Kingdom of Corrosion
Chapter 962 - 416 Doctor

Lin Meng took out a folding shovel and stood guard, while Lin Wu and Maya, lightly equipped, returned to the handcart’s location along their original route. They unlocked the handcart and together lifted it off the rails.

The handcart wasn’t very heavy, but they were navigating a bumpy, overgrown path which made it somewhat difficult. To Lin Ma’s surprise, the station’s broadcast intermittently emitted some static noise, which effectively kept the zombies anchored around the station.

With Lin Meng on the other side, sitting on several backpacks, he pressed his shoulder-mounted radio and reported through the headset, "Someone in the second house is watching us."

Maya warned, "Beware of arrows."

Unexpectedly, the door of the second house opened, and a woman in red clothes walked out, waving at Lin Meng and heading straight towards him. Lin Meng tensed up, "Should I strike first?"

Maya, out of reach, replied, "Use your judgment. Lin Wu, put it down and catch your breath."

The two gently placed the handcart down. Maya looked at her palms, already bruised red.

Lin Wu spoke via the communicator, "Logically, her choice to appear when she’s farthest from you and me does not signal friendliness. I think she will try to talk to you, but I suggest killing her before she speaks. If her nature remains unknown, you won’t feel guilty after killing her."

There is this video of a man in sunglasses on the subway, staring uncomfortably at a woman’s cleavage until she slapped him. Dazed, he grabbed his white cane and carefully stood up, seemingly scared to stay. This made the woman incredibly guilty.

Lin Wu’s theory: After she slaps him, she just walks away, regardless of whether his actions were justified. Now, it doesn’t matter if she’s here to kiss you or kill you, just take her down first.

It’s not that Lin Wu has changed; it’s just that in an apocalyptic world, human hearts are scarier than zombies. When good faces evil, the good are bound to be hurt first, so it’s better to be the bad guy if it means surviving.

Maya didn’t argue with Lin Wu’s logic. She and Nightmare could maintain a tacit understanding of not shooting unless shot at. However, she couldn’t expect her team to have the same restraint in interactions with strangers, where a face-to-face encounter meant life or death.

Watching the woman in red approaching Lin Meng, Lin Ma grew nervous, but Lin Meng hesitated to shoot. The woman in red kept walking until she was 5 meters away and started speaking, but Lin Meng still didn’t shoot. Fortunately, there was no mishap, and he engaged in a normal conversation with her.

The woman in red, named Xiao Hong, was 35 years old. She had buried her sick husband the day before yesterday and followed a group of refugees heading to the Western Peninsula. Last night, their camp was attacked by zombies, and, together, they managed to kill about a dozen of them.

Xiao Hong, a surgeon, voluntarily provided first aid to the injured. During the process, she noticed many people concealing their injuries, claiming they were unharmed despite their bloody trousers, not an isolated case. One suspected infected person was the leader of the refugee group’s wife. The leader instructed Xiao Hong to cut out the flesh around his wife’s wound and dress it, then sternly warned her to keep quiet about it, threatening her life with a packet of crackers.

Thus, at dawn, Xiao Hong quietly left the refugee group. She walked back two kilometers according to her memory, crossed a bridge, and entered a village. Why hadn’t the zombies spread to the village, and how did Xiao Hong arrive safely? Because the station broadcast sporadically blared crackling electronic sounds, similar to some rural streetlights equipped with small solar panels, allowing them to operate intermittently.

Xiao Hong initially planned to stay here temporarily. This morning, she even turned the soil in front of the house, but later, she discovered wild beasts prowling at night. Following their tracks to the edge of the hill, near a small ditch, she found four corpses. From this, she knew there were man-eating wild beasts nearby. Having eaten humans, the beasts would continue to see humans as prey. Therefore, she planned to stay another night, foraging for wild vegetables or roots during the day as food for the road.

She sought Lin Meng, hoping for assistance—at the very least, some food, or ideally, transportation to the Western Peninsula.

After listening, Maya said, "Xiao Hong, even going to the Western Peninsula doesn’t guarantee a spot on the ship."

Xiao Hong nodded, "I’ll try my luck. After all, every place needs doctors."

"That’s right, and we need a professional doctor too." Maya briefly introduced her base, "We can take you to the Western Peninsula. Before this journey, I had already planned to recruit a doctor from among the refugees." Farmers can be trained, and the poor-quality crops they grow can be consumed. People like plumbers, electricians, they can somehow manage. But not doctors; training a doctor takes a long time, and you can’t train one using patients.

Currently, there are ten people at the railway bridge, four people at the forest base, but still no professional doctor. When sick, they could only consume medicine wildly. Imagine, the only one who performed surgery was Lin Wu, so there’s a rigid demand for a doctor at the base. Even 180 days later, Xiao Wu and the others still needed a doctor. Veteran Base only had medics, no doctors.