What is destined to arrive will always arrive.

Wang Chen's plan was simple. Regardless of how Old Man Tian died, and regardless of the common sense that pathogens are far less active in nature when temperatures approach freezing, someone had now apparently died of a sudden illness within the compound. Initiating emergency quarantine protocols first was always the right move!

As for the panic that might be caused by releasing the news, it was not within Wang Chen's consideration at all. There was no need to compare which was more important: staying alive or avoiding panic.

"Xiaohua, the cloud mass has dissipated now. The photos should have been uploaded to the intranet. Is there any news?" Wang Chen skipped the polite pleasantries with Ma and Yang, cutting straight to the point.

Yang Xiaohua swiped her tablet and shook her head. "I uploaded the photos to the medical information processing center an hour ago, and there is no reply yet. Wait a minute, Dai Jian on duty just sent a message. By searching keywords like poisoning, suspected epidemic, suicide, and ingestion of poison, he found four similar reports. Three of them include photos, and the deceased's appearance is extremely similar to Old Man Tian's. The last report was from three days ago at a government outpost near Tianjin. They found a gathering of civilians camping in the wild, all dead. Their states of death were similar to the ones in the photos. If you want to know the difference, these people showed signs of attacking each other and self-mutilation, generally targeting... the lower body."

Was it really not a coincidence? Were there really precedent reports? Wang Chen, who still held a shred of wishful thinking, snatched the tablet and flipped through several photos consecutively. Exactly right, the state of death was identical to the deceased in the workshop! Wang Chen wanted to keep scrolling down the report, but the tablet screen was covered by a hand. Frowning, he looked up and saw Ma Tian keeping his hand on the screen while gently shaking his head at him, then tilting his mouth toward the civilians standing by Old Man Tian's corpse.

Wang Chen understood Ma Tian's meaning: certain sensitive material could not be made known to the civilians inside the outpost. The panic caused by a suspected epidemic was completely different from genuine terror, the latter of which easily caused ordinary people to lose their judgment and commit absurd acts.

Taking a few deep breaths to calm himself down, Wang Chen glanced at the civilians still inside the warehouse. He casually made up an excuse, asking Shu Chang to take the civilians outside to fetch some lighting equipment and tools, while simultaneously notifying the others to assemble in the warehouse after finishing their respective tasks.

During the wait for the assembly, Yang Xiaohua did not say much more. She simply reported the situation according to official procedures and sent messages to Zhao Ying and Zhang Han for help, because the subsequent intelligence was actually pitifully scarce. That outpost had lost contact one day ago—which was close to forty-eight hours after uploading the photos of the dead gathering. Since the nearest other government outpost was over two hundred kilometers away from the lost one, and the loss of contact had not yet reached twenty-four hours, there was still no updated investigative news. Yang Xiaohua directly pulled up recent satellite remote sensing of the lost outpost, which showed no heat source signatures remaining at the site!

Judging from the remote sensing images, the outpost was located at a seaport. Geographically, it was surrounded by water on four sides with only a single road connecting it. The perimeter of the seaport was lined with breakwaters built from concrete blocks, and the tidal drop generally exceeded four meters. If a few vehicles or shipping containers were simply piled onto the road leading in and out of the seaport, no one could possibly force their way through. Its defensibility was no worse than, and perhaps even better than, the peninsula outpost garrisoned by the special operations team!

Such an outpost had been completely wiped out less than forty-eight hours after discovering a civilian gathering of suspected mass suicide?

What on earth had happened?

At the same time, simply in terms of the number of outposts, it was also a baffling point. Endorsed by the government, there were already over a hundred regular outposts nationwide. The number of outposts discovering the new epidemic accounted for only four percent of the total. Compared to the previous wave of the epidemic that had exterminated over seventy percent of humanity, this one could almost be described with the word "gentle." However, the probability of an outpost reporting the new epidemic and subsequently losing contact was one hundred percent! What if one factored in those outposts that hadn't had time to report, as well as the civilian gatherings not endorsed by the government?

The more one thought about it, the more terrifying it became.

The old and new members of the special operations team arrived one after another, gathering around Old Man Tian's corpse. They first listened as Wang Chen introduced the major and minor details that had been confirmed. "...It seems my earlier assessment was still too relaxed. Strictly speaking, we only have forty-eight hours to track down the truth! Otherwise..." Wang Chen didn't need to say anything overly alarmist, because the lesson of the past was not far behind.

"Hell, since the earliest report can be traced back five days ago, why didn't the higher-ups initiate emergency epidemic prevention protocols?" Shu Chang clenched his fists and said bitterly.

To Shu Chang's question, Wang Chen could only respond with a bitter smile. Fang Qiang explained from the side, "It's useless to talk about this now. Outposts everywhere may bear the government's name, but at the end of the day, they are scattered stragglers. It's unrealistic to count on the government for everything. For people like us, managing to get a drone with a couple of missiles and providing information support is already considered pretty good. The rest all depends on ourselves. Yesterday when the weather was nice, I reviewed the recent work reports issued by the upper levels. Stripping away all that nonsense, guess what? As for support for temporary outposts, there's jack shit! The upper levels' current focus is entirely on clearing the Eight Hundred Li Qin Chuan and building the new capital..."

"All right, Brother Fang, let's discuss this later. Can everyone talk about what to do right now?" Wang Chen waved his hand, pulling the topic back on track.

"Should we... perform an autopsy on Old Man Tian first? Figure out the cause of death? Then we can trace the source?" Chen Chong said hesitatingly, seeing that the old and young people around him all had gloomy faces and remained silent.

Figure it out? How to figure it out? Figure out what?

The entire outpost had over a hundred people, up and down, inside and out. Sheng Qingru was the only one with medical knowledge, and she was a veterinarian by training! As for the rest, take any two cooks—they probably had the best knife skills, good at butchering chickens, ducks, fish, cows, pigs, or sheep. If you asked them to slaughter a large dark beast, they would probably have to ponder first whether to strangle it and drain its blood or drown it in a basin of water.

Performing an autopsy with that kind of technique? They wouldn't be able to tell a damn thing!

Fortunately, Chen Chong's tone was relatively mild and his starting point was good, so Wang Chen only inwardly muttered to himself, knowing that the twenty-three-year-old punk had simply watched too many movies and television shows and had his head full of script tropes. On the surface, he merely glanced at Chen Chong, saving him some face without rebuffing him harshly.

Seeing the reactions of the others, Chen Chong realized that his previous idea was a bit of a dud. He smiled apologetically and simply clamped his mouth shut like a tight-lipped jar. The others were also digesting Wang Chen's previous words, racking their brains to think of countermeasures, and the atmosphere grew cold for a moment.

The one who broke the silence was unexpectedly Dai Jian, who was on duty sitting inside the armored vehicle and had not come over.

As a tech geek, his mindset was clearly different from ordinary people. While Wang Chen and the others were still pondering how to communicate with superiors if Old Man Tian died of an epidemic rather than poison—so as to make them believe the matter was important and hopefully dispatch experts to solve it, or at least provide a batch of drugs to enhance the outpost's epidemic prevention capabilities—Dai Jian was thinking about collating the previous suspected reports to find the transmission patterns or routes of the epidemic without expert guidance, thereby doing a good job of epidemic prevention and avoiding its expansion.

And he really had found something.

Temperature.