Chapter 121: Let’s Follow the Steps
Song Yuqing looked at Teacher Fu eagerly, hoping he would answer her questions and clear up the massive doubts swirling in her head.
Teacher Fu merely smiled, remaining silent.
Anxiety flared within her. What was going on? Why the secrecy?
“Just follow the steps,” he said gently. “Some things don’t need to be rushed.”
Song Yuqing shook her head. She wasn’t in a hurry to rush into a fight, but this entire situation was completely mind-boggling—even more puzzling than the apocalypse itself.
Teacher Fu offered no further explanation, leaving her completely powerless to press him. She could only watch as he waved a quiet goodbye, his holographic figure gradually dissipating and melting into the pristine azure water.
With the phantom gone, Song Yuqing completely lost the mood to relax. She had to get down to business. Leaving the tranquil depths behind, she became the only person on the pristine beach carrying a heavy heart.
Nearby, Little Meat Bun was busy wrestling with the waves. The moment he spotted Song Yuqing silently scaling the rope ladder, he rolled over in the surf and scrambled to catch up with her.
Oh? Why are you stopping? Is there no one fun to play with down here?
Pulling herself out of her thoughts, Song Yuqing looked down at the soggy panda, then cast a long glance back at the paradise behind him. She gently patted his head, and finally, reached out to playfully flick his forehead. Her movement was incredibly gentle, leaving no sting.
“Go tell Liu Xiaona and Gaha to wrap it up. We need to start working.”
Little Meat Bun tilted his head back and blinked his large eyes, looking thoroughly reluctant to leave the beach, but he still turned around to trudge off in search of the others.
Song Yuqing climbed the long rope ladder, stepping back through the portal into the second-floor café. The exact second her boots cleared the frame, Gaha shot up through the window with a spectacular, agile bound.
Song Yuqing stood frozen. …Well, that was a tactical error. She really should have waited on the sand and let Gaha carry her up on her back, saving herself the grueling effort of scaling that endless ladder.
“Gaha!” The gargoyle grunted happily, the adrenaline from playing in the surf still buzzing through her system.
Song Yuqing poured two cups of coffee and settled by the window, sitting quietly with Gaha to wait for Little Meat Bun and Liu Xiaona to return. Ever since the portal past the café had been unlatched, she hadn’t properly taken the time to appreciate the cozy space.
She quickly mapped out an operational strategy. She, Gaha, and Little Meat Bun would deploy into the parallel timelines to purchase structural shelter units and restock inventory, while Liu Xiaona would stay behind to manage the storefront. Why leave Liu Xiaona behind? Because she could speak human language and seamlessly coordinate with the refugees currently sheltering on the property.
There was no telling if the pristine beach outside the window would remain accessible after dark, but regardless of the anomalies, when duty called them back to reality, they had to answer. Liu Xiaona’s primary directive was to welcome the bathers back inside as they wrapped up their sessions, and then feel out the crowd to see who was willing to sign a temporary subcontract with God’s Supermarket.
By the time Little Meat Bun and Liu Xiaona finally grunted and dragged themselves back through the café window, over an hour had passed. If they hadn’t been elite espers possessing extraordinary physical stamina, scaling that rope would have taken them twice as long.
To Song Yuqing’s immense surprise, the duo didn’t return alone. A massive cohort of Base Zero survivors trailed closely behind them, having voluntarily cut their beach day short.
Liu Xiaona arched an eyebrow, throwing her manager a look. “I told them I had urgent store logistics to handle and needed to head up, and the next thing I knew, the whole squad insisted on coming along.”
Zhang Hua was among the vanguard. He scratched his head sheepishly, offering a soft smile. “Hey, Manager, we just figured that if the store is facing an emergency, we ought to stick around and help out.”
God’s Supermarket provided them with vital life-saving supplies and crucial psychological sanctuary. If the establishment was facing an urgent crisis, how could they just lounge around on a beach enjoying themselves?
Watching her neighbors systematically vault over the window frame onto the café floorboards, a profound wave of emotion washed over Song Yuqing. She offered them a solemn, deeply appreciative nod. Such loyalty and community spirit could not be taken for granted.
If she had initially accepted the mantle of supermarket manager out of sheer survival and a desire for personal profit, the role felt entirely different now. It had evolved into a sacred obligation—a deep, personal responsibility to do whatever it took to rewrite the brutal living conditions of the post-apocalyptic era.
Plans rarely survived contact with reality. Since the vast majority of the active workforce had already reconvened, Song Yuqing chose to bypass the preamble, bluntly announcing that God’s Supermarket was looking to enlist twenty temporary subcontractors. Before she could even articulate the precise scope of the labor required, the crowd erupted into a frantic scramble to enlist.
“Me! Put me down!” “I want to sign up right now!” “Count me in, Manager! I don’t care about the payout!”
To them, securing a formalized role within the infrastructure of God’s Supermarket was an absolute blessing.
“How on earth could I miss out on an operation like this?!” Zhang Yimiao panted heavily, leaning her weight against the window casing. She weakly gestured for the survivors crowding the ledge to partition and give her some breathing room. Jumping down to the shore had been effortless, but scaling that rope had pushed her muscles to the limit.
Xiaoyi trailed right behind her, peeking cautiously over the sill. “Are there seriously only twenty slots available?”
The survivors traded tense, competitive glances, nobody willing to forfeit the opportunity. But with over a hundred people packed into the café and another two hundred still relaxing on the sand below, whittling down the roster was a massive hurdle. How were they supposed to choose?
Song Yuqing offered a reassuring smile. “The twenty subcontractors will be selected strictly from the cohort standing in this room—the ones who chose to return first.”
There was no need to broadcast the opening to the entire colony, nor was it necessary to drag the entire population through a grueling evaluation matrix. At the end of the day, it was a matter of destiny.
It was an ironic dynamic; under normal circumstances, a temporary retail clerk gig at a convenience store wouldn’t exactly qualify as a prestigious career path, yet every hardened fighter in the room was dying to secure a slot.
“Before anyone commits, listen to the operational parameters,” Song Yuqing called out, her voice dropping into a serious register. “The subcontractors will be tasked with executing an immensely grueling objective. You will be systematically deployed across several parallel realities to locate every single individual Lin Han’s black hole violently banished into the multiverse, and safely escort them back. If a target explicitly refuses to return to our baseline reality, you must coordinate with the local factions to ensure they can live safely and comfortably within that alternate timeline.”
“An actual parallel reality!” Xiaoyi’s eyes went wide, sparkling with pure, unadulterated excitement.
“The deployments carry a remarkably high tier of physical danger,” Song Yuqing warned.
“That’s nothing new! Danger is a baseline reality no matter which quadrant we sleep in!” a fighter bellowed from the back, prompting a chorus of roaring agreement from the crowd.
“Let me contextualize the difficulty,” Song Yuqing continued, shrugging her shoulders as she spread her hands. “For this specific directive, the targets we are hunting possess completely unknown identities, unknown names, unknown coordinates, and an unknown total headcount.”
The parameters sounded entirely absurd.
True to form, the moment she laid out the layout, the boisterous café fell into a dead, contemplative silence for several seconds.
“So… what happens if we deploy and turn up absolutely nothing? What are the consequences of a failed run?” Zhang Hua asked tentatively.
Song Yuqing paused to consider the question. “Then we simply keep hunting.”
“Until the oceans run dry and the mountains crumble into dust,” Liu Xiaona chimed in, layering her voice with a theatrical, tragic sorrow.
Song Yuqing shot a glance at her assistant, nodding in grim validation. That was the absolute reality of the contract. She had initially considered revealing that they possessed localized anchors like Sister Qin and Ai Mei who could provide intelligence support within the dimensions, but on second thought, she chose to hold that data back. She would disclose those strategic coordinates only after the final twenty subcontractors were locked in.
Thus, when a survivor asked if they would have access to a localized support network behind the portals, Song Yuqing simply shook her head.
Operating under these stark parameters, anyone who still aggressively demanded to sign the contract was driven by pure, unadulterated loyalty to the store.
“Alright, if you still want to throw your name into the ring, line up over here,” Liu Xiaona announced, pulling a compact ledger and a pen from her uniform pocket. She took up a position behind the café counter to process the applicants.
“Me! Put me down as number one!” “No way, I was at the front of the line!”
“Everyone, take a breath and raise your hands first!” Liu Xiaona hollered over the din. The second the command left her mouth, a sea of arms shot straight into the air.
A quick scan of the room revealed roughly seventy to eighty eager candidates.
This layout wasn’t going to work. Song Yuqing realized she needed to implement a strict set of baseline screening conditions to narrow the field.
