HCB Chapter 4 Supplies That Are Practically Non-existent
Chapter 4 Supplies That Are Practically Non-existent
Located in the provincial capital city of G, the G Province University Town encompasses all the prestigious universities in G Province. To facilitate the students' lives and social interactions, the University Town standardized the dormitory arrangements for each school and built a dormitory area in the central area of the University Town, just like a residential community in the city. It also includes a small commercial area, a large supermarket, and a community hospital.
Dormitories are also divided into different types according to the cost: ordinary four-bedroom and one-living room eight-person rooms, three-bedroom and one-living room six-person rooms, two-bedroom and one-living room four-person rooms, as well as high-end loft single rooms and even more luxurious villa rooms, etc.
Lu Yuan was lucky. When the dorms were assigned, he paid for an 8-person room, but by sheer coincidence, the 8-person room for the freshmen was full. There was one bed left in the 6-person room, but a strange senior insisted on switching from the 4-person room and refused to live in the 4-person room anymore. So Lu Yuan got the room and stayed there for 4 years.
For Lu Yuan, this was a godsend. The dormitory was a four-person room, but only three people lived there. Besides Lu Yuan, there was also Pei Sihao, a fifth-year medical student. Pei Sihao was a bit taller than Lu Yuan, about 180cm, with a cold, fair-skinned, refined, and roguish face. He looked like someone who loved to play around and had countless romantic entanglements. As he expected, this senior brother who shared a room with him rarely returned to the dormitory, so Lu Yuan was happy to enjoy the benefits of a single room.
In the other room of the dormitory lived Gu Nanfeng, a graduate student pursuing a combined Master's and PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Because he was a graduate student, he was able to have his own bedroom. According to Lu Yuan's female classmates, the 190cm tall, gentle yet somewhat aloof Gu Nanfeng was the campus heartthrob of their university. The unanimous assessment of Gu Nanfeng among the younger students at their school was that although he was a science and engineering student studying mechanical engineering, it did not affect his ethereal and unapproachable aura.
Although Lu Yuan would occasionally see them in the dormitory, they rarely interacted. As a result, even though the three of them had lived together in the dormitory for almost four years, Lu Yuan and they still seemed unfamiliar with each other.
Having successfully shaken off the robotic police and returned to dormitory 1203, Lu Yuan quickly locked the door and turned around to find two tall men standing in front of him with their arms crossed. He had to admit that he had lowered the height standard of the dormitory.
"Your dad's frozen?" one of them asked him. Lu Yuan thought for a while before remembering this classmate. It was his roommate, Pei Sihao, a senior in medical school, whom he had hardly ever met. He wasn't wearing a white coat today, which explained why Lu Yuan hadn't recognized him. The few times they had met before were when Pei Sihao was interning at the community hospital and asked Lu Yuan to deliver things for him.
"Lu Yuan, you have been arrested. Please do not struggle futilely! Open the door! Exit..." Before Lu Yuan could answer Pei Sihao's question, the voice of the robotic police officer rang out from outside the door.
Gu Nanfeng, who had walked back to the window to continue observing the situation downstairs, suddenly turned around and asked, "The police have come looking for you?"
Upon hearing this, Lu Yuan felt that Gu Nanfeng might know something. After all, he was certain that he had seen Gu Nanfeng every day during the four days he had lost his memory. Since he had no other place to live besides the dormitory, he didn't even know where his father lived after selling the house.
Just as Lu Yuan was about to ask further questions, the alarm of the robotic police sounded outside the door, then abruptly stopped and was replaced by frantic knocking: "Lu Yuan! Open the door quickly! That thing is up here!"
The robotic policeman outside the door trembled as if he were alive. Logically, they shouldn't be afraid, but at this moment, PC004261 felt his legs shaking. He didn't want to be crushed and torn in two like PC004260. He kept banging on the door, trying to scream for help like a human, but as a robotic policeman, his program didn't allow him to utter those two words. He could only bang on the door even more urgently.
Perhaps a zombie stormed into the elevator, or perhaps an infected person mutated inside. In any case, upon seeing the zombie emerge from the elevator in the middle of the corridor, PC004261 completely forgot his arrest mission and wanted to hide.
The dormitory door opened the instant a zombie spotted PC004261 rushing towards it, and a hand quickly reached out and pulled him into the room.
"The zombies actually prioritize attacking the robot?" Lu Yuan, who had just pulled the robot policeman into the room, was still panting. He had originally thought that the zombies, like those in novels and movies, would only eat living things and wouldn't care about the robot outside the door. However, Gu Nanfeng said that he had no classes or experiments in the afternoon and had been observing from the window since receiving the quarantine notice in his dormitory.
He discovered that before the commotion in the experimental building occurred when Lu Yuan returned, something had already happened at the community hospital downstairs. He saw Pei Sihao run out, and the zombies that had been chasing him all the way out of the entrance stopped chasing him and instead pounced on the guide robot at the entrance of the community hospital.
He later saw several similar situations, so he immediately called Pei Sihao and told him to find a robot to block the way if he was about to be caught. Pei Sihao had just safely entered the house ten minutes before Lu Yuan entered.
"Is this a virus targeting robots?" PC004261 asked while transmitting Gu Nanfeng's discovery back to the police center via the chip.
"Not entirely. After all, the situation for humans isn't much better, is it?" Perhaps because of his age and the fact that he wasn't personally involved in the incident, Gu Nanfeng was the calmest among the three people and one machine present.
"It's good that Xiao Yuan is back. Now that everyone is in the dorm, we're safe." Pei Sihao said as he walked back to the living room and turned on the TV. There should be breaking news now.
"It's not necessarily safe. The first confirmed case was in the city center hospital, which means it's not just in our university town. Also, zombies prioritize attacking robot chips. Without robots to replenish food, our refrigerator..." Gu Nanfeng analyzed as he walked to the kitchen refrigerator, opened it, and found it empty.
Although the dormitories in the university town are equipped with kitchens, the school already has a canteen, and there is a commercial complex next door, so most students' refrigerators are filled with snacks and drinks.
Their dorm room was worse than usual. Pei Sihao rarely lived in the dorm, and the only things in his fridge were a few bottles of beer, which he bought at the beginning of the semester and didn't even know if they were expired. Lu Yuan was a penniless guy who basically ate in the cafeteria, so there was nothing for him in his fridge. However, he had a few packs of biscuits in his room, which he prepared in case he overslept and missed the cafeteria in the morning.
The most reliable person in the dorm is Gu Nanfeng. He values quality of life and usually buys groceries and cooks in the dorm whenever he has time. Lu Yuan and Pei Sihao have both eaten there before. However, last month, Gu Nanfeng's new materials experiment entered a critical phase, so he mostly ate in the cafeteria. He finally achieved a breakthrough the day before yesterday, and after finishing the final work yesterday, he was still worried about Lu Yuan. He had planned to wait until Lu Yuan came back from the hospital today to make sure he was alright before going to the supermarket downstairs to buy groceries, but he couldn't even leave the house.
"Now, let's take stock of our dorm's supplies: five bottles of beer that's still a day away from expiring, ten eggs (bought last month, in parentheses), and eight packs of the longest-lasting OxO cookies. That's all!" Pei Sihao rummaged through all the food everyone had taken out and placed on the table, almost fainting. "If it's really like what Brother Gu analyzed, the three of us will only be able to survive on water in the future. We might as well be robots, powered by solar energy, just hiding from being torn apart."
PC004261 was quite helpless after seeing their supplies, but luckily he was a robot and wouldn't starve.