Apocalypse: I Can Upgrade Everything

Chapter 188: About to Leave Fog City

Before dawn even threatened to break through the gloom, the convoy was already stirring.

Chen Ye stood by the window of his private dining room, staring out into the oppressive gray void. The thick, suffocating fog swallowed all color and light. Spending too much time in an environment like this would slowly rot a person’s mind, dragging them down into a deep, inescapable depression.

Once they located Sun Qianqian and Ding Dong, Chu Che would immediately order the convoy out of Fog City.

First the scorching desert, then the apocalyptic blizzard, and now the endless, Anomaly-infested fog. The world had mutated so violently that Chen Ye barely recognized it. Sometimes, looking out at the wasteland, it didn’t even feel like Earth anymore.

There was a theory circulating among the survivors that the Anomaly Doomsday was the direct result of their reality violently merging with other dimensional planes. Looking back at the sheer, physics-defying insanity they had survived, Chen Ye was starting to believe it.

“Yawn.”

He stretched, his joints popping loudly. The very first thing he did upon waking was mentally scan his own biology.

He focused inward for several minutes, searching for any sudden spike in power or physical mutation. He found nothing. His body felt exactly the same as it had yesterday.

The sensation was identical to when he had first injected the Sequence Serum. The system’s biological enhancements were rarely instantaneous; the Potion Capsule likely needed time to digest and fully integrate with his cellular structure before the raw Potential could be unlocked.

Chen Ye wasn’t worried. Not once had a system-issued item failed to deliver on its promise.

Hearing the muffled clatter of pots and pans echoing from the main hall, Chen Ye pushed open his door.

No one was sleeping in.

In the old world, the right to sleep in on a day off was a universal luxury. In the apocalypse, unless you were a Sequence Beyonder, sleeping past dawn was a fantasy.

Before the convoy could move an inch, every single vehicle required a meticulous mechanical inspection and a thorough cleaning. Even Chen Ye’s battered Doomsday Pickup—a rusted, dented monstrosity without a single square inch of intact factory paint—was currently being scrubbed spotless by a work detail assigned by Manager Xue Nan.

Then there was breakfast. Even if the morning ration was nothing more than half a slice of moldy, expired bread, the logistics of distributing it required manpower.

Take the newly promoted cook, Zhang Yanping, for instance. She currently had three ordinary survivors acting as her personal assistants, chopping, boiling, and cleaning at her command.

Before the world ended, those three assistants might have been corporate executives or elite software engineers. Now, their resumes meant absolutely nothing. They shared a single, universal identity: expendable survivors.

Captain Chu Che had spent weeks trying to enforce a rigid sense of egalitarian fairness across the convoy, but human nature always found a way. A strict, unspoken class hierarchy was already cementing itself.

At the absolute peak of the pyramid sat Chen Ye, Chu Che, and the other Sequence Beyonders.

The second tier belonged to the administrators—people like Xue Nan and Little Fu—who held direct authority over the masses.

The third tier was occupied by those who held personal favor with the Beyonders. People like Little Yu, Old Wang, and now the cook, Zhang Yanping. Xu Lina, riding high on the ambiguous, terrifying rumors surrounding her relationship with Chen Ye, also firmly belonged to this protected class.

At the very bottom, forming the crushed foundation of the pyramid, were the ordinary survivors. Even Zhou Xiaoxiao, who had once been a brilliant, rising star in the old world, was now relegated to this lowest caste.

Chen Ye and the other Beyonders didn’t actively enforce this hierarchy, nor did they particularly care about it. It was simply the natural evolution of desperate people flocking to power.

Chu Che was well aware of the rotting social dynamics, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. Survival was a dictatorship, not a democracy.

As Chen Ye stepped out of his room, every survivor in the main hall who caught sight of him instantly flinched. Shoulders hiked up to ears, eyes snapped to the floor, and people practically tripped over themselves to pretend he didn’t exist.

Because of the abysmal visibility in the fog, Chen Ye rarely bothered to wear his sunglasses anymore.

His left Blood Eye was out in the open. The survivors knew exactly what it was—a supernatural organ ripped straight from the corpse of a terrifying Anomaly. The fact that Chen Ye had willingly grafted such a horrific, unholy thing into his own skull cemented his reputation as an absolute lunatic.

And now, the lunatic had gone and gouged out his normal eye.

Whatever rugged, pre-apocalypse handsomeness Chen Ye once possessed was completely gone, replaced by a visage of pure nightmare. He had already torn off Doctor Luo’s bloody gauze patch, leaving his right eye socket as nothing more than a raw, weeping, empty hole.

Combined with the cold, crimson glare of the Blood Eye, looking at Chen Ye was enough to induce a panic attack.

“Yawn… Chen Ye, I swear to God,” Captain Chu Che’s voice drifted over from the adjacent room. “You had a perfectly fine human body, but you just couldn’t resist turning yourself into a monster! Look at them. Every single person out there knows you’re a complete psychopath.”

Chu Che stepped out into the hall, looking surprisingly rested. He studied Chen Ye’s mutilated face and shook his head in morbid admiration. “Only you could pull off something this insane and act like it’s a normal Tuesday.”

He sighed. “It’s genuinely terrifying to look at. Do us all a favor and put the sunglasses back on.”

Chen Ye turned his head, his Blood Eye narrowing as it locked onto the captain. “Chu Che. Are you going to keep making small talk, or are we going to discuss the real issue?”

Chu Che’s easy smile vanished. He knew exactly what Chen Ye was implying.

When they had slaughtered that splinter raider group, they had confiscated a massive stockpile of firearms. More importantly, Chu Che had sensed the distinct, supernatural resonance of an Artifact hidden among the loot.

Chu Che held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Let’s wait until we reunite with Qianqian and Ding Dong. Once the core team is back together, we’ll divide the spoils.”

Chen Ye didn’t entirely understand why Chu Che wanted to delay the split, but he trusted the captain’s tactical instincts enough to let it slide. He gave a sharp nod.

“Are the women close?” Chen Ye asked.

“Not far. Once we secure them and scavenge a few more Supplies, we are leaving Fog City immediately. This entire place feels like a graveyard.”

Scavenging Supplies was a necessity. Chen Ye’s own reserves were running dangerously low, and the massive stockpile of gasoline they had lost during the chaos still burned him up inside.

As for Iron Lion, the giant was still unconscious, but the terrifying speed of his cellular regeneration suggested he’d be on his feet soon.

With a few hours to kill before breakfast was ready, Chen Ye decided it was time to put his remaining ten thousand Slaughter Points to work.

His priority was maximizing the Doomsday Pickup’s cargo capacity. Leaving the rear bed exposed was a massive tactical error, and the sheer volume of wasted space was practically criminal.

Chu Che stood at the front doors of the restaurant, staring out into the fog.

The visibility was even worse than yesterday. As a Pathfinder Sequence, his supernatural intuition was screaming at him. The mist thralls were terrifying, unkillable rule-based Anomalies, but Chu Che’s gut told him they were the absolute bottom feeders of Fog City’s food chain.

There were far worse things lurking in the gray. Like the colossal, city-level serpent he had sensed in the Fog River. It was still out there, waiting.

Suddenly, the dense fog directly in front of the restaurant violently churned.

A massive, rusted steel box crashed through the mist.

Chu Che’s jaw dropped.

Chen Ye emerged from the gray, casually carrying the entire rear cargo box of a commercial box truck over his head.

“You… you are entirely out of your mind,” Chu Che muttered, staring in disbelief.

Chen Ye ignored him. When they had parked the convoy last night, he had noticed a graveyard of commercial delivery trucks abandoned along the street. He had simply walked over, selected one with an intact cargo box, drawn Hatred, and violently severed the massive steel container from the truck’s chassis in a few clean strokes.

For a Rank 2000 Artifact, slicing through industrial steel was like cutting wet paper.

Chen Ye hauled the massive box over to the Doomsday Pickup and slammed it down onto the exposed rear bed.

It was a terrible fit. The commercial box was slightly too wide and entirely mismatched with the pickup’s rugged aesthetic, but Chen Ye didn’t care. He had the system to smooth out the ugly details.

He barked an order at Xue Nan, who scrambled to find heavy-duty steel wire. Together, they lashed the massive box down to the pickup’s frame.

The addition made the Doomsday Pickup look even more like a feral, apocalyptic war machine. If society still existed, Chen Ye could have entered it into a Mad Max cosplay convention and won first prize.

Not stopping there, Chen Ye hunted down two abandoned SUVs, violently carved out their high-capacity fuel tanks, and hauled them back to his truck. He even ripped a set of heavy-duty fog lights off a wrecked semi-truck for good measure.

With all the raw materials piled around his vehicle, Chen Ye opened the system interface and finalized his upgrade schematic.

He requested the system to physically integrate and adapt the mismatched cargo box, seamlessly pipe the two auxiliary fuel tanks into his main line, and wire the heavy fog lights into his electrical grid.

The system calculated the labor and spat out a quote: 3,500 Slaughter Points.

If Chen Ye had asked the system to generate the cargo box and fuel tanks from scratch, the cost would have easily exceeded ten thousand points. By violently scavenging the raw materials himself and only paying the system for the mechanical integration, he had slashed the price by over sixty percent.

Chen Ye was extremely pleased with his own fiscal responsibility.

The system estimated the upgrade would take exactly seven hours to complete.

It wasn’t a terrible wait. Naturally, before he had started violently dismantling vehicles in the street, Chen Ye had deployed a thick smokescreen of Absolute Aura Concealment to mask his scent from any prowling Anomalies.

Once breakfast was finished, the convoy would move out!