Chapter 21: Planting a Small Bamboo Forest
Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun walked over to the bamboo forest at the same time, looking up at the leaves. The bamboo shoots fluttered gently, making a soft, rhythmic rustling sound. It turned out the teahouse stayed so remarkably cool because of this small thicket.
Let’s move it!
Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun exchanged a knowing look, nodded, and immediately got to work.
Before the world ended, Song Yuqing had spent days photographing an old craftsman whose absolute favorite hobby was cultivating bamboo. The man could talk about the plant endlessly, and Song Yuqing had picked up several proper transplanting techniques from him.
Finding a small hand shovel, she carefully dug out a root ball about thirty centimeters in diameter around the base of the first stalk, ensuring the root system remained completely encased in the soil. Once it was free, she safely transferred the bamboo and its root ball directly into her spatial corridor.
Though the grove was small, it still consisted of about ten mature stalks, and digging them all out required a massive amount of physical effort. Little Meat Bun was eager to help; he enthusiastically imitated Song Yuqing’s technique, using his bare paws to eagerly excavate the dirt.
The plants hadn’t developed any aggressive mutations to resist them, quietly allowing the duo to dig them up. Song Yuqing dug with great enthusiasm, thrilled by the prospect of taking the entire grove home to transplant right in front of God’s Supermarket. She even considered saving a few roots to trade to Liu Xiaona later.
At that exact moment, twenty kilometers away, Liu Xiaona was being tortured half to death by the brutal, fifty-degree heatwave. Even though he had reached the intermediate tier, his physical body simply lacked the innate traits required to withstand such extreme thermal radiation. Even his water-type abilities were severely suppressed; he could barely manifest or manipulate a steady stream anymore. Stripped of his combat utility, he had essentially become a pariah.
When the temperature originally began to skyrocket, the vast majority of the base populace had retreated deep into the underground bunkers. The unfortunate few who remained on the surface were individuals who had explicitly offended Lin Han—and they were effectively left out in the open to wait for death. Liu Xiaona was squarely among them.
For ordinary refugees and outcast superhumans alike, Base No. 27 could no longer be classified as a sanctuary; it was far more accurate to call it a deadly survival gauntlet. Over the past week, a massive number of people had died—partly due to the unyielding heat, and partly due to the escalating internal strife between Lin Han’s faction and the base’s supreme founder, Xie Zetian.
Liu Xiaona knew with absolute certainty that he couldn’t afford to waste any more time waiting for Sister Qin. He resolved to desert the compound and head out to look for Song Yuqing. The glaring issue, however, was his current physical state; under this lethal sun, he risked collapsing and dying before he could even make it halfway to God’s Supermarket.
Back in Chen Town, Song Yuqing returned to the shop and partnered with Little Meat Bun to dig a row of trenches directly in front of the storefront to plant their new bamboo. The two of them were completely engrossed in their gardening, entirely tuning out Huo Bin, who desperately wanted to pitch in but had absolutely no idea how to help without hands.
The skeleton stood frozen in the doorway, a deep sense of redundancy washing over him, which made him feel profoundly uncomfortable.
Before Song Yuqing had returned, he had spent hours carefully mulling over Master Fu’s suggestion about challenging her for a management role. He desperately wanted an opportunity to prove his worth, but he was terrified. He simply lacked the courage, constantly stressing that he couldn’t possibly compete with her efficiency.
“So? Not bad, right?” Song Yuqing cheered as she finally finished planting the final stalk. She wiped the sweat from her brow with a muddy hand, accidentally leaving a prominent streak of yellow clay right across her forehead.
“Yeah. Looks great,” Huo Bin responded perfunctorily.
The entire lane was completely devoid of life, leaving the small bamboo thicket outside God’s Supermarket as the only vibrant patch of green.
Deep within the shadows at the far end of the alley, a rogue zombie was currently undergoing a radical, high-tier metamorphosis. Its mangled limbs and rotting skin rapidly shifted, taking on the smooth texture and healthy pigment of a living human, while its dull milky pupils cleared into a sharp, golden-brown hue. It stretched its newly aligned limbs, letting out a bizarre, resonant click from its throat. Hearing the command, several primary walkers lurking nearby slowly shuffled toward it, dropping their heads in submission.
The zombie with the golden-brown eyes leaped effortlessly onto a nearby rooftop, landing flawlessly along the eaves. Its physical mobility was vastly superior to any primary or intermediate variant. More importantly, it had successfully reawakened the cognitive functions of a human brain, allowing it to telepathically command the lower-tier undead and assign them tactical objectives.
“Hiss!”
The newly ascended Zombie King issued a harsh command, ordering his subordinates to systematically sweep through Chen Town and eradicate every single living creature left in the grid.
The horde mobilized immediately, starting from the deepest recesses of the alleyways. They conducted a ruthless house-to-house search, hunting down any trace of biological life—mutated dogs, stray chickens, feral ducks, and birds alike. Whenever the horde encountered a lower-tier walker that couldn’t tolerate the extreme heatwave, the Zombie King would step in, funneling a fraction of his own evolutionary energy to assist the thrashing creature in developing a thermal-resistant hide.
Leading a massive, highly coordinated vanguard, the Zombie King rapidly converged on the lane housing God’s Supermarket.
Naturally, Song Yuqing had absolutely no idea a localized army was marching her way. She was completely immersed in the simple joy of owning her new bamboo grove.
“Gaha—!”
The long-haired woman in the white shirt, who had vanished into the horde a few days prior, suddenly materialized out of thin air. Moving with frantic urgency, she lunged forward and aggressively shoved both Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun backward into the shop.
Song Yuqing and the panda were caught entirely off guard, nearly knocked off their feet by the force of the woman’s unexpected tackle.
“Gaha! Gaha, Gaha, Gaha!”
The woman in white began gesturing wildly, flailing her arms in a manic dance as she desperately tried to communicate a critical warning.
Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun stood side-by-side in the entryway, their heads tilted in perfect unison as they stared at her in utter confusion.
Looking at the intruder up close, she didn’t look terrifying or monstrous at all. Her straight black hair was just exceptionally long, her skin was a few shades too pale, and her pupils carried a muted, grayish tint. Setting those anomalous features aside, the woman in white actually looked quite cute.
Hiding securely behind a tall display shelf, Huo Bin stared at her, a memory suddenly clicking in his mind. This girl… she looks exactly like the brave civilian I saw inside the mall on the night the meteor shower hit. He remembered her clearly; to shield a stray child from the initial outbreak, she had courageously fought off a swarm of walkers with nothing but her bare hands.
“Gaha! Gaha!”
Realizing the manager and her bear couldn’t comprehend a single syllable of her warnings, the woman in white let out a frustrated huff. She whirled around, grabbed the edge of the heavy wooden door, and slammed it shut, locking them securely inside the store.
Song Yuqing: “?”
She stepped forward to reopen the entrance, but her hand froze on the latch as a chorus of low, guttural hisses echoed down the pavement outside.
Peering through the front display glass, Song Yuqing’s blood ran cold. A massive, densely packed legion of zombies was marching down the alley, every single monster tracking the shop with a mask of pure, ravenous hunger.
As the vanguard reached the threshold, the woman in white stepped onto the pavement, clenching her fists as she let out an authoritative, booming shout. “Gaha!”
The advancing walkers froze for a split second, their momentum breaking. But a beat later, their eyes glazed over, and they resumed their march, completely ignoring her. Realizing she had lost her telepathic grip on the horde, the woman in white immediately pivoted and fled into the shadows.
Behind the counter, Huo Bin’s joints clattered violently as his legs began to shake with terror.
“Take a breath, Huo Bin. Relax,” Song Yuqing comforted him, keeping her eyes fixed on the street. “Those monsters physically cannot cross the perimeter.”
Suddenly, the golden-brown-eyed Zombie King emerged from the heart of the horde. Moving with terrifying ease, he stepped right across the invisible border that had repelled every lower-tier monster—completely breaching the shop’s invulnerability field. Walking right up to the storefront, he pressed his face against the display window, locking his golden gaze directly onto Song Yuqing.
Song Yuqing froze, pure terror gripping her chest, while beside her, Little Meat Bun bared his jagged fangs, letting out a low, menacing growl at the intruder.
The Zombie King raised a hand, telepathically commanding the remaining horde to storm the structure, only to find the lower-tier monsters were still physically blocked by the barrier, unable to take a single step closer. His golden-brown pupils flashed a dangerous, bloody crimson. Infuriated by the restriction, he raised his fists and began violently smashing them against the reinforced display glass.
“Master Fu! Help us!” Huo Bin shrieked, dropping into a tight crouch behind the shelves, trembling wildly.
“You are a literal skeleton,” Master Fu’s voice boomed over the speakers, sounding thoroughly annoyed. “Why on earth are you terrified of a zombie swarm? They aren’t exactly known for their love of gnawing on bare bones.”
Oh, wait. He’s right. I’m just a pile of bones now; there’s no meat left on me. Zombies have absolutely no interest in eating me, Huo Bin realized, his panic instantly evaporating as a wave of relief washed over him.
Bang! Bang!
The storefront window vibrated violently under the crushing weight of the Zombie King’s strikes, fractures beginning to spiderweb across the glass. Song Yuqing pulled her heavy kitchen knife from her spatial vault, bracing herself just in case the barrier failed completely.
Right at that exact second, a silhouette dropped straight out of the sky. The woman in white plummeted from the rooftop, brandishing a massive, heavy iron rebar rod, and brought it down with crushing force directly onto the Zombie King’s skull.
The Zombie King staggered from the impact, quickly resetting his stance. Snarls tearing from his throat, he whipped his fists around to aggressively strike back at the girl.
“Hiss!”
“Gah!”
The two high-tier entities locked into a furious exchange, trading heavy blows and trading snarls, completely bypassing weapons for a display of pure, raw violence.
Watching the bizarre, brutal duel unfold through the cracked glass, Song Yuqing and Little Meat Bun felt a profoundly surreal sensation settling over them.
“The entity in the white shirt has also evolved into a zombie variant,” Master Fu’s voice crackled to life, explaining the anomaly. “However, her evolutionary path is significantly more advanced than the others. She has retained her human consciousness and actively refuses to consume human flesh.”
Song Yuqing’s chest tightened. She couldn’t just stand by and watch someone get torn apart trying to protect her shop—even if that “someone” happened to be a zombie.
