Living in the steel house wasn't very pleasant, so the energetic Li Ke got up early, intending to take care of his physical needs while the two women lingered in bed.
There was no way around it; being too strong was one of those downsides.
He quietly got up, closed the door, washed up, and then swayed towards the femal merchant's room, ready to enjoy this truly comfortable woman's company one last time.
But a sudden gust of yellow sand swept by, causing Li Ke to squint and his drowsy mind to clear abruptly.
"A sandstorm?" This was what his still-smoky mind was thinking, but then Li Ke suddenly realized something and immediately looked towards the other side of the canyon that Tsunade and Kiri had dug.
The next moment, Li Ke's desire vanished, replaced by a chill, for he saw zombies.
Endless zombies, staggering along the distant cliffs, relentlessly moving in one direction, their numbers nearly equal to before.
This time, his enhanced vision allowed him to see even more zombies in the distance.
These zombies, still one after another, seemed endless, relentlessly advancing into the distance.
He looked around; in every direction, the vast wilderness remained an endless expanse of zombies, without exception.
The moon in the sky cast a dim, yellowish glow, and the swirling yellow sand made the sky appear as if it were night.
"..."
Li Ke stared, mouth agape. Even as the wind carried sand into his mouth, he didn't react, his gaze fixed intently on the zombies.
Today…
Wasn't it the sixth day?!
Li Ke mentally summoned his system time, staring at the blood-red six for a moment, before silently accepting this reality.
He silently went to the merchant's room, but didn't do anything strange. Instead, he took all the steel frames, bought the merchant's last seven grenades, locked the main gate, and returned to their steel hut.
When he returned, Kiri and Tsunade had just finished dressing and were about to come out to wash up, but Li Ke stopped them and made them look outside.
Kiri's mouth gaped open, while Tsunade sat down on the floor, pale-faced.
There were too many, truly too many. They had considered the zombie horde Li Ke had mentioned, imagining it as wave after wave of zombies, but they never imagined it would be as exaggerated as Li Ke described.
"These zombies…"
Kiri swallowed hard, her hands trembling slightly. She finally understood why Li Ke was so fixated on traps and fire attacks.
At this scale, she could never kill them all with a revolver!
"Where did they all come from? And didn't you say they wouldn't appear until the seventh day?"
She lowered her voice, knowing that as long as she didn't shout, she would never be discovered, but she still tried to keep her voice as soft as possible.
"How should I know…"
Li Ke rummaged through his clothes, instinctively reaching for a cigarette. He was panicking too; he still had so much work to do, he still had to…
"Calm down, Li Ke, we're here."
Tsunade, pale-faced, spoke up. Because of the distance, she had regained some strength.
"Besides, based on your description and the number of zombies we've seen, they can't possibly defeat us… First, cover the windows with something. I need to rest for a bit, then block the door."
Li Ke took a deep breath and immediately began to act as Tsunade instructed, sealing the window directly in front of him.
After a while, Tsunade regained some strength and firmly blocked the door with a materialized steel block, giving the zombies no chance whatsoever.
The three of them remained silent inside the house. Li Ke and Kiri silently observed the outside, while Tsunade hid by the bed, staring intently at the steel block at the door, fearing that a blood-soaked monster might burst in at any moment.
Silence was the dominant emotion in the house. Every second was unbearable. No one wanted to start a fight unnecessarily—not Li Ke, and not Kiri either.
"If we fire now, these monsters will overwhelm us all at once, right?"
Kiri wiped the steel pipe machine gun in her hands, as well as the revolver Li Ke had given her. She had been pleased when she received the revolver, as it was a significant upgrade, allowing her to easily unleash her full power.
But now, it seemed a machine gun was more convenient than a revolver.
"Give me two more machine guns. I'll see if they're easy to modify after materializing."
Li Ke didn't speak, but silently crafted two more pipe machine guns and handed them to Kiri.
Kiri didn't hesitate, taking them directly. After materializing them and observing them for a while, she closed her eyes in resignation.
There was nothing to modify; in fact, after materialization, they were considerably weaker than a systematized machine gun.
At least with a systematized machine gun, there's no worry about jamming or falling apart, nor about rate of fire or bullet trajectory. But in reality, this thing is bound to fall apart, and the bullet trajectory is a complete mess—it doesn't even have rifling, making accurate shooting impossible.
So Kiri reluctantly set it aside, preparing to test whether constantly switching between reality and the system would be effective—firing in reality and reloading in the system… or vice versa.
She couldn't determine this in actual combat, but she was certain of one thing: when using a revolver, the system's reloading technology was definitely slower than hers.
She could load all the bullets into her revolver in an instant, taking less than 0.4 seconds, but for Li Ke, the system's reloading was clearly much faster.
Li Ke, waiting nearby, knew from her expression that the modification was worse than no modification at all.
He sighed, continuing to watch the slowly moving zombies and the moon gradually appearing with a blood-red glow in the sky.
If he remembered correctly, the moon shouldn't be turning red this quickly.
Li Ke took a deep breath. If each blood moon arrived earlier and faster, would the seventh one be a full-day blood moon?
The thought made Li Ke's hands clench involuntarily. He stared intently at the moon gradually turning red, watching the time tick towards noon.
And at noon, the moon was indeed half red! The zombies' mobility increased, their movements noticeably more agile.
Li Ke was silent for a moment. This process was three hours faster than the last time, making him chuckle to himself.
"Why is it only these ominous premonitions that come true?"