Eaten Ch.155

Chapter 155: Crayfish

“Only Wu Heng would have any use for it,” Xue Qi added from the side.

Lin Mengzhi was just about to say that a general never fights an unprepared battle, and Wu Heng was about to nod in agreement, when a voice beat them to it.

“I could use it too.”

Before the three of them could turn around, a smiling man bent down beside them, several boxes in each hand. He put the condoms away, straightened up, and looked at the stunned trio.

“What’s there to be so surprised about?”

Wu Heng: “Isn’t that a bit too many?”

Lin Mengzhi: “They’re all the largest size. Are you really that big?”

Xue Qi: “You can’t judge a big d*ck by sight.”

“No need to worry about that,” the man replied with a smile. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Pu Fei, a member of Captain Wang’s team.”

“So who are you buying those for?” Xue Qi asked curiously. He hadn’t noticed any particularly suggestive atmosphere between any two people among them.

“I’m in stable bed relationships with three people,” Pu Fei said, eyes curved in a smile. If you looked closely, there was a faintly seductive glint in them. “You can try guessing who those three are.”

Pu Fei didn’t bother considering what these youngsters might think, or whether this might affect their psychological health. After taking what he needed, he turned and left.

The three of them followed him with their eyes as he walked away, turning halfway around. They had never paid much attention to everyone under Wen Yuan’s command before—like Pu Fei. But now, looking at him on his own, they realized the man had broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and long legs—an exceptional physique, with an elegant, almost otherworldly bearing.

“Mengzhi,” Wu Heng was the first to snap out of it. It was hard for his attention to linger long on people unrelated to him. “Why are you blushing?”

“No, it’s—he—this—” Seeing Xue Qi also turn to look at him because of Wu Heng’s question, Lin Mengzhi’s face not only failed to cool down, it flushed even redder. He pointed at Pu Fei’s carefree departing figure. “Wen Yuan only brought Jiang Xun, and she’s the only woman. Who is he sleeping with? Don’t tell me Jiang Xun can split into multiple bodies?”

“Obviously it’s three men,” Xue Qi said. “Lin Mengzhi, how can you be this dumb?”

Lin Mengzhi felt his worldview shatter all over again.

Wu Heng, on the other hand, didn’t think it was a big deal.

Neither did Xue Qi.

“Being with that many people… wouldn’t that be exhausting?” Lin Mengzhi said awkwardly, his face cycling through all sorts of colors.

“He doesn’t look like a top at all—he’s obviously the one just enjoying himself. Why would he be tired?” Xue Qi spoke with the same scholarly confidence he used when discussing insects.

“Bottoms get tired too,” Wu Heng disagreed with Xue Qi’s point. “If he’s dealing with three tops, that’s even more exhausting.”

When it came to practical experience, Xue Qi had none. After thinking it over, he said, “As long as it’s not all at once, it should be… manageable, right?”

“All at once?! Even the videos I’ve seen don’t have that many people!” Lin Mengzhi shouted. “With that many, if there’s not enough room, does the extra one just sit there and watch?”

“How would I know?” Xue Qi said.

Wu Heng also shook his head.

Xue Qi smiled at Wu Heng. “You’ll definitely never get the chance to try, Wu Heng. Old Xie would never let anyone lay a hand on you.”

“I’ve never thought about it,” Wu Heng said. “And he can forget about it.”

Xue Qi gave a faint smile, then turned to Lin Mengzhi. “But you still have a chance.”

“…” The image of himself lying in bed with three men made Lin Mengzhi’s scalp tingle in horror. “Get lost!”

After that brief interlude, everyone continued gathering supplies they could use and had the means to transport. Wu Heng carried out a silent sweep like a typhoon passing through, putting on a shared act of heartbroken regret with Wen Yuan’s group over the gasoline they couldn’t take—before ultimately returning to the gas station ensnared by ferns and transferring nearly two-thirds of the fuel into his storage space in one go.

Along the way, he also stuffed any flowers, birds, insects, or animals he encountered into the space. It wasn’t just to secure a few extra meals for now—he was thinking ahead. The situation in Deathlands was unclear; if biodiversity there turned out to be limited, the creatures in his space could later be released to enrich its ecological variety.

The next day, they left the main city. Over the following days, it rained without pause—endless overcast skies and steady rainfall. The fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field energy even surpassed the intensity at the very beginning of the apocalypse. All life on the planet underwent a second wave of mass death and rebirth.

Jiang Xun received a call from Jingzhou. Besides the usual reminder to stay alert for extreme weather, the other end also briefed her on the worsening environmental conditions around the world and the high-risk mutated animals frequently appearing in different regions.

For example, the wild boar herds that had left Shenjian—each one now larger than a truck—were specifically lying in ambush along routes commonly traveled by humans.

And in Qianzhou, the high-risk species turned out to be… crayfish running rampant across the entire city. At first, people listening to the report found it almost funny—until the operator added that with a casual squeeze of one claw, a single crayfish could snap a human cleanly into two halves.

“Are they tasty? Are they tasty? Are they tasty?” Quite a few people in the team focused on that particular point.

“Trying them is free. You’re welcome to go test it yourselves,” the operator replied irritably.

For the sake of crayfish, the team altered their route and made a special detour to Qianzhou.

—

The Qianzhou base wasn’t large, but it housed nearly thirty thousand people. Its defensive walls were built higher than those of other bases, and reinforced on the outside with double-layered iron plating.

Upon arriving, the team saw vast swarms of crayfish gathered outside the base—dense and dark, each one reaching half the height of the city wall. As soon as they made a move, they helped eliminate hundreds of thousands in one sweep, finally allowing the guards and officials—who hadn’t rested in days—to catch their breath.

The people inside the city didn’t forget to thank their benefactors. They prepared an entire banquet of crayfish dishes in their honor—though none of them had shells anymore, just glossy, peeled crayfish meat.

They ate and chatted at the same time.

The base’s leaders were a middle-aged couple. They introduced themselves as former night-market vendors before the apocalypse. Their specialty? Crayfish. Braised in oil, garlic-flavored, steamed, mustard-seasoned—there wasn’t a style they couldn’t make.

For over twenty years, the couple had worked diligently selling crayfish. Crayfish had bought them a house and a car. Crayfish had put three children through graduate school. But never in their wildest dreams had they imagined that what they once considered their god of wealth would one day worry them so much their hair would turn white.

“Qianzhou crayfish used to be nationally famous—featured on countless TV programs,” the male leader said, unable to suppress a flicker of pride when mentioning his hometown’s signature dish.

But that pride vanished almost instantly.

“Those lakes—whether artificial or natural—after that rainstorm, they all expanded and deepened. At first, no one noticed. It was only when we truly ran out of food that we thought of the crayfish fry. Honestly, if we’d had even one bite left to eat, we would never have laid a hand on them. That was a whole year’s income for vendors like us.”

“But if we hadn’t gone fishing, nothing would’ve happened. The moment we did… it was like we’d stirred up a hornet’s nest. They seemed to wake up all at once, crawling out in droves—and they were much bigger than before! As big as a person!”

“I’d say more than that,” Yang Xiaoyun said. “The ones outside look way bigger than people.”

“That was just at the beginning,” the female leader explained. “They keep growing. They just keep reproducing and growing nonstop, until they reach the size you’re seeing now.”

“During that stretch of extreme heat and then the heavy snow, they calmed down quite a bit. But didn’t it rain again recently? They became active all over again—crazier than at the start. Right now, our base doesn’t have anything else to focus on. There’s only one job left: fighting crayfish.”

The male leader looked like he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. “In just these two months, we’ve killed nearly as many crayfish as we used to sell in an entire year. And they’re huge now—we can’t even finish eating them. If you like them, eat as much as you want. When you leave, take however much you can carry.”

“We don’t have vehicles, so we can’t take—”

“The base has vehicles. We’ll give you a few cars—no big deal,” the female leader said generously. Then her expression grew serious. “But I do have a request. Could you stay in Qianzhou a while longer? Our people truly haven’t had proper rest in a long time.”

The male leader nodded repeatedly in agreement. “Yes, yes. The worst thing about these beasts is their claws. Even though our city walls are reinforced with iron, they keep chiseling at them endlessly—it won’t hold forever. Not to mention they’re good at digging tunnels underground. They’re practically impossible to defend against.”

“Isn’t there any way to wipe them out completely?” Wen Yuan asked with a frown. If this dragged on indefinitely, setting aside the energy drain on ability users, people might start developing psychological problems.

“They’ve hidden eggs in the lakes—not just the lakes, they’re everywhere outside too. Each one can lay tens of thousands of eggs now. In the past, the eggs took some time to grow, but after this rain, their growth rate is like they’re riding a rocket. In less than a week, they’re crawling straight out of the water.”

“Even if we came up with a solution, the rate we kill them at can’t keep up with how fast they reproduce—unless there’s some way to make them go extinct. But if they really did go extinct, then we’d never get to eat crayfish again.” The female leader forced a smile, trying to find humor in hardship.

“Who knows when this rain will finally stop.”

“No one complains about there being too little crayfish meat now,” the male leader said, patting his stomach. “We’ve even shipped quite a lot of these things to other bases. Sigh, can’t finish them, just can’t finish them.”

Wu Heng looked at the man across the table for a moment. If not for the deep lines etched into his face, he might have thought the man was bragging.

“Would poisoning them work?” Wu Heng had already finished eating and was now feeding large chunks of steamed crayfish meat to X and Shukui beside him.

“We’ve considered that,” the female leader replied, turning to him, still visibly troubled. “But not to mention that a lot of pesticides and insecticides can’t even be found anymore, even if we had them, we wouldn’t have nearly enough.”

Wu Heng fell silent again, continuing to feed the two under the table.

He drifted into thought and didn’t notice that he had handed a chili-coated piece to X. X nearly breathed fire on the spot and kicked Wu Heng hard twice in the shin with both claws.

Wu Heng ignored him. After another stretch of silence, he spoke up again.

“What about sealing them in? No matter what kind of creature it is, it shouldn’t be able to survive without oxygen.”

The two base leaders both froze.

“Seal them in? What do you mean?”

Lin Mengzhi sucked on his fingers and said, “Just trap the crayfish in the lakes. You can’t even figure that out? Wow, aren’t you the ones in charge? The future of this base looks worrying!”

“No, no, no.” The male leader shook his head like a rattle drum. “That’s far too unrealistic. We don’t have any tools capable of confining them to the lakes. Even if we did—tarps, fishing nets, things like that—they wouldn’t withstand those claws.”

Wu Heng nodded seriously, acknowledging the validity of that point. Soon after, he wiped his hands clean. As he lowered them, a lush green elephant ear plant suddenly sprouted into existence beside him.

“What about using this?”

At the sight of the plant, not only the two leaders but everyone else at the table—including their own teammates—were struck speechless.

The leaders weren’t just startled by a plant appearing out of thin air; they had also never seen a living plant symbiote before—only heard of such things in passing.

As for the others, they were stunned for a different reason: how had they not thought of using aquatic plants to counter the crayfish? Of course, even if they had thought of it, they didn’t possess that ability.

Wu Heng dismissed the plant and resumed feeding crayfish meat to the dog and bird, who had long since grown impatient.

The male leader finally snapped out of it. He stammered for a while before managing to squeeze out a dry question:

“Who… who are you?”

Most of the people in the team had never formally introduced themselves—especially the younger ones. The two leaders and the other base administrators had simply treated them as kids. Not out of disdain, but out of the natural concern elders feel toward the young—let the children focus on eating.

The female leader instinctively turned to look at Wen Yuan. His quiet authority was unmistakable; anyone with eyes could tell he held the position of power and decision-making within this group.

Yang Xiaoyun held back a laugh. Leaning over the table, he made a tiny measuring gesture with his fingers. “If we really have to say it… his rank might be just a little bit higher than our captain’s.”

His light tone earned him a sharp look from Wen Yuan.

The two base leaders visibly trembled. “Shocked” wasn’t enough to describe their expressions anymore. They weren’t inexperienced in the ways of the apocalypse—seemingly ordinary young people turning out to be hidden powerhouses wasn’t unheard of. Their own children were examples of that.

But at least their children hadn’t hidden it this thoroughly. As long as someone possessed an ability, even brief contact would reveal the strong fluctuations of their power.

Yet this quiet young man—who had spent most of the time simply eating—hadn’t given off even the slightest oppressive aura of an ability user. On the surface, all he seemed to have was an unreasonably long head of hair and a calm, somewhat gloomy but strikingly beautiful face. And in the apocalypse, beauty alone usually only brought trouble—it didn’t even guarantee fairness or respect in a transaction.

And yet… his strength was greater than everyone present?

The female leader swallowed. Her attitude shifted completely in an instant. Carefully, she asked, “How should we address you?”

Wu Heng opened his mouth, about to respond, but Xue Qi answered loudly on his behalf.

“Rex! You can call him Rex.”

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