After coming out of Prison 18, Qing Chen followed Li Shutong through the long tunnel, passed through the surveillance area outside the prison, and walked all the way to the mountains.
Qing Chen once asked Li Shutong why there would be a secret passage in the prison?
Li Shutong answered that Prison 18 was built by the Li Corporation.
The tunnel was prepared when the Li Corporation built this prison, just in case a decedent would become a prisoner one day and still would be able to live in the outside world.
At that time, corporations didn't have as large of an influence on the Federation, and anyone might become a victim of the struggle for more power at some point.
When the prison was built, the engineers who were responsible to build it all died in a landslide on their way to another task in City 10.
Only a few people in the Li Family knew about it.
Later, the Li family grew up slowly, and the real engineering drawings kept in the Li family were lost at some point, and even the Li Family forgot their ancestors and left them a way to survive.
Because of the Li Corporation's status in the Federation nowadays, it no longer needed such a level of back-up
After Li Shutong brought Qing Chen out, he kept Qing Chen carrying a heavy mountaineering bag. Even when the teenager still had an injury on his foot, the two of them still moved forward at a rapid pace.
"Are there any more bone-cracking sounds?" Li Shutong asked.
"No," Qing Chen shook his head: "It never appeared again."
Like all the Knights before him, his genetic lock has not moved since he left Laojun Mountain.
Li Shutong smiled and said, "It doesn't matter. You'll get something out of this experience eventually."
"By the way, teacher," Qing Chen asked, "the food we brought will only be enough for two more days, what shall we eat next after that?"
Li Shutong looked at the teenager, "How would I know. This is, of course, something you should worry about as a student!"
The girl Qin Yiyi got up early in the morning, folded her tent, and threw it back into the car.
She quietly looked at the teenager from a distance, around ten meters away, and was surprised to find that he was already cooking for the middle-aged man.
"Brother, does the servant really have no chance to regain his freedom?" Qin Yiyi asked Qin Tong.
"I haven't heard of any servants who could regain their freedom," said Qin Tong. "The servants are the ones closest to those big wigs, so they know a lot of secrets. Therefore, even when their contracts ended, the company will not let them leave. They tend to be killed."
Qin Yiyi sighed, why would such a good boy become a servant.
Why would a family ever sell their child to a company?
The Qin Family had a hard time, and they had many children, but even so, they had never thought about selling children.
Thinking of last night, when the teenager was applying medicine to his feet without any pain shown on his face, Qin Yiyi thought that he must have suffered a lot, which could explain why he was so indifferent to pain.
At this moment, the sound of engines and deafening music suddenly came from the north of the woods.
The music was extraordinarily overwhelming, to the point where it could make people nervous even from a distance.
Before the convoy from the north arrived, Qin Cheng saw more than ten drones in the sky passing overhead.
"They are Chen Corporation's Boundary-011 drones, fully armed! Quick, put away our drones!" Qin Cheng shouted loudly.
However, it was already too late.
The drowns suddenly surrounded the camp and more than a dozen drones shot all of Qin Cheng's drones down.
Qin Yiyi felt distressed about the loss. They traded their hunt for those, and with the drones, everyone could sleep in peace in the wilderness.
Qin Cheng took a deep breath and said, "Raise your hands and don't try to resist. It's the Li and Chen families' autumn hunting group. We can't get away from them."
No one in the camp dared to move. The dozen or so Boundary-011s patrolled around the camp like the convoy's outpost.
Qin Cheng and the others were like lambs on the chopping board, waiting to be slaughtered.
In the blink of an eye, the convoy from the north came sweeping across, and the huge tires of the vehicles rolled up the dust on the ground.
Qing Chen and Li Shutong pulled up the collars of their jackets and watched silently.
Li Shutong whispered, "Don't reveal your identity, for now, I don't want to kill them yet."
Qing Chen glanced at his teacher blankly, "…"
The convoy consisted of more than thirty vehicles, 29 SUVs with super-large wheels, and 7 pickups as supply vehicles. This was a large group.
The exhaust vents of the SUVs were not at the rear of the car but on the sides of the body.
In midst of the deafening music, someone stepped on the accelerator and cheered. The exhaust pipes standing on both sides suddenly spewed out flames.
Qingchen felt a little surprised. Jiang Xue told him before that because there was no way to build a large-scale "cloud tower" in the wilderness, most of the vehicles here were diesel vehicles.
Now Qing Chen suddenly realized that the diesel vehicles Jiang Xue was talking about… seemed a little different from the diesel vehicles he imagined.
On the lead vehicle, a man was sitting in the passenger seat wearing a mechanical headset, controlling more than a dozen drones through neuron connections.
Under normal circumstances, people like him would be called the "first officer" in the team, responsible for all investigations, alerts, and camp security, and was usually regarded as the deputy director of the team.
For a car behind, a young man jumped down and slowly walked towards the camp, but when he saw Qin Cheng's two pickups, he cursed loudly.
Someone in the car asked, "What's going on?"
The young man replied loudly, "They are licensed hunters from City 18. We can't kill them."
The pickup was spray-painted with a wolf's head and a serial number, which was the identification serial number of the Qin Cheng family, proving that they left the city legally.
Someone in another car suddenly said, "It should be fine. I don't think they have their recording devices turned on, so the data recording center won't know. Let's just kill them as a start for the Autumn Hunting."
A woman's voice from the same car sounded, "You said you came out to hunt, and now you just end bullying ordinary people? You're truly hopeless."
With that said, the car window rolled down, revealing a tall and muscular woman in the driver's seat of an SUV.
The young man outside the car whistled and laughed, "Yinuo is right, let's go!"
"Hold up," said the muscular Li Yinuo, "Pay the money for damaging their drones."
The young man took out two stacks of money from his bag and threw them on the ground. Soon, everyone turned around and got into the car.
The large convoy hit the road again, leaving only the dusty campground, where everyone looked a little out of place.
People in the camp breathed a sigh of relief. Qin Tong sat weakly on the ground, and the young woman beside him was nestled in his arms, sobbing softly.
The common people seemed so powerless when they met the big wigs.
Qin Yiyi looked back and found that middle-aged man and teenager just standing behind a tree trunk, where it was hard to see them at first glance.