Carrots and sticks were a time-tested strategy.
Cole and Her didn't dare make any reckless moves, jogging over to crouch beside Ram.
Ending up in an isolation pod at least left a sliver of hope for survival. But if Cheng Ye took Simo for an infected entity and put a bullet through him right now, no god or devil would come to save them.
"Sir..."
"Shut up!"
Noticing Cheng Ye walking over, Simo had barely opened his mouth before Cheng Ye cut him off ruthlessly.
"Whatever I do next, you hold still and bear it. Otherwise, get your ass into quarantine. Understand?"
"Understood, understood!"
Realizing there was a chance to live, the exhausted look in Simo's eyes flared with renewed vitality.
Unlike the Central Main Checkpoint—which only screened vagrant survivors for temperature, heart rate, and respiration, immediately isolating or expelling anyone with abnormal vitals—those passing through the fast checkpoint were mostly residents of Happiness City. To balance speed with diagnostic accuracy, it was equipped with additional diagnostic instruments.
Cheng Ye raised a hand and swiped his ID badge across the black case on the desk.
*Click.*
The latches sprang open, revealing two pristine instruments that inspectors rarely ever touched, alongside a scalpel and a metal tray.
A dual-modal vital signs detector.
A rot-light metabolic detector.
The former allowed handheld imaging, displaying a rough real-time scan of the subject's internal anatomy on a screen mounted to the back of the device.
The latter specialized in wound inspection: under a specific wavelength of light, infected tissue would emit visible fluorescence.
If the pathogen matched the internal infection source database, the fluorescence flared a piercing red; if it didn't match, it showed a normal green.
It sounded practical enough, so why were the devices still brand new?
The answer was simple: there was no need.
Nearly three hundred people were locked inside Quarantine Zone A's isolation pods. While infected entities certainly lurked among them, at least ninety-five percent were clean—otherwise, who would dare venture out to scavenge?
Yet hardly any inspector was willing to shoulder the risk. Whenever anomalous vitals cropped up without a clear explanation, rather than running step-by-step checks, inspectors preferred to flag the subject as a high infection risk, toss them into an isolation pod, and leave it at that.
Whether the person made it out alive was never their concern.
Even if pressed for an explanation, an excuse was always ready:
*We're looking out for the hundreds of thousands of people in the Buffer Zone. We can't let hundreds of thousands take the fall just for one person, can we?*
"Can you still move?"
"Yes!"
"Turn your body according to my instructions."
The so-called dual-modal system combined a microfocus CT module and a photoacoustic imaging module.
Cheng Ye had never seen such a thing back in modern times; this was his first time operating it.
Still, the displayed image was remarkably clear, barely a step below a hospital radiographic scan.
On the screen, a three-dimensional gray mannequin rotated back and forth, its right leg glowing with a faint red warning light.
Magnified by the system's image processing, the muscle fibers at the bite site were torn in a radial pattern, and extensive low-density shadowing marked the eroded tissue along the edges of the wound, resembling a sponge eaten away by strong acid.
As for the rest of his body, the scans showed only circular or irregular high-density shadows—the characteristic pattern of hemorrhagic lesions caused by high hemoglobin concentration.
"No problem... Only this one bite wound. Everywhere else is just bruising and abrasions."
Cheng Ye breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
The scavengers' story checked out logically, which meant the focus of the infection screening fell squarely on the wound's characteristics.
With only a single wound on the leg, the probability of infection dropped significantly.
After all, as Brother B had said, attacks by infected entities lacked all rhyme or reason; once they caught sight of a target, they lunged like rabid dogs and would never fixate on chewing up just one localized spot.
Time for the rot-light metabolic detector.
A dim green light shone over the leg wound, soon revealing an emerald fluorescence with no trace of red.
This meant that even if the wound had been inflicted by an infected entity, that entity could only be unregistered in Happiness City's database, just like the Rotting Vine.
The odds of infection dropped another notch.
"One last step. I need to slice off a sliver of your flesh. Can you handle it?"
"What?"
Simo froze in shock, followed immediately by an uncontrollable rush of ecstasy.
What did he just hear?
The last step?
Good God... was this inspector an angel sent from heaven?
"Cut wherever you want, sir! Cut off the whole leg if you need to, I can take it!"
"No need to be dramatic. Just a small sliver will do."
Cheng Ye forced a faint smile, not to ease Simo's nerves, but to settle his own.
He didn't panic when shooting infected entities because he knew they were no longer human.
Subconsciously treating them as monsters was no different from firing at wooden targets.
Yet cutting into a living person still gave him an unsettling chill.
Fortunately, the scalpel in the case was razor-sharp. Cheng Ye made a light incision along the edge of the wound and carved off a piece of tissue roughly the size of a pinky tip.
And surprisingly, Simo didn't even flinch, leaving Cheng Ye marveling silently.
*Impressive.*
If this had been one of those pampered boy-band idols, his shrieks would have been heard three miles away.
"Raven, take this tissue sample to see if it matches any infection source. Make it quick!"
"Understood, sir!"
While the four men were undergoing their screening, Raven and Owl had already been waiting outside the isolation door.
From their perspective as observers, Cheng Ye's conduct was rather baffling—why go to such lengths for a few ordinary scavengers?
Yet looking at it from an ordinary person's standpoint, their feelings were complicated, and they had no idea what to say.
All Raven could do was quicken his pace and rush the sample to the laboratory in Zone E for matching.
Minutes ticked by.
Ten-odd minutes later, Raven returned and slipped a piece of paper beneath the isolation door.
"A problem?"
Cheng Ye frowned slightly, but taking the slip, he saw the word written on it: *Normal*.
Then he realized just how tactful the observer was. Shouting the result aloud for the scavengers to hear would have stolen the inspector's thunder; letting Cheng Ye announce it himself was the mark of someone well-versed in workplace protocol.
"All right, you three can stop crouching there and peeking. Put your clothes on and come over."
Returning behind the desk, Cheng Ye spoke in a calm voice.
A second later, as if springs were loaded into their soles, the three shot across the floor and landed beside Simo.
"Thank you, sir! Thank you, sir!"
The four men wept and embraced, their tearful cries tightening Cheng Ye's throat, leaving him at a loss for words.
What an absurd world.
He had merely done an inspector's duty, following the standard screening procedures in the inspector's handbook to the letter, yet they wept with gratitude as if he were a god.
*It's not that I'm exceptionally kind, but that this checkpoint has rotted to its core.*
Cheng Ye pondered silently, then his thoughts shifted.
If this rotten atmosphere permeated all of Happiness City, what would happen if he ran into something similar one day and had to depend on someone else's whims just to survive?
*The sense of crisis really is suffocating. I suppose everyone in the Buffer Zone claws their way up just to prevent that day from ever coming.*
As the four men's weeping gradually subsided, Cheng Ye drew his thoughts back.
"What was that other thing you said you wanted to give me?"
"Oh, right! Meteoric iron! It's meteoric iron we got from Bluestone Settlement!"
Cole slapped his forehead and rushed to the back of the van, pulling out a fist-sized lump of black ore.
"Take a look, sir. This stuff is rock-hard, and we don't even know what it's made of. Maybe you'd like to keep it as a trinket?"
"Meteoric iron?"
Cheng Ye took the ore and squeezed it, feeling its cold, dense hardness against his fingertips.
Judging strictly by appearance, there was nothing extraordinary about it, nowhere near as striking as the Fire-Concealed Iron he had seen earlier.
*I can have Master Liu take a look at it when I pick up my weapon the day after tomorrow.*
Cheng Ye nodded in satisfaction.
Without the Action function, he wouldn't have been able to make use of raw ore like this.
But with Action, if he acquired a forging skill and managed to get some smithing equipment, he could forge all kinds of weapons at will.
"I have some use for this, so I'll keep it. But take these Happiness Coins back."
As he spoke, Cheng Ye pushed the six coins on the desk back toward them.
Happiness Coins weren't worth much in the Buffer Zone; anything he actually wanted required contribution points. Besides, who knew how long it would take to spend all the Happiness Coins Cheng Long had left behind?
"Sir..."
"Fine, I'll keep one so you can stop worrying, all right?"
Seeing the four gazing at him imploringly, Cheng Ye sighed helplessly. "If you ever come across ores like this in the future, you can bring them to me. My defense comm ID is 96061."
"You got it, sir! Rest assured, whenever we find any ore in the future, we'll definitely bring it to you first!"
Cole's eyes lit up.
The chance to forge ties with an inspector was practically once in a lifetime. Never mind an Easterner inspector—even if a dog were sitting behind that desk, ahem...
Such was the nature of power.
Then again, Cheng Ye truly was different from other inspectors.
The four exchanged glances, pleasant surprise gleaming in their eyes. The reward for reporting the lithium deposit would provide them with a handsome chunk of seed capital, and building a connection with a dependable inspector would save them countless headaches.
After scrapping by in Happiness City for nearly five years, if this venture succeeded, they would truly be riding the wave to prosperity!
"Hurry up and take him to get treated. Move fast and that leg can still be saved."
"Thank you, sir."
The four nodded repeatedly. Cole leaped into the driver's seat and started the van, while Her helped the other two climb into the rear compartment.
Cheng Ye pressed the button, and the blast door at the exit slid slowly open to both sides.
Yet just as Cole waved excitedly and prepared to hit the gas,
*Boom.*
The newly opened blast door slammed shut with a deafening metallic crash.
At the same time, piercing sirens erupted across the entire checkpoint. Two long and two short blares rose and fell, echoing endlessly through the cavernous space.
"What's going on?"
The four looked up in bewilderment, only to see Cheng Ye and the inspector in neighboring Zone B leap to their feet in shock as well.
As if a bomb had dropped into the checkpoint, amid the shrieking alarms, hundreds of armed guards poured out of all four quarantine zones, on high alert as if facing a mortal threat!
"Two long and two short... The checkpoint's highest alert level. Either an infection tide is incoming, or..."
Cheng Ye whipped his head around, and the four brothers followed his gaze.
Up on the checkpoint's machine gun sentry tower, two flags had been raised at some unknown moment.
One was crimson as blood, the other as pale as paper.
That meant...
"Red means danger, white means sacrifice. When the red and white flags fly together..."
Cheng Ye's voice dropped heavily. "An on-duty stationmaster has been killed?!"
Chapter 38