Chapter 44: Breaking into an Abandoned Internet Cafe at Night
“As for me, my dynamic corporate responsibility is to expand our territory.”
Song Yuqing offered a casual shrug, turning on her heel to walk back inside the pristine storefront.
“Man, I am absolutely starving! Liu Xiaona, get the kitchen fired up!” Song Yuqing’s stomach let out a thunderous growl. She felt as though she hadn’t consumed a single calorie all day.
“On it!” Liu Xiaona called back. She clamped a hand firmly over the top of her head to temporarily muzzle her elemental geyser and sprinted toward the kitchen. “What’s the executive menu for tonight?”
To celebrate the official infrastructure tier upgrade of God’s Supermarket, Song Yuqing resolved to treat the Xie brothers, Chen She, and the new defectors to a massive, celebratory banquet. The feast was entirely on the house—zero zombie carcasses required.
She systematically materialized an abundance of fresh meats and vibrant vegetables from her spatial corridor, explicitly instructing the driver to maximize the portions. They had a massive crowd to feed tonight, and every single soul had completely exhausted their energy reserves during the day’s battles; they needed to eat like royalty.
Watching Liu Xiaona drop ten heavy scoops of raw grain into the massive industrial rice cooker, Song Yuqing still felt the volume was lacking. She reached over and dumped another ten scoops inside.
“Oh, wait! We absolutely have to boil a massive side of dumplings too!” she added, reaching back into her vault to pull out two large, vintage bags of frozen dumplings. She had been hoarding these specific packages for a long time; they were from the highest-tier, most celebrated culinary brand before the apocalypse.
Liu Xiaona glanced down at the luxury branding, then shot a highly skeptical, squinted glare at the manager. You’ve been hoarding premium stock like this this entire time, and you’re only choosing to manifest it now?
“Hey… cut me some slack. It’s an absolute tradition in my family to feast on dumplings whenever we clear a major milestone,” Song Yuqing explained sheepishly.
By the time Liu Xiaona finished her galley duties and carried the steaming rice cooker and several oversized platters out to the common room, the entire crew was already gathered tightly around the long table. Their eyes were locked onto her hands like a pack of starved wolves tracking a fresh kill.
Everyone was operating on pure, unadulterated starvation. Within a matter of minutes, the massive mound of rice, the savory main dishes, and the specialty dumplings were completely polished off, leaving the plates spotless.
The moment the dinner table was cleared, the sky outside the window underwent a sudden, unnatural plunge into deep pitch-blackness. It was highly unusual for twilight to settle this rapidly, but having survived a month of reality-bending anomalies, the group simply accepted the shift. Except for Chen She, the rest of the hunters merely sighed, noting how comically fast the hours seemed to slip away in the waste.
“Manager Song, I’m certain our localized timeline is completely compromised,” Chen She murmured, his brow furrowing deeply. He kept his hands clasped behind his back as he quietly trailed Song Yuqing, who was currently heading toward her quarters to catch up on her sleep.
The boy’s mind was running complex calculations. He explicitly remembered that the absolute moment his group had first breached the perimeter of Bell Street, the sector was cloaked in deep night. Then, out of nowhere, the darkness had violently flipped into blinding daylight the second the storefront executed its tier upgrade. The entire chronological gap between those two events couldn’t have spanned more than two hours at most! Yet now, an absolute midnight darkness had violently blanketed the grid all over again.
Being a high-tier temporal psychic, Chen She’s neural networks were exceptionally calibrated to track the literal passage of seconds. He was absolutely certain that from the moment he deserted Base No. 27 until this exact second, less than eight hours of real-world time had actually elapsed.
Listening to his sharp chronological analysis, the sleepiness instantly drained from Song Yuqing’s system. She stared out the glass window at the unnatural, suffocating ink of the alleyway, a profound wave of ominous dread hitting her chest. A severe temporal distortion of this magnitude meant one of two catastrophic scenarios: either an incredibly high-tier, rogue time manipulator was violently warping the local grid, or the planet’s baseline ecosystem had officially lost its natural physical laws, triggering a total macro-collapse. For a celestial body, a temporal fracture was an absolute death sentence.
“Look at those dark circles under your eyes, Chen She. You’re completely spent,” Song Yuqing comforted him gently, pushing her panic down. “Go get some proper rest first and stop overanalyzing the grid.” She signaled Xie Hao, instructing the guard to escort the teenager and his companions over to the adjacent dorms to crash for the night.
Nearby, Liu Xiaona’s eyelids were drooping heavily as she cleared the final glasses, her hands trembling so hard she nearly dropped the ceramic. Little Meat Bun was already completely dead to the world, snoring loudly with his furry face planted flat against the dining table, while Gaha stood in the corner, intensely whispering to Nanjiao.
“Gaha, gaha,” the zombie girl grunted, shaking her head with immense gravity.
“Understood. I’ll go loop your manager into the logistics right now,” Nanjiao nodded, stepping away from the corner to approach Song Yuqing. “Manager Song, I require your specialized assistance for an immediate salvage run. Do you mind escorting me to the abandoned commercial internet cafe in the center of town? I need to source a critical piece of hardware.”
“Gaha! Gaha!”
Before Song Yuqing could even formulate a verbal response, Gaha bounded across the shop floor, aggressively planting herself right between the two humans. If the store manager was deploying into the dark grid, she was absolutely going to anchor her flank!
Nanjiao’s mouth twitched in mild exasperation. He offered a slow, defeated nod, mentally cursing the zombie girl for her blatant, shameless favoritism toward her employer.
“What classification of hardware could you possibly extract from a ruined internet cafe?” Song Yuqing asked, her curiosity piqued.
Nanjiao simply offered a mysterious, highly smug grin.
After locking down the heavy security doors of God’s Supermarket, Song Yuqing led Nanjiao and Gaha deep into the heart of Chen Town, navigating toward the municipal commercial center. Song Yuqing’s familiarity with the town’s geography was purely coincidental; the night before the meteorites broke the world, her production crew had actively debated adding a moody internet lounge scene to their indie film to showcase a sponsor’s mouse advertisement. Consequently, she and her team had scoured the grid late into the night to identify a suitable venue.
Though the sun had set, the blistering, suffocating thermal heat trapped within the concrete wouldn’t subside. However, operating on highly evolved, mutant physiologies, the two humans and the zombie easily ignored the blistering pavement that would have scorched raw civilian flesh to the bone.
With Gaha utilizing her telepathic aura to passively dominate the local undead, their trek down the main avenues was remarkably tranquil. Occasionally, an intermediate-tier variant would successfully break free from her mental containment matrix and lunge from the shadows to attack, but Nanjiao’s reactive, thorny vines would instantly whip through the air, violently crushing the walker’s skull and extracting the core within a single heartbeat. Song Yuqing’s protective suit barely had to absorb a single point of kinetic friction.
After twenty minutes of rapid marching, the trio finally materialized outside what had once been Chen Town’s premier high-end gaming lounge. The primary plastic sign anchoring the facade had been completely shattered and scorched to a dark brown, leaving behind a rough, melted, highly irregular texture that rendered the corporate lettering entirely unreadable.
Song Yuqing reached for the handle, preparing to force the entrance, but Nanjiao stepped ahead, gently blocking her hand.
“Standard protocol: men take point.”
He carefully pushed the heavy frame open, the rusted hinges letting out a high-pitched, metallic shriek that had both Song Yuqing and Gaha clamping their hands over their ears.
“Gaha…” Gaha murmured, her posture instantly stiffening. Her primal undead senses flagged a distinct reading: an unmapped, anomalous entity sharing her exact biological mutation was currently nesting deep within the facility. She tightly gripped Nanjiao’s forearm, desperately trying to warn him of the ambush, but the programmer completely misread the physical contact.
“Don’t stress, Kelin. I’m right here. Nothing can touch you.”
“Gaha…” Gaha rolled her eyes hard into the back of her head. Why on earth are human males so staggeringly, blindly overconfident?
That single, exasperated roll of her eyes caused Nanjiao’s heart to violently skip a beat. The expression was a perfect, nostalgic replica of her human habits; back on the front lines, Geng Kelin used to roll her eyes at his antics exactly like that!
“Hey! Focus! Keep your eyes on the environment,” Song Yuqing hissed, giving the daydreaming programmer a firm shove to snap him back to reality.
The main gaming floor appeared completely vacant, devoid of any standard walker activity. But as they advanced past the reception counter, the suffocating stench of settled dust, stale ozone, and advanced decomposition grew intensely thick.
Song Yuqing materialized a high-powered tactical flashlight from her spatial vault, sweeping the beam across the darkness. The light illuminated a post-apocalyptic graveyard: rows of completely melted plastic mice, warped keyboards, exploded monitors, and shattered desks, all anchored by massive, dried pools of dark human blood. Song Yuqing sighed, assuming the salvage run was an absolute failure. Under the blisteringly intense solar radiation of the past month, delicate civilian electronics stood zero chance of structural survival.
But Nanjiao refused to concede. He snatched the flashlight straight out of her hand, stepping deeper into the ruined server banks. He was desperately praying that the building’s architectural shielding had preserved a few pieces of high-temperature-resistant industrial hardware.
“Gaha…” Gaha muttered suddenly, her pale hand clamping onto Song Yuqing’s wrist as she pointed her other index finger toward a colossal, freestanding steel utility cabinet anchoring the back wall.
Song Yuqing followed the line of her finger, her suspicion flaring. The massive metal unit was heavily battered and choked with a thick layer of ash. Stepping closer to analyze the surface, her beam illuminated a series of faint, fresh, highly distinct human oily fingerprints staining the edge of the latch. Gaha’s brow furrowed, her gray pupils locking onto the steel frame.
“Gaha!”
The moment she let out the sharp cry, the heavy metal door violently shuddered from the inside, opening a tiny, jagged fraction of an inch before snapping frantically back into the lock.
Confirmed. There is an active, unmapped entity hiding inside the chassis.
Steeling her nerves, Song Yuqing raised her hand and slowly, deliberately wrenched the cabinet door wide open.
An instant later, a rotting, skeletal hand caked in dried blood and advanced necrotic slime violently shot out from the dark interior, reaching for her throat.
Song Yuqing and Gaha instinctively executed a lightning-fast backstep, breaking the lunge as a terrifying humanoid creature shivered its way out of the metal enclosure. The mutation was a grotesque structural failure: the left side of its torso retained the distinct, unblemished features of a living human baseline, while the entire right half had completely devolved into a rotting, liquefied zombie corpse.
Song Yuqing drew a sharp breath, her pupils dilating.
“Hiss…” the half-human, half-undead abomination groaned, its single lifeless, cloudy eye locking onto her face as it let out a wet, guttural rattle.
Thwack!
A thick, robust botanical vine violently erupted from the darkness, slamming into the creature’s chest and launching its asymmetrical frame hard across the room.
“Get behind me!” Nanjiao roared, sprinting into the aisle as a dozen secondary thorny tendrils burst from his palms, rapidly wrapping around the flailing monster’s limbs, preparing to violently rip the abomination in half.
“Hold your fire! Stop!” Song Yuqing screamed frantically, her hand lunging forward to physically halt his arm. “Don’t kill it! I recognize this face!”
The absolute millisecond the words left her mouth, the numb, glassy pupils of the half-human, half-zombie variant violently spasmed, a wave of pure, recognition-born malice exploding from its distorted eyes.
