Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 192: Lakeside Daily Life

[Upgrade Complete!]

Seeing the translucent text hover before his eyes, a faint, satisfied arc touched the corner of Chen Ye’s mouth.

He had originally planned to hunt down Chu Che and settle their accounts, but with the vehicle upgrade finally finished, the loot could wait. Chu Che wasn’t going anywhere.

Chen Ye had deliberately parked his Doomsday Pickup a good distance away from the rest of the convoy’s vehicles, ensuring a buffer of privacy. Even if someone happened to notice the sudden, impossible changes to his truck, he couldn’t care less. In a world where the apocalypse was actively rewriting the laws of reality, a magically morphing truck was at the bottom of the anomaly list. Were these survivors going to pull out their dead smartphones and expose him on the ruined internet?

The most drastic transformation to the Doomsday Pickup was the rear carriage.

Previously, Chen Ye had simply scavenged a metal box that looked roughly the right size, brutally hacked it loose with his Heavy Machete, and lashed it to the truck bed with heavy-duty ropes.

Now, the system had seamlessly fused the metal. The carriage looked like a flawless, factory-grade modification.

When Chen Ye originally secured the truck bed, he had planned to convert it into a secure sleeping quarters. The interior now stretched a spacious eight feet long. Running a hand along the reinforced, seamlessly welded panels, Chen Ye nodded in deep satisfaction. He made a mental note to install a proper mattress later. Being a Transcendent didn’t mean he enjoyed sleeping in the freezing mud during a snowstorm; suffering unnecessarily wasn’t part of his survival strategy.

During the upgrade, the system had also punched a pass-through between the rear carriage and the driver’s cabin. If an Anomaly ambushed the camp while he was resting, he could now slip straight into the driver’s seat and gun the engine without ever stepping outside.

Furthermore, the enclosed carriage offered absolute operational secrecy. Any future items he needed the system to upgrade could be processed out of sight.

The modifications were incredibly practical. One side of the carriage could swing upward on hydraulic struts, forming a heavy-duty side awning. To ensure proper ventilation without compromising armor, the system had integrated a reinforced side-window. He could open it to cycle the air, pull back the heavy curtains for natural light, or seal it completely for total blackout privacy.

He checked the fuel gauges. The capacity had expanded massively. By combining the original tank with the two extra tanks he had stripped from abandoned cars that morning, the Doomsday Pickup now held over fifty gallons of fuel. That effectively eradicated his mileage anxiety for their long-distance migrations. It also meant he wouldn’t be forced to do anything excessively cruel to other survivors just to secure a few drops of gas.

As for the exterior aesthetics… the truck still looked like a battered, post-apocalyptic war rig, but beneath the scratched paint, it was evolving into a perfect survival fortress.

In this wasteland, a vehicle was life. It didn’t just dictate your survival odds; it dictated your sanity. Even the convoy’s de facto leaders, Chu Che and Sun Qianqian, frequently slept in their vehicles to survive the bitter freezes. Sun Qianqian had supposedly scavenged her heavily modified off-road vehicle from a neighboring garage in her upscale, pre-apocalypse villa district.

As for Captain Chu Che’s ride? The man remained irritatingly tight-lipped about how he had acquired it.

Chen Ye dismissed the thought, thoroughly pleased with the system’s handiwork. He turned back toward the camp to secure his cut of the loot.

“Help! Help me!”

Shrill, desperate screams suddenly shattered the calm of the lakeside.

Chen Ye snapped his gaze toward the water. A monstrous, mutated fish had breached the shallows, its massive jaws clamping down over a woman’s torso. Only her legs protruded from its dark, cavernous maw, kicking and thrashing wildly against the churning foam.

Before Chen Ye could even adjust his footing, Iron Lion was already moving.

The massive man hit the water like a boulder. Before the beast could drag its prey into the deep, Iron Lion plunged his hands directly into the monster’s gills, roared, and bodily heaved the thrashing leviathan out of the lake and onto the muddy banks.

A dozen survivors swarmed the flailing beast, screaming as they hacked at it with a desperate assortment of scavenged weaponry—kitchen knives, sharpened steel pipes, and aluminum baseball bats. While these crude tools were utterly useless against a genuine Anomaly or a Transcendent, they were more than enough to butcher a stranded fish.

Chen Ye watched with clinical detachment. He rarely paid attention to the ordinary survivors’ arsenals, but he knew they were armed. He himself had started with nothing but a scavenged Hand Crossbow. Chu Che clearly knew about the hidden weapons too, but maintained a stance of calculated indifference.

By the time Iron Lion managed to pry the woman loose from the serrated jaws, it was too late.

She was a ruined mess, her torso nearly sheared in half by the bite. A younger girl wearing a dirty red cartoon t-shirt collapsed over the body, wailing in absolute agony.

Iron Lion stood over the bloody mud, his massive shoulders slumped in grief. “I should have been faster. A second faster, and she’d still be breathing.”

Chen Ye walked up and clapped a hand on the giant’s shoulder, his voice completely devoid of warmth. “This wasn’t a matter of speed. You couldn’t have saved her.”

It was a cold, brutal interlude. A stark reminder that despite the picturesque scenery of the lake, they were still standing in the mouth of the apocalypse.

Death was simply a logistical fact. Although the camp was momentarily shaken, the atmosphere normalized within minutes. Only the dead woman’s friend remained weeping by the water.

Under Xue Nan’s orders, a few survivors quickly dug a pit by the lake. They straightened the woman’s ruined clothes as best they could, lowered her in, and shoveled the dirt back over her.

In less than an hour, every trace of the woman’s existence had been erased from the world, replaced by nothing but an unmarked mound of wet earth.

Despite the fatal ambush, Chu Che did not order a relocation.

Chen Ye watched as the Captain calmly walked to the center of the camp and drove a metallic rod into the soil. A translucent, inverted dome of light rippled outward, locking into place over the convoy.

This would be their staging ground for the next three days. No one voiced a single complaint.

Chu Che had already swept the area. Aside from the fish’s absurd gigantism, he hadn’t detected a trace of a true Anomaly’s aura in the creature or the lake. Abandoning a secure fresh-water source over a mundane predator attack was a fool’s errand. The survivors simply needed to stay away from the water’s edge.

Xue Nan raised a megaphone, strictly ordering everyone to remain within the light curtain’s perimeter. Meanwhile, Xiao Wang, the convoy assistant, barked orders to finish pitching the tents and start boiling water for dinner.

As for the monster on the shore…

Dozens of survivors were currently staring at the colossal fish, openly drooling. Since the world ended, most of them hadn’t even smelled fresh fish, let alone tasted it.

After getting the green light from Xue Nan, several men gleefully dragged the carcass away to be gutted and scaled. Tonight, the camp ate meat. The grim shadow of the woman’s death was quickly overpowered by the primal, euphoric smiles of starving people anticipating a feast.

By the central bonfire, the Transcendents’ dinner was significantly more luxurious.

They were served steaming bowls of white rice, individual cans of meat and fruit, thick slices of cured sausage, and a massive, boiling iron pot filled to the brim with fish stew.

Neither Chen Ye nor Chu Che touched the fish.

Chen Ye stared at the bubbling broth, his mind running a cold calculus. The fish was unnaturally massive. There was a high probability its flesh was contaminated or toxic. He would wait to see if the ordinary survivors started coughing up blood first. If they didn’t die, he would eat.

Glancing across the fire, he noted that Chu Che hadn’t picked up his chopsticks either. The Captain, it seemed, shared the exact same sociopathic patience. He wouldn’t stop the starving camp from gorging themselves, but he certainly wasn’t going to be the guinea pig.

Sun Qianqian, the pink-haired girl, looked slightly green. The memory of the woman being bitten in half had completely killed her appetite.

Iron Lion and Ding Dong, however, showed no such restraint.

The two of them utterly decimated the massive pot. Despite missing her right arm, Ding Dong wielded her chopsticks with terrifying, blinding speed. The aloof, quiet woman was an absolute apex predator when it came to securing calories.

Iron Lion wasn’t eating; he was shoveling. He poured entire bowls of the fish stew directly down his throat, completely indifferent to the sharp bones and spines. In the pre-apocalypse era, the man could have made an absolute fortune doing competitive eating broadcasts.

Chen Ye considered himself a fast eater, but before he had even finished half a bowl of rice, Iron Lion had cleared out six. Luckily, Chen Ye was already used to the giant’s monstrous metabolism.

Once the Transcendents were fully satiated, Chu Che unexpectedly pulled out a tin of his private tea leaves to share. The rich, earthy aroma drifted over the camp, drawing greedy sniffs from the surrounding survivors.

But Chen Ye knew the tea was just a prelude. The real business of the night was about to begin.

Ding Dong had successfully driven the box truck back to camp. Chu Che had explicitly ordered her to recover it, which meant the Captain had known its value from the start.

There should be a massive haul of Supplies waiting inside. According to the convoy’s rigid hierarchy, even though Ding Dong had done the heavy lifting, Chen Ye and the other Transcendents were entitled to a cut of the spoils.

And more importantly—guns.