Hunter of Mysterious Creature-Chapter 337 - 12: Quarantine Town (Part 2)

"The timing was just off." The little girl who took back the fifty-cent bill walked up to Sun Hang and handed the bill back to him. "When they died, the town mayor hadn’t arrived yet."

"...Who is the mayor? Didn’t Maoyun Town have a mayor before? If the Xiazhou Federation can dispatch a new mayor from elsewhere, then why can’t they send some relief food to Maoyun Town? At the very least, they can’t let people starve to death, can they?" Sun Hang threw out a series of questions.

No, something’s still not right...

The other side just mentioned a very crucial word, "the fourth year of abandonment"... According to Sun Hang’s understanding, this should refer to the fourth year after the Xiazhou Federation abandoned the Yundian Region and fully retreated to Shuzhou.

By that time, Maoyun Town had long been a Surrendered Area... If it’s a Surrendered Area, how could the Xiazhou Federation send a new mayor to Maoyun Town?

This new mayor seems like it shouldn’t be human, right?

The little girl didn’t answer the series of questions Sun Hang asked, as if he had asked too much and too quickly, causing her mind to crash into a state of shutdown.

"Uh, let me change my question, can you tell me how Maoyun Town was abandoned?"

"Maoyun Town is a quarantine town," the little girl said.

A quarantine town?! A sudden realization hit Sun Hang, as he understood why there wasn’t even a decent road around Maoyun Town.

In those days, although the financial situation in the Southwest Region was quite bad, under the idea of "you want wealth, you build roads first," various highways, intercity roads, and high-speed rail tracks almost covered every corner of the Xiazhou Federation. As long as it wasn’t too remote a place, you could always find a road within a ten-kilometer radius... Yet around Maoyun Town, there wasn’t even a trace of a road to be seen, more isolated than those Qiang villages in the mountains of Shuzhou.

The root cause is that this is a quarantine town.

The so-called quarantine town is essentially the equivalent of the former "leper colonies"—only that the people gathered in the town weren’t lepers, but those who had direct contact with Deceit Virus carriers.

Back then, the means to detect deceit memetic agents were not so advanced. The only criterion for determining whether someone was infected was whether apparent mutations appeared on their bodies.

But as is well known, not all memetic agents cause bodily mutation in humans upon infection, not to mention that many memetic agents lie dormant within the host for a period before suddenly waking at a specific point, transforming the host from a "normal human" into an infected individual.

To prevent large-scale spread of memetic infections, the Federation Government’s only approach at that time was to "cut through with a single stroke."

The idea behind "one stroke" was to gather everyone who had contact with the infected into a specific area and confine them to live there. As for the necessities of life, aside from the portion the Federation Government would send over regularly, the rest had to be self-supplied by those within the quarantine zone.

Initially, the quarantine zones were small, with a few dozen or a hundred people... But as more and more people were secluded, these settlements gradually turned into villages and towns—these quarantine towns lived isolated from the world, without internet, tap water, or mobile phones. If they wanted to use electrical appliances, they had to rely on clunking diesel generators. Most families still used candles or oil lamps for nighttime lighting.

They were heavily disconnected from normal human civilization... In some of the larger quarantine cities, people even declared themselves as kings...

Most absurdly, not only did the Federation Government not suppress these people, they even provided a certain degree of assistance—in the Federation Government’s view, as long as regional stability could be ensured and the quarantine zone people stayed put, they didn’t care if people called themselves kings or emperors.

As long as the baseline wasn’t crossed, everything was tacitly approved.

Originally, the Federation Government wouldn’t appoint administrators for these places. Generally, quarantine zone administrators were selected from within... As for the selection process, the Federation Government didn’t care at all—they only cared whether the person selected could manage the quarantine zone effectively.

Sun Hang realized that the watchtower he saw upon approaching Maoyun Town wasn’t used to ward off external threats but to prevent people from the town from escaping.

In that great exodus sixty years ago, many quarantine zones were utterly forgotten—no one even notified them that their location had become a Surrendered Area. There were indeed many quarantine zones that continued to send telegrams to empty military camps, reporting conditions within their areas, even after the surrounding military forces had all withdrawn.

...

...

Hengduan Mountain Range, fifty kilometers from Outpost 198.

"Do you know what the Federation Government uses as a benchmark to delineate the exact boundary between human-occupied areas and Surrendered Areas?" Sitting in the passenger seat, Ye Jiu turned around, showing off to the two rookies in the back seat.

Ling Xiao and Jiang Yu both shook their heads.

"It’s the communication signal." Ye Jiu snapped his fingers. "Keep an eye on your phones. The moment it shows ’out of service area,’ it means we’re stepping into Surrendered Area soil."

"But... our phones already had no signal back at the outpost," Jiang Yu said somewhat embarrassed.

"Uh?" Ye Jiu was taken aback. Ever since they had set off, he’d been wearing ’Slaughter,’ and all mobile devices were stuffed in the backpack in the trunk, leaving no opportunity to check his phone.

"Tsk, big stunt failed," said Wang Xiyi, who was driving, unable to suppress a laugh. "The communication base stations in border regions and outposts are integrated. If the outpost is destroyed, the communication base stations naturally wouldn’t survive either... But if you want an accurate boundary, you see the stone marker by the roadside up ahead?"

The group in the car looked up to see, about a hundred meters ahead, a two-person-high stone marker by the roadside, gleaming with a bright orange-red glow in the car’s headlights.

"We did pass some similar stone markers just now on the road... just different colors, some white, some lemon yellow," recalled Jiang Yu.

"The orange-red boundary marker indicates this is the final boundary marker, meaning we are just one kilometer away from the Surrendered Area," Wang Xiyi explained. "As for the actual border, there are no markers."

"Old Wang, you’ve been to the border before?" Ye Jiu asked.

"Mm." Wang Xiyi nodded. "I was chasing a Fallen Hunter, ended up pursuing all the way to the border."

The so-called Fallen Hunters are primarily divided into two types—one is completely losing humanity and sanity under the influence of internal memetic agents, uncontrollably wreaking havoc and slaughter; the other refers to those hunters who commit various misdeeds driven by their own desires and the darker sides of human nature, using memetic powers.

In fact, the two scenarios share certain commonalities, so both are generally referred to as "Fallen Hunters."

Fallen Hunters still belong to the infected category rather than deceit entities, but they are handled in the same way as deceit entities.

"Wow, did you really hunt a Fallen Hunter? Did that guy get away? Made it into the Surrendered Area?" Ye Jiu’s interest was piqued.

"No, fifteen kilometers from the Surrendered Zone’s border, where the white boundary marker is, I excavated his heart with my claws," Wang Xiyi shook her head. "That guy was still crawling toward the Surrendered Area as he was dying, making it about fifty meters before he expired."