Chapter 85: The Treasury

A dazzling array of steel hardware filled every line of sight beneath the lofty dome, the cold metal exuding an immense, suffocating pressure.

As the most important military base on the outskirts of the Kyoto metropolitan area, Shoka Garrison could be said to house every kind of weapon and vehicle ever fielded by the Ground Self-Defense Force, and because it also served as the headquarters of the research division, it even possessed a full range of experimental new weaponry.

Inside this vast warehouse were main battle tanks, armored fighting vehicles, self-propelled howitzers, self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, rocket artillery, self-propelled mortars, and more besides.

It was no exaggeration to say that the weapons stored here were the true crystallization of the world’s military technology, unmistakably weapons of mass destruction.

With the arsenal kept at this base, it would have been more than enough to fight a localized conflict of moderate intensity.

The small Vulcan cannon and RPGs Su Yi and the others had used earlier to wipe out the ghoul army were nothing more than children’s toys by comparison.

If the apocalypse had not arrived without the slightest warning, and if the high mutation rate among humans had not left humanity’s war machine with no chance to even start turning, then an army of a few billion ghouls, despite their vastly superior physical prowess, would truly have been no match for human firearms.

Tsugawa held his breath and stared motionlessly at the endless display of equipment before him.

He understood perfectly why Su Yi had made the decision to take complete control of Shoka Garrison. For the surviving humans to carve out living space in this world overrun by ghouls, these weapons could play an unimaginably important role.

Su Yi sprang lightly upward and landed atop the turret of a Type 90 main battle tank.

According to Tsugawa’s explanation, the tank beneath his feet weighed nearly fifty tons; its firepower, mobility, and armor protection were all among the finest in the world, and Shoka Garrison had no fewer than thirty of them in service, amounting to a quarter of the Ground Self-Defense Force’s total Type 90 inventory.

As for the other self-propelled weapons, there was no need to mention them at all. That alone showed how important Shoka Garrison had been to the Kyoto metropolitan area before the end of the world.

Su Yi lowered his body and placed a hand on the tank’s outer armor.

After a full day, his storage space had finally completed its upgrade. This was the first time he had tried to take in an external object after the enhancement.

There was no flash of light or burst of sound, not even a whisper. As a sharp pain pricked at Su Yi’s brow, and after about a few seconds, the massive tank vanished from where it stood, leaving only the track marks in the floor as proof that it had once been there.

Because Su Yi had explained it in advance, Tsugawa and Hashimoto Ryoko had both steeled themselves for what was about to happen.

Even so, seeing such a behemoth disappear before their eyes still made it impossible for them to hide the shock on their faces.

This was not like the small firearms Su Yi had taken in before; this was a main battle tank over seven meters long and more than three meters wide.

Su Yi sensed the state of the storage space within him. After this expansion, it had become a vast chamber thirty meters in length, width, and height, and even the Type 90 tank occupied only a tiny portion of it.

Moreover, the ratio of length, width, and height was not fixed. As long as he willed it, he could alter it freely to suit his wishes. In effect, Su Yi now possessed a portable space with a total volume of twenty-seven thousand cubic meters whose shape he could adjust at will.

Of course, for the time being, this space, though large, could only store objects. It could not, like the portable spaces of some web fiction protagonists, be turned into a plantation or used to raise animals.

And with the expansion of the space, Su Yi had encountered certain limitations in taking items in as well. For example, the larger the object, the longer it would take to store, and the number of times he could open it in a day was limited, or else it would exceed the burden his body could bear.

Still, in the present situation, the enlarged storage space was far more useful than the original one-cubic-meter version.

Otherwise, making use of the enormous stockpile of weapons at this military base and transporting them out would have been a serious problem.

Su Yi raised his hand and began selecting the remaining weapons and equipment one by one to take in.

...

Qingjian lay prone, his hair a tangled, dry mess.

Though the weather was hot, he wore a shabby, filthy overcoat, curling his entire body of less than one hundred and sixty-five centimeters inside it. The coat was stained black with grime, its original color impossible to discern, and under the blazing heat it gave off a nauseating stench.

As a seventeen-year-old boy who had been only mildly fastidious about cleanliness before the apocalypse, Qingjian had long since grown used to that smell.

Because he knew that if he did not do this, he would die.

Ghouls possessed a sense of smell far keener than that of ordinary humans, and they were especially sensitive to the scent of the living. Without this coat, dug out of a pile of trash more than a month ago, to conceal him, the chance of being discovered by ghouls whenever he ventured outside would rise sharply.

Yes, ventured outside.

In this world now covered everywhere with ghouls and other monsters, Qingjian, like every other survivor, went out for only one purpose: to find food.

It had already been more than two months since the disaster struck, and most of the food stockpiled by survivors before the end of the world had been exhausted. To stay alive, they had no choice but to leave the shelters that gave them a little sense of security and struggle for even the faintest chance of survival.

Regrettably, as far as Qingjian knew, the vast majority of those survivors who took their first step in search of food never lived to see the next morning.

The gap between ordinary humans and ghouls was simply too great. Completely outmatched in strength, speed, stamina, perception, and more, a person had almost no choice but to flee once encountering a ghoul.

And with the sheer number of ghouls and the breadth of their distribution, the moment an ordinary survivor took that step, there was a ninety-nine percent chance they would be torn to pieces and become ghoul food.

Qingjian, of course, was not like them. He was an awakened Evolver.

Yet even as an Evolver of considerable strength, Qingjian still felt himself growing ever more hard-pressed in this world of dangers at every turn.

The survivor group he belonged to numbered fifty-five people in total, six of whom, including himself, had originally been Evolvers.

By relying on one another’s abilities and cooperating together, the group’s life was difficult, but at least it had not yet reached the point of imminent starvation. Indeed, because they often carried out rescue operations while searching for food, the number of survivors in the group had slowly continued to increase.

Though the future offered no visible hope, at the very least they could count on surviving one day at a time.

But even such a fragile situation had been shattered three days ago.