Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 182: Upgrade Complete

“Move out! Move out! Move out!”

Xue Nan’s rough voice blared through Uncle Abao’s battered megaphone as he paced around the perimeter of the convoy. In the past, the little old man had patiently coaxed everyone along to ensure nobody was left behind. Now, the job fell to Xue Nan.

Perhaps it was his hideously disfigured, stitched-together face, but the survivors harbored a deep-seated, primal fear of him. When Manager Xue held that megaphone, nobody dared crack a joke or offer a disrespectful grin.

“Remember the absolute iron rule of this convoy,” Xue Nan barked. “Never, ever fall behind!”

“Old Li, headcount?”

“Thirty-four total. All present!” The balding Old Li shouted back. A few desperate strands of hair clung to his shining scalp, a final, futile grasp at pre-apocalypse dignity.

“Good. Move out!”

The thirty-minute rest had evaporated in a flash.

Chen Ye slid back into the driver’s seat of the Doomsday Pickup. The cabin was spotless. Xue Nan was remarkably meticulous; his newfound authority as convoy manager hadn’t made him lazy or arrogant. If anything, that brutal, near-fatal slash from Chen Ye’s blade had properly kickstarted Xue Nan’s third lease on life.

Chen Ye had to admit, the Doomsday Pickup was an engineering marvel. Through all the hell they’d driven through, it hadn’t broken down once. Even after violently crashing into a concrete planter and flipping over, a quick breather was all it needed to get back on the road.

He glanced at the dashboard. The scavenged cassette player from the wrecked minivan was crude, lacking any proper electronic integration, but a heavy application of duct tape held it firmly to the console. It was a perfectly ugly, post-apocalyptic aesthetic.

Chen Ye felt a rare surge of genuine satisfaction. He pulled out a worn cassette tape—a cheap, forgotten relic from the old world—and slotted it in. In this rotting wasteland, functional entertainment was a luxury that could easily be bartered for a mountain of supplies.

A muted, nostalgic melody crackled through the cabin. It was an obscure, mediocre track by a forgotten singer, but right now, it sounded like a choir of angels. For the first time since the world ended, Chen Ye had music.

He was just starting to tap his finger against the steering wheel when—

BANG!

A violent explosion shook the cabin. The Doomsday Pickup violently swerved, the chassis tilting sharply as shredded rubber slapped against asphalt. Chen Ye slammed the brakes.

“Bzzzt… Mr. Chen, what happened?” Xue Nan’s tense voice crackled over the radio.

Up ahead, the school bus and the heavily modified SUV screeched to a halt.

Chen Ye leaned out the window, peering through the dense, swirling fog. The rear left side of the truck was sagging heavily. “Blowout,” he replied, his tone flat.

He wasn’t entirely surprised. The studded snow tires were currently stowed in the truck bed, meaning he had been running on the standard all-terrain treads. Those tires had endured a brutal, high-intensity beating ever since the desert. For them to last this long was already giving him plenty of face.

Replacing it was trivial. The fog-choked streets were a graveyard of abandoned vehicles. Chen Ye hopped out, marched over to a stranded SUV, and let black smoke pour from his hands, solidifying into a heavy steel lug wrench and jack. In minutes, he had stripped all four tires from the wreck.

He swapped out his three remaining all-terrain tires, replacing the entire set with the SUV’s highway treads—a far better fit for the ruined urban asphalt. He tossed his blown and battered all-terrain tires into the truck bed. He could have the system repair them later. Outside the city limits, finding spare rubber would be a nightmare.

A few survivors scrambled out to assist, and the entire pit stop was over in under five minutes.

He didn’t need to worry about the convoy’s other vehicles. The survivors had long since learned to perform daily tire checks. Neither Captain Chu Che nor the heavy hitters needed to micromanage basic maintenance.

Inside the now-spacious school bus, Iron Lion lay sprawled across a custom-reinforced bed in the back, his massive chest heaving with deep, rumbling snores. Nearby sat Mad Lion, a horrifying sight with literally half of his head blown away. Yet, where his arm had been severed, a thick, pulsating nub of raw meat had already forced its way out of the stump. At this rate, a fresh limb would regenerate in no time.

Sleep was the ultimate catalyst for the Titan Sequence. If one looked closely at Iron Lion’s wounds, they would see thousands of tiny, wet flesh-buds writhing and knitting together like a nest of pink worms.

The regenerative capability of the Titan Sequence was genuinely terrifying. Chu Che had once mentioned that at the highest stages, a Titan Sequence user could regenerate their entire body from a single scrap of muscle tissue. It sounded like a myth, but it was enough to make Chen Ye feel a pang of envy.

“Bzzzt… Captain Chu,” Chen Ye keyed his radio. “How far out are Sun Qianqian and Ding Dong?”

Chu Che’s weary voice replied almost instantly. “Not far. Roughly thirty kilometers. If the road is clear, we’ll merge with them in about two hours.”

Thirty kilometers? Two hours?

In the old world, a seasoned trucker would have laughed in their faces for driving fifteen kilometers an hour. But in the apocalypse, crossing thirty kilometers of urban ruins in under five hours was considered a blazing success.

Chen Ye opened his system interface and glanced at the Heavy Machete’s upgrade countdown.

Only single-digit hours left.

Anticipation thrummed in his veins. What did a top-2000 Artifact even look like? Even ranking exactly at number two thousand meant it was an item of catastrophic rarity and power. Once the Heavy Machete finished its evolution, it would instantly leapfrog to become the most lethal weapon in his arsenal.

Except, perhaps, for the Blood Eye.

The system estimated the Blood Eye’s potential ranking to be within the top one thousand, but Chen Ye hadn’t pumped enough supernatural energy into it yet to fully nurture it into an Artifact. Its current abilities were limited to Abyss Manipulation and Scarlet Gaze, which he had tested on the small raider team earlier in Fog City.

Abyss Manipulation was particularly insidious. It crushed a target’s psyche, Anomaly-like in its creeping, undetectable dread. Even Chen Ye knew he’d struggle to defend against an attack like that. Still, it was a far cry from the overwhelming, god-like suppression the Abyssal Blood Pupil had displayed against the Death God. That gap, however, could be closed with time and Slaughter Points.

The two-hour driving estimate proved to be a bitter joke.

They drove until the heavy gray fog turned pitch-black with nightfall, and they still hadn’t caught a glimpse of the pink-haired girl. The ruins were a deadly labyrinth. Captain Chu Che forced the convoy to double back at least five times on the same stretch of road. More than once, right as they signaled to turn into an intersection, Chu Che’s sharp command over the radio would force them to throw it in reverse. At one point, a dead end nearly pushed the convoy straight onto the lethal Fog River Bridge.

Visibility was virtually nonexistent, and their speed crawled to an agonizing halt.

During one particularly tense detour, Chen Ye triggered Absolute Aura Concealment to bypass a dense cluster of Anomalies prowling the streets. The sudden activation sent the survivors into a blind panic. Without warning, the world was stripped of all color and sound. They were plunged into a terrifying void, unable to even hear the beating of their own hearts.

Though the sensory blackout only lasted a brief moment, it cemented the survivors’ primal, shuddering terror of Chen Ye.

Navigating a ruined metropolis was infinitely worse than trekking through the wilderness. The collapsed infrastructure was bad enough, but the sheer density of Anomalies swarming the urban decay was staggering.

Chu Che’s nerves were visibly fraying. Little Fu, acting as the captain’s driver for the first time, was gripping the steering wheel so hard his sweaty palms were likely leaving imprints on the leather.

Finally, the oppressive gloom thickened into absolute night.

“We have no choice. There are simply too many Anomalies in Fog City,” Chu Che’s exhausted voice crackled over the radio. “We stop here for the day. Manager Xue, establish the camp.”

Chen Ye cut the engine and pulled up the system interface. He stared at the glowing green numbers of the Heavy Machete’s countdown.

“00:00:02”

“00:00:01”

“00:00:00”

[Upgrade Complete!]