War Truck in the Apocalypse

Chapter 4: Encounter With An Earth-Digging Insect

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation

Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

After traveling for half an hour, Shen Cong had yet to see anything new. Everywhere he looked was the same barren wasteland.

At one point, he saw the ruins of a building, which looked like an apartment for a company’s employees, but only its broken steel frame was left, and even it was all twisted. 

Shen Cong left his truck to investigate, but he did not see any signs of life. 

He did not discover any moving objects from the scans provided by the battlefield surveillance radar either. The infrared thermal image scanner also did not detect any heat. 

He had thought about how a lot of people would not be able to survive the disaster, but when it truly happened, he found himself unable to get used to a desolate world where he was the only one alive. 

He did not discover anything to eat. 

The resources stored in Titan would only last three years, and that was if he was frugal with them. His fuel could only last him 1,000 km. 

Shen Cong had thought that once the apocalypse arrived, he would not have to pay to use the gas stations, but he did not expect that the storm would destroy everything, so there would be no gas stations left. 

Fortunately, Titan had become “alive”, and he could slowly guide it toward evolution so that it could use solar energy or other energy sources to have kinetic energy. 

Activity could become stronger. This was something Shen Cong knew well. A month ago, Activity was only activated on Titan’s metallic frame, but now, its entire body possessed the Activity, and it reflected on Shen Cong’s own body by strengthening it. 

He felt like he could kill a bull with one punch. 

‘If I’m headed in the right direction, Wuwei is 1 km away from me.’ Shen Cong came to this conclusion once he made some calculations by using his car’s speed and time as variables. 

But now, he did not have a GPS to guide him, and there were no buildings to serve as landmarks, so there was no way of knowing his precise location. 

Suddenly, Titan swayed violently and snapped Shen Cong out of his thoughts. 

He immediately connected with Titan and sensed that there was something underground knocking against its undercarriage. 

‘A living creature?’

Shen Cong was not excited. He became fully on guard, since he was someone with a persecution complex and there was something knocking against Titan’s undercarriage. He stomped on the brakes, and Titan stopped firmly on the yellow sand. 

The creature crashing against the undercarriage was not large, and while it was fierce, it was not strong enough to damage Titan, considering the fact that Shen Cong had reinforced it. 

But it would not be Shen Cong’s style if he did not retaliate after he was attacked. 

Besides, he wanted to see just what sort of creature had managed to survive the disaster. 

Bang!

Another crash, and Titan swayed. 

For a reason even he did not know himself, Shen Cong decided that he should not leave the truck recklessly. Instead, he walked into the compartment and got himself a periscope from the tools section. Then, he slid open a steel panel the size of a fist at the bottom and pushed the periscope down. 

It was the way a person burdened with a persecution complex and not having any sense of safety behaved. They did everything meticulously and could think of many ways to deal with a situation. 

The periscope took a turn below the undercarriage, and Shen Cong discovered the living creature knocking against the truck. 

It was a mutated insect that resembled a cockroach and was about the size of Titan’s tyre. Shen Cong had switched out Titan’s original tyres with tyres made for large machinery. Their diameter was 1.5 m, which meant that the mutated insect was 1.5 m long. There were also a pair of chelicerae resembling large sickles growing at its mouth. 

Its chelicerae shone with a dark, silvery glow as if it was made of steel. 

Shen Cong could not understand what he was seeing. 

How could there be such a large insect?

However, when he thought about it, since Titan could become alive, it should be a common sight for insects to mutate during the end of the world. 

Since Shen Cong could not change what had happened in front of him, he sucked in a deep breath and knew that he could only accept it. 

The large insect seemed to have become angry after discovering that it could not move the undercarriage even if it rammed against it. It turned its body and dug into the sand before it shot out and crashed against Titan’s undercarriage again. 

It did so with a determination fueled by fearlessness toward death. 

This troubled Shen Cong slightly. He did not know how he should handle the insect which knew how to dig its way out of the ground. However, at the sight of the sharp chelicerae, Shen Cong resolutely gave up on the thought of fighting against the insect. 

Since he could not leave his truck, he could only outwit the creature. 

Once Shen Cong thought about things a little, an idea popped into his mind. He brought out a strip of cured meat from his resource section. The calorie content of cured meat was not high compared to the volume of space it took, so Shen Cong only stored a small amount of it in the truck, and its purpose was just to improve his palate. 

He hooked the cured meat on a metal hook. Then, he fixed one end of the metal hook on a metal chain.

He then placed the metal chain at the hole where the periscope was—Shen Cong’s way of killing the large insect was by catching it on a hook. 

He groped about his storage of items for a high-pressure air shotgun that could shoot shells loaded with steel shots. He also placed a whistle in his mouth before getting ready to fish for the insect. 

However, when he pushed the hook out of the hole, he found himself a little reluctant to sacrifice a full strip of cured meat, so he cut off half of it and took it back before he lowered the hook down the hole, put the mouth of the high-pressure air shotgun at the hole, and blew the whistle. 

The insect was idiotically ramming against the undercarriage when it heard the whistle, and when it saw the cured meat, it immediately became full of vigor. 

It opened its mouth wide and clamped its jaws around the meat, which meant that it bit down on the hook. It could not free itself no matter how it tried, and it let out wretched screeches. 

No matter how big an insect was, it only possessed the intelligence of an insect. 

Shen Cong had intended to use the air pressure shotgun to kill it, but when he saw how stupid the insect was and found out that its bite force was not strong, he brought out a metal fork, positioned it at the hole, and stabbed down. 

Splutter!

Shen Cong was as strong as a bull. When he used his full strength, he could leave a mark on a steel panel that was 10 mm thick, much less an insect. 

The iron fork stabbed into the insect’s mouth and went out the other side of its head. The insect struggled for a moment, then breathed its last. 

Shen Cong keenly noticed that the insect had Activity as well, and it was becoming fainter by the moment. 

He pulled open the secret door at the undercarriage and pulled the insect into the truck compartment. 

He was prepared to research the creature thoroughly. 

*****

Six years ago, when he needed to rely on his own strength to modify Titan, Shen Cong had to gain a lot of knowledge, and this allowed him to cultivate a personality of doing everything himself. 

Any normal person would just find the large insect strange after being puzzled by its existence for a while once they killed it. 

But Shen Cong, in the spirit of research, took photographs of the large insect, made records of what he saw, dissected it, and analyzed its data. Then, he categorized all of it in his laptop and saved the file. 

He had a laptop that was there specifically for him to record all the information regarding the apocalypse. 

This might be another trait of his that separated him from other people. Others would struggle to survive, while he treated the apocalyptic world as a new world for him to explore. 

‘Its muscle elasticity is very strong, which is the result of post-Activity strengthening. But how did this insect form a connection with Activity? Could it be that he gained this ability because of the meteor falling as well?’

Once he recorded the various data gathered from the insect, Shen Cong frowned and thought deeply. 

He gave a name to the insect—earth-digging insect.

He also categorized it under an umbrella known as: mutated cockroach type insect. 

As for its combat strength, he wrote: Low intellect, very weak, fierce. 

‘It seems like once its body becomes bigger, it also gains more flesh. I wonder if I can eat it.’ 

Shen Cong cut off a snow-white muscle stripe from the earth-digging insect’s leg, and once he tested it for acid-base reaction, he found that there was nothing wrong with it. He then made the decision to clean it, fry it, and see whether he could eat it. 

If everything was okay, he would have the possibility of living through the apocalyptic world. At the very least, he would not run out of food. 

While he fried the insect meat over an induction cooker, he started researching the earth-digging insect’s chelicerae. They were about the length of an adult man’s palm and had drastically regressed to the point that they were a mere sclerotin structure that resembled sickles. However, Shen Cong felt that the two chelicerae were more similar to metal compared to sclerotin.

‘Metal? Activity? What do these have to do with each other?’

Shen Cong frowned, but he could make no sense of it. 

Everything in the apocalypse was filled with transformations that made him feel lost. 

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He had too little information, and he could not straighten his thoughts. Hence, he gave up on conducting pointless research and instead went on to taste the insect meat that had been fried to the point that it was completely cooked. He cut off a piece of flesh that was the size of a fingernail and tentatively chewed on it. After a moment, he came to a conclusion. 

‘I don’t know whether it’s poisonous or not. But as for the taste… it tastes a little like chicken, but it’s not crispy. It’s rather dry, and when I eat it, it feels like I’m eating dry firewood. The next time I fry it, I should add more oil.’

After tasting a small piece, Shen Cong decided not to continue eating the insect. He wanted to wait for a little while to see whether it was poisonous before he did anything else. 

He placed a few medicines and injections that could quickly get rid of poison beside him so that he could treat himself at any moment should he begin to show symptoms of poisoning. 

After that, he activated Titan and went on his way once more.