After leaving the three towns, it seed that there were no bustling urban areas along the route.
In fact, along the G318 highway, there indeed weren’t any large cities.
Chen Xin chose this route to traverse the mountains, and this area didn’t have well-developed cities, as the more developed cities in Hubei Province were either in the west or concentrated along the Yangtze River.
This did not coincide with the direction Chen Xin needed to head, so it was not surprising that he didn’t see any cities.
The scenery along the way was still similar to the road before, everything was pitch black, and all that was visible was snow.
Reaching out to take a piece of dried fruit from the workbench that the staff in Hubei Province had previously given him, Chen Xin reluctantly chewed it, savoring the taste of the dried fruit with a sense of nostalgia.
Seriously speaking, this seed to be the first ti Chen Xin had eaten fruit since the disaster, and even if it was just dried fruit, it was a rare treat.
But as he ate the dried fruit and recalled the appearance of the city in the three towns and the pitch-dark scenery along the way, Chen Xin still felt a huge difference.
In big cities, the nation had already begun post-disaster reconstruction, and most dium and small cities had begun to recover from the disaster, actively resuming production.
Because the state, the military, and the police still existed, things weren’t as bad as anticipated.
But what about the situation in the countryside far away from the cities?
Chen Xin did not know, nor had he investigated, but based on what he had seen and the information he had, he feared that the further one got from the city, the worse the situation might be.
After all, the further away from a city, the fewer places that could be considered underground shelters before the disaster, most likely being only farrs’ personal cellars.
Even though the state rushed to build shelters in the countryside and towns in the three months leading up to the disaster, allowing most rural residents to have a place to hide from the disaster, it was too rushed to say that enough shelters were built or that every shelter provided the necessary survival conditions.
Shortage of clothing and food, lack of dical services and dicines, insufficient power and fresh water supply... Chen Xin could easily list a bunch of potential problems without thinking hard.
Especially the oxygen shortage issue that occurred in his city, small shelters might have better ventilation as they were only one or two stories and perhaps not deep enough to have problems like carbon dioxide accumulation, but such shallow shelters also had poor insulation.
Even if the heat could be retained as much as possible, it would quickly beco cold inside without enough heating facilities, turning into a giant icebox.
While having a shelter to block the cold was beneficial compared to facing temperatures of minus thirty or forty degrees directly, people needed more high-calorie food to maintain body temperature in low temperatures, and they were more susceptible to illness.
And what consequences these two would lead to... having played the ga "Frostpunk," Chen Xin knew that once hunger and disease reached a certain level, riots and dissatisfaction would arise.
In the ga, untad citizens would riot to a certain extent of sickness and hunger, driving out the managers, but in reality, once soone started dying of illness, nurous problems and conflicts would erupt, becoming unmanageable.
This also made Chen Xin worried about his parents; they lived in their hotown with relatives, which was just a county, and his parents and relatives didn’t even live in the town.
Though all living together were family relatives, having lived for generations even before the disaster, sharing the sa ancestral shrine, there wasn’t much chaos, and before the disaster, Chen Xin had specifically told them how to stockpile supplies and build shelters. Still, Chen Xin remained worried.
But worrying wouldn’t make Chen Xin go faster; his current speed was already much faster than he expected, having covered half the journey past the three towns, spending only five or six days since departure.
This was already much faster than Chen Xin estimated. At his current pace, he was confident that he could reach Anhui Province within five days, allowing him to return within a month when considering the return journey.
Even if there were matters to deal with after picking up his parents, it would only delay a few more days, with no major variables.
Thinking of this, Chen Xin felt a bit more at ease.
Now alone in the car, Chen Xin had to find a way to adjust his emotions, to not beco too impatient. While he could accelerate the car, rushing would also an danger.
This point was evident from the snow-covered road ahead.
The road ahead should have been built by cutting through the mountain, one side a mountain wall and the other a valley.
But now the whole road was covered with snow, and no trace of it could be found ahead, the snow turning the mountain slope into a whole where the original road couldn’t be seen.
"The snow is just too thick!" Chen Xin looked at the snow ahead, frowning and pondering how to get through this section of the road.
The road was covered with snow, making it impossible to use the original road unless Chen Xin could clear the snow from the road.
But with the effort and energy it would take to clear the snow, Chen Xin might as well think of finding an alternative route or upgrading his car to navigate such slopes.
Even though by design, the caterpillar track could provide enough traction to prevent sliding into the valley despite the slope, driving like that would be overly risky, and a small mistake could result in a fall into the valley below.
Chen Xin hesitated for a mont before sending up two reconnaissance drones, intending to scan the entire surrounding terrain to see if there was a flatter area he could pass through.
Although the surrounding area was mountainous, the terrain wasn’t steep and precipitous, with relatively flat areas in the valleys that could be traversed.
But compared to the original road, the valley route was notably more winding and tortuous.
Yet, this was the only option before Chen Xin, unless he wanted to take more ti to go the other way on the highway.
Using the highway could only be a last resort; although the highway route was straighter and had fewer road undulations, building a highway in a mountainous area would inevitably be filled with bridges and tunnels.
Tunnels were easy to manage, but bridges...
Recalling the collapsed bridges he had seen on his journey, Chen Xin decisively abandoned this plan.
After all, no matter how brilliant Fla Country is at infrastructure, even the infrastructure madman couldn’t build road bridges that could withstand teorite impacts without collapsing.
Soon, the drone returned the scanned results to the map on the console, displayed in color blocks.
Seeing the yellow and red areas on the hillside, Chen Xin could only turn his attention to the relatively flat green areas in the valley, continuing to control the drone to scan forward while restarting the car to move along the green-marked areas.
This thod of moving forward while scanning didn’t pose much danger, but it also didn’t allow Chen Xin to speed up, forcing him to move slowly forward; his speed had dropped to 10 km/h, almost like a turtle’s pace.
"It’s really hard to move here! Luckily, there used to be a river in this valley, a river trench; otherwise, there might not even be a path." Chen Xin shook his head, overlaying and comparing the drone’s scanned terrain with the map, sighing at the marked river channel in the valley on the map.
Just now, thinking he wasn’t slow, he imdiately faced a situation where he had to slow down, making Chen Xin feel both amused and exasperated.
Fortunately, he was in a good mindset, not becoming impatient because of the situation, and accepted the current speed.
Driving in the wilderness wasn’t fast initially, as it wasn’t like driving on roads before the disaster, where roads were flat and straight, with no pothole or mud on hardened roads, allowing for speeding safely.
Without roads in the wild, he first had to plan a direction and route for himself and deal with various complex road conditions in different environnts.
Problems like flooding and mud were the easiest to solve; in this apocalyptic environnt, those, alongside road gravel, trees, rivers, and other obstacles, all turned into snowy surfaces. Although road conditions beca simplistic, they were no easier to navigate.
If compared, driving in completely snow-covered regions is like driving on sand, only that snow is slightly firr than sand, so the wheels or tracks don’t sink in as easily.
But the snow itself also carries hidden dangers, like soft collapses and cavities beneath the snow.
This was also why Chen Xin didn’t activate the operating system for auto-driving but controlled the steering wheel himself.
After all, human judgnt and reaction were better than the rigid operating systems.
However, this also made Chen Xin sowhat regretful; he forgot to ask the townsfolk for more resources, simply upgrading the car’s operating system to artificial intelligence during his ti in the three towns.
With that setup, he wouldn’t have to work so hard, letting his mind wander for a mont.
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