Chapter 123: Different from the Plan
Base Zero.
When Xie Qiang and his wife stepped out of their shelter early in the morning, they found the entire world turned upside down.
Inside the massive expanse of Base Zero, not a single living human remained. The only entities left pacing the streets were zombies heavily disguised as humans. Overnight, the hunters had become predators stranded in a wasteland without prey.
“Could it be that Wan Youzhi and Lin Han pulled something behind our backs?” As Zhang Lin spoke, the false darkness in her eyes slowly receded, revealing their true, gleaming golden hue.
“It shouldn’t be them,” Xie Qiang muttered, his gaze sweeping over the mutant thralls trying their best to look human. The disguised zombies were trading uneasy glances—a rare, chaotic sight.
Where did the layout fracture?
Xie Qiang racked his brains, desperately trying to reconstruct the events of the previous twenty-four hours. His mind immediately locked onto the small scouting party and the giant panda that had infiltrated Base Zero the day before. Those newcomers had shown up, and suddenly his prey had vanished.
But why? Why would they meticulously evacuate every single original resident of Base Zero, yet deliberately leave the disguised mutants behind?
The cold reality hit him: Our identities have been completely compromised.
“Let’s go find Chen Ke and the others.”
Xie Qiang still couldn’t wrap his head around how they had slipped up. Then, he remembered the compact camera clutched in the short-haired girl’s hand. Thinking back carefully, the expression on her face when she snapped their group photo had been deeply abnormal. It hadn’t been the look of a regular survivor catching up with family. In fact, the more he pictured her face, the more familiar she seemed, as if he had crossed paths with her somewhere in his past life.
A dense, suffocating wave of murderous intent radiated from Xie Qiang. It flickered out for a fraction of a second before violently expanding across the courtyard.
“No, let them come to us,” Zhang Lin countered, physically catching his arm to hold him back. At this tactical juncture, holding their ground at Base Zero was undeniably the superior choice. Who could say for certain whether those terrified humans would ever pluck up the courage to return to their newly constructed settlement?
According to their foundational calculations of human behavior, survivors wouldn’t easily abandon a stronghold they had spent months of grueling labor fortifying unless they were backed into an absolute corner.
Xie Qiang conceded to her logic. Hissing a low command, he dispatched a subterranean zombie to burrow through the desert sands and summon Chen Ke, Lin Han, and Wan Youzhi.
“The situation has deviated from the plan.”
Xie Qiang instructed the runner to deliver that exact message. A single sentence would suffice to communicate the gravity of the crisis. It would let Wan Youzhi know that his proud, invincible prophetic foresight had completely failed him.
The underground runner resurfaced a brief moment later. Right on its heels, Wan Youzhi, Lin Han, Chen Ke, and a roaring horde of tens of thousands of lower-tier zombies who hadn’t yet evolved human skin came surging through the perimeter gates of Base Zero.
“What the hell is going on here?” Lin Han barked the moment he locked eyes with Xie Qiang, his tone thick with aggressive accusation.
From his perspective, the blueprint they had meticulously drafted was flawless, designed to ensure every faction secured exactly what they required. Why on earth were they suddenly claiming the parameters had deviated?
Compared to Lin Han’s frantic outburst, Chen Ke and Wan Youzhi maintained an eerie, detached composure, as if they refused to believe the structural layout could truly disintegrate this rapidly.
Xie Qiang let out a cold, mocking snort. “See for yourselves. There isn’t a single living human left inside the walls of Base Zero.”
The city was a ghost town. Lin Han and Wan Youzhi could claim the empty concrete shell for all he cared. But what did the undead stand to gain from an abandoned base? There were no fresh blood reserves to harvest, and the location of the meteorite fragments remained a mystery.
As the gravity of the situation finally clicked in Chen Ke’s mind, she turned a piercing, deadly gaze toward Lin Han and Wan Youzhi. A dark suspicion flared in her chest—had these two pathetic humans cut a separate deal behind her back?
Rage bubbled through her veins. She had personally broken her back hunting down Base Zero’s remaining carrier pigeons just to feed their brains to Wan Youzhi so his psychic mutation could evolutionarily upgrade. She had sacrificed precious assets expecting him to map out a broader vision of the future, only for the duo to orchestrate an internal betrayal?
At the end of the day, humans truly are the most insidious creatures.
Panic fluttered in Wan Youzhi’s chest, but he forced his features into a mask of rigid composure. He and Lin Han had already crossed the Rubicon; their survival matrix was fundamentally fused with the success of the undead. They rose or fell as a single unit.
Chen Ke’s pupils flashed with feral brutality. Moving with blinding speed, she extended her pale hands, clamping one around Wan Youzhi’s collar and the other around Lin Han’s throat, lifting them off their feet.
Lin Han instinctively flared his energy to resist, but Wan Youzhi shot him a sharp, warning glare. Not now. He silently signaled his partner to swallow his pride and endure the throat-hold.
“Hiss… did you two worms dare to lie to me?” The oppressive, terrifying aura radiating from Chen Ke’s form, laced with the distinct, metallic stench of an advanced zombie, nearly suffocated the two men.
“How could we possibly deceive you?” Wan Youzhi wheezed out in a strained whisper.
In truth, his own resentment toward her had reached a boiling point. Over the past few weeks, Chen Ke had treated him strictly as a disposable military advisor, constantly throwing him looks of frigid contempt. What he ultimately sought was to ascend as the absolute king of the human survivors, not to live out the apocalypse as a lackey for a pack of mutants.
If his prophetic mutation wasn’t entirely non-aggressive, and if Lin Han’s raw combat metrics weren’t so thoroughly eclipsed by Chen Ke’s speed, he would never have adopted such a servile posture.
Damn it all! How did this monster manage to evolve to such an absurd tier of power?
Sensing the explosive tension fracturing the alliance, Zhang Lin stepped in to smooth things over. “We have two choices: either we deploy our trackers to unearth exactly where the Base Zero survivors are burrowed, or we dissolve this coalition right now.”
Zhang Lin and Xie Qiang possessed more than enough personal power to safely navigate the wasteland alongside their own mutated bloodline. The only reason they had initially accepted Chen Ke’s invitation to join the collective was because her vanguard had insulated them from the severe chemical downpour.
As zombies, the concepts of gratitude or loyalty were entirely alien to them, but they were a rare evolutionary exception. The closer their skin evolved to match human biology, the more their cognitive centers began to mimic human civilization and nuanced emotional frameworks. Of course, mimicry was the extent of it. Occasionally, they would choose to behave in a hyper-human manner, but it was driven strictly by an icy, detached curiosity.
“We cannot dissolve the coalition!” Wan Youzhi choked out, his face turning an angry crimson as Chen Ke’s grip tightened around his windpipe. “Think about last night! Did none of your sentries intercept a single spatial anomaly?!”
Lin Han snarled through his teeth, “If you slaughter Wan Youzhi and me right now, your horde is doomed. This catastrophic acid rain isn’t finished falling from the heavens, and our team holds the exclusive mutation capable of predicting when the next downpour will unleash!”
Chen Ke let out a mocking sneer and carelessly dropped them to the dirt. But when she spoke again, her voice carried an even sharper, more calculated malice.
“Do you pathetic worms truly believe that when a zombie evolves, we only upgrade our skin and leave our brains to rot?”
Lin Han froze, an icy dread creeping up his spine as if a blade were resting against the back of his neck.
Wan Youzhi, however, managed to steady his breathing. He had long since predicted through his visions that as the high-tier mutants completed their evolutionary cycles, their intellectual capacity would expand exponentially.
“Even if your thralls can calculate the weather anomalies, Chen Ke,” Wan Youzhi spoke up, his voice retaining its smooth composure, “do you realize that God’s Supermarket is actively configuring itself to become your absolute nemesis?”
Everything in this wasteland was a high-stakes gamble.
He was completely incapable of mapping out the structural telemetry of God’s Supermarket; the store’s existence manifested inside his prophetic mind as a dense, impenetrable fog—a catastrophic blind spot that could detonate his plans at any moment. If fortune had granted him an audience with Song Yuqing before his descent into villainy, he would have gladly chosen to integrate with her staff, or at the very least, secure a standing alliance with her shop. He never would have chosen to stand as her enemy.
Tragically, there were no do-overs in the apocalypse.
Right now, God’s Supermarket explicitly categorized him as a hostile element, so his only tactical recourse was to manipulate the zombie horde into viewing the store as their ultimate target. After all, the enemy of his enemy was his functional friend.
His grand ambition was to utilize the raw muscle of the mutant legions to systematically break the independent human strongholds, forcing the elite espers to bend the knee and serve his new empire. He was deeply consumed by a burning desire to seize the absolute power and institutional respect he had been denied before the world collapsed.
He had already foreseen through his private visions that once the zombies successfully amassed every remaining meteorite fragment on the planet, they wouldn’t possess the baseline knowledge required to channel the energy, rendering their grand empire a toothless, localized regime.
Naturally, he had withheld that crucial data point from Chen Ke. Instead, he had fed her a beautiful lie, promising her that if her legions secured the fragments, the undead would command absolute sovereignty over the globe. All he claimed to want in return was a modest slice of territory to rule, and a handful of human slaves to serve his court.
