NOVPUBChapter 808: 485, Fight_5
“For Qing’s Family?”
“Yes, for Qing’s Family.”
“Is it worth it?”
Zhang Wenqi was taken aback: “Sorry, sir, I never thought about that.”
Qing Chen asked puzzledly, “Then why are you doing this?”
Zhang Wenqi thought for a moment and said, “Because that’s what our predecessors did, generation after generation. The success doesn’t have to be mine.”
“Where are you from?” Qing Chen asked.
“I was in City 10 before I turned 13, then I followed my superior to the north, changed my name. I haven’t been back in 10 years,” Zhang Wenqi said.
Qing Chen sighed inwardly, thinking how, in such chaotic times, a 13-year-old child would already have to face this cruel world.
“Sir, can I ask you a favor?” Zhang Wenqi asked.
“What is it?” Qing Chen asked.
“If you make it back alive, could you buy a bouquet of flowers for my mother?” Zhang Wenqi said, writing an address on the ground with his own blood, then wiping it away with his hand.
There’s a Black Box on this floating ship, recording every sound inside it, every second.
Qing Chen thought for a moment and said, “I fear I won’t make it back either, but if I do, I’ll do it for you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Zhang Wenqi smiled and said.
“Anything else you want to do?” Qing Chen asked.
Zhang Wenqi pondered for a long time: “No, nothing else.”
“No regrets?”
Zhang Wenqi thought for a long time, then smiled and said, “Maybe I haven’t lived long enough to have any regrets.”
After speaking, he wrote on the ground again: Do you need me to tell you about the A02 base?
Qing Chen calmly shook his head.
Because Zhao Jie came from the A02 base, Qing Chen already knew everything about it.
The Yamata Group training camp is in the harsh northern land, bordered by an endless prairie to the west and a wide river to the farther north, said to be frozen year-round.
Jindai Consortium not only sends excellent intelligence agents there but also secretly captured prisoners to move rocks.
They are not using the prisoners for labor, as those rocks are of no use.
Jindai merely makes the prisoners repeatedly move the rocks from west to east and then back again.
This endless life and labor break down the prisoners, both physically and mentally.
Half of the prisoners have undergone counter-surveillance and anti-interrogation training; they keep their secrets and thus remain detained.
The other half are ordinary prisoners from the three cities under Jindai’s control.
In Federal prisons, justice is impartial and inviolable, so each consortium detains some prisoners in secret prisons without going through judicial procedures. This has long been no secret.
Each training camp graduation season, Jindai Consortium distributes basic weapons to these prisoners and drives them into the woods, where the newly graduated Yamata Group members hunt them down.
Jindai Consortium tells prisoners that if they can escape alive, they will gain their freedom. Killing a Yamata Group member also grants freedom.
But through Takahashi Toshiki’s memory, Qing Chen knows that every prisoner has the same kind of micro-bomb and locator in their bodies as he does.
Yamata has never let any prisoner leave alive.
Hunting these prisoners is merely to stimulate the animal instincts of the new Yamata members so that they won’t feel uncomfortable killing in the future.
There are three such training camps, internally called A01, A02, and A03 secret military bases.
The one Qing Chen is heading to is A02.
The silence in the cabin deepened. Both Qing Chen and Zhang Wenqi knew that this empty floating ship was an inescapable shackle on their fate, soon to arrive at the A02 base.
The flight path was locked, and the ship’s weaponry couldn’t be activated.
Silence.
Zhang Wenqi sat on the ground and, after a long silence, said, “Sir, I know what awaits me at the A02 base… I’m sorry, I want to desert.”
“Yes, it’s not shameful,” Qing Chen looked out the cockpit’s window, nodding calmly.
“Take care, sir,” Zhang Wenqi smiled, lifted his handgun, and pulled the trigger under his jaw.
Qing Chen’s expression didn’t change at all.
He wasn’t very familiar with Zhang Wenqi, so he wasn’t too sad either.
Strictly speaking, Qing Chen wasn’t a member of Qing’s Family; he didn’t have that sense of honor and belonging.
Whether he was a ‘Public Test Player’ or an ‘Internal Test Player,’ Qing Chen’s sense of identity was always with the Outer World.
But at this moment, there were some ripples in his heart. 𝑛𝑜𝑣𝑝𝑢𝘣.𝘤𝑜𝘮
For the first time in his life since crossing over, Qing Chen found himself with a goal.
He had to find a way to survive and then do something.
5 p.m.
At the A02 base, prisoners wearing cold iron shackles were endlessly moving rocks when they suddenly heard the sound of rapid footsteps and saw hundreds of soldiers, fully armed, assembling in the central clearing of the base.
They formed a defensive formation.
Soon, a forty-meter-long High Sky A-Class Floating Ship flew in.
The prisoners were puzzled, wondering what had prompted the Jindai soldiers to mobilize such a huge force.
They looked on numbly—was there an invasion?
The floating ship descended slowly, and the hydraulic hatch hissed as it lifted upward.
A moment later, a teenager calmly walked out of the ship, standing nonchalantly at the edge of the exit, a smile on his face as he looked at the thousands of soldiers outside.
