Chapter 74: So This Is God’s Supermarket
Liu Xiaona silently retracted her hands from Zhang Yimiao’s grasp.
“I’m Liu Xiaona, a clerk at the God’s Supermarket,” she corrected flatly. “This is our store manager, Song Yuqing.”
She gestured toward Song Yuqing, who was currently looking up at the glowing storefront sign.
Zhang Yimiao’s mouth twitched. She awkwardly shifted her stance, turning her open hand toward Song Yuqing instead.
“Gaha!” Gaha puffed out her chest, standing tall as she waited for Zhang Yimiao’s apology.
Zhang Yimiao caught the zombie’s drift and muttered softly under her breath, “But you are a zombie. It’s only natural for humans to fight zombies.”
As they stood there bickering, goose-feather snowflakes began to drift down from the sky. More accurately, they were fist-sized chunks of ice falling at random intervals.
One slammed right into Zhang Yimiao’s head. She clutched her scalp, groaning in pain.
“Hurry, get inside!” Song Yuqing yelled, taking the lead and sprinting through the front doors.
The ground floor of the God’s Supermarket instantly filled to capacity, with the crowd spilling all the way up the stairs to the second floor.
In the sudden scramble, Lin Han and Wan Youzhi were left behind, still bound tightly by vines in the bamboo forest outside.
The water-type mutants from the adjacent building ran out to look at the massive snowflakes and stumbled right into the two undignified captives.
Lin Han blinked, utterly bewildered. Aren’t these the people we locked up back at Base 27? How the hell did they end up here?
The water mutants wasted no time taunting them, blowing raspberries and aggressively spraying jets of water at them. Before long, Lin Han and Wan Youzhi were soaked to the bone, their skin bruising from the forceful impact of the high-pressure water.
Worse still, a few of the mutants brandished knives. Squeezing through the crowd and risking the pelting snow, they began stepping toward Lin Han and Wan Youzhi, closing the distance with grim determination.
Song Yuqing, Zhang Yimiao, and the others upstairs missed this entirely. They had been jostled up to the second floor, pushing past the café counters. Zhang Yimiao, desperate for a cup of attribute coffee, was busy ordering her people to drag the captives inside immediately when a blood-curdling shriek echoed from downstairs.
“What’s going on?” Song Yuqing snapped, instantly alert.
A voice roared up from the first floor: “Lin Han escaped! He’s gone!”
The moment a blade had touched his throat, Lin Han’s suppressed powers had flared back to life. He had activated his spatial void and vanished into thin air.
Zhang Yimiao slammed her hands on her hips, fuming. She had promised Nanjiao she would “take good care” of the duo, but she had barely delivered half of that promise!
“What about the Grand Seer?” she barked.
“Still tied up!”
Zhang Yimiao let out a sigh of relief. At least she still had someone left to torment.
“Have your men bring Wan Youzhi up here,” Song Yuqing said calmly. She had a few questions for the man.
A moment later, the dark-skinned psychic dragged Wan Youzhi up the stairs. Before bringing him into the room, the guard had given him an extra dousing of black water to keep his powers completely paralyzed.
Stepping into the God’s Supermarket for the very first time, Wan Youzhi could only steal fleeting glances of the miraculous interior through the narrow gaps in the dense crowd. He was violently thrown at Song Yuqing’s feet, crashing hard onto the floor with his clothes torn and his hair in complete disarray.
Song Yuqing studied his face carefully. A strange sense of familiarity washed over her.
Oh? With his long hair draped loosely over his face, he looked exactly like that arrogant, insufferable corporate client she used to deal with before the world ended.
She hadn’t recognized him in the previous video streams—after all, Wan Youzhi had sported a strict buzz cut back then.
Wan Youzhi, however, had long since forgotten Song Yuqing, let alone the fact that he had once gone out of his way to make her life miserable.
“So Director Wan’s real name is Wan Youzhi?!” she scoffed, leaning in. “Do you happen to remember me? You still haven’t paid me for that promotional film, by the way.”
Wan Youzhi stared blankly at her, his lips pressed into a thin, tight line. He kept his head low, his eyes darting toward the glowing café menu. So this is the God’s Supermarket. It felt entirely too pristine, like a place that had no right to exist in a brutal apocalypse.
“Stop looking around. There’s no room for you here,” Zhang Yimiao said, stepping into his line of sight to block his view.
At that moment, a terrifying realization crystallized in Wan Youzhi’s mind. In all his past precognitive visions, the God’s Supermarket and Song Yuqing had never appeared. He realized it wasn’t because they were insignificant, but because his powers were far too limited. He simply lacked the evolutionary qualification to peer into any timeline connected to this supermarket.
“Wan Youzhi, what exactly is running through your head?” Song Yuqing asked, her curiosity completely genuine. “I heard you plan to conquer every base in the territory and play king of the mountain. How does someone even dream up an idea like that?”
“Huh? Talk about delusions of grandeur,” Zhang Yimiao scoffed. She sharply kicked the elbow he was using to prop himself up, sending him face-first onto the floorboards.
Song Yuqing reached down, pulling him back up and casually patting the dust off his jacket. “Come on, tell me what you’re thinking.”
Wan Youzhi shuddered violently, goosebumps erupting across his skin. The phrase triggered a memory; he vaguely recalled that he used to love barked that exact sentence at his subordinates before the apocalypse.
Song Yuqing stared down at him. This was the man who used to plagiarize his employees’ ideas, suppress their careers, and deliberately withhold their hard-earned wages. As the old saying goes, karma had a funny way of bringing things full circle.
Well, a little petty revenge is enough, she thought.
Wan Youzhi frowned, maintaining his stubborn silence.
“What, did you suddenly go mute?” Zhang Yimiao snapped, getting annoyed on Song Yuqing’s behalf. “Speak up, fast.”
Wan Youzhi forced a hollow, pathetic smile. “I was… ridiculous.”
“Gaha!” Gaha hissed, reading his perfunctory expression instantly. The man was just playing dumb.
Before Song Yuqing could press further, a sudden surge of people rushed up the stairs, violently jostling the crowd and pinning both her and Zhang Yimiao behind the bar counter. Seizing the chaotic distraction, Wan Youzhi dropped to his knees and scrambled forward. He clawed his way out of the storefront, enduring several heavy boots stamping down on his fingers as he fled through the legs of the crowd.
The moment he tumbled out of the entrance, Wan Youzhi scrambled to his feet and sprinted away. Before anyone could react, he vaulted over a low concrete wall and vanished into the surrounding ruins.
They hadn’t even managed to get any real answers out of him, and the Grand Seer had successfully escaped! Song Yuqing and Zhang Yimiao exchanged a synchronized, frustrated sigh.
“Alright, everyone get the hell out of here!” Zhang Yimiao roared at the top of her lungs, trying to clear the room.
“No way! The ice outside is basically hail! It’ll break our skulls!”
“Can’t we just wait out the storm inside?”
“Absolutely not!” Zhang Yimiao gripped Song Yuqing’s arm. “You’re the store manager. Order them out!”
Song Yuqing shook her head with a soft chuckle, giving Gaha a meaningful look. Understanding the cue instantly, Gaha bounded over the heads of the crowd, stepping lightly from shoulder to shoulder as she began ushering the people toward the adjacent properties.
“We have empty buildings right next door and further down the alley,” Song Yuqing announced. “You can take temporary shelter there.”
“Fine, I’ll let my men live over there,” Zhang Yimiao said, flashing her neat, eight-tooth smile. “But I get to stay here in the supermarket with you, right?”
“No,” Song Yuqing replied flatly.
Zhang Yimiao’s face instantly crumpled. How was she supposed to survive the night crammed into a room with all those rough fighters?
To help clear the remaining logjam in the lobby, Liu Xiaona came up with an aggressive corporate strategy. He dragged a large basket of umbrellas from the bottom shelf, and alongside Little Meat Bun, began thrusting them into the hands of the customers, urging them to go retrieve the zombie corpses they intended to trade from the alley. Basically, they needed to get moving instead of idling inside and wasting premium retail space.
Meanwhile, the moment Lin Han successfully materialized back inside the perimeter of Base No. 27, he went entirely stiff.
Before he had marched his army out to siege the southern suburbs, a small contingent of loyal psychics had been left behind to guard the captive water mutants, while the regular civilians diligently worked on building up the base infrastructure.
But right now, Base No. 27 was a ghost town.
He had set out with a massive, triumphant column of soldiers, but he had returned entirely alone. The men who had fallen on the battlefield, the defectors who chose to stay at Base 35, and the squads abducted by Zhang Yimiao…
The stronghold he had shed blood to conquer was completely deserted.
Lin Han walked through the empty courtyard in a daze. The tents in the civilian quarters had been ripped away, the water reserves in the villa sector were entirely gone, and the inventory inside the base supermarket had been picked clean. Even the grand villa he claimed as his headquarters had been hollowed out, leaving not a single piece of furniture behind.
Lin Han stared at the barren concrete, unable to believe his eyes. Even if the caretakers left behind had staged a mass betrayal, how could they have wiped the entire base this clean without leaving a single trace?
