Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 161: The Real World Without a Pathfinder

Even though a small part of him hoped the faint noise was just Chu Che tracking his Markings, Chen Ye didn’t recklessly step out of the mist.

A sudden, icy chill ran down his spine. The fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end—a primal, biological warning. His instincts screamed that things were not as optimistic as he wanted them to be.

Whenever he felt this specific, skin-crawling sensation, it almost always meant a high-tier Anomaly was prowling nearby. He had anticipated encountering monsters on the open road, but he hadn’t expected it to happen this quickly.

Chen Ye took a slow breath and exhaled a thick plume of gray smoke.

The mist rapidly coalesced beside him, forming the tall, slender, and hauntingly beautiful silhouette of his Shadow Drag clone. Even if this simulated Death God only possessed a tiny fraction of the original entity’s terrifying power, it was still a formidable deterrent against ordinary Anomalies.

His knuckles white as he gripped the hilt of his Heavy Machete, Chen Ye slowly backed up and slipped quietly into the cab of the Doomsday Pickup.

If the situation went south, he was going to floor the accelerator and abandon this location instantly. As for the shivering cultist outside gathering firewood? Chen Ye didn’t even know the man’s name. He couldn’t care less if he lived or died.

In fact, the man was out there precisely to act as expendable bait—a gecko dropping its tail to distract a predator. It was a cruel tactic, but in the wasteland, it was highly effective.

A few dozen yards away, Boss Wang was shivering violently as he snapped frozen branches off a dead bush, eager to gather enough kindling to go back and start cooking.

Before the apocalypse, Boss Wang had been a prominent, wealthy figure in his city. Everyone had kissed the ground he walked on, constantly calling him “Boss Wang” to the point where he had almost forgotten his actual given name. Back then, a violent nobody like Chen Ye wouldn’t have even been allowed past his receptionist.

Now? Because of a single, cold command from that same nobody, Boss Wang was freezing his fingers to the bone in the apocalyptic snow, acting as a personal chef just to earn the right to breathe.

Fortunately, the bizarre concoctions he had been forced to drink while in the Death God Church had slightly mutated his physiology, giving him a higher resistance to the sub-zero temperatures.

As he stacked the deadwood, Boss Wang’s mind raced. Mr. Chen has a massive pile of Supplies in that truck. I wonder what ingredients he’ll let me use tonight? He had heard the other convoy survivors talking about heavily spiced camel jerky. It sounded heavenly.

A pang of horror suddenly hit him as he remembered the escape from the school. Seven or eight living, breathing men had climbed into that truck bed with him. Now, he was the only one left.

Chen Ye was a ruthlessly cold bastard. Boss Wang had watched with his own eyes as a man slipped from the tailgate, screaming for the truck to stop. Chen Ye hadn’t even tapped the brakes, leaving the man to be instantly swallowed by the pursuing horde.

Comparing his luxurious past to this waking nightmare, an overwhelming wave of sorrow washed over Boss Wang.

Suddenly, a violent shudder ripped through his body.

It wasn’t the cold. An intense, paralyzing tremor of sheer terror erupted from the very depths of his soul. His entire body locked up. Every instinct screamed that something horrific was standing right behind him.

He slowly looked up into the pitch-black woods.

Without a second thought, Boss Wang dropped his firewood and bolted.

“Mr. Chen! Mr. Chen!” he shrieked, his face twisted in absolute terror as he sprinted madly toward the distant bank of white fog.

Inside the Doomsday Pickup, Chen Ye sat perfectly still. Through the windshield and the dense wall of his Absolute Aura Shielding, he watched the man sprinting and screaming for his life. Chen Ye’s eyes were completely dead, watching the scene unfold with the detached apathy of a man watching a nature documentary.

Boss Wang’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. The fear amplifying in his chest was primal, like a rabbit that had just caught the scent of a wolf. He didn’t dare look back. He just ran toward the fog. He didn’t know what the mist was, but he knew the ruthless man inside it was his only chance of survival.

“Mr. Chen! I beg you, save me!”

As long as Chen Ye saved him, he would owe him his life. When the apocalypse ended and society rebuilt itself, Boss Wang swore he would reward the man with millions.

“Save me—!”

Suddenly, Boss Wang’s foot caught on a frozen root. He tripped, pitching forward into the snow.

Before he could even scramble to his hands and knees, he froze.

A goat’s face was hovering mere inches from his own. He could feel the cold, wet air blowing from its nostrils onto his forehead.

Reflected in the goat’s bizarre, rectangular horizontal pupils was his own pale, terrified face.

It was utterly surreal. It felt like he had dozed off in a peaceful meadow and woken up to a farm animal grazing near his head. What was a mountain goat doing out here in the apocalyptic midnight?

Before Boss Wang’s panicked brain could process the absurdity, the goat opened its mouth.

It didn’t just bleat. The jaw unhinged, opening impossibly wide, and seamlessly enveloped Boss Wang’s entire head.

With the casual, mundane indifference of a grazing animal plucking a tuft of grass, the goat bit down.

CRUNCH.

Boss Wang’s headless body slumped into the bloody snow.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, Chen Ye witnessed the entire execution.

The Anomaly was, by all appearances, a perfectly ordinary black mountain goat. Its sleek fur gleamed under the crimson moonlight, and its stubby tail flicked casually back and forth.

But the way it moved was pure nightmare fuel.

The beast stood completely upright on its hind legs. It staggered forward with the stiff, uncoordinated, swaying gait of a toddler who had just learned to walk—or an old man seconds away from collapsing.

When the goat emerged from the tree line, warning sirens had blared in Chen Ye’s mind. In the blink of an eye, the staggering beast had closed the distance, effortlessly snapping up Boss Wang’s head.

The goat stood there, loudly chewing on the skull. Thick droplets of blood and brain matter leaked from the corners of its mouth, staining its black fur.

It swallowed loudly, then twitched its nose, sniffing the air.

Slowly, the bipedal goat turned its rectangular pupils toward the dense bank of white fog. It began to stagger forward, seemingly curious as to why a massive, unnatural cloud of smoke had materialized in the middle of the wasteland.

Chen Ye’s breath hitched.

The Absolute Aura Shielding erased all traces of his existence, but it didn’t render the truck physically intangible. If the goat bumped into the steel chassis, the illusion would be shattered.

As Captain Chu Che had warned him: every Anomaly was unique. Some, like the Eight-Limbed Human Face, possessed human-level intelligence and extreme cunning. Some could speak. Others operated on bizarre, unpredictable instincts.

Chen Ye had no idea what this goat was capable of. Sitting in the dark cab, a cold sweat broke out across his back. Even as a Sequence 2 Mist Master, he absolutely refused to engage this thing. Even if he could easily kill it for Slaughter Points, the resulting shockwaves of combat would echo through the silent night, drawing an endless tide of horrors directly to his location.

The bipedal goat hobbled closer to the edge of the mist, looking like a crippled old man. It leaned forward, pressing its wet nose against the boundary of the fog, and took a massive sniff.

Finding no scent, the beast seemed dissatisfied. Its jaw still grinding loudly, it took a step forward, plunging its short, furry legs directly into the Absolute Aura Shielding.

Crunch… squelch… crunch…

The wet, sickening sound of chewing echoed through the fog, reaching Chen Ye’s ears.

Chen Ye didn’t dare blink.

The moment the goat stepped into the mist, it was completely stripped of its hearing, smell, and spiritual perception. It wandered aimlessly, occasionally shaking its head in confusion, its large ears twitching violently as if trying to physically shake off the sensory deprivation.

It couldn’t see anything but a wall of white.

But in reality, the beast was standing less than 30 feet from the front bumper of the Doomsday Pickup.

The goat walked in crooked, erratic circles through the fog, constantly raising its snout to sniff blindly at the air.

At one horrifying moment, the staggering beast wandered so close that it was less than 3 feet from the driver’s side door. Chen Ye held his breath, silently shifted the Doomsday Pickup into neutral, and carefully, painstakingly let the truck roll backward just a few inches to avoid physical contact.

After several agonizing minutes of blind wandering, the goat Anomaly finally lost interest. It turned around and stumbled back out of the mist.

The Absolute Aura Shielding only blocked senses; it wasn’t a spatial maze, so the beast easily found its way out.

Emerging back into the clear night, the bipedal goat returned to Boss Wang’s decapitated corpse. It leaned down and slowly, methodically began to eat. It looked exactly like a regular goat lazily grazing in a pasture, except its meal was human flesh.

It took over an hour.

The goat didn’t just eat the meat. It consumed the bones. It ate the thick black robes of the Death God Church. It even licked the bloodstained snow completely clean, swallowing the frozen red slush into its stomach until there was absolutely zero trace that Boss Wang had ever existed.

Only then did the bipedal goat turn and leisurely stagger back into the dark forest.

Sitting in the truck, Chen Ye finally exhaled a long, shaky breath, his muscles aching from the prolonged tension.

So this is the reality of the wasteland, Chen Ye thought, wiping the cold sweat from his brow. This is what happens when you travel without a Pathfinder.

This is the real world without a guide.