Chapter Forty-Three: Encountering Jun Fei Again

Lead itself is a very soft metal, but once combined with certain other metals, it can become remarkably hard. For this reason, lead alloys are excellent materials for crafting bullet heads. Most crucially, lead has a melting point of just over three hundred degrees Celsius, which means even the makeshift furnace Qin Fei built could easily generate enough heat to melt it.

At present, Qin Fei had three guns, but he lacked ammunition. When he escaped from the Baishui River camp, he had taken a shotgun. During the defense against the zombie horde, he also found a pistol in a backpack carried by one of the undead. Additionally, he had purchased a thunder tube from the lady doctor. Except for the thunder tube, which could be loaded with homemade gunpowder and paper cartridges, making ammunition for the other two firearms was simply impossible in the short term.

Therefore, Qin Fei did not rush to mine the lead deposit he had discovered. With only a few days left before the next wave of the undead, he had to focus on fortifying his defenses as quickly as possible. After memorizing the location of the lead mine, he returned to his shelter.

There were only two days left until the fourth Blood Moon. The walls of Qin Fei’s shelter stood over three meters tall, and he had always used a wooden ladder to climb up and down from the raised platform. However, wooden ladders could be easily destroyed by zombies. If the horde arrived and the ladder was broken, leaving him stranded below, it would spell disaster.

To prevent this, Qin Fei salvaged a metal ladder from the nearby town and nailed it directly to the platform. Above the ladder, he installed a skylight fitted with an iron bolt—a simple push would open it, but the mindless undead would never figure out how.

Aside from installing the metal ladder, Qin Fei had spent the past few days grinding down steel plates. By the morning of the twenty-eighth day, he had fashioned four steel blades. It took two blades to construct a single blade trap, so these four would allow him to build two.

After assembling the blade traps with nuts, wires, and other materials, he installed them beneath the shelter, one on each side of the metal ladder. When the horde arrived, he’d only need to power them up, and the blades would spin at high speed. These steel blades could easily sever the legs of the undead.

With the blade traps in place, the fortifications of Qin Fei’s shelter were, at last, complete.

As dusk fell, Qin Fei inspected every defensive structure in the base, checking each detail with care. Only after confirming that everything was in order did he finally relax.

The shelter’s outermost perimeter was a deep trench that Qin Fei had dug himself, filled with countless wooden chevaux-de-frise. Closer in was the electrified fence. Inside the fence were the blade traps—though, pressed for time, Qin Fei had only managed to build two, so the remaining inside area was guarded solely by more chevaux-de-frise.

As the sky darkened, thunder rumbled overhead. The Blood Moon rose, heralding the arrival of the undead horde.

The deeper the crimson hue of the Blood Moon, and the closer it was to a perfect circle, the more ferocious the horde would be that night. When the Blood Moon finally became a full circle, glowing purple, it would signal the most perilous wave yet.

Tonight, the moon in the sky had grown redder than ever, its shape having shifted from the crescent of the first horde to nearly a half-moon.

Qin Fei tossed the firewood he’d prepared into the generator and lit it. As the flames grew, the engine roared to life, and the single bulb at the top of the shelter blazed to life.

Ten o’clock arrived swiftly. With a chorus of barking in the distance, a pack of a dozen zombie hounds burst from the darkness, charging straight for Qin Fei’s position. They soon tumbled into the deep trench and were impaled on the sharpened stakes.

Their deaths were followed shortly by the arrival of a dozen ordinary zombies, surging toward the shelter. By now, these posed little threat to Qin Fei. Once he had dispatched them, a group of bloated zombies began lumbering forward. Detonating near the trench, they quickly filled it in, forming a makeshift path.

The first line of defense was breached, but the undead were soon halted by the electrified fence. Upon touching it, they were seized by the current and left twitching helplessly in place. Qin Fei, crouched atop the platform, picked them off one by one with his iron crossbow.

Even those few zombies that managed to cross the fence and reach the base of the shelter were swiftly hobbled by the blade traps. The power of the shelter’s electrical defenses was undeniable—holding back the horde was almost effortless.

Suddenly, retching noises echoed from the distance. Qin Fei looked toward the sound and saw three grotesquely fat zombies not far away, all still wearing police uniforms.

These were military heavies.

Qin Fei had already encountered these abominations at Shanwei Foods and knew how revolting they could be. Even at a glance, he could almost smell their nauseating stench.

As the vomiting sounds continued, three streams of acid arced through the air toward him. The acid moved slowly enough that Qin Fei dodged with ease. Where it landed on the wooden boards of the platform, a thick, putrid smell immediately filled the air. The planks blackened and began to smoke as the acid corroded them—its potency was undeniable.

The last time at Shanwei Foods, even a small splash on his neck had left him with a nasty burn. The platform above had no walls to block the acid jets from the military heavies below, and they stood just far enough away that his crossbow couldn’t do much damage.

Left with no choice, Qin Fei took cover behind the earthen stove on the platform. The three zombies below spat several more streams of acid, but the stove blocked them all. The acid could eat through wood and flesh, but against hardened earth and stone, it was powerless.

Pinned down by the military heavies, Qin Fei didn’t dare to expose himself. Even the slightest splash would be agonizing—not to mention the corrosive effect on flesh, the stench alone would cling to his armor for days.

Unable to counterattack with his crossbow, Qin Fei watched as the ranks of the undead assaulting the shelter began to swell once again. With only two blade traps beneath the platform and the rest of the defense relying on wooden chevaux-de-frise, the growing numbers quickly overwhelmed and destroyed the wooden barriers. Unimpeded, the zombies began a frenzied assault on the concrete pillars supporting the platform.