Cooking Gourmet Meals in the Apocalypse

Chapter 271: Chapter 268: Waterfall in the Desert

Chen Xing finally understood.

This was no ordinary yellow sand. Just as she’d suspected, there was something strange about it.

This was a real pain.

’If it keeps closing in at this speed, their entire group is going to die here!’

But it seemed impossible for her to draw the sand’s attention on her own.

It looked like the yellow sand was definitely drawn to larger groups of people.

Chen Xing caught up to one of the vehicles and rolled down her window.

By now, the view outside was already obscured by the swirling yellow sand.

She kept waving at the car next to her. After a long moment, the other driver reluctantly rolled down their window. ”What is it?”

”Where’s your leader?”

The man pointed to a vehicle up ahead before hastily rolling his window back up.

Chen Xing sped up again, catching up to the manager’s vehicle.

After another wait, the other window slowly rolled down.

However, her attitude wasn’t bad. ”Thanks for warning us that the sand was coming! We would have all died in our sleep otherwise.”

Chen Xing frowned; the woman’s attitude felt a little fake. ”That sand seems to get faster the more people there are. You have way too many people here; you’ll never get away if you all stick together! You should split into two groups. That way, at least you won’t all die.”

The manager, a woman just under fifty, turned and consulted doubtfully with the others in her car before accepting the proposal. ”Alright!”

She picked up a walkie-talkie and started dividing them into teams.

As the woman divided the teams, Chen Xing felt that something was off about this manager.

She suspected the manager knew about the sand’s properties. The woman assigned only a small number of people to her own team, and they all looked strong and possessed superpowers.

The two teams split up. The manager headed southeast, while the remaining group went southwest.

Chen Xing followed the group heading southwest.

Less than twenty minutes later, the yellow sand had already caught up to them.

Seeing the sand right behind them, the group of over one hundred people simply stopped their vehicles and got out.

Seeing this, Chen Xing had no choice but to stop her car and walk over as well.

The group sat huddled together in a circle, holding hands, their faces filled with despair and helplessness.

”Why aren’t you running anymore? If you stay here, you’ll die...” Zheng Weinan said anxiously, trying to reason with them.

’Maybe there’s still hope if we keep driving?’

But before he could finish, he spotted his own mother in the large crowd.

In just one year, his mother seemed to have aged more than a decade, with many more wrinkles on her face.

Mrs. Zheng also saw the son she had longed for day and night. She let go of the hands she was holding, stood up, and stared at her son in disbelief. ”Nannan... Is it really you, Nannan...”

She had always believed her son was still alive. And she was right!

”Mom...”

Chen Xing was speechless. ’I get that their mother-son bond is deep, but now really isn’t the time for a reunion.’

The yellow sand was upon them.

Chen Xing saw everyone watching the mother and son, seemingly glad that they could at least die together.

Mrs. Zheng was the more clear-headed one. She looked at her son with sorrow and said, ”There’s something strange in this sand. Once it catches up, everyone dies!”

Their group once numbered nearly a thousand people.

But because they ran into this yellow sand, the manager split them into two groups.

The other group of seven or eight hundred people were all killed.

Among the survivors, another portion died when they encountered monsters.

Chen Xing knew there was something off about that manager.

So she knew a larger group would attract the sand, which is why she ran off with only a small number of people.

She’d used the rest of them as bait to lure the monster away.

While everyone’s attention was focused on the mother and son, Chen Xing took out the Little Poison Grass.

Instantly, everyone was paralyzed and collapsed.

Chen Xing moved with incredible speed, pulling the hundred-plus people into her Cat Space one by one.

’It’s a good thing the Black Cat Space was upgraded,’ she thought. ’Otherwise, it would’ve been really hard to get this many people inside.’

Just as everyone was safely inside the space, she saw the yellow sand in front of her flip Meng Hu over.

Chen Xing dashed forward and pulled Meng Hu into the space as well.

Just then, a tentacle-like object shot toward her.

As Chen Xing dodged, she also pulled all of their vehicles into the space.

’They might be safe, but without transportation, they’d just die in the desert anyway!’

She didn’t bother investigating what was in the sand. Whatever it was, it was definitely a monster.

She had expected the sandstorm to persist, but as soon as the people vanished, it dissipated like a puff of smoke.

Before long, Chen Xing saw the cloud of yellow sand rising again, off to the southeast.

The manager’s team hadn’t escaped!

A feeling of immense satisfaction washed over Chen Xing.

Once the yellow sand was far in the distance, Chen Xing brought everyone back out.

The vehicles, of course, came out first.

With that done, she lay down beside Meng Hu, joining the others on the ground.

When the people woke up, they saw that everyone was alright, though their vehicles were half-buried in the sand.

Overjoyed and relieved, they didn’t bother investigating what had happened. Instead, everyone rushed to dig out the vehicles.

They thought it best to leave the desert as quickly as possible, while there was no immediate danger.

Zheng Weinan and his mother didn’t have much time to talk. Once all the vehicles were freed, Chen Xing said her goodbyes.

”This desert is so dangerous, you should come with us!” Zheng Weinan said, thinking it was too risky for Chen Xing to be alone.

”I’m heading in a different direction!” Chen Xing lied casually.

After parting ways with them, she continued heading west.

The deeper she went into the desert, the colder it got.

But Chen Xing was living quite comfortably, driving with the heater on and sleeping in her house space at night.

Five days passed like this before the weather suddenly turned warm.

The daytime temperature in the desert neared fifty degrees. In just half a day, numerous cacti had sprouted from the sand.

As if they had been suppressed for too long, the cacti shot up, growing as tall as a two-story building in just a few hours.

Fortunately, they weren’t too dense, or else she wouldn’t have been able to drive.

After another two hours, she discovered that these cacti were not just plants; they could also move.

They weren’t fast, but they were definitely moving.

At night, the temperature dropped sharply again, and the cacti quickly retracted back into the sand.

Chen Xing was speechless.

She had a growing suspicion that the things she’d sensed beneath the sand earlier were these very cacti.

The next morning, she hit the road early, before the cacti re-emerged.

Half a day later, she saw a waterfall.

The waterfall seemed to fall from the sky itself, descending vertically into the heart of the desert.

It was both beautiful and bizarre.

As she got closer, she could see that the waterfall formed a square, enclosing a patch of green land.

Within a hundred-meter radius of the falls, there was no sand and no cacti.

There was only a concrete surface, damp and covered in green moss.

’So... this sand is afraid of water?’

Chen Xing drove her vehicle onto the mossy area, and the sand stopped trying to engulf it.

’To understand this sand so well, and to build a waterfall to stop the desert from encroaching... no matter how I look at it, this has to be the work of the Xingguang Research Institute.’

Feeling she had found an important clue, Chen Xing turned off her vehicle and prepared to venture into this desert oasis.