After dealing with the water purifier, Li Qingyu armed himself with the impact drill, connected power, and went to the corner of the Hideout. Aiming at the ceramite floor, he started drilling—he needed a drain.
He'd already gone down one level before and knew that beneath the floor ran a vast shaft hundreds of meters deep, studded with ceramite load-bearing columns. What lay below in the impenetrable darkness remained a mystery.
After some time, Li Qingyu punched two fist-sized holes in the floor. Then, using the tin toilet he'd bought from the trader, some pipes, and ceramite grit, he built a perfectly functional flush toilet. The bathroom problem was solved, except he had to pour water into the cistern manually.
Sanitary module Lv.0 upgraded to Sanitary module Lv.1.
Li Qingyu poured water into the shower head and took a cold shower with pleasure. All the dirty water went down the drain. After cleaning himself up, he washed his stinking clothes and sheets, hung them to dry, and fell into a dead sleep.
He woke up at some unknown hour. Eating automatically, washing it down, he checked production. The candles on the Emperor's altar had burned down; the second bottle of sacred oil was ready. After collecting it, he lit a new candle and poured in the next portion of cooking oil.
Then he went to the purifier. In the first settling tank, only sludge remained on the bottom, while in the second 99 liters of safe water sloshed. Li Qingyu fetched a new batch of dirty water, refilled the system, tossed in another tablet so the process wouldn't stop, and began preparing for a raid.
This time he planned to get to the surface, look for PDF tags, and also ask Lieutenant Rudolfson whether he could get armor-piercing weapons. The trader had given him a quest to kill three chempigs, and you couldn't take those things with bare hands. Last time he'd just gotten lucky—counting on a second stroke of luck was stupid; he needed proper AP.
Li Qingyu slung the plumbing-pipe shotgun over his back, left over from the last outing, put on a full Level 2 armor set, took two smoke grenades and one gas grenade, and headed for the ventilation. Deployment went smoothly.
Again the dizziness—and again the Northern Combat Zone. He landed not far from the previous spot; the Grain Station was visible on the map. It had once been held by rebels, but then Lieutenant Rudolfson had rolled through in a Chimera and cleared out everything alive. Some time had passed since then, and it was unclear who controlled the site now. Li Qingyu decided to check.
Raising his homemade gun, he sprinted for the station two kilometers away. It was midday, but he didn't hide—he just went straight. If a sniper took him out, so be it; his gear was trash anyway.
Spending two-thirds of his stamina, he reached the target, but didn't go inside. He went prone, caught his breath, and began observing. The station was enclosed by a wall of construction ceramite; inside he could see the grain warehouse and an office building. A huge breach gaped in the wall, clearly punched by a Chimera IFV.
Pressing himself to the edge of the breach, Li Qingyu carefully looked in. Chaos reigned: the walls and ground were pocked with craters from a 40 mm autocannon, corpses lay everywhere. Rudolfson had made a punitive raid without trying to hold the place; so the moment he left, the rebels came back.
Now rebels moved around inside—about a hundred people. They were collecting bodies and loading them onto carts. Many carried autoguns and some terrifying homemade contraptions.
"Can't break through? Retreat?" he weighed it.
While thinking, he noticed a rebel barely dragging a cart packed with corpses, hauling it north. Looks like he was taking it for burial? Li Qingyu had an idea. Body processing? What if he followed? If there were PDF bodies at the burial site, he could make a tidy profit off the tags.
But there were lots of rebels, and the farther north you went, the more densely they appeared. How to tail the corpse cart unnoticed? Turning over options in his head, Li Qingyu came up with a bold plan.
He smeared his face, hands, and clothes with dirt and dust, then walked into the station with the calmest expression imaginable. Just walked in—casually, like drinking a glass of water. No one even looked his way. They had no uniform at all and no standardized weapons, and Li Qingyu in his rags blended perfectly into the crowd.
Nervous but not looking around, he kept the corpse cart in sight. Some scrawny kid was pulling it, and it was clearly killing him.
Li Qingyu walked up and began pushing the cart from behind. Feeling the load lighten, the kid turned around.
"Move it—don't space out, there's still a ton to do," Li Qingyu grunted, not lifting his head.
"Oh. Yeah, thanks," the kid replied, leaning harder into the straps.
So the two of them rolled the cart out of the station, heading deeper north into the rebels' rear.
The farther they went, the more people they passed. Li Qingyu saw well-kept fields where locals worked. Sincere smiles shone on people's faces. It looked like the rebels' agri-policy was far more humane than the Planetary Governor's. But Li Qingyu understood: it was an illusion. Let the Governor miss the Imperial tithe—and a tax-collection fleet would arrive with an Inquisitor aboard, and everyone would be finished—loyalists and rebels alike.
In any case, it wasn't his problem. He was just a gang rat from the Underhive, dreaming of climbing up.
After hauling the cart for a while longer, the kid ran out of steam and collapsed by the roadside.
"Whew, I'm going to die. Need to catch my breath!" He panted, sitting on a mound, and stared at Li Qingyu. He wanted to say something, but then he grew wary. "Hey—what unit are you from?"
Li Qingyu froze for a moment while lighting a cigarette, then kept moving.
"Fourth."
The kid's pupils narrowed.
"There is no Fourth unit."
Li Qingyu took a slow drag, looked around—nobody. Then he looked at the kid.
Thirty seconds later, Li Qingyu was wiping blood off his knife. Then he grabbed the body with its slit throat, still twitching weakly, and tossed it on top of the other corpses in the cart.
"You always do this," he grumbled under his breath. "Asking stupid questions. Buried yourself. In the next life, be less curious."
Sprinkling dirt over the bloodstains, he dragged the heavier cart on alone. Soon he came across an old peasant working in a field.
"Hey, old man," Li Qingyu called. "I'm new, don't know the roads. Commander told me to haul the dead—where's your grave pit?"
"Go another two kilometers north along this road, then left. You'll see a big pit—that's the grave pit," the old man answered.
"Got it. Thanks, old man!"
Li Qingyu walked another two kilometers and indeed found a pit where rebels dumped bodies.