The ideal state would actually be an oxygen-producing planted cultivation area, but Lin Xian knows nothing about it, so he could only leave it vacant for now. The last #3 carriage is filled with various tools, motorcycles, cranes, welding machines, and will be used to store materials later on.
When he was busily building his mobile fortress, his phone suddenly vibrated.
Lin Xian was startled, as most of the satellites had been destroyed, and satellite communication functions rarely worked anymore. The main purpose of keeping his phone powered was to store data, maps, and for emergencies later, but he didn't expect to receive a call.
Answering the phone, a slightly nervous female voice came from the other end.
"Lin Xian, are you still in Jiang City? I... I want to join your orbital train plan."
The person on the phone was Chen Sixuan, Lin Xian's college teacher, the only person Lin Xian had been able to contact from his address book in the days after the apocalypse.
Chen Sixuan, twenty-seven, looked like a flower, had no boyfriend, and was considered a rare occurrence in the early-marriage environment of Jiang City before the apocalypse.
In memory, this university foreign language teacher was tall and born into a well-educated family, a typical urban beauty, and was the center of attention in the academy.
When Lin Xian first mentioned his train plan to her, she refused because Lin Xian had not revealed his superpower to her, which made the plan sound unbelievable to her, and at that time, Chen Sixuan still naively believed that a rescue team would come to help her.
However, after Jiang City experienced its first polar night, countless people died in despair, and the eerie darkness continuously devoured the survivors' last vestiges of sanity, Lin Xian saw too much of the societal chaos and the tragic human condition. In this environment, if a woman wasn't a superpower user, her value in those survival teams wasn't even as much as a barrel of gasoline!
He originally thought that Chen Sixuan had either left with a team or had already died, so he was surprised by her call. If she hadn't escaped, how had she survived this long?
At that moment, inside a locked apartment, the curtains tightly drawn, Chen Sixuan with disheveled hair and wearing home clothes, sat tensely curled up in the corner of the sofa, watching her phone's last bit of battery, her once smooth and plump lips now deathly pale and trembling uncontrollably.
For two months, she had experienced the darkest period of her life, with a lack of food and unending nights.
She was awakened every night by terrifying sounds in the darkness, her whole being feeling vague, her body had become noticeably thinner.
Initially, she had been waiting for the official rescue teams, and quite a few sycophants had even delivered supplies to her doorstep, but when she realized that the entire world order had collapsed, and polar night had commenced, Chen Sixuan understood she was trapped in a hopeless situation.
Thus, she began to seek help.
But after the polar night, most people in Jiang City seemed to have disappeared from the earth, with the remaining starting to migrate and flee. Those groups willing to take her in asked her to send a nude photo first to assess her "quality."
At that point, she fully realized that she was no longer the charm-all university teacher, nor the sought-after Chen Sixuan among Jiang City's wealthy boys. She was now a burden, in this apocalyptic world, where even a measure of beauty, was only possible if she offered herself up, just for others to spare a glance.
Just as Chen Sixuan was about to be at her wit's end, she suddenly remembered Lin Xian.
All the power banks had run out of battery, and her phone was also down to its last bit of power.
At that moment, no matter how crazy the plan, even just being able to connect the call, seemed to bring hope.
"Teacher Chen, are you okay?"
Lin Xian's tone was calm and steady, which instantly eased Chen Sixuan's anxiety.
"Lin, student, I'm... I'm still alive. Are you still... in Jiang City?"
Chen Sixuan bit her fingers tightly.
Silence lingered for a while, until Lin Xian's voice finally came through again.
"I am."
Chen Sixuan's body shook, her tension released at once, hope flickering in her eyes, she quickly said over the phone,
"Where are you, can you come get me..."
As soon as she finished speaking, she immediately regretted it.
It sounded ridiculous. Just a few days ago, when she contacted a group planning to flee eastward, she had instinctively uttered the same phrase, and the response from the other end was almost mocking, roughly meaning: "At times like this, you still think you're a princess?"
So she quickly corrected herself, "No no no... I mean, where are you? Can I come to you?"
In order to survive, she had to take the risk, otherwise, when her phone shut down, she would only have two options left, continue to cower in the apartment waiting to die, or aimlessly go out and be torn apart by zombies.
"Teacher Chen," the voice from the other end, Lin Xian said, "Do you have supplies, or have you awakened a superpower?"
Hearing this, Chen Sixuan's heart sank.
She looked around her empty apartment, her lips trembling, in an almost crying tone she said, "No... I don't have any."
"If, if you want me..."
Chen Sixuan never imagined that one day she would say such beggar-like words to one of her students.
But before she could finish, the voice on the other end interrupted her, "Sorry, Teacher Chen, my supplies are also limited, if you want to join my plan, you must have something of value to offer, sexual needs are of no concern to me."