For lunch, he followed his usual routine: two pouches of nutrient paste to replenish protein and carbohydrates, followed by a piece of malt slab candy for a quick burst of sugar.
Cheng Ye could not bring himself to eat the synthetic jerky Liu Bi had given him. He intended to save it as strategic supplies, keeping it for an emergency energy boost during future field deployments.
After finishing lunch, he stood watch by the window until the rain slightly weakened. Only then did he throw on a raincoat and head toward the quarantine zone.
Perhaps because the torrential downpour over neighboring Cloud City was so terrifying, workers could be seen everywhere along the road hastily erecting flood defenses. The already narrow alleys felt all the more cramped and chaotic.
Beneath a roadside shelter from the rain, several new residents who had clearly just joined Happiness City huddled together, staring with deep anxiety at the churning black clouds on the horizon.
Damp resident identity cards could not buy shelter. For people like them, finding work before the storm arrived was a race against the clock if they wanted a roof over their heads.
"Inspector Cheng, you're still assigned to Window 8 today."
"The crowd was huge this morning, but afternoon traffic is even heavier. If an emergency gets out of hand, feel free to call the station for backup at any time."
"Understood!"
Cheng Ye nodded, donned the mask meant to conceal his identity, and walked forward with his head held high.
Standing in the corridor leading to the front area, he could already see a dense, dark sea of people crowding before the conveyor belts.
At least seven or eight hundred?
The torrential rain was part of the reason, but the wave of infections sweeping Cloud City was another major factor.
Some survivors had no choice but to flee, and Happiness City, sitting right nearby, was naturally their best evacuation choice.
"Window 8 is now open. Survivors, please line up in an orderly fashion to enter the isolation cages."
Just as Cheng Ye took his seat at the inspection desk, the loudspeaker on the watchtower crackled to life at the right moment.
Working an official iron-rice-bowl job truly made a difference. He had taken half a day off that morning, and despite the massive crowd of survivors packed outside, Window 8 had remained empty and closed the entire time.
Amid a slight stir among the crowds queued at the other seven conveyor belts, an iron isolation cage was quickly pushed in front of Cheng Ye.
Three figures huddled inside: two women and one man, a common "family" unit in the wasteland.
"Names?"
"Zhou Tian, Yun Zi, Yun Duo."
Obvious aliases made up on the spot. Cheng Ye pretended to look down and take notes, but in reality, he summoned his panel to inspect them.
The blue panel flickered faintly, and the search function instantly displayed information for all three individuals.
[Zhou Tian, 42%, Search Scope: Intelligence, Items]
[Yun Zi, 55%, Search Scope: Intelligence, Items, Skills]
[Yun Duo, 18%, Search Scope: Intelligence]
*Just by asking for their names, she's already reached a 55% cooperation rate?*
Cheng Ye was genuinely surprised.
He had assumed that a high cooperation rate required these people to speak the absolute truth, but the metric's underlying logic was far fuzzier than he had imagined.
Should he search them?
Cheng Ye hesitated for a split second, then decided against wasting his precious opportunities on these three.
Based on his observations over the past few days, he had categorized the relative strength of wasteland family combinations into rough tiers:
One man and two women < One man and multiple women < One woman and multiple men < Lone wolves < One man and one woman < One man, one woman, and a child.
The three before him belonged to the absolute bottom tier. Once they entered the buffer zone, they would struggle even to earn a meal doing hard labor. There was no point in squandering a chance on them.
Still, Yun Duo's cooperation rate was remarkably low. Cheng Ye looked up and tapped his finger lightly on the desk.
"Yun Duo, right? See the first temperature gauge on the table in front of you? Pick it up, press it against your forehead, and tell me the reading."
Hearing Cheng Ye address her, a flicker of surprise crossed Yun Duo's eyes, but she obediently lifted the gauge.
"Sir... the reading is 36.9."
"Good. Now pick up the second gauge, press it against your chest, and tell me the reading."
"It's... 117."
"The third one."
"16."
Following Cheng Ye's instructions, as Yun Duo reported each number, her cooperation rate on the panel steadily climbed.
By the time she finished using all three instruments, it had risen from 18% to 44%.
This shift gave Cheng Ye a rudimentary understanding of how the cooperation rate was calculated.
"Alright, the three of you may leave and proceed to the back to process your residency paperwork."
"Huh?" Zhou Tian could not help but let out a gasp of surprise.
"Is there a problem?"
"S-Sir, aren't you going to ask where we came from, whether we ran into danger, or if we're infected?"
"I already know. You came from Cloud City, ran into danger on the way, but had no direct contact with infected beings."
"...?"
Zhou Tian's Adam's apple bobbed, his expression shifting slightly.
Yun Duo and Yun Zi also drew in soft, sharp breaths, their gazes toward Cheng Ye shifting.
"Rule Number One of the Happiness City Resident Handbook: never question the professionalism of official personnel."
For a trainee inspector to secure a steady post at a window in barely a month, he relied on far more than the goodwill Cheng Long had left behind or Liu Bi's reputation.
Cheng Ye lightly tapped the tabletop, his gaze sweeping over the mud trails the three had left on the iron cage. "Torrential rains have poured for days. The provincial and county roads between here and Cloud City collapsed half a month ago. The only passable route is an abandoned country road not marked on any map, known only to Cloud City survivors. The black sandy soil clinging to your soles consists of rock fragments unique to that stretch of road.
"Look down. The mud splatters on the inside of the two women's storm jackets are scattered droplets, not drag marks or abrasions. That matches panicking and fleeing in terror from danger, but it doesn't match signs of combat.
"Furthermore... your knees are trembling at too rapid a frequency. That isn't exhaustion from a long trek; it's identical to the refugees escaping Cloud City. It's the lingering aftereffect of sprinting under sheer terror. So don't ask me again why I didn't question you. Since your vitals are normal, get moving to process your resident IDs and stop wasting my time."
Cheng Ye spoke with cold impatience. The three shrank back, ducking their heads as they hurried away, not daring to utter another word.
*Are the inspectors in Happiness City really this professional?*
Without asking a single question, he somehow knew everything. The realization left them feeling stripped bare, as if all their secrets had been exposed to the light.
"Next."
The conveyor belt groaned into motion, and another family consisting of one man and two women was transported over in an iron isolation cage.
This time, Cheng Ye was even faster. It took barely a dozen seconds to verify their cooperation rates before he waved them through.
In truth, very few infected beings dared to walk brazenly into a Happiness City inspection station.
This was not one of those minor shelter cities that lacked intelligence networks and diagnostic equipment, forced to rely purely on manpower to make slow determinations.
A temperature gauge, a pulse monitor, and a respiratory rate counter.
As long as an entrant's travel route was clear and their three vital signs fell within normal parameters, the probability of them being an infected carrier was negligible.
Of course, there were also special infected carriers with extraordinarily deep latency, but Happiness City's upper echelon never expected isolation-zone inspectors to catch those anyway.
The sprawling buffer zone and towering fortified walls would keep all external threats locked outside the Inner City.
***
An hour slipped by in the blink of an eye.
The crowd waiting at the main entrance showed no signs of thinning just because Window 8 was operating; on the contrary, the bustling queue only swelled as time passed.
Cheng Ye had already cleared seventy-one people, yet he still had not found a single target worth spending a search on.
This was an inevitable outcome.
As survivor numbers surged, the disparity in quality among the crowd was magnified exponentially.
And with eight separate conveyor belts operating, the randomness of drawing a truly capable survivor dropped even lower.
*Judging by how these survivors performed, most of them are probably bottom-feeders at the base of the food chain, just like me—no background, no skills, no gear.*
*There are plenty of people today. I have to be patient.*
Cheng Ye had no desire to trigger a skill search with high hopes, only to discover that all three of the subject's skill slots were completely blank, identical to his own.
Even if he wasted both attempts on genuine powerhouses, that was still far better than pulling lottery tickets on random small fry.
Before long, another hour passed.
*Bang! Bang, bang!*
Three consecutive gunshots rang out, making Cheng Ye instinctively jerk his head toward the sound.
Inside an iron isolation cage on Conveyor 4, a man and a woman who had been undergoing inspection had just been shot through the head by sentries.
Immediately after, tentacles identical to the ones Cheng Ye had seen only yesterday burst from the pair's throats. It was another case of the highly covert Deathwhisper Tentacles.
If this kind of specialized infection source—one that nested inside human obsessions—made its way into a small shelter city or an outlying settlement, it could hatch hundreds of tentacles within a single month, readily triggering a massive catastrophe.
Fortunately, in all the vast wasteland, very few people harbored deep obsessions over small shelter cities.
*In a sense, the frequent appearance of Deathwhisper Tentacles is a testament to Happiness City's strength and influence,* Cheng Ye mused silently, quickly brushing the faint chill from his mind.
In the wake of the tragedy on Conveyor 4, any survivor who witnessed people getting their heads blown off and still dared to step into an isolation cage had to possess some real capability.
As the caliber of the arriving survivors rapidly rose, a man and a woman standing in a cage reached the end of Conveyor 8, moving toward Cheng Ye. He instantly pulled himself together.
Just then, however, a sudden argument breaking out nearby stole his attention away.
He glanced over.
*Holy shit. A man, a woman, and a child... has the wasteland royalty finally arrived?*
***
Chapter 5