Chapter 35: Liar Is A Puppy
A delicate purple orchid blossomed directly from the pistil of the blue rose.
“Gaha!” Gaha shrieked with excitement, lunging forward to touch the fresh petals, but Song Yuqing quickly yanked her back by the arm.
“See? This is a specialized application of my flora manipulation—the peanut flower,” Nanjiao explained proudly, basking in their stunned silence. “The fragrance it emits isn’t just incredibly refreshing; it actually possesses advanced tissue-regeneration properties to heal physical wounds.”
Wow.
Seeing the sheer, child-like pride washing over Nanjiao’s face, Song Yuqing and the others finally let out a collective sigh of relief, dropping their guard.
Xie Hao took a deep, aggressive breath of the fragrant air, rubbing his bare scalp. “If I stand here and inhale this stuff long enough, will it help my hair grow back?”
“Honestly? I haven’t run any clinical trials on baldness,” Nanjiao admitted.
“Gaha!” The absolute second Song Yuqing loosened her grip, Gaha bolted forward. She snatched the glowing flower straight from Nanjiao’s palm, jammed it right under her nose, and took a massive, desperate sniff—before letting out an incredibly loud, resonant burp.
“Gaha…” the zombie girl muttered, sheepishly scratching her dreadlocks as an awkward smile broke across her pale face.
Nanjiao stared at her, his lips trembling as a wave of intense, heartbreaking sorrow hit his chest. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. Geng Kelin had never been this relaxed, this wonderfully carefree, back when she was trapped under the crushing responsibilities of human baseline command. “How did you manage to become so adorable?” he whispered softly.
“Hold on a minute,” Song Yuqing interrupted, her sharp eyes tracking his movements. “How exactly did you break out of those hemp bonds without making a sound?” She gestured toward his bare wrists, then down to the cleanly severed ropes littering the floorboards.
“Oh, come on, it was a total walk in the park!” To completely clear her suspicions, Nanjiao casually dropped cross-legged onto the floor. Right before their eyes, a thin, flexible vine sprouted from his skin, rapidly weaving the frayed strands back together. He slipped his wrists right back into the loops, tightened the knots, and locked himself back into the chair perfectly. “See? Done!”
Song Yuqing let out a sharp laugh, a mix of exhaustion and amusement. “Unbelievable. Fine, let’s untie you for real, sit down, and actually talk strategy.”
That night, Song Yuqing and Nanjiao stayed up until dawn, meticulously mapping out their logistics. The rest of the crew eventually hit their physical limits, slipping back to their respective dormitories to crash. Gaha carefully arranged the blue peanut flowers into a clean glass vase, setting the arrangement right on top of the cashier counter. Thoroughly satisfied with her work, she turned on her heel and slipped back into her room as well.
Once she fully verified the operational authenticity of Base Zero’s network, Song Yuqing officially resolved to partner with Nanjiao to establish a decentralized digital portal: an online God’s Supermarket. This sprawling e-commerce network would directly interface with the fifteen major sovereign survivor compounds across the continent, siphoning premium supplies—fresh underwater agricultural produce, vacuum-sealed rations, shelf-stable beverages, household essentials, educational media, and high-grade trauma medicine—straight to the civilian sectors.
The glaring bottleneck, however, was physical distribution. They couldn’t exactly hand Liu Xiaona a rusty electric scooter, order him to manually cross a thousand miles of apocalyptic wasteland to deliver a box of instant noodles, and expect him to haul twenty rotting corpses back on his rack. That primitive setup barely sufficed for their local black-market runs to Base No. 27, but a continent-wide network serving fifteen massive strongholds required real corporate infrastructure.
“Is your system capable of replicating and deploying more of those automated security gates?” Nanjiao suggested, tapping the counter. “Every sovereign base operates on a standardized internal credit economy. The refugees and hunters accumulate digital points based on their recorded zombie liquidations and public infrastructure labor. We can bridge their databases to our shopping platform. Once a consumer places an order online, the base command centers can simply feed the equivalent corpse weight directly into a local security gate deployed at their terminal, siphoning the credit loop. The gate acts as a automated reverse-accounting node, tracking and deducting balances seamlessly.”
Song Yuqing’s eyes lit up. What a brilliant corporate strategy!
She tilted her head up toward the ceiling, mentally projecting her consciousness to query the disembodied AI. Master Fu, can you fulfill this request?
“Oh, look who finally remembered my existence,” Master Fu’s voice crackled dryly through her mind. “You require fifteen multi-dimensional security nodes? Entirely within my manufacturing capability. However, corporate protocol dictates you must fulfill an immediate supply transaction of exactly one hundred high-tier zombie carcasses to unlock the inventory.”
“One hundred? Why such a steep premium all of a sudden?”
“Because once your aggregate store metrics clear the one-hundred-corpse threshold, the core infrastructure of God’s Supermarket will trigger a permanent tier upgrade. And as an executive performance bonus, your personal spatial attributes and the individual superpower capacities of your registered staff will undergo a massive, permanent evolution.”
Song Yuqing’s pulse quickened, her eyes flashing with ambition. The promise of an evolutionary upgrade for her crew was an incredibly tempting incentive.
“Be advised,” Master Fu added, his tone sharpening. “A strict operational deadline applies. You have exactly five days to clear the metric.”
“Are you serious? You’ve got to be kidding me!” Nanjiao yelled, suddenly slamming his fists onto the table as he bolted upright in a panic. Because he was physically incapable of hearing the AI’s internal transmission, he assumed Song Yuqing’s whispered reaction was directed at him.
“Relax, I wasn’t talking to you,” Song Yuqing corrected quickly. “The store’s backend system just issued a mandate: we need to finalize a bulk transaction of one hundred zombie corpses within the next five days to officially secure the fifteen distribution gates.”
“Consider it done. I’ll personally coordinate the regional marketing campaign across the network channels,” Nanjiao declared. Witnessing her interact with the empty air completely solidified his trust in Ruan Fanfan’s initial dossier; God’s Supermarket truly was anchored by a high-tier, reality-bending system.
“That still leaves one critical variable up in the air,” Song Yuqing noted, narrowing her eyes. “Even if the inbound credit loop is resolved by the gates siphoning corpses at their home terminals, how do we physically transport the bulk inventory from our vault directly into the hands of the remote buyers?”
“Base Zero maintains a massive, fully trained logistics division,” Nanjiao grinned. “And let me tell you, our delivery couriers fly at absolute breakneck speeds!”
“A dedicated vanguard of aviation psychics?”
“Of course not! Elite airmen are far too expensive to waste on residential cargo drop-offs. We utilize a highly trained fleet of mutated giant carrier pigeons.”
Song Yuqing stared at him, her mind completely blank as she tried to visualize a miles-long queue of monstrous, irradiated pigeons neatly lining up outside her storefront every morning, waiting patiently to clip takeaway boxes onto their talons.
“I swear to God, I am not making this up!” Nanjiao barked, aggressively thumping the table again to defend his credentials. Fortunately, both Liu Xiaona and Little Meat Bun were locked deep within a heavy, food-induced slumber down the hall, completely undisturbed by the shouting.
Meanwhile, inside her dark dormitory room, Gaha lay flat on her back, her graying pupils staring wide-eyed at the ceiling tiles. As her dead neurons processed Nanjiao’s presence, a fractured, cinematic memory began to play across the blank surfaces of her mind.
The projection showed Nanjiao quietly trailing a few paces behind her younger self, his arms loaded down with gear as he tirelessly watched over her flank, using his aggressive botanical manipulation to violently tear apart a swarm of carnivorous mutant plants that had tried to claim her.
“Anyone who tries to break your cover is going to have to answer to me!”
Out on the shimmering sands of a blinding, oppressive desert grid, the memory-version of Nanjiao held up four fingers, swearing a solemn oath directly into her face. His brilliant eyes were brimming with a soft, affectionate laughter that had caused her human skin to flush a deep crimson. A group of rowdy mercenaries had tried to shout a series of crude taunts from a nearby transport vehicle, but the memory-Gaha had let out a terrifying, throat-tearing roar, scaring the troublemakers clean out of the sector.
Why exactly had he taken that oath? Gaha’s dead cells couldn’t trace the context. The memory dissolved back into static.
Drifting out of the trace, she caught the faint sound of Song Yuqing’s voice echoing from the shop floor, politely instructing Nanjiao to navigate his way to the vacant residence next door to find a couch for the night.
The digital dashboard on the counter indicated it was already well past four in the morning.
Adhering to the manager’s directions, Nanjiao stepped through the adjoining threshold, collapsing onto the worn fabric of the living room sofa. Surveying the interior, his heart ached as he noticed the carpet was entirely carpeted in the dried, brittle remains of the home’s defensive flora.
Deep within the master bedroom across the hall, Xie Hao and Xie Zetian were completely dead to the world. The cousins had clandestinely excavated a healthy, thick stalk of supernatural bamboo from the storefront grove earlier that evening, dragging the plant into their quarters to function as a primitive, ambient air-conditioning unit. Their thunderous, alternating snoring echoed off the walls. Remarkably, as the sound waves vibrated through the air currents, the dead, desiccated mutant plants scattered across the floorboards began to slowly, unnaturally revive, their withered roots greedily siphoning the residual elemental energy.
A neglected ceramic pot housing a common spider plant suddenly sprouted a cluster of vibrant, neon-green leaves. Its heavy, thorny vines began stretching out like skeletal fingers, creeping quietly across the mattress toward the large bed where the guards slept.
Smack!
A heavy, vine-like tendril whipped across the sheets, delivering a sharp, stinging slap directly across both Xie Hao and Xie Zetian’s faces mid-sleep.
The cousins bolted upright in a blind panic, instantly glaring at each other in raw fury. Each assumed the other had launched a treacherous midnight strike, and they were a fraction of a second away from trading bare-knuckle blows.
Smack!
Turning their heads toward the source of the secondary strike, their eyes locked onto the heavily mutated, thrashing spider plant. Letting out a pair of terrified shrieks, they instantly channeled their full elemental reserves, launching a dual barrage of pressurized water and jagged earth spikes to violently incinerate the creature in its nascent stage.
Out in the common room, Nanjiao watched with professional fascination through the open door as the dormant flora finally reclaimed its vitality, growing exponentially by the second—only to watch the vines violently wither into ash under the guards’ counter-attack. Sighing, he focused his core, pushing his flora-manipulation reserves to the absolute limit to force the remaining household greenery to rapidly regenerate and join the fray.
What followed was a absolute midnight disaster. Xie Hao and Xie Zetian found themselves engaged in a furious, close-quarters war against a localized jungle, fighting their way from the master bedroom straight out into the common room before they finally traced the biological source of the anomaly back to the scrawny programmer resting on the couch.
Nanjiao blinked in genuine surprise as two furious, mud-stained warriors cornered him. Song Yuqing had completely failed to mention that the tyrannical former rulers of Base No. 27 were currently crashing in the exact same apartment!
Wrenching a series of aggressive, mutated thorns off his uniform, an infuriated Xie Hao lunged forward. He violently grabbed Nanjiao by the collar of his white robes and dragged the screaming investigator out onto the street, marching straight back toward the shop.
Song Yuqing had barely managed to close her eyes for twenty minutes when a thunderous pounding on the storefront door violently shattered her rest.
“Boss Song! Open up! This bastard is a certified hostile spy!” Xie Hao roared the second she slid the latch, dragging Nanjiao across the threshold.
“Manager Song! He’s executing a targeted assassination plot to strip us of our capital!” Xie Zetian bellowed close behind him.
Nanjiao shook his head frantically, holding his hands up in an expression of pure, pathetic innocence, looking exactly like a helpless victim who had been brutally bullied by street thugs.
Song Yuqing was far too sleep-deprived to even fully unseal her eyelids. She stood in the center of the air-conditioned shop, listening to the chaotic, overlapping accusations for a few painful minutes before simply turning on her heel to trudge back to her quarters. She still had a high-tier crystal core resting on her nightstand—the massive, deep red stone Little Meat Bun had refined after devouring Lin Han’s spatial vortex. She needed her rest if she was going to absorb that density of power later.
Seeing that the store manager had completely tuned out the drama, and that Xie Hao was still aggressively vibrating with rage, Nanjiao decided to cut his losses. He clamped his hands firmly over his ears, dropped straight onto the smooth floorboards of God’s Supermarket, found the absolute most comfortable structural angle against a display rack, and promptly drifted off to sleep right then and there.
Gaha quietly materialized from the back corridor, her weightless steps making zero sound as she crept into the aisle to silently watch over the sleeping programmer.
As Xie Hao’s muffled curses finally died down, Nanjiao, lying curled on his side, slowly closed his eyes, a single, silent tear escaping the corner of his lashes to trace down his cheek. He tilted his head slightly against the metal shelf—his gaze clearing just in time to lock onto the protective, silent silhouette of the zombie girl guarding his dark corner.
