Chapter 112: It’s You
Not long after the old man set up his makeshift stall outside God’s Supermarket, the acid rain suddenly ceased. The sky cleared completely, bearing all the signs of a weather pattern that would never return.
It was a joyful moment, to be sure, but as Song Yuqing stared out the window at the endless expanse of smoking ruins, a deep sense of desolation and a vague, persistent unease washed over her.
“Well, now that the acid rain has stopped, nobody’s going to bother trading their life savings for your umbrellas,” someone scoffed at the old man out on the porch before running off into the distance.
Slowly, the refugees who had taken shelter inside God’s Supermarket began filtering out. Some started the long trek back to their own bases, while others set up temporary camps nearby. Without exception, everyone threw a look of pity at the old man as they passed his stall. But he remained completely unfazed, seemingly possessed by an absolute confidence that his raincoats and umbrellas would always be in high demand.
The exact day the storm broke, the computer terminals inside the supermarket roared back to life, and a massive deluge of messages from various survival bases came pouring into the queue. The vast majority of these transmissions had been dispatched during the height of the chemical rain, but due to the fractured network infrastructure, they hadn’t been successfully delivered until today. Some clients were attempting to purchase emergency rations, others were sharing their raw terror over the past few days, and a few were desperately crying out for immediate rescue.
Song Yuqing and Liu Xiaona merely skimmed a few of the distress logs before thick tears began welling in their eyes. They forced themselves to swallow their sobs, fiercely fighting to ensure neither of them was the first to openly break down.
Song Yuqing systematically organized the data blocks, replying to the text threads one by one, while simultaneously adding the old man’s specialized acid-proof umbrellas and raincoats onto the digital inventory shelves. After a brief negotiation with the craftsman, she decided the supermarket would waive its standard agency and listing fees entirely.
However, the digital storefront of God’s Supermarket was actively colliding with a fatal, high-stakes logistical crisis.
The whereabouts of their homing delivery pigeons were completely unknown. Without the birds to run the routes, the establishment was entirely stripped of its automated shipping methods, meaning they would have to rely on raw human manpower to ferry crates of supplies across the country to the separate sectors.
Song Yuqing’s first instinct was to establish contact with the administrative teams at either Base Zero or Nanjiao, but her digital pings failed to connect. Furthermore, she couldn’t locate a single line of correspondence regarding Nanjiao, Xie Hao, or the rest of their core tech group within the incoming logs. A terrible worry gnawed at her stomach—she couldn’t shake the fear that Nanjiao’s faction had already been dissolved into foul pools of liquefied tissue during the storm.
As she was trapped in her anxious thoughts, a loud shout suddenly shattered the silence. It was Liu Xiaona, calling her out to the front porch to bid the departing neighbors farewell.
The second the toxic rain cleared, the local survivors couldn’t wait to mobilize. They desperately needed to return to their coordinates to verify whether their respective base structures had managed to survive the chemical onslaught.
Song Yuqing instructed Liu Xiaona, Gaha, and Little Meat Bun to help her pack a series of massive duffel bags with premium provisions, handing one over to each departing group as a gift. With the localized zombie population entirely depleted and the old man fiercely refusing to unlatch his jaws regarding his secret hunting grounds, Song Yuqing took matters into her own hands, distributing the life-saving food reserves out of pocket.
She reasoned that if Master Fu were present, he would have readily validated her charity.
Nearby, Xiaoyi was saying goodbye to her companions from Base 35, her eyes rimmed with thick red lines from crying. She had firmly resolved to stay behind at God’s Supermarket, intending to wait out the crisis until Ruan Fanfan came to find her.
Looking at her innocent face, Song Yuqing simply couldn’t find the heart to shatter her world by revealing that, just like the horrifying premonitions projected in the theater, Ruan Fanfan was already dead.
“Make sure to send us a sit-rep regarding the status of your walls once you arrive,” Song Yuqing urged, shaking hands with each faction leader as she bid them goodbye.
Aunt Peng carefully maneuvered through the bustling crowd, squeezing her way up from the back of the line to stand directly beside the manager. “Manager Song, thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I truly hope fortune grants us another meeting.”
In the wasteland, nothing was guaranteed. Who could say for certain whether their paths were fated to cross again? Everyone standing on the porch knew deep down that after this separation, they might never see each other alive again.
“What are you folks going to do if the chemical downpour catches you out on the open highway?” the old man asked, blinking as he watched the survivors crowd near his stall without a single person making a move to purchase his wares.
“Aunt Peng still has those heavy-duty plastic rolls!” someone shouted back.
“Wait, aren’t most of our caravans charting different trajectories than Aunt Peng’s squad? Hey, Aunt Peng, which quadrant are you heading toward?”
“Any chance you could spare a few swatches of that polyethylene canvas for the rest of us?”
“Look, it’s just a single minute of lifespan. I’ll pay for ten umbrellas out of my own pocket!”
“Exactly…”
“How can you even be sure how much time you have left on your clock? For all you know, you could drop dead in the next sixty seconds.”
“To hell with you! What kind of sick garbage are you spouting right now?!”
The crowd immediately dissolved into a chaotic, noisy argument. Hearing her name tossed around, Aunt Peng didn’t bother hunting for the speaker, simply throwing her voice over the din. “I’m not returning to the base with the rest of the squad. I’m heading straight out into the deep desert.”
She intended to transfer her spatial inventory of supplies over to her base’s active combatants, then strike out alone in a completely separate direction to hunt for her missing child. After all, her future screening had explicitly shown her daughter manifesting amidst the sand dunes.
Hearing her declaration, Song Yuqing and Liu Xiaona shot her deeply worried looks, but Aunt Peng merely offered them a completely serene, reassuring smile.
Amidst the frantic wave of farewells, the old man threaded his way through the huddle, hoisting a heavy stack of finished umbrellas and raincoats over his arm as he loudly hawked his inventory.
“Better to have something than nothing, folks! It’s better to be geared up than left out in the cold!”
Watching the old man pitch his products with a fierce, intense scowl on his face, Liu Xiaona couldn’t help but let out a sudden laugh. She nudged Song Yuqing’s arm with her elbow. “What is with this old guy’s sales technique? Hahaha, it’s hilarious. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear he was out here aggressively collecting a gambling debt rather than running a business.”
Song Yuqing cast a solemn glance at her employee. “He’s operating under the assumption that the acid rain is going to return… and honestly, I agree with him.” This specific chemical storm felt radically different from the previous extreme heat and sudden snowfall cycles.
Eventually, several of the operatives preparing for long overland treks stepped up to trade with the elder. The roads were long and choked with variables; the more defensive gear they secured, the higher their statistical probability of survival.
Song Yuqing deliberately narrowed her eyes, tracking the exact mechanics of how the old man executed his transactions.
The moment the old man activated his time mutation, a spectral, translucent clock face slowly materialized from the client’s back. Across the glowing interface, only a single second hand rhythmically ticked away. The old man extended his palm, using a remote telekinetic motion to physically force the second hand backward.
The entire process was blindingly fast, concluding in less than three seconds.
“Gaha…” At some point, the gargoyle had quietly materialized right at the old man’s elbow, her face inches away as she stared intensely at his features.
“Ahem—whoa, Gaha, what are you doing?” The old man had just retracted his palm from a scan. Turning around to find the zombie’s small face hovering right beside his own, he instinctively shrank back a step.
“Gaha…” The gargoyle offered a slow nod to herself, turning on her heel to amble back toward Song Yuqing.
“Did you catch something?” Song Yuqing asked, catching her employee by the arm.
Gaha let out a low, heavy sigh. “…Gaha…”
Song Yuqing and Liu Xiaona blinked, entirely unable to decode the reaction. Beside them, however, Little Meat Bun wore an expression of sudden, profound realization, nodding his head as if everything made perfect sense—a display that left Song Yuqing itching with curiosity.
“Gaha, listen to me, did you actually discover something about him?”
The zombie looked back at the craftsman handing out an umbrella, offering a blank, solemn nod.
“Do you… do you also think his bone structure resembles Shen She’s?”
“Whoa, hold on, how is that even possible?” Liu Xiaona scoffed, her mouth flying open. “Shen She is literally a little kid…” Her voice died in her throat, her palm flying up to cover her lips as the memory slammed into her mind. During Lin Han’s brutal raid on Base 35, Shen She had aggressively weaponized his temporal mutation to trigger a localized time acceleration, transforming from a child into a fully grown man in the blink of an eye.
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the four supermarket employees.
Once the massive caravan had completely cleared the area, the immediate perimeter of God’s Supermarket grew quiet, leaving only the four staff members, the craftsman, and Xiaoyi on the lot.
Having successfully siphoned a minute of lifeforce from over a dozen elite espers, the old man appeared noticeably more re-energized, his posture straightening. His physical appearance hadn’t shifted drastically—after all, he had only managed to secure roughly fifteen additional minutes of overall lifespan.
Song Yuqing took a deep, centering breath and marched over to his vending stall. The man was sitting cross-legged beneath the canopy of the Chinese tallow tree, a thick layer of leftover acid-proof canvas acting as a cushion beneath his knees. He was entirely concentrated on slicing the fabric, refusing to look up as her silhouette blocked the light.
“So…” Song Yuqing spoke softly, her voice cutting through the quiet. “It really is you, isn’t it, Shen She?”
