Chapter 304: What She Values
"What happened to the radio?" Chen Bo asked, his eyes moving over the three injured men standing in front of him.
The soldiers exchanged another uncomfortable look before one of them finally answered.
"She spoke through it."
Gu Han’s expression hardened. "I figured. I heard that part."
The woman had called herself the person keeping the thread, told him that his men were mostly on the ground, and dismissed his territorial claim as nothing more than ribbons tied around a neighborhood.
Then she had crushed the radio.
"She could have killed all of you," Gu Han said.
No one disagreed.
"But she didn’t."
The men looked relieved, as though he had found something positive in their failure.
He hadn’t.
Leaving them alive had clearly been deliberate. Dead men couldn’t carry warnings home, and the woman had wanted Gu Han to know that she had refused him, that her people were stronger than his patrol, and that she considered his claim too unimportant to fear.
That wasn’t mercy.
It was an insult.
"Did she give you a name?" Gu Han asked.
The man with the injured jaw shook his head. "No."
"What did the others call her?"
"They didn’t."
That caught Gu Han’s attention. "Not once?"
"No. They didn’t need to. They watched her and waited for her to decide what happened."
Gu Han looked toward the central house, where the poisoned leader had been taken for treatment. The four men might have allowed the woman to speak because they found her amusing, but that didn’t explain why none of them had moved until she made her decision.
Powerful people didn’t surrender authority without a reason.
Either she controlled something they all needed, or they believed losing her would cost them more than following her ever could.
"Did any of them try to stop her from speaking through the radio?"
"No."
"Did they argue when she decided to leave you alive?"
The soldier hesitated. "They didn’t argue with her about anything."
That was more important than the thread, the insults, or the destroyed radio.
Chen Bo waited until the injured soldiers had been taken away before speaking quietly. "Do you want another team sent out?"
"No."
The answer came easily.
Sending more people without understanding the group would only provide the strangers with another opportunity to weaken him. Gu Han had spent too long building loyalty among his people to waste their lives proving a point, especially when the first patrol had already confirmed that ordinary weapons wouldn’t be enough.
"Double the patrols around the marked streets, but no one approaches the five of them," he continued. "I want to know where they live, how often they travel, and what routes they use. No threats and no collection demands until we understand what we’re dealing with."
Chen Bo nodded. "The rooftop team may still have eyes on the SUV."
As if summoned by the words, a radio crackled at Chen Bo’s waist.
He lifted it immediately. "Report."
"The vehicle left the shopping plaza and headed east," a scout said through the static. "We followed from a distance, but the roads became difficult near the outer residential blocks."
"Did you lose them?"
There was a pause.
"Not exactly."
Gu Han held out his hand, and Chen Bo passed him the radio.
"What does that mean?" Gu Han asked.
"The SUV turned toward an estate at the edge of the neighborhood. We couldn’t follow any closer because the entire area is covered in mutated plants."
Gu Han looked toward Chen Bo before returning his attention to the radio. "How many?"
"Too many to count. There are vines across the walls, trees growing through the surrounding properties, and flowers large enough to swallow a person. The plants moved aside for the SUV, then closed in behind it. They didn’t threaten the occupants at all."
The description shouldn’t have been possible.
Mutated plants attacked anything that came too close. They didn’t open gates, recognize vehicles, or distinguish between the people they allowed to pass and the ones they consumed.
Unless someone controlled them.
Gu Han thought of the small vine wrapped around the woman’s wrist and the way his men said it had obeyed her. Perhaps it wasn’t a separate mutation at all. It might have been part of something much larger.
"What is inside the perimeter?" he asked.
"There are a lot of residential houses, maybe ten or so. At the very top of the cul-de-sac was a mansion with high walls. We saw several vehicles, including trucks large enough to haul supplies. The property has electricity, and there are people working around the house. Everything looks maintained."
"Were the workers armed?"
"Some of them carried weapons, but they weren’t standing guard. They were repairing the property."
That meant the mansion had enough security that the people outside its walls could focus on construction instead of watching for zombies. Either the five power users trusted the plants completely, or there were more defenders the scouts hadn’t seen.
"How many fighters?"
"We couldn’t get close enough to count them. There were workers outside, but we only saw the same five power users enter. The plants reacted when the SUV approached, so we backed away before they noticed us."
Gu Han lowered the radio.
Five powerful people were dangerous enough. Five powerful people living comfortably behind a coordinated wall of mutated plants were something else entirely.
They had electricity, maintained vehicles, workers, and enough security to leave their home for something as unnecessary as craft supplies. Their clothes were clean, their weapons were maintained, and none of them had shown the desperate caution of people wondering where their next meal would come from.
That meant resources that 99.9% of the population, including him, lacked.
The woman hadn’t risked her life over a basket of thread because the thread had mattered. She had done it because losing half of anything was so unfamiliar to her that she found the demand offensive.
Or perhaps she had refused because she already possessed enough to believe no one could force her to surrender anything.
Gu Han looked toward the supplies stacked inside the central garage. They had food for now, fuel for a little longer, and enough medicine to handle ordinary injuries. Several families had already begun rationing their portions without being ordered to, and the generator consumed more fuel every day the nights remained cold.
None of what they had would last forever.
A fortified mansion with hidden resources could change that.
"Keep watching the roads," he said as he handed the radio back to Chen Bo. "No one goes near the plants, and no one lets them know they’re being followed. I want a map of every road leading toward that estate, but the scouts stay outside the range of the vines."
Chen Bo studied him. "You want to bring them into the settlement?"
"If they can be persuaded."
"And if they can’t?"
Gu Han looked toward the red cloth hanging from the entrance barricade.
Four powerful men might be difficult to threaten, but everyone valued something. The woman had already shown that she cared about possessions, control, and whatever waited behind those walls.
He simply had to determine which of those things mattered most.
"Then we find out what the woman values more than her thread."
