radicalducati Chapter 75 News Brief
Chapter 75 News Brief
Today is the fifth day of the apocalypse.
After getting up, Lu Chen's first action wasn't to wash up, but to pick up the satellite phone on the bedside table and open the military app pre-installed by the military.
The app's interface is very simple, with several icons arranged in a row. Lu Chen clicked on the icon in the upper right corner, which was labeled "Daily Briefing".
He discovered this feature before going to bed yesterday... The app automatically pushes a batch of news briefings every morning at 7 o'clock, covering a much wider range than radio broadcasts. It not only covers local news in Wanshun City, but also the developments in the entire province and even the capital.
He opened the briefing list and quickly scrolled down.
Local news from Wanshun City was listed first, and the content was largely the same as what was broadcast on the radio yesterday.
The number of survivors continues to decline; yesterday, survivors made up 8% of the total population, but today it has dropped to 7%.
On the contrary, the number of elite zombies is still increasing, reaching an average of two per street.
The only good news is that the number of rescue teams organized today has increased from 20 yesterday to 30.
However, for a city with a permanent population of over 2 million and less than 100,000 survivors in need of rescue, this amount of manpower is still a drop in the bucket.
After reading the local news, Lu Chen scrolled down the page and began to look at briefings from other regions, focusing on the latest research findings on zombies published by various research institutes.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences and local research institutes have been operating at high intensity, making new discoveries every day.
If you can glean a few useful pieces of information from these briefings, it's worth more than killing a few more zombies.
Soon, he did make a new discovery.
The briefing included a virology research report published by a branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The title was very academic, but the text was explained quite plainly.
Scientists have finally figured out why zombies don't eat their own kind and prioritize attacking humans unless absolutely necessary. The key lies not in the zombies' "habits," but in the virus within their bodies.
The zombie virus present in different individual zombies varies significantly.
The briefing gave a very intuitive example: the zombie virus in an elite zombie and an ordinary zombie have extremely low correlation in their gene sequences, and can even be regarded as two completely different viruses.
The relationship between these two viruses is not cooperation, but competition.
If an elite zombie devours the flesh and blood of an ordinary zombie, the two vastly different viruses will attack and devour each other within the same host. This process will cause severe discomfort and cellular damage to the zombie itself.
Sometimes, the energy replenished by the flesh and blood swallowed cannot compensate for the energy consumed by the mutual devouring of viruses.
"So that's how it is!" Lu Chen nodded in realization.
Viruses need clean host cells to replicate and spread, and humans and other uninfected animals are the ideal fresh culture medium.
He continued scrolling down and soon came across the second interesting study.
This briefing is more focused on practical application: to judge a zombie's potential, you can't just look at its current physique, but you have to observe how fast it absorbs the red moon.
The briefing provided a specific comparative case... Suppose there are two zombies, one 1.9 meters tall and the other 1.6 meters tall.
In the early stages of the apocalypse, the larger animal, with its existing physical advantage, will definitely be able to crush the smaller one.
However, if the 1.6-meter-tall zombie absorbs the Red Moon's energy more efficiently than the 1.9-meter-tall zombie, the situation will gradually change.
The red moon energy will continuously strengthen the zombie's physique. Zombies with high absorption efficiency will evolve faster. As time goes by, the 1.6-meter-tall zombie will surpass its opponent in all aspects and may even be the first to break through to the elite level.
Moreover, this comeback won't take too long. The briefing estimates that a 1.6-meter zombie, if its efficiency in absorbing Red Moon energy is 50% higher than the opponent's, can achieve this comeback in about a month at most.
"So, those strong guys and iron pillars I captured are only strong now, but their potential might not be high? They might be overtaken by ordinary zombies later?" Lu Chen couldn't help but scratch his head.
The zombies under his command are selected based on their physique. If any of the Iron Pillar-level zombies is actually absorbing the Red Moon very slowly, then after a few weeks, it might not even be able to defeat a strong, potentially powerful zombie.
This means that he may need to keep replacing the zombies.
"Forget it, I'll deal with it later." He decided to stop dwelling on the matter.
It's just a bit troublesome, not an unsolvable problem. We can replace him later if necessary; he won't develop any feelings for the zombies.
He continued scrolling through the briefing, trying to see if there was any other useful information.
He swiped his finger across the screen twice more, and a research brief with a title that wasn't particularly eye-catching but whose content was extremely striking caught his eye, causing him to frown instantly.
The briefing stated that zombies can sense the "blood" of humans.
The "blood energy" here is not the internal energy in martial arts novels, but a complex mixture of chemical signals continuously emitted by the human body, including thermal radiation from body temperature, carbon dioxide concentration gradients exhaled, volatile organic compounds produced by microbial metabolism on the skin surface, and trace amounts of blood proteins released from wounds or physiological activities.
The blood energy signals emitted by a single or a few humans are very weak, and the zombies' perception will be very vague, usually only able to detect them at a relatively close distance.
However, as the number of people gathering increases, these signals amplify and combine, creating an exponentially increasing clustering effect.
简报里给出了一个大致的量化模型：10个人聚集的血气信号强度是1个人的15倍，50个人是300倍，100个人是1000倍以上。
This means that the more humans gather, the more likely it is to attract zombies from the surrounding area.
Moreover, as the number of people continues to increase, the area of attraction will expand outward at a non-linear rate.
Once the number of people in a shelter or stronghold exceeds 1000, the intensity of the blood energy signal emitted by it is enough to attract zombies within a radius of several kilometers, which may trigger a zombie horde.
"This..." Lu Chen frowned deeply.
There are now 130 people in Xiangyang Community, and the blood energy signal of that size is not small. The group of zombies attracted yesterday afternoon may not have been entirely due to the smoke; they may have also been drawn there by the blood energy of 130 people.
If we bring over more survivors from Green Bamboo Garden and Sunshine Garden this morning, the number could easily exceed 300 or even more, which would further expand the reach of the event.
Looking further ahead, if the stronghold really develops into a scale of thousands of people as he plans, then even if he clears out all the zombies in the surrounding streets, the zombies in the outermost areas will still be continuously attracted by the blood energy signal.
"Then we need to prepare for the future." He read the briefing twice and memorized the key data.
The early warning system needs to be further improved. The previously planned three lines of defense now seem to need to be extended by another layer.
Not only are zombies being cleared from the area around the residential area, but several main streets and key intersections are also being cleared regularly to disperse potential zombie gathering points in advance.
The best way to avoid danger is to nip it in the bud. Eliminate them all before they form a zombie horde, and there won't be one.