Chapter 114: Master Fu Is Back
Driven by the desire to secure more zombies to benefit the store, Liu Xiaona made it her daily mission to pester Shen She at every opportunity. Eventually, she managed to pry the secret out of him.
To harvest the corpses, Shen She had weaponized his temporal mutation, temporarily jumping back to a point in the timeline before the zombies had completely vanished from Chen Town.
For the next several days, the weather remained calm and the sun shone brightly.
Song Yuqing frequently received text updates from the espers who had recently departed, each checking in to report that they had made it safely across the wastes. However, a suffocating silence hung over the channels for Base 35, Base Zero, Nanjiao, Xie Hao, and Xie Zetian. Even the reliable flocks of carrier pigeons that usually materialized whenever an order was logged had completely ceased to appear. Once again, a dark suspicion gnawed at Song Yuqing’s stomach—she couldn’t shake the terrifying thought that the catastrophic acid rain had entirely wiped out all external life.
It was merely a theory, of course, devoid of empirical data. Perhaps they were simply bottlenecked by some unforeseen complication on the road.
Trapped in a cycle of boredom and mounting anxiety, Song Yuqing decided to organize a scouting party to evaluate the current state of Chen Town. Since anchoring herself to God’s Supermarket, she had rarely stepped foot beyond the immediate perimeter, but there was one specific landmark she had been dying to revisit for a very long time.
The massive impact crater.
The exact coordinates where she had first arrived in Chen Town—the absolute starting point of her rewritten life.
With a bundle of homemade acid-proof umbrellas strapped to his hunched back, Shen She trailed quietly behind the supermarket crew. The landscape they traversed was staggering, a scenery of pure destruction. Not a single living creature crossed their path, and the winding residential alleys had been completely leveled. Before long, the group of five arrived at the edge of the depression.
The crater had filled with water and now sat only slightly lower than the surrounding terrain. The stagnant, chemically altered rainwater rested in a deceptive calm, transforming the site into a massive pond that resembled a foul, stinking ditch.
“Why did we travel all the way out here?” Liu Xiaona asked, scratching her head in confusion.
Song Yuqing shrugged. “Just wanted to take a look.”
Standing at the lip of the pond, she could easily see the distant silver walls of God’s Supermarket gleaming beneath the afternoon sun.
“Look over there! There seems to be something shifting beneath the surface,” Shen She noted, pointing a finger toward the dark water.
Following his line of sight, Song Yuqing caught a faint, unmistakable glint of white light shimmering in the depths. Could it be… a remnant of the meteorite?
Shen She unsheathed one of his custom umbrellas and plunged it into the pool, attempting to hook the luminous fragment with the tip. He made several careful attempts, but the jagged stone slipped away each time, remaining firmly embedded in the silt.
Blinking, Gaha suddenly stepped forward, casually plunging her bare arm into the liquid to retrieve it.
“Gaha, no!” the group screamed in unison, absolute panic seizing them.
“Gaha…” The gargoyle merely pulled her hand from the depths, pinching a dripping fragment of the meteorite as her eyes crinkled into a serene, close-eyed smile.
Seeing that she was completely unscathed, everyone let out a massive collective sigh of relief. Spending so much time working alongside her, they had almost forgotten that Gaha was fundamentally a zombie.
“Wait, hold on!” Liu Xiaona’s head snapped up, her features freezing in realization. “Aren’t you terrified of the acid water?”
Gaha nodded simplemindedly. She had previously tried to reach her hand out from beneath the store’s eaves during the height of the storm to test the downpour, and the corrosive droplets hadn’t eaten through her skin at all.
“Why on earth didn’t you tell us sooner?!” Song Yuqing gasped, snatching Gaha’s hand to carefully examine her skin. There wasn’t a single trace of chemical corrosion on her fingers.
Gaha rubbed her nose sheepishly. It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried to communicate the discovery; rather, at the time, everyone had been entirely consumed by their own panic, and her guttural dialect was impossible to decode. She had actively tried to walk out into the storm, but Liu Xiaona and Little Meat Bun had frantically dragged her back inside.
“Does this mean the undead are completely immune to the acid rain?” Liu Xiaona wondered aloud.
Gaha rolled her eyes and shook her head. She knew she was an anomaly; only highly evolved, high-tier mutants of her caliber could withstand that level of chemical saturation.
Little Meat Bun nudged Song Yuqing’s arm, gesturing toward the debris lining the bank. Scattered along the edge of the pond were a few scattered chunks of melted flesh and a lone, decaying gray eyeball. Clearly, the lower-tier hordes had been brutally dissolved.
Shen She pulled a square patch of acid-proof canvas from his pocket, carefully wrapped the dripping meteorite shard Gaha had retrieved, and handed it to Song Yuqing. However, the manager gently pushed his hand back, insisting that he keep it in his own inventory.
“Shen She, you ran operations inside the Base Zero research sector for a while. Do you have any technical insight regarding these fragments? Did the scientists discover anything concrete?”
Song Yuqing remembered tasking Zhang Yimiao with delivering a batch of these exact stones to Base Zero for comprehensive analysis. She had no idea whether their labs had unlocked a breakthrough—nor did she even know if Zhang Yimiao’s team was still alive.
Shen She knitted his gray brows, locking himself in deep thought for a few moments before shaking his head. Base Zero housed dozens of independent laboratories, each operating under strict secrecy; their data blocks and research milestones were never cross-shared.
By the time the scouting party trekked back to God’s Supermarket, they found Xiaoyi curled up on a small wooden chair nestled inside the bamboo grove, drifting off to sleep. Nearby, Zhang Hua and the water-type espers who had chosen to stay behind were busy constructing a reinforced encampment using rolls of the acid-proof canvas.
Shen She cast a cautious look toward the sky. Even though the afternoon weather remained unblemished, he couldn’t shake the persistent dread that a toxic downpour might unleash without warning. Moving without hesitation, he gestured for Little Meat Bun to help him lift the sleeping Xiaoyi—chair and all—and safely ferry her back inside the store’s main lobby.
“Hello, friends! It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?”
The sudden transmission echoed clearly through the room. It was Master Fu’s voice!
Song Yuqing, Liu Xiaona, Little Meat Bun, and Gaha froze, a wave of profound excitement instantly crashing over them.
“Master Fu! Where the hell have you been? Were you seriously planning to abandon us to die?!” Liu Xiaona was the first to screech, her booming voice instantly jarring Xiaoyi awake from her nap.
“Hmph! Mind your manners and stop prying into my personal itinerary! You characters have absolutely zero respect for my authority!”
It had been days since they last intercepted his signature, and hearing the familiar voice left Song Yuqing feeling strangely emotional. For all his annoying, bureaucratic quirks, this was the exact entity that had asked her if she wanted to survive on that fateful night, ultimately preserving her life.
“Master Fu!”
Gaha and Little Meat Bun, entirely unable to articulate their joy in human speech, simply locked each other in a fierce embrace and began jumping in ecstatic circles across the floorboards.
Now that their supervisor had re-established his connection, a profound sense of hope returned to the establishment. Song Yuqing felt it deeply. Without even realizing it, she had grown fundamentally dependent on Master Fu’s systemic presence. Every single task or doomsday objective he assigned ultimately carried a crucial purpose that directly or indirectly ensured the salvation of human life.
Watching her coworkers suddenly erupt into a frenzy of emotional celebration, the dazed Xiaoyi shrank back into a corner of the lobby, aggressively rubbing her eyes as she wondered if she was still trapped inside a dream.
Shen She, however, displayed zero traces of astonishment. Having unraveled the nature of the multiversal system, he knew exactly why Master Fu had dropped offline the moment the atmospheric anomaly hit the grid. He quietly pulled up a chair to sit beside Xiaoyi, silently observing the four supermarket employees as they cheered and conversed with the empty air.
“Master Fu, do you have any idea what we had to endure just to keep this storefront operational while you were gone?” Song Yuqing said aloud. She felt a fierce urge to march up and aggressively punch his chest, but to her own surprise, thick tears began spilling down her cheeks instead. The sheer volume of buried trauma and helplessness she had carried over the last few days finally broke through her composure.
The system fell silent for a long moment before Master Fu spoke again, his tone unusually soft. “I know. I’ve audited the transaction logs. But there are structural limits to how much I can directly intervene, you understand? Besides, your team managed the crisis beautifully. You showed incredible resilience.”
Song Yuqing let out a shaky sigh. Hearing the clinical validation felt hollow.
“Master Fu, you don’t get it—God’s Supermarket was literally on the absolute brink of total annihilation!” Liu Xiaona snapped, her anger flaring up again.
“I am aware. It was close.”
“Since you’re our managing director and the one who holds our contracts, you carry a baseline legal responsibility for our welfare! How could you just completely vanish off the grid during a level-five catastrophe?!”
Song Yuqing gently reached out to pat Liu Xiaona’s shoulder, attempting to calm her down. “Xiaona, take a breath. I’m sure Master Fu didn’t choose to disconnect intentionally.”
“Ha! See that?! My primary manager, Song, is the only one here who truly comprehends my genius!” Master Fu chimed, instantly bouncing back into his characteristically cheerful, unbothered persona.
Song Yuqing fixed her eyes on the ceiling, dropping her next question with zero preamble. “Master Fu… what exactly is the nature of your relationship with Teacher Fu?”
The targeted inquiry hit the system like a physical blow, plunging the storefront into an immediate, deadpan silence.
“Master Fu?” Liu Xiaona blinked.
“Don’t tell me this guy just went missing on us again?!”
As the employees traded confused, anxious glances, Master Fu’s voice finally manifested through the speakers once more. But this time, the playful, arrogant inflections were entirely gone. The voice that echoed through God’s Supermarket was chillingly detached, direct, and completely cold.
“Let me ask you a question, Song Yuqing. Do you truly want to unearth the foundational reality of this grid just so you can depart with a clear conscience? Or would you prefer to happily maintain the status quo?”
