Lunch at noon turned out to be mushroom soup. Xi Bei said it was planted in the mine by himself and was clean. Mushrooms grew quickly and the amount left over was enough to eat for several days.

An Zhe heard this and silently shrank back into the corner. Xi Bei looked so kind and friendly but unexpectedly, he was a mushroom killer. Still, he had become an accomplice to eating mushrooms.

Before starting to eat, he noticed Lu Feng looking at him. An Zhe thought that the colonel must be remembering the bowl of mushroom soup he wasn’t able to eat before leaving the base. It seemed to be a regret and humans didn’t like this, so it seemed today’s meal made up for it.

After the meal, Xi Bei took them to see the grain reserves. There wasn’t much, only some mushrooms, dried meat strips and a packet of salt.

“The meat was stored from before,” Xi Bei explained. “Traps can catch small monsters. They say that eating the monsters who are too strange can cause an infection. So we eat those that aren’t too strange and look like animals.”

“Low variation monsters can be eaten 24 hours after death.”

“My uncles were right.”

Lu Feng asked him, “What monsters are there here?”

“There are birds, many lizards and big mice,” Xi Bei replied.

“However, after the sandstorm, I saw two particularly ugly things.” Xi Bei spoke with a slightly pale face. “They were extraordinarily large and I was afraid they found me. I only watched them through a telescope and have never seen such things before. Do you know what they are?”

“This should be the Eastern Hills and originally, the pollution level wasn’t high.” Lu Feng stated. “However, in the past five days, there was a magnetic accident resulting in a secondary mutation and mixed-type monsters appeared.”

“…Yes?”

Lu Feng’s voice was slightly dull. “Small monsters will converge through the food chain into large mixed monsters.”

Xi Bei’s face turned a bit white.

An Zhe listened to Lu Feng’s words. It could be imagined that the monsters killed and devoured each other, decreasing the number of monsters but greatly increasing the mutation level. Perhaps even more terrible was that the same thing was happening all over the planet. Every day was becoming more chaotic than yesterday.

Lu Feng looked at Xi Bei. The shape and colour of his eyes combined with his cold and sharp outline. Xi Bei obviously wasn’t used to looking at the colonel and pulled off the piece of paint from the table.

Lu Feng asked, “Has anyone ever mutated in the cave?”

“Yes, some uncles were bitten by monsters and then they bit others.”

“What did you do?”

“Let them go.”

The communicator still wasn’t working but the colonel fulfilled his duties. In the afternoon, Lu Feng borrowed a pen and paper from Xi Bei and briefly documented the situation here.