Chapter 188 : Pleasant Surprises
Elijah promptly implanted Abigail's information into the two standout zombies, who immediately fell in line with the rest.
Satisfied, Elijah instructed Abigail to train the zombies while he drove back to the coastal service area.
Quentin's guys, Brandon and Adrian, were already waiting there with another companion, totaling three trucks.
Daisy and Lily each drove a truck, making a convoy of six vehicles heading towards their destination.
The journey to the mall was smooth. Charlotte and Quentin had already cleared nearby zombies and had some supplies ready at the entrance.
Seeing Elijah's return, everyone resumed loading the trucks.
Throughout the entire day, Elijah led multiple round trips with the convoy, rotating drivers to ensure familiarity with the route.
Due to their activity, they attracted attention from several survivors who intercepted the convoy, seeking assistance or wanting to join them.
Elijah deferred any decisions about new recruits to Quentin, who provided food and water, directing them towards Seabreeze Terrace.
If they lacked the courage or ability to handle such a journey, Elijah wasn't interested in taking them.
By evening, Elijah and his team no longer needed to stay at the mall, leaving Gabriel with Quentin's crew to watch over it.
The rest returned to their respective gathering points.
Over the next two days, Elijah alternated between driving and guarding the supermarket during the day and returning to the island in the evenings to play with Bella, Lily, and especially Jasmine.
Elijah found Jasmine's mature age and profound ideas captivating.
That same evening back on the island, while discussing advanced yoga poses with Jasmine, Elijah suddenly received abnormal consciousness fluctuations from Daisy's consciousness thread.
Through persistent practice of the Hun Yuan Technique, Daisy had finally broken through to the second tier.
Her stealth ability now allowed her to truly merge into shadows without being affected by their size or brightness, even in daylight.
There was no longer a cooldown period for her stealth transitions.
Additionally, Daisy's speed had greatly enhanced, now rivaling that of Gabriel at the first tier. She had become a true shadow assassin, capable of striking anyone without perception abilities.
In addition to Daisy's awakening, on the 20th day of the apocalypse, Elijah observed the Crystal Grass.
Thanks to cultivation with second-tier Corpse Core, the Crystal Grass had reached a breakthrough.
The first node had fully matured, and the second was beginning to grow.
Once the Crystal Grass reached six nodes, Elijah could once again collaborate with Katherine to birth another Tier 3 powerhouse, allowing him to confidently seek revenge against Matthew.
With time running short for his preparations, Elijah also noted another Zombie Grass had grown to the point of awakening, prompting him to produce another awakening potion, which he entrusted to Xavier.
Xavier, who had been diligently assisting with logistics and cargo handling, successfully awakened due to his upbringing near the sea, manifesting water manipulation abilities.
Elijah assigned him to accompany his sister Sophia on the fishing boat to catch fish.
Quentin's crew enjoyed the seafood, a delightful change from canned and packaged foods, prompting an increase in seafood procurement to compensate for the scarcity of meat.
With Xavier focusing on fishing, Elijah brought Hannah back to replace him, with Emily replacing Gabriel, joining the escort team transporting supplies at the mall.
Vincent took over the task of cattle farming, leaving Elijah to concentrate on training and observing the awakening progress of the 26 newly contracted zombies.
Over the 20th and 21st days of the apocalypse, all 26 zombies awakened one after another, leaving Elijah pleasantly surprised at the results.
These 26 zombies, 10 of them have advanced towards body mutation, their forms becoming incredibly diverse!
Some have grown into giants, others are as small as dwarves, some resemble crawlers, and some maintain normal body sizes.
Among the normal-sized ones, either their arms or legs have developed exceptionally, and there are those with hardened bone spikes growing from certain parts of their bodies, similar to clawed zombies.
These mutated forms are too grotesque and terrifying in appearance, none of them appealing to Elijah.
However, he didn't outright discard them; instead, he planned to use them as samples to show to the people on the island and the service area on the shore.
He aimed to educate them on how to deal with similar zombies and where their weaknesses lie.
The other 16 awakened zombies mostly manifested abilities that were already awakened among the people on the island.
For example, strength, defense, speed, fire, and ice abilities were common.
But there were surprises as well; one zombie awakened a perception ability similar to Sophia's, though it wasn't limited to sensing only moving creatures but could perceive all living beings within a range of just under 20 meters.
Aside from this, the biggest surprise was another zombie gaining invisibility abilities.
This invisibility didn't make the zombie transparent but cloaked it in an optical camouflage, rendering it nearly invisible to the naked eye.
This first-level invisibility ability allowed Elijah to cloak himself and his clothing in optical camouflage, disappearing from view.
Acquiring this ability would make traversing areas heavily populated by zombies much easier in the future.
Despite these zombies awakening or evolving, Elijah's nurturing of them didn't end there; he continued to feed them corpse cores.
Even those zombies he didn't desire or whose abilities were redundant received the same treatment.
Elijah intended to wait until these zombies advanced to the second stage and possessed second-stage corpse cores before killing them to obtain the cores.
This process would then facilitate the cultivation of Crystal Grass using second-stage corpse cores.
On the evening of the 21st day after Doomsday, Katherine brought Elijah good news.
After several days of continuous screening, she had finally selected a strain of Red Fruit with higher efficiency in absorbing corpse cores and containing stronger Chi energy.
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Katherine named it Red Fruit No. 2.
That night, Elijah shared this news with everyone and distributed several Red Fruit No. 1 fruits that Katherine had nurtured over the past few days for everyone to taste.
Because the mass cultivation of Red Fruit hadn't yet matured, there were only a few Katherine had screened and ripened, and each person received only two or three.
Even Yello, who joined in for the sake of it, got two.
Everyone praised the fruits after tasting them!
The taste was indeed excellent, but more importantly, they contained Chi.
After consuming them, they could clearly feel their Chi energy increase, especially Sophia, Lily, and other first-level ability holders, who felt it most distinctly.
It was at this moment that Yello, who had already grown quite large, suddenly let out a wolf-like howl, and a familiar wave of consciousness surged into Elijah's mind.
"Yello has awakened?"