Chapter 118: Base Zero Is Destroyed
The moment Song Yuqing saw through the lens of her diagnostic camera that nearly half the crowd weren’t human, she knew exactly what her next move had to be.
First and foremost, she had to evacuate the living humans to God’s Supermarket.
As for what came after, they could figure it out later. Right now, they simply knew too little about these evolved zombies.
With a tight smile plastered across her face, Song Yuqing snap-shot a few more group photos of the Base Zero residents. The prints materialized instantly, but she swept them away, downplaying the urgency by casually announcing she would print and distribute copies to everyone the following day.
The moment the crowd dispersed, Song Yuqing quietly isolated Gaha, Little Meat Bun, Liu Xiaona, Zhang Yimiao, and her remaining squad members, pulling them one by one into her pocket dimension. She no longer cared about checking any other corner of Base Zero.
Safe within the confines of the spatial corridor, Song Yuqing laid out her plan: everyone was evacuating to God’s Supermarket, the single safest sanctuary at their disposal.
She produced the freshly captured group photos and distributed them among the squad, tasking them with splitting up to quietly round up the living survivors shown in the images and bring them to the main gates of Base Zero. She would be waiting at the threshold to usher them directly into her dimension.
Zhang Yimiao hesitated, torn by the sudden retreat. Were they really just going to abandon Base Zero? Were they handing the entire stronghold over to the undead on a silver platter? What about the personnel who had vanished without a trace—were they not going to look for them? Weren’t they going to expose the zombies’ conspiracy or stand and fight?
Liu Xiaona immediately backed Song Yuqing. “We can worry about all of that after everyone is safe.”
Late that night, once they confirmed that all the residents of Base Zero had returned to their respective quarters, the extraction began.
Song Yuqing calculated the timeline, expecting Liu Xiaona, Zhang Yimiao, and the others to arrive at the city gates before dawn. She didn’t plan to sit idly at the extraction point from the start; first, she wanted to see her parents. She had poked around with Zhang Yimiao’s local contacts and discovered that the couple was housed in a tent pitched just outside the base perimeter.
By the time she neared the shelter, her palms were slick with cold sweat.
Not far off, a dim light flickered from within her parents’ tent. They’re still awake…
Song Yuqing caught the silhouettes of her parents cast against the canvas wall, standing face-to-face. Tiptoeing closer to the fabric, she strained her ears, consumed by a desperate curiosity to hear what they were saying.
But before she could close the distance, several more shadows abruptly rose straight out of the ground inside the tent.
Song Yuqing froze, horror gripping her chest. Is the entire tent packed with mutants? Are the zombies holding a tactical meeting?
Steeling her faltering courage, she crept another step closer. This time, the guttural dialect of the undead leaked through the canvas.
“Hiss… hiss…”
The rasping exchange was completely impossible for a human to decode.
Suddenly, an absolute silence fell over the tent. Right before her eyes, the cluster of monstrous shadows collapsed back down, leaving only the two familiar human profiles cast against the facade.
At the exact same moment, Song Yuqing noticed the desert sand right outside the tent flap beginning to ripple, rising and falling in a rhythmic, undulating motion.
Clamping her jaw shut, she quietly trailed the subterranean movement as it threaded its way away from the shelter. The shifting ridge led her straight back to the primary gates of Base Zero. She halted beneath the threshold, refusing to take a single step past the framework to avoid alerting the enemy.
A profound wave of gratitude washed over her; thank goodness she had made the executive decision to pull the remaining human population out of the base tonight.
Slowly, the living citizens of Base Zero began filtering toward the gates, systematically guided through the dark by Zhang Yimiao, Liu Xiaona, and the squad. When the headcount finally stabilized, the group totaled roughly one hundred survivors.
Only a hundred people left alive.
Throughout the covert transit to the gates, an absolute silence was maintained. Every survivor had intercepted whispered warnings from Zhang Yimiao or Liu Xiaona regarding the mutant infiltration. A few hotheaded fighters had initially bristled, aggressively wanting to mount an immediate counterattack, but their teammates had firmly shut them down.
Now that the extraction group had assembled, Song Yuqing wasted no time on pleasantries. She systematically ushered them through the spatial threshold one by one. Inside the pocket dimension, Little Meat Bun and Liu Xiaona maintained strict operational order, while Gaha and Zhang Yimiao managed the headcount at the gates, keeping a hyper-vigilant eye on the dark perimeter.
The evacuation proceeded with remarkable smoothness. Not a single disguised zombie materialized from the shadows to halt their retreat.
Meanwhile, several kilometers out in the open desert, Lin Han and Wan Youzhi were locked in a tense strategic discussion with Chen Ke. Nearby, the bound forms of the Xie brothers, Nanjiao, the executive Director of Base Zero, and several core research experts lay helplessly on the dirt.
Chen Ke threw a look of utter disdain at her human partners, her voice cold. “Just slaughter them all and be done with it.”
“No, we can’t execute them yet. They still carry functional value,” Wan Youzhi countered firmly.
He was the architect who had forged this fragile tripartite coalition. Anchored by the absolute certainty of his own prophetic foresight, he firmly believed he was destined to be the supreme decision-maker among them.
But Chen Ke clearly didn’t share that perspective. Ever since ascending to her position as a alpha zombie leader, she had undergone a total psychological transformation. The delicate, vulnerable woman she had once been was entirely gone. Right now, she was actively forcing herself to suppress her growing dissatisfaction with Lin Han and Wan Youzhi.
Her current cooperation with the duo relied exclusively on Wan Youzhi’s capacity to chart the future. His foresight had accurately predicted the onset of the catastrophic acid rain, allowing her and her mutant thralls to successfully bypass the disaster. Furthermore, Wan Youzhi had predicted the existence of the high-tier zombie couple and foretold that Base Zero would fall into complete ruin following the chemical storm.
Acting on his strategic blueprints, she had personally negotiated an alliance with the mutant couple, embedding them as deep-cover agents to dismantle Base Zero from the inside out.
Her primary objective was the base’s entire stockpile of meteorite fragments. Those useless humans held the anomalies yet possessed absolutely no understanding of how to unlock their raw energy—it was a pathetic waste of global resources. She was taking them.
Yet, there was a fundamental anomaly she couldn’t parse: why on earth would Lin Han and Wan Youzhi, as baseline humans, actively conspire with the undead to wipe out a human stronghold?
Moreover, if their primary goal was to seize control of Base Zero, why hadn’t they weaponized the chaos of the acid rain as their main gambit? Was capturing the executive command deck merely an exercise to help her unearth the coordinate logs for the meteorite vaults? Did Lin Han and Wan Youzhi genuinely harbor zero personal interest in the power of the fragments?
Chen Ke fixed a piercing, icy glare on the two men. Wan Youzhi remained perfectly serene and unbothered, but Lin Han visibly shifted, guilt flickering in his eyes beneath her scrutiny.
“Just focus on managing your own grid. I’ll take care of breaking these characters,” Lin Han barked, aggressively kicking Nanjiao in the ribs to deflect.
Nanjiao hissed through his teeth as a sharp pain flared through his side, unleashing a torrent of furious curses at his captor.
The moment he and the Xie brothers had realized the top tier of Base Zero’s administration had gone missing from the census, they had launched an all-out search across the sectors. Tragically, they had blundered straight into an ambush orchestrated by Lin Han and Wan Youzhi, and had been bound like cattle ever since.
Initially, Nanjiao had been utterly stunned. According to his baseline intelligence logs, Lin Han definitely shouldn’t have possessed such a terrifying tier of combat capability. The man must have mastered an advanced evolution technique; his raw power metrics had completely skyrocketed. Operating at their current thresholds, he and the Xie brothers had been entirely outmatched. For a bitter moment, he deeply regretted not purchasing more of the stat-boosting meats, fruits, and vegetables from God’s Supermarket to fortify his own mutations.
Lin Han, Wan Youzhi, and Chen Ke had already taken turns brutally interrogating Nanjiao and the directors multiple times, but not a single human had unlatched his jaws to reveal the precise coordinates of the meteorite vaults. Every prisoner understood the grim leverage of the situation: as long as they withheld the data, the coalition would preserve their lives for the sake of the extraction; the second they confessed, they would likely be executed on the spot.
For now, the standoff remained deadlocked. Bound hand and foot, they had been living like human livestock for days, entirely cut off from any operational intelligence regarding the status of Base Zero.
Initially, Nanjiao had stubbornly clung to a fragile shred of hope that his squad would mount a rescue. But Wan Youzhi’s casual commentary had ruthlessly doused that illusion.
The prophet had smugly informed him that they had successfully seeded a vanguard of evolved mutants inside Base Zero—entities that looked perfectly human, yet possessed vastly superior intellect and peak physical conditioning. Furthermore, the coalition planned to engineer a localized structural collapse to render the sudden disappearance of Nanjiao’s outer-sector detail perfectly logical. After all, given the continuous, volatile caving of subterranean architecture following the severe chemical saturation of the soil, such an incident was completely plausible.
Nanjiao frantically cycled through every possible escape variable in his mind, but maddeningly, Wan Youzhi’s psychic foresight allowed the man to instantly predict his every tactical calculation before he could even execute a muscle movement.
It’s over.
Nanjiao’s chest tightened in despair. He was entirely finished, and Base Zero was doomed.
