Wasteland Survivalist: A Scientific Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Survival

Gu Lang immediately drove away from the aquaculture pond, turned the car around and headed west onto National Highway G228.

This is a coastal highway that starts in Dandong and ends in Fangcheng Port, Quang Xic province.

Stretching nearly 7000 kilometers, it is known as the "coastal corridor" of the Dragon Kingdom.

Even now, the scenery outside the car window is still picturesque.

To the left of the road lies the sea, sometimes turbulent, sometimes calm as a mirror.

To the right are plains, hills, and scattered villages and towns.

However, despite the beautiful scenery, it hides deadly radioactive dust that is invisible to the naked eye.

With a clear goal in mind, Gu Lang headed towards a nearby fishing port.

Although the drone did not find any fishing boats there, it did show the rooftops of factories in the footage.

He judged that it must be a fairly large aquatic product processing base.

There must be large industrial cold storage facilities there for deep freezing aquatic products.

Its walls must be filled with thick heat insulation materials, which themselves have a certain weakening effect on radiation.

More importantly, cold storage facilities are far more airtight than ordinary buildings, which can effectively block radioactive dust.

He planned to use it as a temporary base until he found a suitable boat to escape.

The factory gates were wide open, and inside the yard, only scattered seafood transport crates and an abandoned electric tricycle could be seen.

After a thorough search, Gu Lang confirmed that there was no one inside.

He arrived at a giant sliding cold storage door that was 5 meters high.

The door is made of thick metal sandwich panels, with wide, air-cushioned sealing strips along the edges.

Grasp the huge manual latch and push the door open.

A dozen meters ahead, another identical gate appeared.

Pushing it open again, a whiff of air mixed with the stale smell of seafood and a faint musty odor wafted out.

Gu Lang took out the Geiger counter, and the data confirmed his conjecture.

The radiation level inside the cold storage is significantly better than that in the external environment.

He got back into the light truck, shifted into reverse, and parked the vehicle.

After pushing the electric tricycle into the yard, he closed the cold storage door.

After the door was closed, it was eerily quiet inside.

You can even hear the steady beating of your heart inside your chest.

The interior of the cold storage is a vast, empty space that can be disorienting.

The steel structure supports the high ceiling, where the powerful evaporator, which has ceased operation, is suspended.

The aluminum fins gleamed with a cold, faint light under the flashlight beam.

He took out the clean fresh water stored in the car and took a thorough full-body shower in a corner of the cold storage.

After finishing the meal, I went back to the car to rest and recharge.

As night fell completely, Gu Lang put on his protective suit again after many days, wrapping himself up tightly.

I hopped on the fully charged three-wheeled vehicle and embarked on my exploration journey to Zhuanghe City.

Gu Lang slowly moved along the coastline, carefully searching for places where boats might be hidden on the beach.

After driving for more than ten kilometers, we still hadn't found anything.

But as he got closer to the city, a suffocating hellish scene began to appear in the night vision goggles.

At first, there were only a few outdoor tents clustered along the roadside, like temporary shelters hastily set up by refugees.

Then large disaster relief tents appeared, and their numbers increased exponentially, stretching as far as the eye could see.

Eventually, even living facilities appeared inside the plastic greenhouses.

The land around these camps has been extensively excavated.

He approached the edge of one of the pits, which was not yet completed, or rather, would not be completed in time.

At the bottom of the pit were layers upon layers of corpses, intertwined with each other.

Men, women, young and old—their numbers are countless.

Body bags can still be seen at the bottom, and at the very top, many people are even without their clothes.

They were exposed nakedly between heaven and earth, piled up like mountains.

The pungent stench seemed to penetrate even through the filtration system of the protective suit and the sealed mask, rushing straight to the brain.

Some of the corpses had already begun to decompose and liquefy, mixing with the soil to form a horrible paste.

But there were hardly any flies in sight; it seemed that even they had been affected by the nuclear radiation, which had reduced their reproductive efficiency.

After leaving the "mass grave," Gu Lang returned to the three-wheeled vehicle.

I plugged the charger into the power bank in the rear side compartment to extend the battery life.

Further on, some medical tents marked with red crosses came into view.

Upon entering, one finds the hospital beds filled with corpses that had not yet been buried.

The deceased had lost all his hair and was extremely emaciated and dehydrated, almost turning into a dried corpse.

The appearance of the remains was extremely shocking, presenting a sense of "destruction from the inside out".

"It really is acute radiation sickness." Gu Lang sighed inwardly.

When exposed to extremely high doses of radiation, the clinical manifestations are dominated by neurocardiovascular syndrome.

The entire central nervous system and circulatory system will collapse in a very short time.

This can lead to the patient's death within hours to days.

Because death is so rapid, the body does not have time to exhibit late-stage, severe symptoms in the hematopoietic system and gastrointestinal tract.

The body will appear relatively "well-preserved" and will not have experienced much pain before death.

In the second-lowest level, when exposed to high doses of radiation, the clinical manifestations are mainly gastrointestinal syndrome.

The intestinal epithelial cells will die and slough off on a large scale, leading to fatal bloody diarrhea.

The patient will survive for one to two weeks while suffering from severe abdominal pain.

When exposed to moderate doses of radiation, the clinical manifestations are dominated by hematopoietic system syndrome.

After experiencing initial nausea and vomiting, patients will enter a "latent period".

It may appear to be getting better, but in reality, the lymphocytes and bone marrow stem cells in the body are dying rapidly.

He eventually died from uncontrollable infection, bleeding, and multiple organ failure.

The patient could survive for one to two months, and the way they die is exactly what you see here.

Gu Lang picked up a notice that was scattered on the ground.

The notice stated that due to an unexplained outbreak of disease out of control in Zhuanghe City, all medical personnel were required to urgently evacuate to Changhai County.

Gu Lang checked the map and found that it was an island county located southwest of Zhuanghe City.

At this point, Gu Lang finally understood why he couldn't find a boat at the beach.

They abandoned their plan to go to Zhuanghe city and turned back to the cold storage.

Over the next few days, he used drones to expand the search area.

They tried to contact any ships that might be at sea using a radio, but unfortunately, they received no response.

"Our only hope now is the boat from Dalu Island. We need to find a way to get to the island."

Gu Lang made a judgment and began to look for a feasible way to cross the sea.

First, swimming is out of the question, as the temperature is only ten degrees Celsius.

Without proper equipment, prolonged immersion can lead to hypothermia.

Due to the influence of ocean currents, the actual swimming distance is likely to be more than 15 kilometers.

This is far beyond the capabilities of most ordinary people.

Gu Lang finally decided to build a simple kayak and cross to the island as soon as possible.