Chapter 33: Which One Are You?
“Which one are you supposed to be?” Liu Xiaona asked, highly amused by the dramatic entry.
“I am a special investigator from Base Zero,” the man replied, though his eyes remained completely glued to the bubbling beef hotpot. “The name is Nanjiao.”
“Base Zero?”
“Special Investigator?”
“Wait, is Nan actually your surname?”
A barrage of questions instantly erupted from the hotpot table. Song Yuqing watched the stranger shamelessly edge closer to the food, and her left eyelid began to twitch with a bad premonition.
Without asking for permission, Nanjiao pulled a pair of smooth bamboo chopsticks from his sleeve and immediately began fishing meat out of the boiling broth.
“Hey! You haven’t paid for that!” Xie Hao barked, his single hand slamming against the table as his eyes went wide with anger.
“Relax, I left exactly twenty zombie corpses neatly lined up right outside your door,” Nanjiao muttered, his mouth so stuffed with premium beef that his words came out entirely muffled. “Before the apocalypse, one zombie would easily be valued at ten dollars. Twenty zombies equal two hundred dollars. Is that balance not substantial enough to cover my meals for a few days?”
“Huh?” Song Yuqing couldn’t sit still anymore. This complete stranger was clearly deeply familiar with the commercial mechanics of God’s Supermarket, yet she had absolutely zero memory of ever meeting him. Has the shop’s reputation spread across the region without me even realizing it?
Song Yuqing and Xie Hao led the charge to the front entrance, cautiously peeking out into the dark lane.
Wow.
Twenty pristine zombie corpses were laid out in a flawless, geometric row on the pavement. Every single walker had its hands neatly folded over its stomach, looking incredibly polite in death. Little Meat Bun, Liu Xiaona, and Xie Zetian scrambled over to form a secondary line behind them, peering over their shoulders and letting out a series of identical, stunned gasps.
Song Yuqing clenched her jaw, slowly turning her head to glare back at Nanjiao, who was currently continuing to devour her premium beef with an air of mock elegance. Gaha remained seated calmly at the table, her gray pupils intensely tracking the stranger’s movements.
Finding himself the center of absolute scrutiny, Nanjiao didn’t show a single shred of shame. He casually transferred another massive heap of sliced beef from the pot into his personal bowl.
“If you guys are done eating, I’ll go ahead and finish the rest. We can’t let premium cuts go to waste, right?”
“Who the hell said we were done?!” Liu Xiaona was the first to aggressively protest, rushing back to reclaim his chopsticks.
Nanjiao completely ignored the outburst, polishing off the meat in his bowl in two massive bites. He reached back into the pot, pulled out a perfectly cooked slice of beef, and gently laid it right into Gaha’s clean bowl.
“Why don’t you take a bite? You haven’t touched a single scrap of food since I walked in, yet you claimed the absolute best seat at the table! You were the one screaming for a proper beef hotpot run just a few weeks ago.”
“Gah!”
The room went stone silent. This guy actually knows Gaha!
Song Yuqing and the others frantically swarmed back to their stools, fixing Nanjiao with a piercing stare.
“You’re personally acquainted with Gaha?”
“Of course I am. She used to operate as the vanguard captain for our primary zombie liquidation detail back at Base Zero. She was legendary—the single highest-ranking hunter in the entire compound to survive without an elemental superpower.”
“Are you kidding me?!” Xie Hao stared at the zombie girl in absolute, breathless disbelief.
“Gaha…” Gaha tilted her head, her mechanical jaw clicking. Base Zero? Not Base No. 10? The sudden trigger caused the fragments of her dead memory to tangle into a thoroughly confusing fog.
Nanjiao let out a satisfied burp, though he refused to lay down his bamboo chopsticks. “By the way, aren’t you going to funnel those twenty corpses outside through your security gate?”
“You even know exactly what that scanner gate does?” Song Yuqing felt entirely exposed, as if her privacy had been completely violated. While the security framework of God’s Supermarket wasn’t a confidential secret, hearing a total stranger casually list its functions felt incredibly jarring. It was exactly like walking down a crowded public street, only for a random passerby to stop you and casually mention that your home bedroom door featured two massive diamond decals and a vintage Doraemon sticker.
“What else do you know about this establishment?” she demanded.
“I also know that God’s Supermarket deploys a passive, multi-dimensional protection matrix engineered to keep the storefront and its registered employees entirely invulnerable to outside harm,” Nanjiao smirked, sucking the broth off his chopsticks as he shot her a sharp, sidelong glance. “And your name is Song Yuqing. Before the meteor shower hit, you were scraping together a living as a low-budget commercial director.”
Song Yuqing’s brows knitted together. Nanjiao didn’t radiate the malicious aura of a typical wasteland mercenary, but he certainly couldn’t be classified as a standard good Samaritan either. What kind of trustworthy civilian explicitly lists your entire biological and professional background the absolute first second they meet you?
“How did you secure that much classified data on me?” Song Yuqing lunged forward, her hand firmly clamping over Nanjiao’s wrist right as he prepared to scoop up the last piece of meat. Beside her, Little Meat Bun aggressively puffed out his chest, throwing his heavy shoulders back as he leveled a fierce, terrifying glare at the intruder.
Nanjiao simply smiled. “Because Ruan Fanfan sold me the complete dossier.”
The sudden explosion of rage burning in Song Yuqing’s chest instantly evaporated, replaced by a profound, hollow ache in her heart. Her shoulders slumped.
“Ruan Fanfan! That treacherous, spineless snake of a woman!” Xie Zetian roared, violently slamming a fist onto his own thigh.
“What is your ultimate objective in tracking down God’s Supermarket?” Liu Xiaona asked, stepping behind Nanjiao’s chair and clamping a heavy hand onto his shoulder, subtly channeling his physical strength to exert a bone-crushing pressure.
Against any ordinary scavenger, Liu Xiaona’s grip would have had them screaming for mercy within a heartbeat. But Nanjiao didn’t even flinch. Moving with fluid, effortless precision, he casually brushed Liu Xiaona’s heavy hand off his shoulder, executed a loose shrug, and offered a calm smile.
“I already laid out my credentials the moment I stepped past the threshold… I am an official special investigator representing the high command at Base Zero.”
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean to us?” Song Yuqing muttered, her mind frantically calculating three separate tactical scenarios to neutralize him if the barrier failed.
Nanjiao blinked in genuine confusion. “Wait… do you seriously not comprehend the significance of Base Zero?”
“As far as regional geography is concerned, the formal survival strongholds start strictly at Number 1,” Xie Zetian muttered, aggressively rubbing his thumb against his index finger as he analyzed the title.
“Wow. So you guys truly are operating in total ignorance,” Nanjiao sighed, shaking his head. “I have never crossed paths with a more uneducated crew of survivors in my entire life.”
With that single, arrogant sentence, Nanjiao successfully offended every single entity sitting at the table.
The heavy golden broadsword resting across Xie Hao’s lap vibrated as his hand twitched toward the hilt, but Xie Zetian firmly reached over to press the steel down, signaling him to hold.
Nanjiao calmly rose from his seat, pacing slowly along the rows of display shelves to inspect the retail stock.
Thoroughly disoriented, Song Yuqing tried to mentally prompt Master Fu for a system evaluation, but the disembodied AI completely ignored her query, remaining radio silent.
Nanjiao completed a full lap around the aisles. Turning back toward the window, he acted as though he had only just noticed the entire staff was staring at him like a hawk tracking prey. “Hey, why are you all hovering around like statues? Sit back down!”
Sit down? Song Yuqing thought. Or should I just order the panda to violently kick this arrogant babbler out into the heatwave?
“Gaha…” Gaha murmured softly, her gray eyes pleading. Her baseline instincts told her that Nanjiao harbored a deeply kind core, and a person with a kind core could never be inherently evil.
Taking her cue from the zombie girl, Song Yuqing swallowed her hostility and reclaimed her stool. There was truly no logical reason to stress; as long as she remained within the perimeter of God’s Supermarket, her safety and the lives of her staff were absolute. She picked up her chopsticks, aggressively diving into the remaining broth to hunt for any leftover beef, determined to see exactly what kind of game this Nanjiao was playing.
Nanjiao rubbed his palms together eagerly. “Alright, where should we initiate the breakdown? Should we focus on the geopolitical origin of Base Zero, unravel the tragic life history of Miss Gaha here, or dive straight into why I explicitly traveled across the grid to find you?”
“Gaha’s real history,” Song Yuqing answered without a second of hesitation. Beside her, Xie Hao began nodding his bald head like a maniac in absolute agreement.
“Fascinating. I had fully intended to initiate the lecture with the origin of Base Zero,” Nanjiao sighed, letting out a theatrical groan. “Ah, whatever. Let’s unwrap Gaha’s past first. But to properly comprehend Gaha’s history, we must naturally analyze the operational layout of Base Zero…”
Song Yuqing: “…”
Xie Hao: You absolute swindler. I hyped myself up for nothing!
Gaha: “Ga… ha…”
Through Nanjiao’s smooth, rhythmic cadence, a hidden layer of global history that had remained completely obscured from the civilian populace before the doomsday outbreak slowly materialized in the room.
Base Zero was essentially a high-tech Noah’s Ark, envisioned and funded by a select cabal of multi-billionaires who had anticipated a cosmic or biological doomsday long before the meteor shower ever breached the atmosphere. They spent an entire decade secretly excavating and building a colossal, fully self-sustaining underground metropolis deep within an uncharted, uninhabited desert sector, engineered to comfortably preserve hundreds of thousands of lives. They systematically recruited a massive legion of elite retired military operators, black-ops specialists, and premium security experts to establish an unyielding defense matrix for the compound. The logistics grid was sourced from top-tier advanced manufacturing plants and confidential aerospace tech empires, backed by an elite team of professional global procurement agents who traveled the world to secretly hoard daily essentials under corporate covers.
Back then, the standard civilian populace foolishly believed the project was a conspiracy theory. No one envisioned a sudden meteorite shower would permanently shatter global civilization, or that the undead would violently replace humanity as the apex species on the planet. Yet, even when the future was entirely impossible to map, the global elite had already built an iron umbrella to survive the rain.
The second the meteorites struck, the surviving corporate titans and political dignitaries immediately fled to the desert terminal, systematically absorbing high-tier elemental psychics along their evacuation routes to bolster their ranks. Gaha had been granted executive entry into Base Zero for one simple reason: she had single-handedly broken a zombie blockade to rescue a founding family from being eaten alive.
“Her birth name is actually Geng Kelin,” Nanjiao said, his tone softening as a look of deep, genuine pity crossed his features as he looked at the girl. “Her parents were elite traditional martial arts masters. Gaha was raised on a brutal conditioning regimen from the time she could walk, inheriting an absolutely flawless physical talent for cold combat.”
Roughly a month ago, the central directors at Base Zero finally initiated a regional communication network to scout external strongholds. Gaha, who had been living an incredibly comfortable, high-status life within the luxury sectors of the underground city, immediately filed an official request to deploy as a frontline liaison to assist struggling surface compounds. Nanjiao had pushed his limits to convince her to decline the mission, but her stubbornness was absolute; she refused to listen.
“And now look at you,” Nanjiao murmured softly. “You’re no longer classified as a living human, yet you’re physically incapable of integrating into the feral zombie hordes.”
Song Yuqing felt a deep, agonizing ache in her chest. She reached over, tenderly smoothing down Gaha’s thick dreadlocks to offer what comfort she could.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Nanjiao winced, waving a hand to wave off Song Yuqing’s display of affection. “You know what the real tragedy is? Back when Geng Kelin was still a breathing human, she wasn’t a docile little kitten! She was a terrifying, unyielding warlord of a woman! And because her combat utility was so completely overpowered despite lacking a single drop of elemental magic, the superpowered elites stationed at Base No. 10 grew intensely jealous of her profile.”
“Jealous?”
“Oh, absolutely. The local psychics couldn’t tolerate being outperformed by an unawakened human baseline who held a direct line to Base Zero’s elite command. I ran a full investigation into her file after the infection hit. The incident where her armor was compromised and her open tissue was exposed to active zombie fluids? That wasn’t a combat mistake. It was a calculated, deliberate sabotage executed by those pathetic, insecure elementals!”
“Gaha—?!”
Gaha suddenly let out a sharp, fractured shriek. Clutching her head violently between her pale palms, she slipped straight off her small wooden stool, collapsing heavily onto the floorboards as her dead neurons began to wildly spark.
