Chapter 115: Two Survivors
“What do you mean by that? Are you trying to kick us out?!” Liu Xiaona exclaimed in utter disbelief.
The raw ice in Master Fu’s voice sent a sudden, heavy chill directly through the hearts of the four people inside God’s Supermarket.
“Alright, Master Fu. Forget it, we won’t ask again,” Song Yuqing said, clenching her fists tightly as she stepped forward to diffuse the tension.
BZZZ—
Following a sharp, piercing whine of static feedback, Master Fu’s tone abruptly shifted back to its standard frequency.
“Excellent! That’s the spirit! We should focus all our energies on running God’s Supermarket with a smile!” Master Fu cheered, instantly reverting into his usual blend of subservient yet overbearing corporate chatter. “By the way, how is the progress mapping out on those objectives I dropped on your schedule last month?”
Liu Xiaona rolled her eyes, her voice dripping with thick sarcasm. “Please. You’re the supreme director behind this entire enterprise, Master Fu. Don’t tell me you don’t already have the real-time data blocks?”
“Is that any way to address your commanding officer?! Watch your mouth, young lady, or I will permanently shrink your staff dormitory dimensions directly in half!”
“What?!” Liu Xiaona’s eyes went wide as she clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Fine, fine. Just pretend I never opened my mouth.”
Beside her, Little Meat Bun tapped his thick paws together in deep dissatisfaction. This version of Master Fu is seriously not cute at all. He doesn’t hold a candle to the gentle old man who raised me in the bamboo grove.
“Now then, Manager Song, let’s hear your comprehensive operational report. Make sure you flesh out the details perfectly. If the summary happens to put me in a magnificent mood, who knows? I might throw a few system upgrades your way, or significantly downgrade the difficulty tier of your next assignment…”
Song Yuqing scratched her head, forcing herself to temporarily bury her mounting suspicions regarding Master Fu’s true nature. She would just have to bide her time and hunt for a cleaner opportunity to extract the hard answers out of him down the road.
She walked him through a perfectly honest, transparent breakdown of their activities over the past few weeks, tracing their milestone completions step-by-step. Yet, as the words left her mouth, a storm of unanswered questions continued to whirl through her brain.
Could Master Fu’s sudden radio silence be directly correlated to the atmospheric deployment of the acid rain?
And most importantly… is Master Fu genuinely a benevolent entity? If her team ever successfully unlatched the core reality of this grid, would the system truly execute its threat and permanently banish them into the void?
Song Yuqing locked the terrifying variables deep within her mind, refusing to let them show on her face.
Meanwhile, in a desolate stretch of the deep desert miles away from the storefront, the grand perimeter gates of Base Zero—which had been severely eroded and warped by the chemical downpour—were slowly rising back into a magnificent, imposing alignment, entirely powered by the precise calculations of several earth-type espers.
A short distance out from the construction line, a middle-aged husband and wife were slowly shuffling toward the newly reinforced city gates, supporting each other’s weight. Their gait appeared incredibly labored, heavy, and clumsy, yet the footprints they pressed into the shifting desert sands left nothing but a microscopic, shallow line behind them.
They lifted their chins to track the silhouette of the massive compound gates, their pupils momentarily flaring with a sudden, golden light before bleeding back into a standard dark hue in an instant.
The moment they crossed within five meters of the perimeter, they joyfully slapped each other’s palms in a frantic celebration.
“We actually found it!!! We’re finally here!!!” the middle-aged woman wept with pure, unadulterated relief. Her knees buckled beneath her weight, and she collapsed heavily into her husband’s waiting arms.
Xie Hao, who had just finalized his grueling labor shift and was preparing to head back to his quarters for some much-needed sleep, caught the entire interaction from the scaffolding. His heart—which had grown considerably hardened by the brutal conditions of the wasteland—softened slightly at the sight. After all, the sight of the elderly couple deeply reminded him of his own missing parents.
“Hey! I need some medical staff over here, fast!” Xie Hao hollered to the guards as he scrambled down the framework to help support the unconscious woman.
As he checked her vitals, he noted with a surge of quiet admiration that both husband and wife were completely devoid of chemical burns, their garments perfectly immaculate. He instantly deduced that this duo must possess an extraordinary tier of defensive mutations; otherwise, surviving the raw chemical downpour in the open desert would have been a statistical impossibility.
Xie Hao carefully escorted the travelers into a newly pitched, chemically resistant plastic tent, ensuring they were comfortably settled onto a pair of cots.
“Thank you… thank you so much, young man!” the middle-aged husband choked out, firmly grasping Xie Hao’s hand as thick tears spilled down his weathered cheeks.
He introduced himself as Xie Qiang, explaining that following the initial meteor strike, his biology had awakened a rare, passive mutation—a body of solid steel that rendered his flesh completely invulnerable to physical weapons. Utilizing this defensive shroud, he and his wife, Zhang Lin, had managed to safely navigate the absolute worst horrors of the post-apocalyptic collapse over the past few months. They had eventually excavated a secure cavern deep within a nearby mountain ridge, and with their immediate needs met, he had fully resigned himself to living out the remainder of his days in quiet isolation.
But the cruelty of fate had denied him even that modest sanctuary. The catastrophic acid rain had unleashed without warning, systematically dissolving the small homestead they had spent months fortifying until it was reduced to a smoking heap of toxic rubble. If they hadn’t managed to salvage a few discarded swatches of heavy-duty industrial plastic sheeting to shield their retreat, they would have been corroded into nothingness out in the wastes.
Hearing that the traveler shared his exact surname, a sudden wave of kinship washed over Xie Hao, and he found himself unlatching his professional guard to vent his own heavy frustrations. Life had been exceptionally brutal lately. After finally completing the grueling overland transit alongside Nanjiao to establish their operations at Base Zero, the catastrophic weather anomaly had dropped on their heads the very next moment. The structural integrity of Base Zero had been largely compromised, and a massive percentage of their personnel had vanished in the chaos.
Xie Qiang gently guided Xie Hao to take a seat on the edge of the cot. Like a doting, nagging family elder, the old man listened intently, offering a stream of comforting words.
“Xie Hao! I am running myself ragged out here—what the hell are you doing slacking off in a tent?!” Nanjiao barked, aggressively throwing back the plastic flap of the shelter. Seeing his teammate casually lounging inside the structure, his temper flared instantly.
“I’m not slacking off,” Xie Hao defended himself, his voice thick with confidence. “I’m running intake and helping these new arrivals settle in.”
Nanjiao’s gaze darted to Xie Qiang, his brows knitting tightly together the moment he clocked the unfamiliar faces. “Who exactly are you people?”
“We traveled across the quadrant to pledge ourselves to Base Zero,” Xie Qiang answered smoothly. “We intercepted broadcasts from other wandering caravans stating that your administration treats its citizens with immense fairness, and…” He paused, throwing a subtle look around the tent. “And that your sector holds a vast wealth of leftover resources.”
The structural defenses are tighter than reported, the traveler calculated internally. Our scouts never possessed the leverage to mount a successful breach against Base Zero prior to the storm.
But look at how fortune spins. The chemical rain has compromised their walls, and someone is actively hand-delivering an opening. We must exploit this fracture perfectly.
As he spoke aloud, Xie Qiang suddenly dissolved into a violent fit of hacking coughs, his chest heaving as if he were harboring a severe, terminal illness.
“Alright, fair enough. But let’s be entirely clear: Base Zero does not harbor idle freeloaders,” Nanjiao cut in, throwing a sharp glance at Xie Hao. “You understand the protocol. I’ll personally escort him to the administrative deck to process their citizenship registry and assign them to a labor detail.”
The compound was a complete disaster zone, leaving them with an infinite mountain of infrastructure work to manage! Nanjiao had been working himself to the bone out in the sectors, stripped of regular meals or adequate sleep just to get the communications matrix back online and nurse their remaining homing pigeons back to health.
He shot another pointed look at his partner. “Xie Zetian is still out in the residential sector struggling to fortify the framing for the new shelters. Stop wasting time and go give him a hand!”
“Fine, fine,” Xie Hao muttered, pushing himself up to head out into the heat. After working alongside Nanjiao for months, he had grown incredibly compliant with his directions. Yet, if he were perfectly honest with himself, a quiet tier of raw awe and subtle fear had taken root in his chest—a dynamic akin to a younger sibling navigating a strict guardian.
He and Xie Zetian had been completely dominated by Nanjiao’s fierce leadership. Back when they were still operating within the safety of God’s Supermarket, he had viewed Nanjiao merely as a peer who happened to possess a similar tier of elemental mutations. But the longer they shared the road, the more he felt entirely eclipsed by the man’s sheer competence, leaving him utterly baffled as to how the power dynamic had shifted so drastically.
Nanjiao paid absolutely no attention to Xie Hao’s internal brooding. He cast a final, calculating glance toward Xie Qiang and the middle-aged woman resting silently on the cot, his lips flattening into a thin line before he turned and exited the tent without another word.
A crushing weight of anxiety had been pinning his shoulders for days. The elite biological researchers at Base Zero had officially reported that the localized zombie population had completely vanished from their tracking grids. The entities had either been thoroughly liquidated by the chemical precipitation or had retreated into deep subterranean chambers to finalize their evolutionary configurations. His instincts screamed that the latter hypothesis was dead accurate.
To make matters worse, that reckless kid Shen She had secretly abandoned the complex under the cover of darkness! Although Nanjiao’s logic dictated that the boy had almost certainly charted a course straight back to God’s Supermarket to seek out Song Yuqing, a deep worry still gnawed at his stomach. He was terrified the child’s short, artificially accelerated lifespan would give out before he reached the doors.
But the absolute most critical crisis suffocating their operation was resource scarcity. Base Zero’s active population had taken a catastrophic dive, their food reserves were dangerously low, and without a reliable communication link to God’s Supermarket, their long-term survival matrix looked bleak. A wave of terrifying rumors had already begun filtering through the lower decks, with survivors whispering that the colony wouldn’t perish from the acid rain or the extreme heat cycles, but would simply starve to death inside their bunkers.
Short on food. They had come full circle, slamming straight back into the foundational crisis of the post-apocalyptic era. The sudden arrival of the chemical storm had completely shattered their fleeting era of prosperity.
Nanjiao exited the intake sector, his mind a chaotic whirl of logistics as he hurried toward his next appointment.
Inside the tent behind him, the middle-aged couple stared intently at the translucent silhouette of his back filtering through the plastic sheeting, their expressions twisted into a mask of deep, hungry calculation.
Zhang Lin remained flat on the cot, the heavy wool blanket pulled completely over her face. Her index finger rhythmically tapped against the wooden frame of the bed.
Click. Click.
Deep beneath the floorboards, the desert gravel began to subtly shift and vibrate. A small, discrete ridge of earth slowly elongated from beneath the frame, threading its way out past the canvas threshold of the tent into the open courtyard.
“Just bide your time,” Xie Qiang murmured to the empty room, his lips curling into an ambiguous, predatory smile.
