Chapter 54: One Wave Left, Another Came
“I honestly had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Song Yuqing said, completely sincere. She simply wasn’t that cunning or clairvoyant.
However, given that the Zombie Kings were operating in the immediate vicinity, it only made logical sense that Chen Ke—their newly appointed cook—would eventually show up here.
“Are you two going to take a breather here before you head out?” she asked.
“Gaha!” Gaha nodded enthusiastically, backing up Song Yuqing’s suggestion.
“No. We still have a long road ahead of us,” Nanjiao declined. His expression hardened with resolve as he glanced down at the transparent plant capsule securing his mutant pigeons.
Hearing his refusal, the rest of the hunters—who had been desperately hoping to crash at God’s Supermarket for a few more days—instantly lost their morale, their shoulders slumping in dejection.
“You are incredibly ruthless,” Xie Zetian muttered, curling his lip in annoyance.
“The wasteland is packed with unpredictable dangers. If you’re too terrified to face them, you’re never going to survive out there,” Chen She countered, firmly taking Nanjiao’s side. Despite technically being a child, the boy’s psychological maturity vastly outstripped most of the adults in the vanguard.
Even if Nanjiao and Chen She were the only two fully committed to the march, the rest of the squad had zero tactical alternatives. They couldn’t outnumber the enemy on their own. If Nanjiao was pushing forward, Xie Hao and the others were forced to follow. After all, they were relying entirely on the programmer’s elite credentials to smuggle them into Base Zero.
As Xie Hao always preached: Apocalypse or not, you only get to eat meat if you follow the boss. Song Yuqing deeply agreed with the sentiment. The only reason she had survived this long was because she was firmly clinging to the mighty thigh of God’s Supermarket—or rather, Master Fu’s thigh.
Realizing how completely drained everyone was after the massive zombie ambush, Song Yuqing reached into her spatial vault, materializing a fresh batch of enhanced tomatoes and cucumbers to help them replenish their psychic reserves. Following her lead, Little Meat Bun suddenly pulled several glowing crystal cores of varying sizes from somewhere on his body, generously shoving them into everyone’s hands.
“Man, it would be absolutely perfect if we had some hot food right now,” Xie Hao mumbled incoherently, aggressively devouring a cucumber in massive bites.
Chen She gently pinched the crystal core Little Meat Bun had handed him. It radiated a bizarre, comforting heat, which was highly unusual considering every other core he had ever handled was entirely ice-cold.
Warm… The word kept echoing around Song Yuqing’s mind.
After a brief, agonizing moment of hesitation, Song Yuqing gritted her teeth and reached back into her vault. She pulled out the remaining bamboo shoot pork buns and frozen dumplings she had hoarded from the parallel world, using her spatial mechanics to instantly heat them until they were steaming.
The moment she made the executive decision, her mind was violently torn in two. Half of her brain was screaming, Keep the premium inventory for yourself! while the other half was aggressively condemning her for being an absolute cheapskate. Ultimately, her rational desire to share the wealth completely overpowered her corporate greed.
Mine! My meat buns!
The absolute millisecond Little Meat Bun laid eyes on the steaming pork buns, his dark eyes lit up like fireworks. Unable to contain his primal urges, he lunged forward, aggressively snatching at the pile of buns and dumplings.
“Oh my god, that smells incredible!” Xie Zetian drooled, being the first human to aggressively reach for the bamboo shoot buns.
Unwilling to be outmatched, Little Meat Bun began frantically shoving the buns into his jaws, swallowing them whole one after another. Mutant pigeons absolutely paled in comparison to the sheer culinary glory of a bamboo shoot pork bun!
“Little Meat Bun! Control yourself and learn how to share!” Song Yuqing scolded, violently slapping the bear’s heavy paw away. She forcibly confiscated the remaining platters, distributing the food equally among the hunters. Even Gaha, whose undead system naturally lacked a human appetite, found herself completely unable to resist the savory aroma and delicately accepted a bun.
Taking his first bite of the bamboo shoot pork bun, Chen She’s eyes instantly welled up with heavy tears. Before the meteorites fell, his parents used to buy him fresh soy milk and meat buns for breakfast every morning—a mundane meal he had foolishly despised back then. In less than six months, a simple meat bun had transformed into an unattainable, impossible luxury.
After another solemn, highly emotional round of farewells, the two factions officially parted ways. Nanjiao’s heavily armed vanguard marched out toward the city borders, while Song Yuqing, Little Meat Bun, and Gaha resumed their original logistics run to scavenge a functional electronics store.
“Gaha…” Gaha murmured softly, trembling with residual fear throughout the entire trek. She was deeply terrified that the Golden-Eyed Zombie Kings were going to circle back and launch a secondary ambush.
“Relax. With you and the bear holding the line, we have absolutely zero reason to fear a Zombie King,” Song Yuqing reassured her. It wasn’t blind arrogance talking; Gaha and Little Meat Bun had rapidly evolved into absolute powerhouses capable of dismantling a hundred hostiles alone. Their biological growth rate was exponentially outpacing the baseline evolution of the undead.
Meanwhile, deep inside the putrid, abandoned vegetable market, Chen Ke had tightly chained Lin Han’s battered frame to a heavy concrete pillar. She sat quietly a few yards away, patiently waiting for the two Zombie Kings to return from their siege.
“Chen Ke, listen to me… please. For the sake of our past loyalty, let me go,” Lin Han pleaded, completely refusing to abandon his desperate negotiation.
“Hiss…” Chen Ke merely rattled her jaws. Her human consciousness was rapidly fading, her erratic movements reflecting the feral, disjointed twitches of a standard walker.
“If you release these chains right now, I swear I will escort you straight back to the base and secure you the highest-tier medical treatment,” Lin Han promised, violently fighting down the nausea rising in his throat as he looked at her rotting face.
Smack!
Chen Ke lunged forward, viciously slapping Lin Han across the face. Lies! Absolute lies! She would never trust a single syllable leaving his mouth ever again.
“I am going to directly dedicate your flesh to my masters,” Chen Ke hissed, forcing the human words out through her grinding, exposed teeth. Holding her rage back had pushed her to her absolute physical limit.
Realizing she possessed absolutely zero mercy, Lin Han’s desperation rapidly morphed back into pure, arrogant rage. “So it seems you’ve officially accepted a pair of brain-dead zombies as your supreme masters? Hmph! Even if you defect to the undead, you will amount to absolutely nothing!”
Chen Ke simply stared at him, a deeply unsettling, grotesque smile creeping across the human half of her face.
“I have highly capable loyalists actively tracking my position. They will breach this perimeter and rescue me. And the absolute second I reclaim my throne, I am going to have you captured, strapped to an operating table, and meticulously sliced apart for biological research.”
“Hiss… What exactly is the tactical point of trying to provoke me?”
Lin Han snapped his mouth shut. He had completely lost his psychological control over her. He desperately tried to forcefully activate his spatial reserves, but his massive black hole attack in the alleyway had completely drained his elemental core. It was going to take a significant chronological window for his superpower to regenerate.
At this current stage, Lin Han’s singular hope was that the cowardly mercenaries who had fled the alleyway would manage to relay his capture coordinates directly to Wan Youzhi.
Will Wanyouzhi actually deploy a rescue vanguard? Lin Han couldn’t calculate the odds. He could only close his eyes and pray to the void.
Completely ignoring his presence, Chen Ke turned her milky eye toward the market’s main entrance. The two Zombie Kings still hadn’t returned. A deep, gnawing wave of unease began to settle in her chest. Because the necrotic elements ravaging her system had been directly infected by the two Kings, she was biologically tethered to their auras. And right now, she could palpably sense that their massive energy signatures were rapidly, inexplicably weakening.
Back at God’s Supermarket, Song Yuqing breached the threshold, casually dangling a heavily yellowed, frayed data cable from her fingers.
Liu Xiaona sprinted across the shop floor to greet her.
“Oh, thank god you’re finally back! My right eyelid has been violently twitching for the past hour. I was terrified you had been ambushed out there. I was five minutes away from locking down the shop and deploying to hunt you down!”
“Relax, the grid was completely secure,” Song Yuqing smiled, retrieving her final, steaming bamboo shoot pork bun from her vault and tossing it to the driver. While Liu Xiaona voraciously wolfed down the food, Song Yuqing gave him a rapid, detailed breakdown of how they had broken the zombie siege and successfully captured Lin Han.
“Damn it, it is an absolute tragedy that I wasn’t on the front lines to witness that beatdown!” Liu Xiaona groaned in deep regret.
“Woo-hoo! You’re finally back!” A figure suddenly bolted out of the residential bathroom. The absolute second they spotted Song Yuqing, they threw themselves at her, wrapping her in a massive, crushing hug with zero regard for personal boundaries. A brightly colored parrot was perched confidently on their shoulder.
“Oh, right. I completely forgot to brief you,” Liu Xiaona grumbled, crossing his arms, looking deeply unamused. “This greedy, manipulative con artist showed up at the door claiming to be your personal friend and demanded access to our executive restroom.” The driver was still fiercely holding a grudge; he hadn’t forgotten that this exact trickster was the one who had deceived him and Sister Qin into deploying to Base No. 20!
“Ruan Fanfan?! What the hell are you doing here?!” Despite knowing full well the sheer volume of deceit Ruan Fanfan had orchestrated, Song Yuqing couldn’t suppress her smile, eagerly returning the hug.
If Ruan Fanfan wasn’t going to voluntarily confess to the massive scam she had pulled, Song Yuqing wasn’t going to aggressively interrogate her over it. Their friendship operated on an incredibly delicate, unspoken balance. Song Yuqing had never possessed a wide circle of friends growing up; she understood her own stubborn personality flawlessly and completely refused to permanently sever her bond with Ruan Fanfan over a tactical wasteland hustle.
“I brought you an absolute premium corporate gift: two highly-evolved zombies sporting glowing golden eyes!” Ruan Fanfan announced, pulling back with a massive grin.
Song Yuqing froze in pure shock.
“Yeah, she literally just processed two walkers through the automated security gate,” Liu Xiaona corroborated, putting on a highly theatrical display of casual indifference. “They were just a pair of basic zombies. Looked incredibly weak.”
“The automated terminal quoted me an absolutely massive invoice of premium supplies and dispensed a huge shopping list,” Ruan Fanfan chirped. “But I don’t actually require the physical inventory right now, so I figured I’d just transfer the raw capital over to your accounts to help you hit your quota.”
My god… Song Yuqing’s jaw hit the floor. She rapidly deduced that Ruan Fanfan had absolutely zero comprehension that the two “golden-eyed zombies” she had just casually processed were the literal apex Zombie Kings terrorizing the entire region!
“Hold your position. I will personally extract the high-tier crystal cores from their skulls, but I am keeping their physical carcasses to balance my ledger.”
“Ruan Fanfan… how on earth did you manage to defeat those two specific zombies?” Song Yuqing asked, her voice trembling slightly.
Ruan Fanfan’s eyes darted nervously around the room, completely refusing to make direct eye contact.
“I’m just incredibly awesome,” she deflected, flashing a highly unconvincing grin.
