Chapter 302 - 289: Strange
"Gu Xi?" Shen Yue suddenly moved closer to her.
Just now, he had keenly sensed an extremely dangerous aura coming from Gu Xi. Without a second thought, he instinctively felt he had to do something to break her out of it.
"Are you okay?" He looked down at her, hiding the deep worry in his eyes. He tapped her on the head and asked with feigned laziness, "What are you thinking about? You’re so lost in thought."
"Nothing. I was just thinking..." Gu Xi lowered her eyes, her lashes trembling slightly. She fiddled with a young leaf at her fingertips, her voice soft and slow. "...on the way to the A City Reservoir, aside from that major earthquake, we’ve barely encountered any obstacles..."
"Don’t you find that strange?" Gu Xi looked up and asked Shen Yue.
Shen Yue’s mind was incredibly sharp.
His expression immediately turned solemn. "Are you saying that... that person... wasn’t actually trying to stop us from coming here?"
The person he was referring to was, of course, Yun Ye.
In fact, in the eyes of the few insiders and high-ranking officials, Yun Ye was a very special entity. Few people would ever mention his name directly.
When Gu Xi heard Shen Yue use "that person" to refer to Yun Ye, she guessed that he must have known something.
But that wasn’t surprising. Shen Yue was Shen Zhennan’s son, after all. And given Shen Zhennan’s status, it wasn’t odd for him to know Yun Ye’s identity.
Gu Xi nodded.
She and Li Ming had analyzed this before. Although Yun Ye had control over these Hibernation Chambers, he actually looked down on the ’things’ inside them.
He had never considered zombies to be his own kind.
’So, this whole time, Yun Ye knew my objective but never showed up to stop me. And then there was the matter with the Gu Family. He deliberately threw some of the Hibernation Chambers to them, probably to make me sever my ties with humanity completely and see how despicable humans could be...’
’Even a behemoth like the Gu Family was, in his eyes, nothing more than a gift he gave me.’
Yun Ye considered himself superior to everything in this world, looking down on all other species.
Before coming to the A City Reservoir, Gu Xi had always thought so too.
But now, she suddenly had a different idea.
"There’s a very special energy here," Gu Xi said suddenly, looking around at their surroundings.
Shen Yue frowned slightly. He could vaguely sense the energy within the miasma, but he didn’t understand what Gu Xi meant.
Gu Xi’s gaze was calm as she looked into the distance. She sent her spiritual power probing deep into the swamp, but it was quickly blocked by another powerful force.
Gu Xi frowned slightly. ’What in the world is hidden at the bottom of this swamp? To think it could contend with Yabao?’
’And why did those people bury this batch of Hibernation Chambers under the A City Reservoir in the early days of the apocalypse?’
’Could it be related to that thing?’
Gu Xi had no way of knowing any of this.
But...
Gu Xi narrowed her eyes slightly. "A large number of Hibernation Chambers containing frozen High-level Zombies or infected individuals should be buried under this swamp. But what if..."
She turned her head and looked up at Shen Yue. "I’m saying, what if that special energy could trigger another evolution in this batch of High-level Zombies or infected?"
Her tone was calm and deep as she spoke, but it was inexplicably chilling. It was like standing on the edge of an abyss in the wind; one misstep, and you’d fall into a chasm with no hope of return.
Shen Yue forcibly suppressed the storm raging in his heart. He asked Gu Xi, "What would they evolve into?"
"Perhaps... they’d evolve into beings like Yun Ye?" Gu Xi was only guessing. After all, that special energy was mysterious. She only had a vague sense of its purpose and couldn’t be certain.
Gu Xi even considered, "Do you think it’s possible... that Yun Ye originally escaped from this very place?"
Her words made Shen Yue’s heart sink.
A single Yun Ye had already thrown the higher-ups into chaos and left them severely hamstrung. If another one appeared, or even several...
But soon, he thought of another problem.
"If this place," he turned to look into the depths of the miasma, his gaze cold and stern, completely different from his usual casual demeanor, "is truly going to give birth to another being like *him*, then..."
Shen Yue turned back to Gu Xi and asked seriously, "Gu Xi, based on your understanding of him, would he allow that to happen?"
Gu Xi thought for a moment. ’Deep down, Yun Ye is a very detached person. He thinks very highly of himself, to the point of believing he’s the only one who matters.’
’He used to look down on those with abilities, and he looked down on High-level Zombies. In his eyes, even a Zombie Emperor was just a servant barely worthy of being enslaved by him!’
’Would a being like him really want another existence with powers as special as his own to appear?’
Gu Xi’s intuition said no.
But Yun Ye’s attitude toward her was strange. He saw her as his own kind and wanted her to stand with him at the pinnacle of this world. Clearly, he didn’t reject her.
Back then, after she fell into his hands, he didn’t kill her to eliminate a future threat. And during the thirty years she was frozen in hibernation, everything Yun Ye did seemed more like... an attempt to completely transform her into one of his kind.
’Perhaps it was only because he discovered after his own experiments that he didn’t possess such means, which is why he later wanted to use human technology.’
’But people are greedy...’
Gu Xi didn’t know the specifics of what happened during their collaboration with Yun Ye. But the final result was obvious: they took her Crystal Core Fragments and continuously drew her blood...
Yun Ye had clearly discovered all of this, even though they did it under the guise of scientific experiments to help her evolve.
But he didn’t stop it. Instead, he tacitly condoned it all, even proactively using her Crystal Core Fragments to lead those people by the nose, step by step, until those high-and-mighty, ambitious power-mongers were all working for him.
And over the years, her Crystal Core Fragments and blood had clearly brought the two sides into a much closer partnership.
Until she escaped it all.
But after that, when Yun Ye faced her, he acted as if he had a clear conscience. He even wanted her to stand against humanity and completely side with him.
It was just so strange.
"Gu Xi?" Shen Yue frowned slightly when she remained silent.
Gu Xi snapped back to her senses and shook her head slightly. "I don’t know."
But Shen Yue said, "Do you think it’s possible that he is also wary of certain beings under the swamp that are on the verge of a successful evolution? But for some reason, he can’t get close to this place himself, so he wants to use you to eliminate the potential threat here?"
That wasn’t impossible.
But even so... Gu Xi looked up toward the depths of the swamp. Even so, she had no other choice.
It was as if someone were holding the hundreds of thousands of survivors in A City Base hostage to threaten her. Even though she knew full well that Yun Ye was deliberately using her, she had no choice but to take on this mess.
Because she had long been held hostage by this world.
Gu Xi stared into the distance, her eyes narrowing slightly as an extremely dangerous aura erupted from her for an instant.
Beside her, Shen Yue subconsciously tensed up, but he quickly noticed that Gu Xi had suppressed that dangerous aura.
Shen Yue followed her gaze and suddenly said, "Gu Xi, no matter what happens in the future, I... we will always be on your side."