Chapter 31: Estrangement (Part 2)
For two straight days, Liu Xiaona studiously avoided Song Yuqing. He continued to perform his duties around the shop, but the old enthusiasm and drive were entirely gone. With foot traffic practically non-existent, he spent the better part of the day sitting alone in the bamboo grove, moodily jostling for position with Little Meat Bun. Seeing that the driver was in a foul mood, the giant panda decided to be the bigger animal and chose not to argue with him.
“Is something bothering you?” Song Yuqing asked Liu Xiaona for the umpteenth time, leaning against the storefront frame.
“No.”
“You know, a lot of tragedies in stories only happen because the characters don’t have mouths to speak.”
Liu Xiaona actively avoided her inquiring gaze. Last night, after everyone else had fallen asleep, he had secretly slipped out of bed to pace the dark shop, standing silently outside Song Yuqing’s closed door for a long, tense interval.
“If you’ve grown to dislike working at God’s Supermarket, you are more than welcome to pack your bags and leave as soon as possible,” Song Yuqing said, her voice dropping into a cold, detached register. “After all, unlike the others, you haven’t signed an indentured contract selling your services.”
Liu Xiaona clutched his head in apparent pain. “Just let me think about it.”
Song Yuqing said nothing more, turning away cleanly. Both Little Meat Bun and Gaha had clearly picked up on the toxic friction between the manager and the driver, and they were both incredibly nervous, not even daring to breathe too loudly on the shop floor.
Xie Hao and Xie Zetian were equally uneasy about the sudden, drastic drop in the store’s atmospheric pressure. Xie Zetian muddled it over, realizing he had encountered this exact type of suffocating tension just a few days ago back at the compound. At the time, he was still the supreme commander of Base No. 27.
It was the unmistakable, depressing calm before a massive political storm.
“And besides that! The quality of the meals Liu Xiaona has been whipping up over the past forty-eight hours has severely plummeted!” Xie Hao sighed, rubbing his stomach.
Right at that second, Liu Xiaona glided silently past his chair. Xie Hao felt an instant, physical chill crawl down his spine and promptly shut his mouth.
“Let’s have beef noodles for dinner today,” Liu Xiaona said, suddenly flashing Xie Hao a wide smile.
The sudden shift gave Xie Hao absolute goosebumps across his entire body.
“Brother Xie, once we’re done eating, make sure you head out into the grid to retrieve that zombie corpse you put down the other day. It’s been baking out there for two days already. If you leave it any longer, it’s going to rot into liquid sludge and go to waste.”
“No problem. Let’s make sure we add an extra portion of beef to our bowls today,” Xie Zetian chimed in, raising his eyebrows.
“You should head out with Brother Xie to help him,” Liu Xiaona instructed, his face completely devoid of expression. “He only has one hand; he physically can’t haul that much weight alone.”
“I can handle it just fine! Who says I can’t move it?!” Xie Hao protested, thoroughly unconvinced.
Liu Xiaona offered no verbal counter-argument, simply training a cold, silent stare directly onto Xie Zetian.
Xie Zetian let out a forced cough, feeling profoundly uncomfortable under the weight of the gaze. “Honestly, if this were the old world, I would have slapped you across the mouth long ago. This truly is a textbook case of a proud tiger being bullied by a dog on open ground… Fine, fine, whatever. I’ll head out with him.”
A faint look of satisfaction finally cut through Liu Xiaona’s wooden expression, and he turned toward the back galley. Song Yuqing had already neatly prepped the raw inventory for the shift, leaving the ingredients arranged across the counter: fresh cuts of beef, blocks of packaged noodles, and a vibrant, nutrient-dense selection of vegetables.
“Fancy nonsense,” Liu Xiaona muttered. He despised these soft, processed noodles; his palate fiercely preferred the traditional, firm bite of alkaline wheat strands.
Suddenly, a terrifying shriek echoed from the back hallway. The moment the sound registered, Liu Xiaona dropped his spatula and sprinted toward the shared facility.
Song Yuqing was currently pounding furiously against the bathroom door, frantically calling out to the panda locked inside.
“Gaha~” Gaha drifted over, a wet cleaning rag balanced casually on top of her dreadlocks as she tilted her head in confusion.
“Little Meat Bun, open the door right now!” Song Yuqing yelled, her anxiety spiking. But the panda refused to slide the latch, a series of frantic rustling and scratching sounds echoing from the other side of the wood.
“Did you slip on the tiles?!”
An instant later, the loud, aggressive spray of a shower head violently erupted inside the stall, water splashing everywhere.
“Little Meat Bun is currently conducting an emergency full-body wash,” Master Fu’s voice crackled over the sound system, acting as an executive translator for the crisis. “The facility’s secondary dispenser ran entirely out of toilet paper, so he resorted to utilizing his bare paws to clear his system.”
Song Yuqing: “…”
“Do you happen to have a spare roll of toilet paper tucked away inside your spatial vault?” Liu Xiaona asked, staring directly at her. “I distinctly remember noticing the retail shelves out front are completely out of paper stock as well.”
“In that case, I’ll take Little Meat Bun and sprint over to the Chen Town commercial mall to scour the household goods aisle.”
“Let Gaha and the bear handle the run,” Liu Xiaona interrupted sharply, his voice entirely devoid of politeness as he cut her off mid-sentence. “I have a few critical things I need to discuss with you alone.”
“I’m worried if they go by themselves…” Song Yuqing began, but Liu Xiaona’s cadence grew even more aggressive.
“You certainly seem to harbor an immense amount of deep concern for those creatures,” the driver sneered, his lips curling into a bitter line. “I’ve been stranded out in the wasteland for weeks, yet you didn’t seem to lose a single second of sleep worrying about my survival. Or maybe I’m exactly what I feel like—a total outsider inside this supermarket.”
Liu Xiaona locked his gaze squarely onto her eyes, one of his hands white-knuckling as he violently pinched the fabric of his own thigh.
A sharp, acrid burning smell suddenly wafted down the corridor. Startled by the odor, Liu Xiaona broke eye contact and scrambled back toward the galley. But he was catastrophically too late; the heavy broth had completely boiled over, and the noodles were scorched black against the bottom of the pot.
Whatever. Serve it anyway, he resolved bitterly. It’s the apocalypse; who cares about a little char on their food?
When the dark, mushy mass of noodles was finally laid out on the counter, the face of every single staff member twisted in pure disappointment. Among them, Song Yuqing was visibly the most furious.
This marked the absolute first time she had openly lost her temper since the day she had taken the driver in. If Xie Hao and Xie Zetian hadn’t physically stepped between them to de-escalate the tension, she would have violently hurled the entire ceramic bowl straight out the front door.
“I push my physical limits to cross dimensions and secure premium food, and you casually destroy it like it’s garbage!”
“I’m volunteering my own labor to cook for this camp, and all you do is complain!” Liu Xiaona fired right back, his chest heaving. “Fine! See if I ever waste my sentiment on you again!”
The two of them barked insults back and forth, the structural tension in the room reaching a boiling point.
“Gaha!” Gaha and Little Meat Bun immediately lunged forward, physically forcing a wide pocket of distance between the two screaming humans. The entire scenario felt profoundly surreal; nothing about the breakdown felt organic or correct.
As the zombie girl actively pushed the manager back, her gray eyes scanned Song Yuqing’s face, only to freeze. Hidden beneath the mask of raw, screaming fury, a faint, highly calculated smile was playing at the corners of Song Yuqing’s mouth.
Gaha: (⊙o⊙)?
The violent screaming match was forcibly muzzled by the two non-human clerks. Gaha securely clamped a pale hand over Song Yuqing’s mouth, while Little Meat Bun used his massive paw to firmly seal Liu Xiaona’s jaws shut. Gaha’s grip was perfectly gentle, but the giant panda was operating on pure frustration, squeezing the driver’s face so hard the man could barely draw oxygen through his nose.
Watching the drama unfold, Xie Zetian and Xie Hao kept their heads buried low over their bowls. The food was a blackened, mushy disaster, but having a full stomach in the wasteland was infinitely better than starving.
The moment the plates were cleared, Liu Xiaona frantically ushered Xie Zetian, Xie Hao, Gaha, and the giant panda out the front door. One team was dispatched down the highway to haul the dead weight of the zombie corpses, while the other was pushed toward the Chen Town commercial mall to secure paper supplies.
Within minutes, the sprawling shop floor of God’s Supermarket fell completely vacant, leaving only Song Yuqing and Liu Xiaona standing in the silence.
“Alright, let’s lay our cards flat on the table,” Song Yuqing said, her voice dropping all pretense. She had been sitting calmly by the front window, but the absolute second the panda’s tail cleared the lane, her expression hardened, and she stood up to face him. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?”
“You’re genuinely going to let me isolate you like this?” Liu Xiaona asked, standing behind the register as he slowly raised his head, his eyes flashing with a dangerous intensity. “Aren’t you even a fraction of a second terrified of what I’m about to do to you?”
“You’ve been operating under this roof for days, Liu Xiaona. Do you honestly not comprehend that the structural matrix of God’s Supermarket will—”
“You can’t hide behind the passive protection of this shop for the rest of your life,” Liu Xiaona cut her off fiercely, his voice rising. “Personally, you simply do not possess the raw, physical strength required to survive out here.”
Directly across the street, crouched securely behind the low brick wall of the alley perimeter, Lin Han and Chen Ke kept low to the dirt. Moving with stealthy precision, a wave of elite psychics stood stacked directly behind them, their weapons drawn and ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
Lin Han wore a pair of high-end tactical headphones, intensely tracking the live audio stream of the conversation bouncing from the tracking bug inside the storefront.
“The audio quality on this junk is absolutely atrocious!” Lin Han hissed, violently ripping the headset off and tossing the gear into Chen Ke’s lap. He carefully edged his chest over the top of the brickwork, watching the front windows of God’s Supermarket with a predatory glare.
He had run the numbers. As an outside entity, the shop’s invulnerability laws meant he couldn’t inflict a single point of physical harm on Song Yuqing as long as she remained behind the threshold. To crack the fortress, he had needed to identify a registered clerk within her inner circle whose mind could be easily broken and manipulated.
An internal strike was always the most lethal poison.
Lin Han possessed absolute confidence that his elaborate strategy to sow discord would execute flawlessly. Aside from his core mercenaries, not a single living soul in the quadrant knew the real truth behind Sister Qin’s ultimate fate.
He had masterfully exploited that vacuum of intelligence to dump a bucket of toxic slander onto Song Yuqing, leveraging the fact that she shared the exact same high-tier spatial attributes as himself. Liu Xiaona and Sister Qin had looked out for one another like real family; the driver would stop at nothing to violently avenge her erasure. The enemy of my enemy was his perfect asset.
Lin Han was simply waiting out the clock. The absolute second Liu Xiaona successfully cleared the non-human defenders out of the sector, neutralized Song Yuqing, and physically dragged her bleeding frame out past the storefront boundary line, Lin Han would step from the shadows to finish her off. The multi-dimensional trading post would change executive hands in a matter of minutes.
Inside the air-conditioned shop, Liu Xiaona’s hands began to violently tremble as his elemental reserves snapped awake. A churning, pressurized vortex of raw water energy suddenly materialized out of thin air, wrapping securely around his entire silhouette.
