Chapter 106: Acid Rain
Before the relentless acid rain began to fall, in a remote stretch of the desert surrounding Base Zero, two middle-aged zombies crawled out from beneath the sand. Their eyes were dark and gloomy.
A group of figures was slowly marching toward them, led by a long-haired beauty who radiated a chilling, murderous aura.
“Hiss…” The zombie with feminine features took a cautious step back, and her companion, the middle-aged male zombie, firmly grabbed her arm.
“Hiss!” The long-haired beauty led her squad to encircle the two middle-aged mutants. She immediately began to negotiate, her voice carrying the guttural rasp unique to zombies.
The female zombie furrowed her brow, her raw instincts sensing an impending disaster. But just as she was about to screech to summon her hidden thralls, the middle-aged male zombie held her back.
It isn’t time yet.
“Hiss… My name is Chen Ke. I’m here to talk business,” the long-haired beauty hissed. It was indeed Chen Ke, who had traveled all the way from Chen Town.
“This is not your territory!” the middle-aged male zombie growled, baring his teeth ferociously.
Chen Ke smiled carelessly, gesturing to a zombie behind her to toss a heavy roll of plastic sheeting onto the sand.
“An extreme acid rain is about to fall. Cover yourselves with this if you don’t want to be corroded into nothing.”
Acid rain? The two middle-aged zombies traded a bewildered glance, completely unfamiliar with the term.
Chen Ke let out a sharp chuckle. “Well, you wouldn’t understand even if I explained it. I’ll leave this here. It can save your lives, but remember, I can just as easily slaughter you all. Once the storm passes, you two had better come find me on the highway.”
Hearing the smiling threat, a golden light flared in the female zombie’s pupils. She shot a look at the male zombie beside her.
Kill them.
No. They might not be here to claim our territory. The middle-aged male zombie gave a subtle shake of his head, overruling her.
Throwing them a final look of utter contempt and supreme confidence, Chen Ke turned on her heel and marched away with her mutant squad.
This diplomatic excursion had been explicitly orchestrated by Wan Youzhi. A few days ago, his foresight had granted him a vision of the incoming disaster—a highly destructive, catastrophic acid rain.
Acting on his prophecy, the bizarre alliance composed of Lin Han, Wan Youzhi, and Chen Ke had instantly altered their travel coordinates, detouring to an abandoned industrial plant first to salvage a massive stockpile of specialized, chemically resistant plastics.
During their absolute first encounter back at the vacant Base 27, Chen Ke had surged into the complex with every intention of slaughtering Lin Han. Naturally, she had failed, completely falling into Lin Han’s tactical trap. Wan Youzhi had predicted her ambush from the start, providing Lin Han with the exact counters needed to hand her a crushing defeat.
It wasn’t that Chen Ke, in her current high-level zombie state, was physically weaker than Lin Han. Rather, she had been forced to temporarily swallow her hatred for the sake of survival. Wan Youzhi had extended an olive branch, presenting her with a massive cache of high-grade crystal cores to persuade her to form a joint coalition.
Fine. We can cooperate for now, she had reasoned, driven by her own swelling, monstrous ambitions. Once every human stronghold is wiped off the map, it won’t be too late to settle my personal score with Lin Han.
Just as Chen Ke had warned, while the two middle-aged zombies were quietly resting beneath the dunes, the acid rain unleashed. Corrosive liquid cascaded down from the bruised, ink-black sky.
A sharp, violent sizzle erupted across the landscape. Under the heavy downpour, the pristine lines of the sand dunes began to distort and collapse. The toxic rain quickly oversaturated the sand, slowly seeping downward to invade the flesh of the buried horde.
The outer skin of the two leaders—which had evolved to look almost perfectly human—was rapidly eaten away by the acid, exposing the mottled, blue-gray tissue beneath. Their appearances grew increasingly grotesque by the second.
“That material!”
The middle-aged male and female zombies instantly remembered the roll of plastic Chen Ke had discarded. They immediately barked a command, forcing several lower-tier thralls to burrow out into the toxic downpour. The mindless drones unfurled the plastic sheeting, spreading it evenly across the melting sand to form a barrier against the acid.
The entire subterranean colony scrambled to compress themselves beneath the shielded zones, piling on top of one another like a massive, frantic pyramid.
Meanwhile, miles away, God’s Supermarket was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with terrified survivors.
The moment the acid rain struck, every single structure in the sector began to dissolve and cave in under the severe chemical erosion—save for the supermarket itself. Song Yuqing stared out the front window at the utter devastation, offering a silent, breathless prayer of thanksgiving for the store’s mystical immunity.
“What are we supposed to do now? Is our home base going to collapse too?” “Will hiding in an underground bunker protect us from this stuff?”
The crowds packed into the lobby conversed in low, heavy murmurs, the atmosphere thick with dread.
When the first drops had begun to fall, the neighbors had still been sound asleep. It was the store staff who had frantically banged on their doors, ushering them into the safety of the supermarket. Every ounce of provisions and gear they had painstakingly salvaged was now buried deep beneath the rubble of the collapsed high-rises next door.
Worse yet, with mutants becoming an extreme rarity in the sector, the survivors had absolutely nothing left to use as currency to trade for store supplies. Unless it became a matter of absolute survival, they refused to beg for handouts or demand free access to the inventory.
The leaders of the various local factions huddled in a corner, auditing their remaining personal rations. They grimly estimated that their pooled resources could only sustain their people for one more day.
Aunt Peng stared out the window at the heavy deluge, a sudden realization clicking in her mind. She accessed her spatial inventory, materializing several massive rolls of industrial plastic sheeting onto the floorboards.
“Aunt Peng, what is that?” Xiaoyi asked, quickly shuffling her feet back to make room for the heavy rolls.
“High-density polyethylene,” Aunt Peng explained, an excited smile breaking across her face. “It’s completely resistant to chemical corrosion. Thank goodness I had the foresight to stash a few rolls into my space before the collapse; this might actually save our lives.” Before the apocalypse, the factory where she worked had specialized in manufacturing this exact material.
“Can a simple layer of plastic really withstand extreme acid rain?” someone from the crowd asked skeptically.
“Only one way to find out,” Xiaoyi said. She cleanly sliced off a small swatch, draped it over her head like a makeshift umbrella, and prepared to step out the front doors.
“Gaha!” Gaha quickly lunged forward, gently plucking the material from her hand to conduct the experiment on her behalf.
The toxic droplets heavily pelted the plastic sheeting, but the liquid pooled and rolled off harmlessly, unable to penetrate the barrier.
“It actually works!” Song Yuqing’s eyes lit up with excitement. “Aunt Peng, can I purchase one of those rolls from you right now?”
She desperately needed the material to shield the massive Chinese tallow tree in the courtyard. While the mystical tree was far more resilient against the chemical downpour than the concrete high-rises and brick walls, it had already lost the vast majority of its leaves, its branches looking visibly bare and battered. The supermarket absolutely required the integrity of the tallow tree to maintain network communications with the external bases.
“I’m not selling this to you, Manager—consider it a gift!” Aunt Peng stated generously, rolling a massive cylinder over to Liu Xiaona. “Take it, and thank you for keeping us safe.”
Sensing her raw sincerity, Song Yuqing didn’t decline. The staff quickly fashioned four heavy-duty raincoats for themselves out of the material. Moving as a coordinated unit, the four employees of God’s Supermarket rushed into the storm, carefully wrapping the trunk and canopy of the massive Chinese tallow tree inside a transparent, protective shell.
A faint, sickly pale light finally began to fracture along the horizon. Standing beneath the plastic canopy of the tree, Song Yuqing swept her gaze across the landscape. The view was staggering.
The winding alleys, the residential high-rises, and the paved streets had vanished entirely. Chen Town had been wiped off the map, leaving God’s Supermarket standing as a solitary, silver monolith amidst a vast wasteland of smoking rubble.
Vast and boundless. Those were the only words echoing in her mind. A profound, hollow sense of emptiness settled deep within her chest—a massive, black void she had no idea how to fill.
BZZZ—
The sudden vibration of her phone startled her. She pulled the device from her pocket to find an emergency transmission from Nanjiao.
[It’s over! The base defenses have completely failed! We can’t hold the line anymore!]
Song Yuqing’s stomach took a violent drop. She frantically clicked the diagnostic link appended to his message. The screen loaded a pitch-black feed, the audio channel overwhelmed by a chaotic barrage of agonizing screams.
Nanjiao’s entire faction had sought refuge inside their deepest subterranean bunkers. However, the relentless chemical rain had begun to compromise the ceilings, toxic droplets steadily seeping through the concrete to rain down upon the crowded survivors below, instantly eating holes into their flesh.
Faced with the sheer, unbridled fury of the catastrophic weather, the elite espers were completely powerless, their elemental mutations entirely useless against the end of the world.
