Chapter 124: The World of Night
Using his predictive foresight, Wan Youzhi successfully unified Chen Ke, Lin Han, Xie Qiang, and Zhang Lin behind his cause. As long as events played out according to his visions, this wasteland would remain his home turf—even if only temporarily.
“Tell me exactly what happened yesterday,” Wan Youzhi said, fixing his gaze on Xie Qiang. “No matter how minor it seems, I need to know.”
Xie Qiang hesitated to mention that Song Yuqing had gathered the residents of Base Zero for a group photo. He wasn’t entirely sure why he had felt so suspicious of it at the time; it had simply been a dull, instinctual gut feeling.
Still, he and Zhang Lin began recounting everything from the moment they woke up the previous morning.
“When we got up and looked around, the residents of Base Zero seemed perfectly normal. They just went about their day, eating and repairing their shelters.”
“But yesterday afternoon, a few unfamiliar faces arrived at the base and insisted on taking a group photo with everyone.”
“Who were they?” Wan Youzhi asked, his guard instantly going up.
“They seemed to be from Base Zero originally. Apparently, they had left on a long trek before the acid rain and had just returned.”
Lin Han immediately sensed an anomaly. “Why would they go on such a long journey?”
“Hiss, we have no way of knowing that,” Zhang Lin replied, shooting a dissatisfied glare at Lin Han. She had taken a dislike to him the moment they met. Even as potential food, he didn’t look the least bit appetizing.
“Did anyone in that group stand out?” Wan Youzhi pressed. He was thinking of a red-haired woman named Zhang Yimiao, who had appeared in his predictions before as an ordinary survivor. If it weren’t for the bright red hair, she would have blended completely into the crowd.
“Actually, yes. There was a giant panda with them,” Zhang Lin noted after a moment’s thought. She remembered how incredibly cute the furry creature had been, though she had only learned it was a giant panda after overheering the Base Zero espers gossiping about it.
“A giant panda?!!” Lin Han shouted. Someone from God’s Supermarket had breached the base!
He and Wan Youzhi traded a sharp look, a sudden surge of terror mirroring in each other’s eyes. God’s Supermarket had completely evacuated the survivors of Base Zero, shattering their grand blueprint at the absolute starting line.
God’s Supermarket again?!
Wan Youzhi took a deep, shaky breath as panic fluttered in his chest. The store’s faction had cleanly extracted every human from Base Zero without any of the deep-cover zombies noticing a single thing. That was terrifying.
This development confirmed three devastating realities: first, the people at God’s Supermarket knew that evolved zombies could flawlessly masquerade as humans. Second, they possessed a definitive method to distinguish mutants from living people. Third, and most terrifyingly—did they already know about his and Lin Han’s shadow alliance with the undead?
If the store manager possessed that data, she could easily publish it on the digital shopping interface, branding him an absolute traitor to humanity. If that happened, his grand ambitions would be ruined; no human would ever submit to his rule again.
“Hiss…” Chen Ke’s posture hardened as she realized the severity of the fracture. “Hiss, it was Song Yuqing. She didn’t just extract the population—she stole the meteorite fragments too.”
She had deliberately embedded Xie Qiang and Zhang Lin inside Base Zero so they could covertly locate and secure those exact fragments for her. Now, that avenue was completely dead. Dealing with God’s Supermarket was going to be an immense hurdle.
“God’s Supermarket must be eliminated,” Wan Youzhi spoke slowly, his tone dark. If he couldn’t rule them, he would destroy them. Only then could he rise as the ultimate savior, piloting humanity’s true Noah’s Ark.
“Yes! We have to wipe that place off the map!” Lin Han snarled, his rage boiling over the moment he pictured Song Yuqing and her store.
“Fine. And how exactly do you propose we destroy it?” Chen Ke countered coldly.
Wan Youzhi and Lin Han fell into a tense silence.
Xie Qiang frowned, unable to follow their hesitation. “We command a legion of tens of thousands of subordinates. Wouldn’t it be trivial to just swarm the property and slaughter them?”
Lin Han gritted his teeth, his voice thick with frustration. “You don’t understand. Zombies are physically incapable of stepping past the threshold of God’s Supermarket.”
Wan Youzhi began pacing back and forth, his steps growing faster and more frantic. Suddenly, his knees buckled, and he collapsed face-down onto the yellow sand, his back charting toward the sky. Nobody moved to help him up.
After a long moment, Wan Youzhi pushed himself up from the dirt, his face completely ash-white.
“What did your foresight reveal this time?” Lin Han demanded.
“Nothing,” Wan Youzhi lied, remaining tight-lipped.
The future he had just glimpsed had plunged him into an absolute, suffocating despair.
“Did you witness something terrible?” Xie Qiang asked, his tone deceptively casual. “It’s fine. Spill it.”
Lin Han nodded in agreement. “Yeah, just tell us. Think of it like fortune-telling—we just need to know the parameters so we can seek good fortune, avoid the pitfalls, and turn the danger around.”
Wan Youzhi merely let out a miserable, hollow laugh, shaking his head. “Let me process the layout.”
He desperately wanted to believe that this particular vision was a malfunction—a complete error in his prophetic telemetry. Yes, that had to be it. His mutation was just glitching.
“Chen Ke… can you provide me with a few more carrier pigeons?”
Chen Ke fixed an icy, calculating stare on him before responding, “Fine.”
Meanwhile, within the parallel timeline, Song Yuqing, Gaha, and Little Meat Bun continued their trek down the vacant, profoundly quiet streets.
In the absolute absence of municipal streetlights, they relied exclusively on the vibrant, pale green curtains of the aurora borealis to map their trajectory through the dark world. Song Yuqing felt a quiet wave of anxiety creeping up her spine. She was terrified that after hiking all this way, they would arrive at the local iteration of God’s Supermarket only to find the shutters sealed. After all, midnight had already claimed the quadrant, and there was no guarantee this alternate shop operated on a twenty-four-hour cycle.
Fortunately, when the silhouette of the building finally materialized through the gloom, the entryways stood completely open, though the surrounding lot was devoid of foot traffic. This particular version of God’s Supermarket appeared remarkably austere compared to her own storefront; aside from the brilliant blaze of its neon signage, the exterior was stripped of any decorative status markers.
But just as Song Yuqing and her crew prepared to cross the threshold, a sudden movement fractured the shadows.
A cohort of five or six individuals aggressively intercepted their path. Each figure was defined by severely matted hair and caked-in layers of filth, their tattered clothing giving them the unmistakable appearance of destitute beggars.
Little Meat Bun let out a sharp, defensive growl, instantly vaulting in front of Song Yuqing and Gaha to act as their vanguard.
“Gaha!!! Song Yuqing! Little Meat Bun! Oh my god, it’s actually you characters!” a voice suddenly shrieked. It was an ecstatic, weeping sob, bursting directly from the tallest figure in the ragged group.
Hearing the sudden shout, Song Yuqing instinctively reached out, firmly tightening her grip on the panda’s scruff. Her survival instincts immediately flagged a sense of profound shock.
“Gaha!”
The moment the vocal signature registered in Gaha’s ears, a violent tremor rippled through her framework, as if a live electrical current had surged straight through her undead limbs. She aggressively nudged Little Meat Bun out of her trajectory, leaping toward the tall speaker until she was hovering a mere half-meter from his face, scanning him from head to toe.
Seeing her charge forward, Little Meat Bun scrambled to hook her jacket and drag her back to the line, but his movements were halted by Song Yuqing’s sudden, piercing gasp.
“Nanjiao?! Xie Hao?! Xie Zetian?!”
The little panda froze, blinking his massive eyes in utter bewilderment. He shot a frantic glance at the filthy group, tilting his head as if his brain refused to compute the visual data.
“Yes! It’s really us! Oh thank god…” Xie Zetian sobbed hysterically. He lunged forward with every intention of wrapping Gaha in a massive embrace, but Nanjiao ruthlessly shoved him aside. Undeterred, Xie Zetian pivoted his momentum, throwing his arms tightly around Little Meat Bun’s thick torso instead.
The panda let out a disgusted huff, aggressively peeling the dirty youth off his fur.
“How on earth did you guys end up trapped inside this timeline?!” Song Yuqing asked, her voice a chaotic blend of absolute shock and profound relief.
Xie Hao spat bitterly into the dirt, his features twisting into a mask of pure, unadulterated malice. “It was that bastard Lin Han! The second I drag that worm down, I am going to personally ensure his execution is as slow and agonizing as humanly possible!”
