposed to keep track of her teammates. "Why did you wander off?"
In the window's reflection, the hand Jiang Ping had raised snapped back.
Zhu Ning made a sound of acknowledgment, falling into an oddly natural rhythm with Xu Meng. "I was just looking at this statue. It's kind of interesting."
"Stop looking," Xu Meng picked up the thread smoothly. "We have a problem."
Zhu Ning glanced back at Jiang Ping. Through the protective helmet she couldn't read his expression. He'd gone quiet. Since Xu Meng had stepped in, the dark aura around him had receded—he looked like a perfectly normal person.
Zhu Ning moved to Xu Meng's side. She'd come specifically to warn her? Out here in the middle of nowhere, this undercover agent was, surprisingly, a source of reassurance.
At least compared to a group of potential lunatics, Zhu Ning could be certain Xu Meng was completely sane.
Xu Meng: "We're lost."
The entire group had stopped. They'd all realized they were adrift in the forsaken village.
"Get the Technology Department on the line," someone frantically called out, broadcasting on the public channel so everyone could hear. "Hello? We're in trouble—hello! Hello!"
"Stop shouting," another voice answered, barely concealing its terror. "Haven't you noticed there's no signal?"
"How—" The first person was in disbelief. They'd had signal on the way in. They'd even contacted the center after collecting the Contamination Spores. But the display inside the helmet confirmed it—no signal.
"T-time seems to have stopped," someone said.
The helmets displayed the time—one of their reference points, which had always worked. But after they'd realized they were lost, the clock had frozen. It was stuck at 5:59 PM.
"Is it b-broken?"
"That can't be right. How would it break?"
The Sanitation Center's technology was at the forefront of the Federation. In an era when they could rewrite genes and even upload consciousness, a clock malfunction was simply unimaginable.
Beyond the wall, there was a powerful sense of rupture. Human civilization was in retreat.
Inside the wall, technology had advanced to the point of creating Synthetics. Beyond the wall, civilization had regressed to the primitive.
For people accustomed to life inside the wall, being thrown into the wilderness beyond it was the ultimate horror.
"H-have you noticed the sunset looks wrong?" Someone extended a trembling hand, pointing at the sky.
The sunset looked strange—a gloomy smear of dark red hanging behind the forsaken village, like a pool of blackened blood.
There was a reason people used sunsets to symbolize the end of life. Under normal circumstances, a sunset faded quickly—within fifteen minutes the sky would visibly change. Yet they'd been watching this same sunset for over an hour.
For that entire hour, the sunset hadn't changed at all. Not in the slightest.
Because the mission cameras had been running automatically, someone pulled up the earlier footage.
They watched it at 4x speed. Sure enough, the sunset hadn't moved at all from beginning to end—the clouds hadn't shifted a single centimeter.
It looked less like a real sunset and more like a projected computer wallpaper.
In the wilderness, magnetic fields could affect clocks and compasses—but they couldn't cause the clouds and sky itself to freeze in place.
And this wasn't a hallucination caused by Psychic Contamination. Everyone could see it. All dozen or so Cleaners on the scene had pulled up their recordings to compare—footage captured simultaneously by different people showed the exact same thing.
With that much video evidence, it was proven: this place was genuinely strange. Where had they ended up?
"We're lost," the lead Garrison soldier said.
Jin Tao bellowed: "What kind of pathfinding is this? Did you do this on purpose?"
Zhu Ning had spoken with Jin Tao before and knew he harbored hostility toward the Garrison Troops—hostility he'd been suppressing. Now it finally erupted.
The lead Garrison soldier was equally fed up with the Cleaners. "Are you insane? You want to go home—you think I don't?"
Snap—
Jin Tao suddenly raised his gun, leveling it at the Garrison soldier's head. "Did you do this on purpose?"
"What do you mean on purpose?" The Garrison soldier raised his weapon in turn. Their equipment was heavy-duty; the Cleaners only carried light gear.
Jiang Ping beside Zhu Ning moved too. Once someone drew a weapon, it was impossible to stop—they all raised their guns simultaneously, pointing them at each other.
The Cleaners had the numbers, but the Garrison Troops clearly had more wilderness combat experience. Two in front, one behind—a flanking formation. If it came to a fight, the outcome was genuinely hard to predict.
Jiang Ping: "What are you all going crazy for?"
"You're the ones who've gone crazy!" Jin Tao roared. "Did you bring us out here to feed us to the Contaminants?"
With Jin Tao saying that, some of the Cleaners who hadn't known the truth and hadn't wanted to take sides suddenly panicked.
Feed them to the Contaminants? They were just food?
"What?" Some couldn't believe it. "Jin Tao, spell it out—what do you mean, feed us to the Contaminants?"
Jin Tao: "That's how the others died before. Entire teams wiped out. Where do you think that zero-or-hundred-percent mortality rate comes from?"
Jiang Ping gave a cold laugh. "Do you have persecution complex?"
Compared to Jin Tao's unraveling, Jiang Ping was utterly composed—but that dark, detached composure, as if none of this concerned him, even faintly amused, made him seem all the more unsettling.
"Answer me!" Jin Tao was losing control of himself. "Is it true or not?"
The standoff held. Only Zhu Ning's side hadn't drawn weapons—Li Nianchuan, Xu Meng, and Zhu Ning, their squad seemingly standing apart from the whole thing.
Li Nianchuan had been wondering whether to draw his gun too, but since Zhu Ning and Xu Meng hadn't moved, he quietly asked Zhu Ning: "What do we do now?"
Zhu Ning wasn't afraid of them actually opening fire. She had her metal manipulation ability and could control the situation in an instant. The only complication was potentially exposing herself to the Sanitation Center.
Xu Meng was probably thinking the same thing. They both had things they were hiding from the Sanitation Center, and with the cameras running, neither wanted to reveal the full extent of their abilities.
Zhu Ning could manage the situation—but she still had to face the real problem. They were genuinely lost.
But how had it happened?
There was only one road through the village. No matter which way they walked, they couldn't reach the end, and the old locust tree from when they'd arrived was nowhere to be found.
Zhu Ning mentally retraced the sequence of houses. Her mind worked like a computer—even without a network connection, it had basic functions, including perfect recall.
The order had changed.
The houses were in a different sequence now. The current order was completely different from what she'd seen on the way in.
It was as if the houses weren't fixed structures but a deck of cards, shuffled anew with every pass.
Zhu Ning looked back at the house with the statue. The statue was still watching her. It was the joker card.
Frozen time. A village with no exit. A path that could never be found. This feeling was too familiar—had this place formed an enclosed Contamination Zone?
On the main road of the forsaken village stood twenty-one people: eighteen Cleaners and three Garrison soldiers. Fifteen of the Cleaners had their guns trained on the nearest Garrison soldiers; the Garrison's three weapons were aimed at the Cleaners in the middle.
The argument raged on. A gunfight seemed ready to ignite at any moment.
Suddenly, Zhu Ning frowned and cut through the atmosphere of imminent slaughter. "Hey!"
No one paid her any attention. They all had guns in their hands and didn't dare take their eyes off their targets.
"Everyone," Zhu Ning's voice dropped low, as if afraid of disturbing something. "Go ahead and shoot if you want."
She had no intention of playing peacemaker. Hostility was hard to defuse, and mishandling it could easily backfire—she'd end up with both sides turning on her.
"But before you start killing each other," Zhu Ning said, "shouldn't you take a look around first?"
Jin Tao had been about to glance at Zhu Ning out of the corner of his eye, but what he caught instead was her sudden alertness. Zhu Ning's ability was well-established—she hadn't been this tense even when they'd encountered the yellow flower. That sudden tension was contagious.
What was it? What had Zhu Ning noticed?
Jin Tao didn't dare turn his head—he could only look sideways at the dark, desolate houses. One glance was all it took. He couldn't look away.
Snap—
A light suddenly came on in one of the houses, like a match thrown into dry kindling. Then, one by one, lights flickered on down the row of abandoned buildings.
Light filled the houses that had been empty and dark. Dim light—not the bright white of modern bulbs, but the warm, murky glow of old incandescent lamps.
Not just light. There were also… people.
Every house in the village was like a display case. Now there were figures standing at the windows.
In the window closest to Jin Tao stood an old woman in a red sweater, pressed right up against the glass, her nose nearly touching it.
Her window had a paper-cut magpie decoration, worn and faded with age. The light shining through it carved her face into strange, fragmented pieces.
The villagers stood silently inside their homes, staring out with blank expressions—as if they'd been there for a very long time, existing long before these outsiders had ever arrived.
They had watched the Cleaners pass through the village, seen these strangers go to the hills behind to collect Contamination Spores, and now watched them get lost.
What was unsettling was the villagers' gaze. Their eyes held no warmth at all. The way they looked at the Cleaners was the way you looked at livestock.
In that moment, Jin Tao had a very strange feeling. The villagers were… watching them.
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