Chapter 133: Searching the Apartment |
After leaving, Bai Mu did not head straight home.
He was completely out of cash. Now that the woman was dead, he had to find a way to secure some funds on his own. Furthermore, he wanted to catch a small animal, perhaps a rat, to test the effects of that strange mushroom.
He avoided crowded areas. Although the soldier patrols provided the citizens with a false sense of security today—making it seem like an ideal time for trading—Bai Mu simply had too few valuable items on hand to make a decent profit.
Rather than bartering goods for cash, he figured it would be better to fall back on his old profession.
Bai Mu quietly slipped behind an apartment building about three kilometers away from his own place. He was dressed in a black trench coat. The sun had almost set, shifting the sky from a fiery crimson to a deep, dark red. Visibility was dropping fast, and warm lights began to flicker on in several nearby homes.
Bai Mu's footsteps were incredibly light. He employed a unique walking technique that allowed him to move without making a single sound.
The Illegal Infiltration skill was also taking effect. This passive ability drastically reduced his presence, turning him into a mere shadow hidden within the night.
Bai Mu bypassed the main entrance entirely. Instead, he scaled a water pipe in the narrow alleyway, climbing up to the upper floors of the apartment building barehanded.
As he climbed, he pressed his ear against the exterior wall, listening carefully for any signs of activity inside the rooms.
Reaching the sixth floor, Bai Mu selected a dark, empty room. Using his masterful lock-picking skills, he pried the window open and slipped silently into the apartment.
A faint, musty odor hung in the air. It was a single-occupancy apartment, featuring only a bedroom and a bathroom. There was no kitchen, though a portable induction cooktop sat on a counter.
The bed was neatly made, but large, dark bloodstains marred the sheets. They had dried a long time ago.
'This must have been a solitary resident who was attacked by a Doppelganger,' Bai Mu thought, scanning the room.
The corpse had likely been removed by the Emergency Center, as he could not find any "human fragments" lying around. What he did find strange, however, was the front door. It was perfectly locked, showing absolutely no signs of forced entry.
'Did the tenant willingly invite the Doppelganger inside, only to be murdered?'
Bai Mu analyzed the visual clues scattered around the room to piece together the tragedy that had unfolded here.
While investigating, he methodically rummaged through the cabinets and drawers, thoroughly looting every corner of the apartment.
He did not find any food, but he did recover a flashlight. In the narrow gap between the bed and the wall, he also discovered a crumpled five-dollar bill, likely dropped by the tenant a long time ago.
After stripping the room of anything useful, Bai Mu repeated his silent entry technique on the next empty apartment.
Scavenging was his true calling. Having spent ten grueling years gathering supplies in the apocalypse, he was confident that no one in this Script world knew how to loot better than he did.
Maintaining a brisk pace of about three minutes per apartment, Bai Mu quickly cleared out all the empty units on the sixth floor.
Moving on from the sixth floor, he descended to the fifth. He had deliberately climbed to the top so he could methodically sweep the entire building from top to bottom.
While the odds of finding valuable loot in any single room were low, his sheer speed and volume made up for it.
By the time he reached the third floor, he had amassed two cups of seafood instant noodles, one cup of cheese-flavored instant noodles, an unopened bag of black pepper beef jerky, half a bag of milk caramels, and two bags of butter-flavored potato chips.
Aside from food, he had also secured a bag of coffee beans, half a pack of cigarettes, and various survival tools, including flashlights, candles, and lighters.
Counting both bills and loose change, his cash haul came to a total of 136.60 dollars.
Before leaving his house, he had completely emptied his inventory, so he had plenty of extra spatial slots to store the food.
Recently, however, he was increasingly feeling the limits of his inventory. Even with a travel backpack expanding his available slots, he had accumulated over a dozen miscellaneous items from various Scripts, like the APTX4869.
Items like that might be crucial one day or completely useless the next, making him reluctant to leave them behind in his personal warehouse.
'If I have any spare cash when this Script ends, I really need to buy another inventory expansion item.'
Bai Mu looked at his maxed-out inventory slots. He had shoved the smaller items into his coat pockets, but the sheer volume of loot was becoming cumbersome.
Fortunately, he had found a black backpack in one of the apartments. Hoisting it onto his shoulders, he figured it would give him just enough room to clear out the remaining three floors.
With eight units per floor, he had already searched about twenty apartments. Some were completely barren, while others were gruesome crime scenes soaked in blood.
Of the apartments where people had clearly died, roughly a third had their front doors violently breached.
The building was quite old and outfitted with rusted steel doors. If a full-grown man threw his entire weight against one in a desperate bid to break it down, there was a high chance the entire door frame would pop right out of the wall.
But these breached doors had not simply been knocked loose—they had been warped into terrifying, twisted shapes.
To be precise, they had been peeled back like the lids of tin cans.
The Doppelgangers had violently shredded the reinforced steel as if they were popping open a soda. Bai Mu tested his own might against an intact door, but even with 24 points in Strength, he couldn't replicate the sheer destructive force.
Examining the mangled metal reaffirmed his suspicions: the combat prowess of a Doppelganger was undeniably on the level of a true monster.
He had yet to clash directly with one of the creatures, but he strongly suspected that Doppelgangers did not possess any conventional "weak points."
None whatsoever.
Judging from the intel he had gathered so far, Doppelgangers were essentially resurrected corpses—something akin to zombies. Even if he were to blast through their heads and hearts with a firearm, it likely wouldn't do a damn thing.
'But the personnel from the Emergency Center used fire to deal with those mushrooms,' Bai Mu recalled the recent incident. 'Fire might just be their critical weakness.'
'I need to scrounge up some gasoline or alcohol later to craft a few incendiary bombs.'
Making explosives was another one of Bai Mu's specialties. His recipes for Molotov cocktails and improvised pipe bombs had been refined through countless life-and-death battles. In a survival Script meant to last fifty days, only an overflowing stockpile of ammunition could provide him with a genuine sense of security.
With his plans set, he continued his descent, sweeping the lower floors.
However, as he reached the second floor, he paused. Faint voices were drifting out from a completely dark apartment.
Crouched on the outer ledge and gripping a water pipe, he strained his ears. People were definitely talking, but he couldn't understand a single word. The rapid, guttural chatter sounded entirely like a foreign language.
'Could there be... Doppelgangers hiding in there?'
Truth be told, Bai Mu had been harboring a nagging question: where exactly did all the Doppelgangers go during the day?
Now, he finally had a chance to uncover the answer. However, he knew the Doppelgangers possessed terrifyingly acute senses. After all, they could determine whether an apartment's occupants were solitary or living in a group without ever setting foot inside.
Playing it safe, Bai Mu opted against creeping up to the window to peek inside with his naked eyes.
Instead, he retrieved the Night Vision Camcorder from his inventory. Summoning the Hand of Walrider, he had the invisible appendage grip the Camcorder tightly and angle the lens down through the window, providing him with a clear, top-down view of the room's interior.