Chapter 129: Confidentiality
Time seemed to stand still.
Stranded within that stark, featureless expanse, everything felt fundamentally illusory.
“Are we physically unable to escape this sector?” Nanjiao asked, his voice tight with an acute, mounting worry.
Nobody offered an answer; everyone was completely consumed by a silent, suffocating anxiety.
Right then, the suspended digital rendering of the city began to fracture again, its pixelated strings of code dispersing and rapidly recombining into a new sequence. This time, a line of text materialized clearly across the void:
“Should we terminate the doomsday simulation?”
Directly beneath the prompt lay two definitive input options: [ YES ] and [ NO ].
They watched in absolute suspense as a digital cursor hovered back and forth between the two choices. The unseen administrator operating the system seemed locked in a agonizing moment of hesitation.
Click.
The cursor finally settled on [ NO ].
For some inexplicable reason, Song Yuqing and her companions let out a collective, ragged sigh of relief.
The very next second, a violent wave of vertigo crashed over their senses. By the time their consciousness stabilized, they had materialized back inside the familiar, narrow corridors of Song Yuqing’s private pocket dimension.
Right before their eyes, their physical forms began to reconstitute, their bodies growing back smoothly, inch by inch, until they were fully anchored to reality.
The travelers traded a series of heavy, knowing looks. Every human in the corridor held the exact same terrifying realization in their hearts. However, Gaha and Little Meat Bun, entirely locked out of human language, remained thoroughly confused by the nature of the shift.
“Gaha?” The gargoyle tilted her head, throwing Song Yuqing a deeply questioning look.
The giant panda was equally bewildered, aggressively rubbing his chubby cheeks with both paws as he tried to process the event.
“I feel like… we are literally living inside a doomsday simulation,” Nanjiao muttered, a profound, icy chill creeping straight down his spine.
To put it another way, they were nothing more than digital entities trapped inside a virtual architecture—glorified NPCs manipulated by an overarching script, no different than the alternate populations they had encountered across the parallel timelines.
“Is it mathematically coded that we will all just be slaughtered by the zombie horde in the end?” Staring blankly into the dark corridor, Nanjiao couldn’t halt the dark, fatalistic thoughts from bleeding out.
“Statistically, yes. That appears to be the hardcoded conclusion,” Song Yuqing replied, taking a deep, heavy breath. She looked down the gallery at the rows of identical iron doors melting into the darkness of her space, a profound, suffocating sense of despair settling over her soul.
What was the point of fighting to survive? While she hadn’t exactly been pushing her absolute limits before, right now, she seemed to be stripped of any logical reason to try at all. No matter how creatively or aggressively she attempted to rewrite her predicament, the overarching programming would inevitably course-correct, naturally guiding her actions toward a predetermined demise.
In fact, it was highly probable that her current existential dread was nothing more than a pre-written algorithm executing perfectly within her psychological script.
“Let’s head back to the storefront,” Song Yuqing instructed, her voice flat as she desperately fought to project a calm exterior. “And once we cross the threshold, do not breathe a single word of this to anyone.”
“Understood. Absolute secrecy,” Nanjiao validated, his tone incredibly heavy.
What other tactical play did they have? They were entirely powerless, forced to sit back and watch the programming systematically push their reality toward its final, inevitable purge.
They had no idea how to even frame a conversation like this to the rest of the survivors. Perhaps a few radical fighters would credit their story, but so what? No human would ever easily accept the psychological horror that their entire existence, down to their deepest emotions, was nothing more than a string of predefined code.
The mutant legions were massing out in the wastes, and their impending operational strategy remained a terrifying blank. At a critical juncture like this, the surviving human factions could not afford to forfeit their remaining hope, nor could they allow their fragile internal unity to fracture.
The truth was an absolute horror, and there was zero functional benefit in forcing the collective to bear the weight of it.
“We just focus on living for as long as the system allows,” she resolved.
Should they simply surrender their lives to destiny? A fierce, painful conflict twisted in Song Yuqing’s chest.
“Gaha! Gaha! Gaha!”
Gaha aggressively tugged at the hem of Song Yuqing’s uniform jacket, snapping her out of her spiral. The gargoyle was frantically reminding her manager that their absolute priority right now was to deploy back to God’s Supermarket to verify whether Liu Xiaona had collided with any systemic errors.
“Right!” Nanjiao agreed, reaching out to pat Gaha’s shoulder. “But honestly, my gut says Liu Xiaona is perfectly fine.”
“Hmm…” Song Yuqing murmured, a sudden realization hitting her. After reviewing the operational headcount, she discovered a massive logistical oversight: the Xie brothers and the elite research administrators from Base Zero were still stranded back in the fields of the Dark World. She had no choice but to temporarily initiate another jump to the night timeline to extract them.
The moment they caught sight of Song Yuqing’s vanguard returning through the portal, the Xie brothers immediately swarmed her, frantically demanding a comprehensive breakdown of the anomaly. They were bursting with intense curiosity, dying to know what had transpired within the sky rift.
Bound by her vow of secrecy, Song Yuqing couldn’t disclose a single shred of the truth. She quickly fabricated a casual, smooth excuse to deflect their suspicions. The Xie brothers accepted the narrative without much pushback, but the elite experts from Base Zero weren’t so easily fooled. They were incredibly sharp, analytical minds.
Faced with the researchers’ piercing, highly skeptical glares, Song Yuqing simply feigned absolute ignorance, looking right past them. As long as she maintained her rigid wall of silence, they would never be able to mathematically deduce the reality.
By the time the entire cohort successfully deployed back to the main lobby of God’s Supermarket, Liu Xiaona had already finalized the evaluation matrix, successfully locking in the twenty temporary subcontractors for the establishment.
Naturally, Xiaoyi, Zhang Yimiao, and Zhang Hua had secured slots on the roster. If one were to evaluate their raw combat metrics, they definitely wouldn’t rank as the absolute strongest espers in the colony. However, Liu Xiaona had brilliantly managed the selection process, implementing a secondary qualification metric that bypassed raw destructive power: a community-wide public opinion vote. Although the democratic process had extended the timeline, spanning three full days and two nights, it had filled the window perfectly prior to Song Yuqing’s return.
The twenty chosen personnel were systematically partitioned into four balanced tactical squads, with five espers assigned to each unit. Their elemental mutations were carefully cross-matched, ensuring optimal synergy and operational cooperation across the board.
The moment Song Yuqing, Gaha, Little Meat Bun, and Nanjiao laid eyes on Liu Xiaona standing safely behind the counter, a profound wave of emotion washed over them, their eyes glistening with tears. They came within a hair’s breadth of breaking protocol and spilling every horrific detail they had witnessed within the server void.
He’s alive and unblemished. Thank goodness.
Liu Xiaona found her coworkers’ sudden, intense behavior completely bizarre. Ever since stepping back through the portal, the entire core staff had been treating him with an overwhelming, almost suffocating tier of pampering.
For instance, Song Yuqing had personally hand-delivered a massive stockpile of rare, premium delicacies she had purchased from the parallel commercial terminal. Furthermore, Little Meat Bun had voluntarily ambled over to provide him with an incredibly soft, professional shoulder and neck massage. Even Gaha had become remarkably compliant with his store requests, rendering him the undisputed darling of God’s Supermarket overnight.
The behavior of Nanjiao and the Xie brothers was even more eccentric. Setting aside the mystery of how they had managed to return alongside the manager, their sudden, explosive enthusiasm was charting toward the completely wrong target.
It had been months since they last shared a sector. Logically, Shen She was the individual they held the deepest baseline history with, yet the second they breached the entrance, the veterans had bypassed the boy entirely, marching straight into a fierce, emotional huddle around him, Liu Xiaona! The display had grown so intense that Liu Xiaona had been forced to awkwardly return the embrace against his will, sputtering out a stream of polite pleasantries about how much he had missed them on the road.
Using his peripheral vision to scan the room, Liu Xiaona caught sight of Shen She standing under the tallow tree, tracking the spectacle with a deeply contemplative, analytical stare. A flash of sudden panic hit his chest. Oh great. I don’t care if Shen She technically looks like an old grandfather right now—mentally, he’s still just a kid. What if he gets incredibly jealous and grows to loathe me for stealing his thunder?
Aware that her assistant’s internal monologue was escalating into pure absurdity, Song Yuqing simply offered a quiet, knowing smile. Skipping any correction, she smoothly announced that effective immediately, the deployment schedules and day-to-day operations of all twenty temporary subcontractors would be managed exclusively by him.
“Congratulations, Liu Xiaona. You have officially ascended as the absolute second-in-command of God’s Supermarket.”
Hearing the formal promotion, a brilliant, ecstatic smile erupted across Liu Xiaona’s face. He couldn’t help but marvel at his luck; ever since the world had collapsed into an absolute apocalypse, his retail career had completely flourished, charting from one massive promotion to the next.
“Gaha…” Gaha grunted softly from the corner. She clearly saw through his vanity, but chose to keep her thoughts to herself.
Later that evening, Song Yuqing systematically distributed the newly acquired residential units to the survivors temporarily camped out on the perimeter. She selected the compact apartment blocks for the general populace, while holding onto the vibrant luxury villa models she had secured through her alternate self, intending to list them on the digital store interface for premium points.
Shen She, proving his sharp intellect, immediately approached the counter with a business proposal. He offered to trade the entire inventory of custom acid-proof umbrellas and heavy raincoats he had manufactured over the last forty-eight hours straight to God’s Supermarket in exchange for the deed to one of the villas.
Although Song Yuqing’s baseline mathematical calculations dictated that the store was taking a significant financial loss on the exchange, she readily authorized the contract anyway. At the end of the day, she simply wasn’t a ruthless, profit-driven capitalist. In truth, she had never possessed the predatory mindset of a traditional merchant.
“A spectacular executive decision, Manager Song,” Master Fu’s broadcast suddenly resonated in her mind, his tone thick with a warm, approving pride. “The foundational directive of our glorious supermarket is to serve the citizens of this world.”
Song Yuqing let out a long, quiet breath of relief. The supervisor had manifested at the absolute perfect moment; she had an infinite mountain of burning questions she was dying to confront him with in private.
She walked him through a meticulous, step-by-step recitation of her experiences inside the server void, mapping out the pixelated construction logs and the terminal selection choices they had witnessed. As the data accumulated, Master Fu fell into a profound, heavy silence.
But the moment Song Yuqing sharply pressed him to unlatch the core database and reveal the absolute truth regarding the nature of their universe, the system interface immediately began to glitch on purpose, his voice dissolving into a stream of comical corporate deflection.
“Bzzz—processing—static—wait, what exactly did you just say, Manager Song? The audio transmission lines are severely dropping! I can’t decode your signal clearly at all!”
