Chapter 559: Brainwashing
Chapter 559: Brainwashing
The snow kept falling, and the city gates stayed sealed. In such harsh weather, it was unlikely that any survivors had made it out besides Fatty’s group. Even the mutant monsters dared not cause trouble in this storm.
The few guards on the city walls idled their days away, either playing cards or huddling inside the lounge, unwilling to step outside.
No one would run over to the Hexi villa compound to meddle in the affairs of this group of burdens.
Fatty put on an act for a few days, sending people to beg for food at the gates. When he realized that no one came—aside from the occasional corpse or dying soul—he finally felt at ease.
The plan to transform Hexi officially began. Fatty dispatched several earth-type ability-user to dig through the frozen soil, cultivate a few acres of land, and build a stone roof over it. An Ran then led several Wood-type ability users to vigorously promote the growth of trees.
Luo Feifan continued making trips to Hedong every day, engaging Zhou Zheng and the city wall soldiers, while Zhan Lian, Yun Tao, and Liang Ziyu threw themselves into building a wind turbine system at top speed.
More people from Hedong were transported into Hexi. Some had already frozen to death. The dead, Fatty burned. The survivors he herded into houses, giving them firewood and medical treatment.
Then came the brainwashing—turning them into his own people.
What was worse, some actually bought into it.
At times, An Ran felt certain Fatty must have worked in pyramid schemes before the apocalypse; his brainwashing wasn’t crude, but a full-fledged system. Sometimes she even wondered if she herself had been brainwashed by him.
Back then, she clearly remembered despising Fatty’s habit of manipulating the elderly, the weak, the sick, the disabled, and pregnant women. Yet now, without realizing it, she found herself accepting it as normal.
This was bad. She must have been brainwashed too...
In short, Hexi gradually saw the arrival of young and middle-aged men. Once treated by Fatty, these men willingly stayed behind in the villa complex, working tirelessly for their “savior” like slaves.
Meanwhile, An Ran’s planting work flourished. Most of the villa’s trees were buried under snow, but unlike flowers, they weren’t as delicate. Many had survived the cold, and An Ran and her team transplanted them into the rocky ground to cultivate further.
But soon, she understood why Fatty had been so determined to recruit her. The few Wood-type ability users he assigned to her were painfully incompetent. They were all elderly, weak, sick, or pregnant. When inducing tree growth, they lasted two minutes before needing half an hour of rest. Even with crystal cores, their absorption was abysmally slow—one at a time, not by the handful like An Ran. And all they were given were ordinary zombie cores, the same low-grade ones An Ran had first seen back in the hospital.
Of course, their abilities were limited, so it wasn’t surprising. Still, Fatty had sent them, so An Ran let them be and did most of the work herself. But from their occasional words, she pieced together something else—there were definitely more Wood-type ability users under Fatty’s control.
Some of them, she heard, had even been assigned to “production.”
Some? Just how many were there, exactly?