Chapter 677: Cause and Effect
Chen Jiao listened, her pretty face carrying a faint disappointment.
A moment later she forced herself to perk up, nodded to Chen Chaogong, and spoke with an air of indifference.
“It’s fine. Third Uncle’s situation is more important. As for He Wen, he’s fated to die early anyway, haha.”
Everyone was selfish, and Chen Jiao had always believed she was the best example. Back in that shabby hospital in the South, she believed the choice she made was the most correct one anyone would make. She insisted she had nothing to regret.
Later, on the streets of the South, she had been abandoned by that wretch An Ran. She survived only because, by luck, she turned a corner and bumped into a group of survivors. As for what happened to her during that period, Chen Jiao refused to talk about it. To her, it didn’t exist.
She struggled all the way north. Life had finally stabilized. She found the Chen family and returned to a life of comfort and food.
She didn’t know whether she brought it on herself or because she had grown too comfortable and restless. The more stable life became, the more she thought about the child who had come out of her belly, He Wen.
The moment she heard the Chen family discussing plans to head south, her heart felt like a locked cage flung open and all the trapped emotions rushed out.
She didn’t want to admit it, but she had no choice: she missed He Wen badly.
But someone without parents to protect her was nothing more than an orphan. Even if she carried the Chen family’s bloodline, her parents were already dead in the apocalypse. In the Chen family she had no strong backing. Between her He Wen and Chen Chaofa, it was naturally Chen Chaofa whose situation mattered more.
Chen Jiao wore a smile now, but inside she felt a sharp sour ache. Her longing for He Wen grew to a level she had never expected.
Yet Chen Chaoxi looked at her with admiration, holding a beer, sitting beside the counter, saying,
“Jiao, you really have grown more sensible.”
Chen Jiao smiled with pride, but the bitterness in her eyes was something no one could see.
If this was cause and effect, then what she was tasting now was the bitter fruit of the cause she herself planted.
In Jinmen Base, the weather gradually improved. No longer did people freeze to death the moment they stepped outside. As people could finally leave their homes, the authorities began issuing tasks at the mission center: missing-person searches, collecting mutated species, and so on.
Most tasks were clearing snow, digging out the ten-meter-thick layers that buried the base, slowly revealing the original appearance of the settlement.
More and more people gathered at the mission center, and information flowed better than before.
Suddenly, Chen Jiao began acting like someone possessed, spending entire days at the mission center.
Meanwhile, in Yaoyang Base, Fatty calculated the number of survivors left after the blizzard. His own burden group, plus a number of Hexi survivors and those from the Grand Fortune Hotel, totaled fewer than six thousand.
He no longer bothered wasting manpower to dig the whole base out of the snow. Following Zhan Lian’s advice, he ordered strength-type ability users to dig only the underground parking structures, especially ones with civil defense installations. Those were Fatty’s priority.
They had learned their lesson. Zhan Lian was worried more planes might come someday to bomb them again, so he intended to dig out several reinforced underground garages as shelters.