Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 162: Finally Waited for You~

Just as Chen Ye was debating whether to abandon his hideout, two more bipedal goats staggered out of the treeline.

They hobbled over to the bloody patch of snow where Boss Wang had been devoured and spent a long time aggressively sniffing the ground. Eventually, they turned their rectangular pupils toward the dense bank of white fog concealing the truck. They tilted their heads, staring at the unnatural weather phenomenon with unsettling, almost human-like curiosity.

They stood there, completely motionless, for nearly half an hour. Just as Chen Ye’s finger hovered over the ignition button, convinced he had been discovered, the goats finally lost interest and slowly hobbled away into the dark.

Chen Ye felt a cold knot tighten in his gut.

The number one rule of wilderness survival in the apocalypse—a rule paid for in oceans of human blood—was to avoid combat with Anomalies at all costs. No matter how powerful a Cultivator you were, and no matter how weak the Anomaly appeared, you could never predict what reality-breaking abilities it possessed.

Worse, engaging a single monster was practically guaranteed to draw the attention of a horde. Even apex Transcendents would eventually be ground into meat paste by an endless wave of attrition.

His original plan to sit tight and wait for Chu Che was officially dead. The area was compromised; the local Anomalies had already noticed the suspicious fog bank.

Chen Ye engaged the Doomsday Pickup’s silent electric mode. To avoid drawing any visual aggro, he left the headlights completely off.

Before rolling out, Chen Ye manipulated a tendril of his smoke to form a solid, grasping hand. He reached out and snatched the glowing Marking stone he had tossed onto the asphalt earlier. He couldn’t risk Chu Che following the trail and driving straight into a herd of bipedal, man-eating goats.

As he pulled back onto the highway, Chen Ye realized the vision in his mutated left eye—the Abyssal Blood Eye—was exceptionally sharp in the dark. While it wasn’t daylight clarity, the faint crimson filter allowed him to navigate the ruined roads without headlights. His normal right eye, however, was completely useless, blinded by the pitch-black night.

He also noticed that the relentless blizzard, which had battered them constantly since the siege at the primary school began, had finally ceased entirely. The snowpack on the highway was visibly thinning out.

Retracting the smoke-plow from the front bumper, Chen Ye let the truck roll smoothly over the asphalt, the only sound the quiet crunch of the studded tires rolling over loose gravel.

He drove in tense silence for roughly 10 miles.

“Chen Ye!”

A weak, exhausted voice suddenly called out from directly behind the truck.

It sounded eerily familiar. The cadence was exactly like Chu Che’s, but the pitch sounded faintly like Sun Qianqian.

Chen Ye’s heart leaped into his throat. Holy shit! Finally! Good thing I—

He started to whip his head around to look out the rear window. But before his neck could even turn, a violent, icy shock ripped down his spine. Through the rearview mirror, his Abyssal Blood Eye caught the reflection of his own hand on the steering wheel.

Every single hair on the back of his hand was standing straight up.

Chen Ye froze. He slowly, rigidly forced his neck back to center, locking his eyes dead ahead.

He didn’t touch the brakes. The Doomsday Pickup continued rolling forward at a steady 30 miles per hour.

“Chen Ye, wait for me! I didn’t make it into the cars!” the voice cried out, the sound of desperate footsteps crunching on the thin snow directly behind the tailgate.

“Chen Ye, I’m so tired… I finally found you!”

“Stop the truck, damn it! Let me in!”

The voice, perfectly mimicking an amalgamation of his surviving teammates, jogged effortlessly behind the speeding vehicle.

Chen Ye stared blankly ahead, acting as if he had suddenly gone deaf. He didn’t speed up. He didn’t slow down. He just drove.

“Chen Ye…” the voice dropped its desperate facade, taking on a venomous, echoing quality. “You heartless bastard… are you really going to leave me out here to die?”

Chen Ye didn’t blink.

“Chen Ye… did you forget everything we went through? Everything we survived?!”

“Chen Ye… please… save me!”

“It’s so cold out here… I don’t want to be alone!”

“Just open the door! I’ll do anything you want!”

A wave of pure, visceral disgust and terror washed over Chen Ye. His foot twitched over the accelerator, desperately wanting to floor it and leave the nightmare behind, but he forced himself to hold the speed steady.

As the miles rolled by, the voice clinging to his bumper cycled through a maddening loop of desperate begging, bitter resentment, and vitriolic curses.

Chen Ye had a terrifying premonition: the absolute second he tapped the brakes, whatever was running behind his truck would instantly materialize in the passenger seat.

Realizing that its psychological warfare was completely ineffective against the stone-faced driver, the voice gradually faded into the howling wind.

Waaah… waaah…

A new sound pierced the night—the loud, unconsolable sobbing of a young child.

The crimson pupil of Chen Ye’s left eye instantly contracted to the size of a pinprick. Standing perfectly still by the side of the desolate highway ahead was a little girl, no older than 5.

She was dressed in filthy, tattered rags. She stood beneath the skeletal branches of a dead tree, rubbing her eyes and crying loudly. As the Doomsday Pickup slowly approached, she looked up, her large, bright eyes locking directly onto Chen Ye through the windshield.

“Waaah… Uncle, I’m lost…”

“Uncle… I can’t find my mommy… can you help me find her?”

Fat, heavy tears rolled down the child’s pale cheeks, catching the red light of the blood moon and glowing like liquid rubies.

Even a hardened, ruthless bastard like Chen Ye felt a momentary, involuntary pang of sympathy.

He didn’t touch the brakes. He didn’t swerve. As the truck rolled past the crying child, Chen Ye stared straight ahead, completely ignoring her.

It was the middle of the apocalyptic night. It was sub-zero. A little girl standing alone under a dead tree on a deserted highway? Only a suicidal idiot would pull over.

Having spent so much time traveling in the safety of Chu Che’s convoy, Chen Ye had almost forgotten how utterly terrifying the open wasteland truly was.

The Anomalies birthed by the apocalypse defied all logic and definition.

Some were blunt instruments of slaughter, like the Crawlers or the Eight-Limbed Human Face. But others operated on bizarre, hyper-specific sets of rules. They were conceptual traps.

Like the Weeping Paper Effigy he had encountered back in Apricot Blossom Town. When the effigy had grabbed him, it hadn’t instantly killed him; it had presented a choice. Chen Ye had offered it a piece of candy, satisfying the entity’s specific condition and allowing him to escape.

These rule-based Anomalies were far rarer than the feral beasts, but they were infinitely more dangerous. Human civilization had collapsed far too quickly for anyone to properly catalog or study the supernatural laws governing these entities.

The things stalking the highway tonight were clearly trying to bait Chen Ye into opening the truck door. The fact that they hadn’t simply ripped the roof off and eaten him meant they couldn’t—not until he triggered their specific attack condition by acknowledging them.

Chen Ye had no idea what the exact trigger was, but he wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

He locked his arms, keeping the steering wheel dead straight.

“Hey, handsome… could you do a girl a favor and pull over?”

A few miles later, a woman wearing a skin-tight cocktail dress and stilettos stood shivering by the guardrail. Under the crimson moonlight, her curves were impossibly, artificially perfect, resembling a flawless AI-generated model.

If you ignored the freezing wasteland and the apocalyptic context, she was the kind of woman who could crash a live-streaming server in minutes.

As the Doomsday Pickup rolled past her, Chen Ye felt a heavy, freezing weight slam against the passenger side door. He heard the metallic clack of the door handle being violently yanked upward.

He didn’t look. He didn’t flinch.

Whatever it was, it eventually let go, unable to force its way inside.

Cold sweat poured down Chen Ye’s face, soaking his collar.

For the rest of the night, Chen Ye ran a terrifying gauntlet. He drove past sobbing grandmothers, screaming children, seductive women, and even the mutilated visages of people he used to know. He saw twisted, frenzied eyes glaring at him from the dark woods.

He drove with his teeth ground together, the interior of the cab completely choked with the thick smoke of a dozen chain-smoked cigarettes.

He didn’t stop once. He didn’t answer a single plea.

Finally, just as the digital clock on his dashboard ticked over to 5:40 AM, he found a relatively intact, elevated overpass.

He pulled the truck under the concrete bridge, killed the engine, and exhaled a massive, rolling cloud of smoke, instantly deploying a hundred-yard perimeter of Absolute Aura Shielding.

Only then did Chen Ye collapse against the steering wheel, letting out a ragged, exhausted breath.

The eastern horizon was beginning to turn a bruised, hazy purple. Dawn was breaking.

Chu Che had mentioned that some Anomalies were adapting to the daylight, but the sun still offered a profound, psychological layer of security.

Chen Ye wiped his face, suddenly realizing he was sweating profusely. He shrugged off his heavy winter down jacket and tossed it into the backseat.

Wait.

He frowned. It wasn’t just the adrenaline. The ambient temperature in the cab had drastically spiked. It wasn’t freezing anymore.

Chen Ye looked out through the windshield. His Absolute Aura Shielding blocked the outside world from looking in, but it didn’t impede his own vision.

The snow was completely gone. Not just thinned out—it had vanished entirely from the asphalt and the surrounding dead trees.

And as the pale morning light began to bleed across the wasteland, Chen Ye realized the air outside wasn’t clear.

A thick, unnatural, and suffocating fog was slowly rising from the ground, swallowing the ruined world.