Chapter 127: Loopholes
After Song Yuqing finished checking out, Gaha, Little Meat Bun, Nanjiao, and the others arrived at the registers with their overflowing shopping carts. Song Yuqing had been worried that her funds wouldn’t cover the total, but when she checked the balance, she found she still had 10 points left on her card.
“Isn’t this place a bit too profitable?” Xie Hao muttered, still unable to believe his eyes. The prices in this iteration of God’s Supermarket were unbelievably low. As they had gathered their supplies, they had meticulously prioritized their items, mapping out which goods were absolute necessities and which ones they could afford to leave behind.
The little girl’s mother kept her head down, quickly scanning the items. Initially, no one else had noticed how much she resembled Song Yuqing.
But when she overheard Xie Hao’s comment, she suddenly looked up. “We are barely turning a profit here. We’ve already given you a substantial bulk discount.”
The moment the group saw the woman’s face clearly, everyone froze in absolute shock.
They darted their eyes back and forth between Song Yuqing and the cashier. Their senses hadn’t played tricks on them; these two women were the exact same person.
“Are you also the designated owner of God’s Supermarket in this parallel timeline?” Nanjiao joked, trying to ease the sudden tension.
“Wow, you really are the chosen one,” Xie Zetian muttered, a trace of envy bleeding into his voice.
Song Yuqing shrugged helplessly, forcing a tight smile. “I’ll explain everything to you guys later.”
Tracking the group’s bizarre reactions, the little girl looked up, thoroughly confused. “Is it really that strange to see people who look identical? You must see them all the time, right? I have two classmates at school who look exactly the same.”
“Those are called twins, kiddo,” Xie Hao replied. But his store manager and this local cashier definitely weren’t twins, right?
“No, they’re not twins,” the little girl countered, pouting. “One of my classmates looks exactly like her mother, and the other looks exactly like her father. But their mother and father aren’t even a couple.”
“This sort of thing is actually quite common across the sectors,” the little girl’s mother added, a calm, practiced smile resting on her face. “At the end of the day, it’s just a repetitive program.”
The moment those words left her mouth, Nanjiao and the Xie brothers widened their eyes in disbelief, while Gaha and Little Meat Bun simply blinked. The human world was proving to be incredibly complicated.
They turned their heads in unison to look at Song Yuqing, their eyes asking a silent question: Does what she’s saying actually make any sense to you?
Song Yuqing offered a calm, solemn nod. Yes, that’s exactly the case. Shocking, isn’t it?
Song Yuqing utilized the remaining ten points on her card to purchase one final housing unit, systematically storing the mountain of real estate models inside her pocket dimension. Once the inventory was securely logged, she called out to Little Meat Bun, Gaha, Nanjiao, and the Xie brothers, signaling that it was time to deploy back.
The group had been lingering around the little girl and her parents, eagerly trying to ask a dozen more questions. When they saw Song Yuqing calling for a retreat, they looked thoroughly reluctant to break off the encounter.
“Can’t we just hang around and head back a little later?”
After exiting the commercial terminal, Song Yuqing prepared to guide the cohort straight into the spatial corridor. However, Xie Hao and Nanjiao immediately began to protest, stubbornly insisting that they be allowed to explore this strange world of perpetual night a bit longer.
Song Yuqing couldn’t override the stubbornness of the older men, and when Gaha and Little Meat Bun joined in, turning their big eyes on her to plead, she finally threw her hands up and conceded. Little Meat Bun eagerly selected a quiet, unpaved trail wrapping around the perimeter of God’s Supermarket and led the vanguard.
The cohort drifted down a dirt path that stretched out as far as the eye could see, flanked on both sides by massive, towering mounds of harvested rice.
If the concept of a peaceful, unhurried life could be mapped to a single image, this was undoubtedly it.
Once their legs grew weary from the hike, the group casually sat down in the grass. Song Yuqing reached into her spatial inventory and pulled out a crate of the cold beverages she had just purchased, passing a bottle to each person to quench their thirst.
By tacit agreement, nobody raised the topic of when they would initiate the return sequence.
Song Yuqing remained silent on the matter as well.
The trail was entirely devoid of other pedestrians. The only entities sharing the space were themselves and the various insects, birds, and small animals that seemed to be nesting quietly in the dark brush.
Where exactly is the rest of the population hiding?
They only had to lift their chins toward the sky to unearth the answer.
The vast majority of the citizens were captured on screen, locked inside corporate cubicles or crammed into institutional classrooms. Their rigid, monitored routines couldn’t begin to compete with the group’s leisurely stroll through the fields.
Their own massive silhouettes still dominated a significant portion of the northern sky. Initially, they had deliberately avoided looking up at the intrusive sky curtain, but by now, they had grown completely desensitized to the surveillance.
“Gaha!” Gaha suddenly barked, pointing her claw toward a blank, dark rift in the empty air.
Song Yuqing tracked her movement, her eyes narrowing. The small, empty void resembled a jagged tear in the fabric of the sky, with bright currents of static electricity violently sparking around the edges.
While the group sat frozen, staring blankly at the strange anomaly, a sudden bolt of lightning violently discharged from the center of the rift—and along with the electricity, a human silhouette plummeted rapidly toward the earth.
“Go, move! Go check it out!” Song Yuqing and Liu Xiaona’s voices rang out almost simultaneously from their respective locations.
Their peaceful, stolen holiday was shattered in an instant. The trajectory of the fall perfectly mirrored the exact signature of Lin Han weaponizing his void mutation to discard another victim.
The group sprinted anxiously toward the coordinate path beneath the atmospheric tear. As they ran, Nanjiao, the Xie brothers, and the research experts panted heavily, frantically shouting questions over their shoulders.
“I’ll explain it later!” Song Yuqing barked, thoroughly annoyed by the interrogation. She was already losing her breath from the sprint; trying to articulate a complex multiversal lecture on the run was exhausting her reserves.
Wasting no time, she commanded Little Meat Bun to expand his physical proportions, hopping onto his massive back alongside Nanjiao as the panda barreled forward. Gaha’s baseline agility was already spectacular, and she easily outpaced the bear, leaping and bounding over the terrain like a vanguard.
The aging experts from Base Zero were instantly left in the dust by the panda’s stride, ultimately giving up the chase to collapse and rest in the grass.
Xie Hao grumbled in frustration, “Why am I always the one left behind?!”
Xie Zetian let out a bitter, winded laugh. “We’re the designated rearguard to make sure these old guys don’t wander off.”
Xie Hao glared fiercely at the lingering researchers, his temper flaring. The experts merely rolled their eyes and rubbed their noses in response. It wasn’t their fault their physical conditioning wasn’t built for a cross-country sprint!
A few moments later, Song Yuqing’s vanguard intercepted the individual who had fallen from the sky. The person lay flat on the pavement, staring blankly up at the heavens. Native pedestrians calmly shifted their trajectories to walk right past the body, their features devoid of a single shred of curiosity.
Song Yuqing cautiously approached the fallen form, her heart sinking when she noted the person was completely saturated in blood.
“Wait a minute… that guy looks exactly like Liu Xiaona!” Nanjiao gasped. The physical build, the distinct hairstyle, and even the fabric cut of the clothing were an identical match to their assistant back home.
Song Yuqing’s stomach dropped into a cold hollow. Is this an alternate version of Liu Xiaona native to a separate parallel timeline? Or could it actually be their own assistant?
If their Liu Xiaona were present right now, he would undoubtedly throw a massive fit. He was fiercely proud, firmly believing himself to be entirely unique in the universe.
Nanjiao stepped forward, carefully rolling the limp form over so they could get a clear view of his face.
The moment the features came into focus, every muscle in Nanjiao’s frame locked into absolute, rigid paralysis.
A cold sweat erupted across everyone’s skin as the horror of the visual data hit their brains.
The individual bleeding out on the pavement was undeniably Liu Xiaona—or an entity structurally indistinguishable from him.
Song Yuqing’s mind dissolved into a frantic buzz, her hands and feet turning completely numb. She desperately prayed this wasn’t their Liu Xiaona, because their assistant was supposed to be back at the storefront, actively running the tournament to select the twenty temporary subcontractors!
“Gaha…”
Suddenly, Gaha let out a terrified whimper, her pupils shrinking as she stared up at the blank rift cutting through the sky.
A massive, blinding column of light violently poured down from the tear, enveloping their entire group inside a brilliant shroud.
Within the intense energy of the beam, the body of Liu Xiaona lying on the pavement began to dissolve, fracturing into tens of thousands of glowing pixels before vanishing from the timeline entirely.
Before Song Yuqing and her crew could process the anomaly, a pair of powerful, invisible hands materialized within the light. The forces violently seized them, pulling their bodies upward into the swirling vortex of the sky rift.
Song Yuqing’s ears were completely flooded by the panicked screams of her companions, synthesized with her own terrified shrieks.
Right before the darkness swallowed her consciousness, the milestones of her short life flashed vividly through her mind.
When Song Yuqing finally opened her eyes again, she made a horrifying discovery: she no longer possessed a physical body.
