Chapter 39: Playing Some Tricks (Part 2)
Song Yuqing quickly pulled up her vine-woven mask, ensuring her features were completely concealed.
Lin Han narrowed his eyes slightly, but after a tense second, his gaze drifted away from her and continued to scan the rest of the crowd.
Thank goodness he didn’t recognize me! Song Yuqing let out a quiet sigh of relief.
She and Nanjiao discreetly melted into the back of the mob, watching the long queue of anxious residents from a safe distance.
Lin Han reached into his spatial void, pulled out a massive grandfather clock, and set it heavily right beside the commissary doors.
“The twenty-second countdown includes the time it takes to return to this threshold with your haul!” he bellowed. “First ten people, step forward!”
The moment Lin Han gave the command, the first ten residents at the front of the line bolted into the supermarket, shoving, tripping, and colliding into one another in a frantic scramble. They had barely managed to grab a single handful of food before the twenty seconds evaporated.
They were forced back out empty-handed—ten precious crystal cores completely wasted.
This wasn’t a sale; it was a blatant trap designed to drain the population of their hard-earned currency.
“Second group, get ready!” Lin Han announced, his fingers rhythmically tapping against the casing of the clock.
Seeing how rigged the game was, a considerable number of residents voluntarily dropped out of the queue.
“Listen to me,” the teenage boy, who was currently sitting tenth in line, whispered urgently as he grabbed the shoulders of the people ahead of him. “Twenty seconds is nothing if we fight each other. But if we divide the labor and cooperate instead of hoarding everything individually, we can actually haul out a massive score.”
The moment Lin Han barked “Start,” the first five members of the second group sprinted into the building in a synchronized, orderly vanguard. One targeted the food palettes, another broke for the water crates, a third swept the medicine shelves, and the last grabbed daily necessities. Instead of turning back, they violently hurled the supplies through the air to the remaining five team members anchored right at the entrance.
Whether it was pure luck or the sheer efficiency of their teamwork, their timing was absolutely impeccable.
Song Yuqing focused her gaze on the young boy anchoring the hand-off line at the threshold. He looked completely different from the panicked crowd. He wasn’t even watching the chaotic interior of the store; instead, his pupils were entirely unfocused, staring blankly into space as a thick stream of dark, bloody mucus began to flow from his nose.
Right at the exact twentieth second, the catcher at the door securely snagged the final box of supplies.
Lin Han let out a cold, irritated snort. Refusing to let the population adapt, he immediately called for the third round, ordering the remaining line to storm the entrance all at once.
Song Yuqing still had a few enhanced tomatoes stashed in her spatial corridor for personal use. Without a second thought, she materialized one, concealing the vibrant red fruit deep within her palm as she casually slipped through the crowd toward the boy.
The moment her silhouette crossed paths with his, she seamlessly pressed the tomato directly into his hand. The boy looked down at the fruit in sheer bewilderment, then stared at her retreating back, a profound sense of confusion washing over him.
The intensely sweet, refreshing aroma of the enhanced tomato made his mouth water instantly. Ducking low, he used the broad back of the resident in front of him as a visual shield, shoved the fruit into his mouth, and swallowed it in one greedy gulp.
Song Yuqing completed her loop and strolled back to Nanjiao’s side, though the programmer looked thoroughly perplexed by her behavior.
She raised an eyebrow, pointing a finger toward the front steps. “That kid is a time manipulator. I just went over to give his system a much-needed blood transfusion.”
Nanjiao shot her a highly skeptical look. A temporal mutation was an exceptionally rare anomaly—practically a one-in-a-ten-thousand genetic miracle. How could a specialized attribute like that manifest in a scrawny, malnourished baseline civilian? To his analytical eyes, the kid didn’t radiate a single drop of elemental energy.
“Just watch closely,” she smirked.
As the third round kicked off, the massive mob surged through the golden doors. But the chaotic stampede didn’t unfold the way Lin Han had anticipated. Though the residents initialed crowded and fought over the inventory, the atmosphere inside the building rapidly underwent a bizarre shift.
While the first few seconds felt frantic, as the countdown progressed, the shoppers became unnaturally orderly and calm. By the tenth second, every single resident had managed to lock down a substantial haul of supplies, ensuring their ten-core entry fees wouldn’t be lost.
Lin Han’s brow furrowed into a deep frown. He tapped his fingers hard against the glass face of the clock, a sickening feeling settling into his gut. Something was fundamentally wrong with the timeline. The mechanical hands looked like they were dragging through thick sludge, but he couldn’t verify the anomaly. The sensation was profoundly surreal—as if a single, standard second were being forcefully stretched wide, or rather, as if the physical movements of the shoppers had been supernaturally accelerated.
“Time’s up!” Lin Han roared, his voice trembling with fury.
“Look at the dial, Commander! It hasn’t even hit twenty seconds yet!” an excited scavenger shouted back from the floor.
The crowd continued to aggressively stream supplies back to the threshold, their ecstatic, wild cheers completely drowning out Lin Han’s desperate attempts to terminate the round.
Inside the commissary, the young boy stood frozen beside a towering pile of food rations, his vacant gaze locked onto the empty air in front of him as he pushed his brain to its absolute limits, manually slowing the progression of time.
Twenty seconds was forcefully expanded into two full minutes.
Eventually, his internal stamina was completely drained, and his consciousness broke as he collapsed heavily onto the floor boards.
Nanjiao kept his eyes locked onto the boy, a wave of genuine worry hitting his chest. The absolute millisecond the kid collapsed, he could physically feel the temporal anchor snap, time violently accelerating back to its standard velocity so fast it left him feeling momentarily dizzy.
“Countdown! Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!”
In those final ten seconds of standard time, the remaining crowd rushed the exit, met at the threshold by the teammates who had already cleared the gates.
By the time the dust settled, nearly half of the damaged and expired inventory Lin Han had been hoarding inside the armory had been completely cleared out.
Amidst the raucous, chaotic revelry of the base residents, Song Yuqing and Nanjiao quietly slipped past the outer barricades, exiting the compound entirely.
Standing beside his large clock, Lin Han closed his eyes and drew a long, trembling breath, violently suppressing the urge to slaughter his own guards. He had orchestrated this entire flash sale intending to siphon free capital from the weak, yet his greed had backfired, resulting in a massive net loss of physical stock.
“Commander Lin, I just finalized the analytical ledger,” Ah Hu whispered, stepping up with a flattering, oily smile. “Technically speaking, we didn’t suffer a deficit. In fact, our core accounts reflect a slight profit—”
Before he could finish his sentence, Lin Han’s heavy fist violently slammed into his skull, cutting him off.
Ah Hu stumbled back, clutching his bruising head as he grimaced in pure agony. “I—I’ll immediately go coordinate the corpse collection detail!”
Following Song Yuqing and Nanjiao’s departure, Ah Hu organized a heavy vanguard of commissary laborers, systematically checking every resident who had secured supplies to extract the mandated transaction fees.
As twilight began to paint the sky in dark shadows, Nanjiao wiped the grime from his face and re-entered the gates of Base No. 27 alone, tracking down Lin Han to claim their share of the zombie carcasses.
Lin Han guided him to a barren clearing near the motor pool, pointing a cold finger toward a messy pile of exactly seventy zombie bodies scattered across the dirt. “That’s the final tally.”
Nanjiao’s mouth twitched ever so slightly.
If he hadn’t been standing right inside the commissary plaza during the flash sale, he might have actually believed the dictator’s math. Judging by the sheer, manic volume of thousands of residents rushing the shelves, the total influx of transaction fees had to be astronomically higher than this meager pile.
“Understood,” Nanjiao muttered weekly, offering a compliant nod. He bent his spine, grunting with theatrical effort as he began manually dragging the first corpse out toward the road.
He cast a subtle glance over his shoulder at Lin Han and the elite psychics hovering around the clearing, but not a single mercenary made a move to offer him a hand.
Fine, have it your way, he thought.
Nanjiao focused his core, channeling his flora manipulation as a series of thick, robust vines shot out from his open palms. The green tendrils wove themselves into a massive, heavy industrial net in mid-air, tightly trapping all seventy carcasses in a single clean sweep.
“So that’s the extent of a plant-type attribute,” Lin Han remarked, his voice entirely flat and unimpressed. “Nothing special.”
Nanjiao offered a cold internal sneer, firmly gripping the master line of the vine net, and dragged the massive weight of the dead meat straight out past the compound gates.
During their initial logistics run, Song Yuqing had simply funneled the cargo straight into her spatial corridor to slip back to the shop undetected. But this time, with Nanjiao’s massive net holding the weight, she was more than happy to walk beside him, casually helping him guide the heavy web down the highway back toward God’s Supermarket.
“Are you absolutely sure I can’t just open my vault and dump this inside?” she asked, wiping her brow.
“Negative.”
Drenched in sweat, Nanjiao shot a speechless, exasperated look at the store manager, who was mostly just pretending to apply physical force to the line.
The two of them trudged slowly down the ruined highway toward Chen Town, their uneven boots sinking into the dirt as the heavy cargo left a massive, distinct dragging trench cut deep into the asphalt behind them.
Deep into the ink-black night, the young time-manipulating boy and three emaciated, low-tier psychics quietly tracked that exact same dragging trench, navigating their way toward Bell Street.
“Are you absolutely positive this line points directly to the multi-dimensional supermarket?” an older, gaunt youth whispered, shifting his grip on a rusted pipe as he questioned the boy.
“I’m not certain.”
The small group fell back into an anxious, heavy silence as they walked.
They had literally risked execution, deserting the fortified perimeters of Base No. 27 under the absolute cover of midnight for one desperate reason: to locate Song Yuqing’s sanctuary.
The entire defection had been engineered by the young boy.
He had boldly deduced that the mysterious civilian who had slipped the enhanced, life-saving tomato into his hand at the commissary steps was none other than Song Yuqing—the legendary, compassionate store manager the laborers kept whispering about.
Instead of remaining inside the concrete walls of Base No. 27 to be worked to death under a tyrannical monopoly with zero future, they had resolved to throw themselves into the dark grid to test their fortunes.
After navigating the ruins for hours, the boy and his companions finally breached the intersection of Bell Street in Chen Town. But the drag marks on the asphalt had grown faded and heavily obscured by wind-blown ash, causing them to completely lose their bearings.
Suddenly, a bizarre sight cut through the gloom ahead. A girl with a striking head of thick, purple-tinted dreadlocks was frantically chasing a stray zombie down the lane, aggressively slapping crisp sheets of parchment onto the front and back of the thrashing walker’s torso.
Terrified by her pursuit, the rogue walker swung its rotting torso around and came sprinting full-tilt straight toward the hidden group—and it wasn’t alone. A secondary cluster of groaning zombies was trailing close behind.
“Form a perimeter! Defensive stances!” the older youth shrieked.
Their trek across the open highway had been miraculously peaceful, but they hadn’t anticipated that catastrophic, lethal danger was waiting to ambush them the absolute second they arrived at the doorstep of sanctuary.
