Chapter 66: Station Refit

“Dalou, have there been any changes to your ability?”

“It seems…” Dalou scratched his head, looking honest and simple. “I feel like my strength has increased a bit, and my spirits are higher too.”

Lin Xian’s eyes showed a hint of surprise.

“When? Was it on the roof?”

“No, it was when I was chopping up the monster’s corpse looking for the bead. I felt like I absorbed a very fishy and smelly bloody aura…”

Hearing this, Lin Xian frowned.

Bloody aura?

Before, both KIKI and Jiang Yun had said that ability users with monstrous proliferation could directly absorb the flesh and blood of other ability users or anomalies to get stronger.

And after the white monster and the red bug died, that black smoke had appeared and formed the Anomaly Blood Crystal.

It seemed that both he and an ability user like Dalou could gain a certain degree of enhancement by absorbing this black gas.

Even…

He thought of how the giant white monster had also been rapidly changing after devouring Tang Hai.

If Lin Xian wasn’t mistaken, Tang Hai was already an evolved-level ability user.

“Anomalies eat people and get stronger. People eat anomalies… and can also get stronger.”

Lin Xian’s eyes burned.

“It sounds pretty messed up, but it also seems fair.”

The most troubling problem right now was still the path to evolution. He figured that an origin-seed level ability user like Tang Hai, although he had shown almost no combat power in the early stages, had become significantly stronger after evolving.

But looking at his half-human, half-ghost appearance, he always felt that it was very likely the failed evolution KIKI had mentioned.

“Dalou, did you and your sister start fleeing after the first polar night?” His mind was a bit chaotic. Lin Xian took a deep breath and decided not to think about it, starting to chat with Dalou instead.

Dalou shook his head.

“After the polar night came, our parents died, so we… ran.”

A pickup truck became their home. Dalou was an ability user, and his sister Shasha, although young, was mature and courageous. The two siblings cooperated well and managed to escape from several cities of the living dead.

About an hour later, the Infinity slowly pulled into Yuchi Station. It was a small station with only a small waiting hall.

On the branch line within the station, a freight train was also parked.

Lin Xian looked at it. “Dalou and I will go down and check it out first. You and Shasha stay on the train.”

Lin Xian had already built an Ethereal Fluctuation detector based on the blueprint he had scanned from Jiang Yun’s. However, he currently lacked an Anomaly Blood Crystal, so scouting for danger still had to rely on manual labor and radar.

The driver’s cabin door opened, and Lin Xian and Dalou got off the train, one after the other, holding guns.

The two of them, one on the left and one on the right, held flashlights and searched along the freight train that was blocking the way. They found that it was just a mine cart, and it had no locomotive.

The old cars were empty, with nothing of use.

“Just in time.” Lin Xian looked at this big lump of over twenty cars and thought to himself that he had been worried about not having enough steel to upgrade the roof armor.

And here was a ready-made one.

“Dalou.” Lin Xian pointed to the few zombies wandering around the station. “Clean them up.”

“Okay.”

Dalou nodded. It was night now. To reduce trouble, he didn’t use a gun, but instead took the Steel-Cleaving Greatsword and leaped onto the platform. Ten minutes later, the entire Yuchi Station was quiet.

“The commotion will definitely get bigger and bigger.”

Lin Xian went to car 5, dragged down the welding machine and crane, completed the repairs, and then began to pre-cast the armored roof using high-manganese steel according to the roof’s dimensions.

Unlike the grille armor on the sides, which was forged from high-hardness tungsten steel, he planned to make the roof fully sealed, except for the pre-set exhaust and ventilation ports at the back. That’s why he used high-manganese steel.

This type of steel plate had good toughness and impact absorption capabilities. Even in extremely harsh environments, such as high impact loads and severe wear conditions, it could maintain good integrity and performance.

He didn’t just randomly draw the blueprint for the armored roof. He had borrowed the design of the streamlined, shaped protective plate structure on the surface of that heavy TFV600 twin-barreled tank.

This type of protective plate had a double-layer buffer. The two sides were connected to the side protective plates. Under heavy pressure, it could directly transmit the kinetic energy downwards to the car body and at the same time release it onto the tracks.

This would greatly avoid the situation where the roof was caved in by something like the giant white monster, destroying the air conditioning system.

The only difference was that Lin Xian had enlarged the design of this protective plate. According to the dimensions of the Infinity’s cars, he made it into a large top structure of 3 meters by 6 meters. Each piece weighed at least two tons. It was a good thing he didn’t use rolled tungsten steel, otherwise it would have been even heavier.

With the materials in Lin Xian’s current decomposition space, it was far from enough to cover all seven cars of the Infinity. Each passenger car needed at least 4 panels, the electric locomotive needed 10, and the gas turbine locomotive needed 6.

This meant he had to manufacture 36 giant armored roof panels.

Now that Lin Xian’s mechanical manufacturing level had increased, although the speed of manufacturing these structurally simple armor plates was extremely fast, it still consumed a lot of stamina. Each panel took him at least 10 minutes.

At the same time, when he ran out of materials, he had to stop manufacturing and go devour the freight cars over there to get more materials.

Because the armored roof was too heavy, Lin Xian and Dalou forged it directly on the roof. Lin Xian was in charge of covering the roof, and Dalou was responsible for helping with the welding and assembly.

Whoosh~

On this side, Lin Xian used his mechanical repair ability to repair the damaged air conditioning systems on cars 5 and 2, and then manufactured the armored roof panels one by one.

Chen Sixuan and Shasha, on the other hand, used the sprinkler device of the water tank to pull out the water pipes and began to wash the flesh and corpses off the sides and front of the Infinity!

After charging out of a zombie horde of thousands, the front and sides of the entire train were almost covered in blood. Turning on a flashlight revealed a horrifying, hellish scene.

The two women, wearing gas masks, one on the left and one on the right, began to spray.

The water in the water tank was unpurified rain and snow water, not connected to the internal circulation system. Because it was used for the locomotive engine’s circulation cooling, the water in the tank had not frozen.

Lin Xian planned to have the group go into Yuchi City to scavenge after the armor was done. He needed a large amount of basic materials like plastic, glass, and fiber to make a water purifier. At the same time, cars 5 and 2 were also lacking a lot of daily necessities.

“Brother Lin.”

On the tracks, Shasha, wearing a gas mask and holding a spray hose, said to Lin Xian in a muffled voice while washing the wheels.

“There are a lot of bones and stones stuck in the wheels.”

“Clean them out first.”

Lin Xian’s face was covered in fine sweat. Manufacturing the armored roof was constantly consuming his stamina. He said, “We’ll finish the roof first. After it gets light, we’ll come back from the city, and I’ll add wheel wing protective plates to the sides of the train.”

“Lin Xian,” Teacher Chen on the other side said at this moment.

“For situations like derailing, we can use the horizon gate device. If you add wheel wing protective plates, it’s best to leave a certain distance from the ground.”

“I know.”

Lin Xian nodded.

The wheel wing protective plates would be relatively thin and light, mainly to protect the wheels. The horizon gate device, on the other hand, was used to adhere to the tracks during high-speed sprints. Only the locomotive had this system. Cars 1-5 were too old and didn’t have it, so there was still a risk of derailing.

Actually, derailing was a small problem for the team at the moment. The main trouble was broken rails. If it wasn’t an emergency, Lin Xian could manufacture rails to repair them. The fear was being in a full-speed sprint like last night.