Chapter 471 - 404: Rescue Communications from Various Places
Chapter 471: Chapter 404: Rescue Communications from Various Places
After the signal station for Korsan Base was established, Morhaven’s connection with it grew much closer. Moreover, since the successful development of the repellent devices, usage of the Morhaven airport had also increased.
However, special forces soldiers like Five and Nolan Jennings couldn’t act as pilots forever. Thus, Villa No. 3 began recruiting pilots.
The requirements for pilots were extremely high, both before and after the apocalypse.
Applicants were required to have excellent physical and mental fortitude, preferably be Level 3 or higher superpower users, and must be familiar with operating various types of aircraft, possessing strong adaptability.
But as for Morhaven, although it had been a coastal area with high traffic and a large population before the apocalypse...
...since the cataclysm, its population had dwindled to just under 100,000 people.
There were only about a thousand superpower users, half the number at Korsan Base. This was why Flora Bloom had been so shocked to learn that all two thousand people at Korsan Base were superpower users.
After several days of recruiting with no success, a strange channel connected to Morhaven Base’s communication station. A choppy voice came through, requesting support.
The station’s technicians traced the other party’s location to a small county on the edge of the western plateau.
This was only the beginning.
The next day, two such distress calls came in: one from a small island city in a bay at the center of a sea region to the east, and another from a remote small town, also in the east.
On the third day, even more rescue signals were received; three came in that morning alone. By evening, over a dozen more communications had arrived. Besides distress calls, there was, at last, a request for a direct call from an unknown party.
Morhaven Base’s communication station was installed inside Villa No. 3. Saul Sterling was the one who answered the call.
Simultaneously, the satellite network connected to the station had already pinpointed the caller’s geographical location.
"Hello? Hello? Who is this?"
"This is Rivenlock Base. This is great! We finally reached someone alive!"
The voice on the other end belonged to a young man. The surprise and excitement in his tone were palpable.
"Where are you? How many survivors do you have?"
Saul Sterling’s expression flickered inscrutably as he held the satellite images of several regions that Five had handed him.
"What about you? How many survivors do you have left?"
Saul Sterling’s voice was mournful, filled with an indescribable sorrow.
"Sigh, we don’t have many people left either."
Saul Sterling handed the map views of the traced locations to Lex Cross and shook his head slightly. He then began a heartfelt, emotional chat with the person on the other end.
Flora Bloom was about to ask something, but Lex Cross stopped her with a finger to his lips.
The group stood by silently, not making a sound as they listened to Saul Sterling talk with the man.
If she hadn’t seen Saul Sterling speaking with her own eyes, Flora Bloom would have sworn it was Five on the line.
For some reason, the person on the other end kept trying to subtly probe for the number of survivors at their Morhaven Base.
Saul Sterling, however, played the fool and instead managed to trick the other party into revealing their own base’s numbers. Right up until the moment he hung up, the person on the other end was still consoling the "grieving" Saul Sterling, telling him to take care and move on.
"What’s the situation?" Flora Bloom asked curiously as soon as Saul Sterling hung up.
Saul Sterling looked at the others, cleared his throat in slight embarrassment, and then said with a serious expression,
"It was someone from Rivenlock Base. He claimed they have a population of four hundred thousand and over ten thousand superpower users. But I think, based on our own numbers here in Morhaven—a thousand superpower users out of a population of a hundred thousand—our ratio is already quite high."
Flora Bloom pondered this, then shook her head and looked at Lex Cross. "How many superpower users does Argent Base have?"
"Three thousand, six hundred and thirty-one."
As soon as Lex Cross said it, everyone was taken aback. "That many?"
Saul Sterling continued his analysis. "Is that a lot? Proportionally, Argent Base has a large population, right? Similar to a third-tier city in a remote, underdeveloped region before the apocalypse, with three to four hundred thousand people. Yet they only have a little over three thousand superpower users.
"Given Argent Base’s overall strength, it should be the most powerfully armed place in the country, or even the world, even after the apocalypse.
"Rivenlock is just a remote town with a population of only a few hundred thousand. How could they have resisted the zombie virus and saved the entire city when the apocalypse began?
"Did none of them get infected? That’s impossible! And a population of four hundred thousand with ten thousand superpower users? That’s an awakening ratio of one in forty. That’s even more impossible!"
"It’s not entirely impossible," Flora Bloom interjected after thinking for a moment. "Lex and I went to Korsan Base a few nights ago. The base is built in the mountains; it’s where we took people to install the communication station equipment not long ago.
"The entire base extends from a few processing plants at the foot of the mountain up into the hills. It’s not very big, and there are only two thousand people, but every single one of them is a superpower user. Their awakening rate is one hundred percent."
Lex Cross nodded. "We can’t analyze and explain everything with our usual logic, but there is definitely something strange about Rivenlock."
"The leader of Rivenlock invited people from our Morhaven Base to visit them. Should we go?"
"Rivenlock is on the eastern edge, so far away, and he wants us to visit? I’ve got a bad feeling about this." Cynthia Grant walked over to Flora Bloom and patted her belly.
"They said they would send a plane to pick us up," Saul Sterling added.
The group fell silent.
Morhaven’s current development was, to them, already rapid. They had a stable supply of meat, a clean and inexhaustible source of water, and rice, flour, grains, vegetables, and fruits were all being widely cultivated in the base.
Besides exchanging their labor for food, ordinary people could also choose to join the base’s various teams to help clear zombies from other cities.
This served to build their courage and could also unlock their own potential. Cases of ordinary people in Morhaven awakening superpowers were becoming common, and none had failed.
Furthermore, Morhaven Base’s communication station had begun establishing contact with the outside world. The Morhaven airport had even made two flights this month, specifically to deliver a large amount of food resources to Argent Base.
Of course, Argent Base had paid a hefty sum of Crystal Cores for it.
Meat: one hundred Crystal Cores per kilogram.
Rice and flour: two hundred Crystal Cores per kilogram.
Vegetables and fruits: five hundred Crystal Cores per kilogram.
Jade, accompanying Five and Nolan Jennings on a round trip from Morhaven Airport to Argent Airport, delivered nearly a thousand kilograms of supplies in total and brought back two hundred and twenty thousand Crystal Cores.
This also gave Flora Bloom and the others an indirect understanding of the sheer wealth of Crystal Core resources at Argent Base.
They had handed over two hundred and twenty thousand Crystal Cores without batting an eye. It seemed that for them, this amount was just a drop in the bucket.
’How vast the human population was. Two hundred and twenty thousand Crystal Cores meant that two hundred and twenty thousand people had turned into zombies, only to be killed by humans who then dug out their Crystal Cores.
’It was clear just how many zombies the apocalypse had created. Relying on humans to kill them one by one... when would they ever be able to exterminate them all?’