novelsite Chapter 143 Electric Fishing
Chapter 143 Electric Fishing
Chapter 143 Electric Fishing (4300 words)
The morning patrol of Zone F-6 was as peaceful as ever.
The scorched fields stood silent under the still-scorching late summer sun. The distant river reflected blinding light, its surface calm and still, as if the ferocious fish leaping and splashing and the shadows lurking underwater yesterday were just illusions.
Xu Mo and Zhang Yun maintained a highly efficient and tacit understanding, with everything proceeding smoothly from route planning and observation to reporting.
Zhang Yun's mental state was noticeably better than yesterday. Occasionally, she would exchange a few words with Xu Mo about their opinions on the weather or the progress of the construction site in the distance. The subtle distance between them caused by Xu Mo's unusual behavior yesterday seemed to have been quietly melted away by the steamed buns and a few frank words in the morning.
The calm lasted until the afternoon. As their patrol route approached the middle of the river again, the sight before them made both of them stop in their tracks.
The once deserted and desolate riverbank has now become unusually lively.
Several trucks and trailers bearing the Jiangcheng Project logo were parked at a safe distance of 20 to 30 meters from the riverbank. They had unloaded various sizes of diesel generators, thick black insulated cable coils, and some heavy, professional-looking metal equipment that the two men couldn't identify.
A dozen or so workers, dressed in uniform dark blue overalls and wearing safety helmets, were setting up the equipment in a tense but orderly manner, under the watchful eyes of several armed soldiers.
They spread out the thick cable along a nearly 100-meter stretch of riverbank, and at intervals, they carefully pushed a strangely shaped, heavy pole into the river.
The air was filled with the distinctive smell of a diesel engine preheating, mixed with the smells of metal and rubber.
"What is this—what are you doing?" Zhang Yun asked in a low voice, his hand unconsciously resting on the gun handle, his eyes wary.
Xu Mo frowned slightly, observing carefully. Judging from this setup, it was clearly not a simple measurement or sampling.
Those generators were quite powerful, and the cables were of much higher specifications than those used for ordinary electricity. He had a vague guess in his mind, but he wasn't sure yet.
The two did not approach rashly. According to patrol regulations, when encountering other departments carrying out missions, they only need to observe and guard from a distance to ensure that their patrol area is not disturbed, and be ready to provide support or assist in evacuation when needed.
A middle-aged man, who appeared to be in charge of the site, was using a megaphone to address the busy workers. His voice drifted intermittently on the wind: "—Check the insulation! Double-check the safety distance! Are the downstream warning signs up? ——Hurry up and finish clearing this section of the river before sunset!"
Xu Mo's hearing was far superior to that of ordinary people. He caught the person in charge whispering to a technician next to him: "—The voltage is adjusted correctly, and the water's conductivity is quite good—"
Voltage — Cleaning —
Xu Mo's eyes narrowed. Sure enough!
Previously, when faced with threats in the river, all I could think of was shooting, fishing with nets, or even, in extreme cases, using explosives. I never went beyond the framework of individual confrontation or limited-area elimination.
Seeing this scene with his own eyes and hearing the word "voltage," he suddenly realized that his thinking had been limited by his identity as an individual adventurer.
This is indeed the end times, but Jiangcheng is a huge entity with a population of one million and has begun to restore its industrial and organizational capabilities!
They can solve problems by utilizing forces beyond individual imagination, forces belonging to the level of "civilization"!
Electric fishing is an illegal act that damages the ecosystem in peacetime.
But here, in the face of a river teeming with deadly mutated creatures that threaten water security and shoreline activities, this is the most efficient and direct physical method of elimination!
High-voltage current can instantly cover large areas of water, indiscriminately killing aquatic life within the range, especially fish that rely on muscle and nerve activity. No matter how sharp their teeth are or whether they can shoot water jets, their nervous system will be instantly destroyed in the face of powerful current.
"Simple, crude, but effective," Xu Mo silently commented to himself, while feeling a touch of self-mockery at his previous preconceived notions.
He was indeed bound by his individual survival experience in the apocalypse, forgetting that the resources that collective power could mobilize and the forms of violence it could manifest could be so different.
Just then, a small commotion seemed to occur on the other side of the river. It might be the patrol team that Xu Mo and his group had encountered before, or some other group, who were also watching curiously.
In the middle of the river, near an electrode, something seemed to be disturbed beneath the surface of the water. Suddenly, two water jets, as thick as an arm and moving at extremely high speed, shot out and flew straight toward a worker operating equipment on the bank!
"Watch out!" The soldiers on guard and the person in charge shouted almost simultaneously.
The worker was clearly well-trained, or rather, had planned ahead. The instant the water jet broke through the water, he did a side somersault and rolled, narrowly avoiding the attack. The water jet hit the soil behind where he had just stood with two "plop" sounds, leaving two craters.
"Damn it, still dare to show your face? All units, prepare!" the person in charge cursed, yelling into the loudspeaker, "Unauthorized personnel, back off! Execution team, countdown, three, two—power on!"
"Buzz—!!!"
A deep, teeth-grinding hum came from several diesel generators connected in parallel, and then, as if an invisible force suddenly seized that hundred-meter stretch of river.
"Sizzle—Crackling sound!!"
Visible to the naked eye, fine blue-white electric arcs leaped and spread wildly across the water surface between several submerged electrodes, like a death net that opened and then tightened in an instant.
Xu Mo only saw the water surface violently churning and boiling, not from being heated, but from the violent electrolysis and physical disturbance caused by a powerful electric current passing through the water.
A faint, indescribable smell of burnt fish filled the air.
This breathtaking scene lasted for less than ten seconds.
The buzzing stopped, and the electric arc disappeared.
The river, which had just been turbulent and teeming with danger, suddenly fell into an eerie calm.
Then, under the sunlight, patches of silvery-white, gray-black, or strangely patterned objects began to slowly float belly-up on the surface of the somewhat murky water; these were the corpses of fish.
More and more fish corpses appeared on the water's surface, densely packed, almost completely covering the treated section of the river.
These fish ranged in size from as small as a palm with fine scales to as long as half a meter with large heads and wide mouths. There were also many other strangely shaped species that Xu Mo had never seen before, some with bony spines and others with unusually developed fins. Without exception, they all showed no signs of life and swayed slightly with the current.
Xu Mo glanced at the river and saw that countless dead fish had floated to the surface along this hundred-meter stretch of water, including about a hundred that were over a foot in size and had obvious attack potential.
This doesn't even include those that were stunned and sank to the bottom or were too small to float. The efficiency is astonishing.
The staff and soldiers on the shore seemed used to this scene and began to proceed to the next step in an orderly manner.
Several people wearing rubber waterproof pants and thick gloves pushed two sturdy-looking flat-bottomed boats into the water and began to use long-handled nets to scoop up the floating fish carcasses.
Xu Mo noticed that they seemed to be making distinctions during the retrieval. Some fish that were particularly large or had unusual shapes were carefully placed separately into plastic boxes, clearly to be taken back. It was unclear whether these fish would be used as research samples or for some other purpose.
The vast majority of ordinary or slightly larger mutant fish were roughly scooped up and dumped directly into the truck bed, which was prepared on the shore and lined with a waterproof tarpaulin.
The fish carcasses piled up, quickly forming a small mountain in the truck bed that kept dripping slime and emitted a pungent fishy smell.
Two people who seemed to be in charge of logistics and recording were chatting while registering. Their voices were not loud, but Xu Mo could hear them clearly: "---This area is considered good. I heard that a few days ago, they used this method at the old reservoir in the west. When they cast the net, wow, the things that came up were much weirder than this. There were even some that could briefly discharge electricity and resist each other. It took a lot of effort."
"If you ask me, if it weren't for the fact that this section of the river is connected to the water intake upstream, and we were worried about pollution, it would have been so much easier to just use a strong toxic agent. We could have just sprayed it along the river, and all the fish, turtles, shrimp, and crabs would have died, and even the aquatic plants would have been wiped out. The post-treatment would have been simple too. Now, we still have to fish them out, which is a hassle."
"Come on, how can people drink the water after it's been poisoned? Besides, the recovery period for poisoned water is too long, and we still have to monitor it. Using electricity, although it's more troublesome, is a physical method. After a few days, the water flow will wash it away, and it will be back to normal. It won't affect the overall situation. What the higher-ups want is to control the threat, not create new trouble."
Upon hearing the word "poison," Xu Mo's eyebrows twitched again.
Yes, poison. If you don't care about the ecosystem and only seek complete extermination, this is indeed a more "thorough" approach.
Xu Mo felt his thinking had been broadened once again. Under the premise that survival was paramount, many taboos and considerations of peacetime could be re-evaluated, and the range of methods to choose from was far wider and—ruthless—than he could have imagined.
Xu Mo watched as the fish carcasses were continuously thrown into the truck bed and asked the foreman who was passing by and directing the loading, "What should we do with these? Bury them?"
The foreman glanced at Xu Mo, noticing his patrol uniform, and pointed to the truck bed: "Some of it will be sent to the research institute. The rest will be taken to a designated processing plant outside the city to be made into organic fertilizer. New fields are being cultivated outside the city, and there's a severe shortage of fertilizer. Although this stuff isn't edible, it's high in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and organic matter—it's good for making use of waste."
Waste utilization—Xu Mo remained silent. These mutated creatures, which were potentially deadly threats not long ago, had become fertilizer to nourish crops in the blink of an eye. The resource cycle in the apocalypse was connected in such a cruel yet pragmatic way.
Xu Mo and Zhang Yun remained on guard and observed for about half an hour until the clearing work on this section of the river was basically completed, and the equipment began to be packed up in preparation for moving to another section of the river downstream.
By this time, most of the fish carcasses floating on the river had been retrieved. Although the river water was still somewhat murky, it had resumed flowing, but the fishy smell in the air lingered for a long time.
"Let's go," Xu Mo said to Zhang Yun. Their patrol mission had to continue.
The two turned and followed their predetermined route away from the riverbank that had just witnessed a silent "massacre".
After walking a distance, Zhang Yun finally let out a long sigh of relief and said in a low voice, "I didn't expect them to solve it this way. It seems pretty simple."
"Simple?" Xu Mo shook his head. "Not simple at all. Those high-powered generators, special cables, and electrode equipment are not something any survivor team could put together. The initial intelligence gathering, the mid-term plan formulation, the later execution support, and the follow-up handling we just saw—each step requires enormous organizational capabilities and resource allocation. None of them are simple."
"What seems like an insurmountable task to us as individuals might just be a routine 'environmental cleanup' for an organized group."
Zhang Yun nodded thoughtfully, "It's because we were only thinking about how to dodge and fight, while they were thinking about how to wipe us all out at once." She paused, her tone somewhat complicated, "It just seemed a bit—"
"A bit cruel? Or perhaps too efficient and indifferent?" Xu Mo interjected, understanding Zhang Yun's feelings.
The way that indiscriminately wipes out all life in a body of water challenges humanity's instinctive feelings towards nature and life.
"Mm," Zhang Yun replied.
"But this is the apocalypse." Xu Mo's tone was calm. "When they threaten our survival, especially when they threaten lifelines like water sources, any efficient means of eliminating the threat will be given priority. Emotional and moral considerations often have to give way to survival. Jiangcheng is just doing what it has to do."
Zhang Yun remained silent for a moment, then nodded and said nothing more.
Having experienced the despair of her squad's annihilation, she knew all too well that in the face of absolute danger, there were often few compassionate options. However, witnessing such collective violence firsthand still caused a psychological shock.
In fact, not only Zhang Yun, but Xu Mo also felt that his mind had been opened up.
The second half of the patrol proceeded uneventfully. When they returned to that section of the river, the cleanup team had already moved on, leaving only a few scattered drag marks on the bank and the lingering smell of diesel fuel and fish in the air. The river flowed quietly, as if nothing had happened.
In the evening, after finishing their patrol for the day, as they parted ways with Zhang Yun outside the meeting point, they nodded to each other, everything understood without words.
After today's events, the partnership between the two seems to have gained an additional layer of shared understanding of the post-apocalyptic reality.
Xu Mo walked alone on the road back to the inner city. The setting sun cast a long shadow of him. He recalled the electric fence he had seen that day...
The fate of the floating corpses and the "fertilizer" did not stir much emotion in my heart, only a calm understanding.
No matter how strong an individual is, there are limits and blind spots in their perspective. The power that a revitalized civilization can mobilize and the problem-solving logic it demonstrates are beyond the reach of a solitary survivor. It may be ruthless, it may be uncomfortably efficient, but this is the instinctive reaction of a collective in a life-or-death situation.
The divisions within humanity caused by the source of power that I had previously worried about now seem to be temporarily suppressed under Jiangcheng's strong and pragmatic collective control, but they may also lurk in more covert and distorted ways.
What comes after "electrofishing"? If one day the threat comes from the sky, from the ground, or from uncontrollable mutations within humanity itself, what kind of "solution" will Jiangcheng come up with?
Xu Mo didn't know the answer, but he knew that someone more professional would step forward and offer a more reliable solution. Because of this, Xu Mo increasingly felt that he wasn't suited to be a manager.
Back in the courtyard, the outside noise and the "cleaning" he had just witnessed were shut out. Xu Mo stood in the courtyard, slowly assuming a cultivation stance. The qi and blood in his body began to flow faster with his will, warm and powerful, like an underground river that never freezes, surging forward in the riverbed under his control.