Chapter 46: The Zombie King’s Cook (Part 2)
Song Yuqing saw a flicker of genuine fear in Gaha’s eyes. To play it safe, she decided they should stay hidden and observe the situation a little longer.
Watching Chen Ke squatting at the feet of the two Zombie Kings, meticulously plucking the white dove’s feathers, Song Yuqing felt a sudden wave of conflicting emotions—part sympathy, part pity. When she had first crossed paths with Chen Ke back at Base 27, the woman had been incredibly arrogant, ruthlessly reprimanding Liu Xiaona like a strict disciplinary director just for driving a tractor without authorization. Not even that much time had passed, yet the base commander’s former right-hand man had been reduced to a zombie’s… underling? Song Yuqing honestly didn’t know how to describe Chen Ke’s current relationship with the two monsters; the sight of it felt entirely surreal.
She kept her eyes glued to the scene. Chen Ke finished plucking the feathers and handed the bare, shivering pigeon directly to the two Zombie Kings. The poor bird was still breathing.
One of the Zombie Kings, drool pooling at its jaws, eagerly snatched the pigeon, ripped a small gash into its flesh, and tipped its head back to let the fresh blood drain into its mouth. Once the bird was completely drained, the monster callously tossed the carcass back to Chen Ke. By then, Chen Ke had already used a lighter to spark a small fire on the concrete floor, smoothly beginning to roast the meat over the flames.
The sequence of events left Song Yuqing utterly shocked. What on earth am I witnessing right now?
Soon, the distinct aroma of cooked poultry wafted over to their hiding spot—a bizarre, stomach-turning blend of savory meat and the market’s putrid stench. Song Yuqing watched in disbelief as the two Zombie Kings voraciously devoured the roasted pigeon, their expressions morphing into ones of pure, gluttonous satisfaction.
Zombies eating cooked meat? Song Yuqing and Nanjiao turned their heads to look at Gaha at the exact same time, blinking in complete bewilderment. Their silent glares practically screamed: Excuse me, Gaha, since when did your distant relatives undergo this kind of evolution?
Once the entire sack of pigeons had been systematically drained and roasted, the two Zombie Kings turned around and sauntered away, thoroughly content. Gaha’s fists instantly clenched tightly. Oh no. Her heightened undead senses signaled that the raw power radiating from the two kings had just violently spiked again, jumping by more than an entire tier. Song Yuqing picked up on an even more disturbing anomaly: after filling their bellies, the monsters’ posture looked increasingly human as they retreated into the shadows.
If the undead could evolve to perfectly mimic human traits, how could humanity possibly hope to survive?
“What’s the play here? Do we strike or do we hold?” Nanjiao whispered, his voice barely audible.
“Gah…”
“We need to step back and map out a long-term strategy,” Song Yuqing whispered back.
“I’m afraid we’re officially out of time for a long-term strategy…” Nanjiao sighed heavily.
Song Yuqing snapped out of her racing thoughts and looked up, only to freeze. Chen Ke was staring directly at their hiding spot, actively marching right toward them.
The moment the two Zombie Kings left the perimeter, Chen Ke had picked up the stripped pigeon skeletons left in the dirt, greedily gnawing on the remaining scraps of meat trapped between the bones. After consuming the cooked flesh, her human consciousness had apparently been temporarily restored to a certain degree.
“Song Yuqing,” Chen Ke rasped, her voice incredibly hoarse.
Song Yuqing slowly rose from behind the stone butcher’s stall, slipping one hand behind her back to quietly materialize a heavy kitchen knife from her spatial vault.
“Stand down. You must be exhausted from crouching back there,” Chen Ke said dejectedly. She casually hopped onto a nearby concrete table, letting her legs swing idly over the edge.
Gaha anxiously stepped forward to shield Song Yuqing, but the manager gently patted her shoulder, pushing her back.
“It’s fine, Gaha. Let me talk to her.”
Song Yuqing walked slowly toward the table. The closer she got to the woman, the more overpowering the stench of decomposition became. She firmly pursed her lips, holding her breath to fight down her nausea.
“I reek, don’t I?” Chen Ke sneered, a bitter laugh escaping her throat. “I can’t exactly help it. Those monsters drain my blood every single day. Half of my body is already completely dead.”
“How did you end up like this?”
Chen Ke’s features twisted into a desperate, hollow smile.
That fateful afternoon, Lin Han had callously used her as a human shield to absorb Liu Xiaona’s water dragon, leaving her severely broken. The Zombie Kings had picked up her bleeding frame from the dirt. She had fully expected them to rip her to shreds on the spot, but to her horror, they kept her alive specifically to torture her—viciously tearing her tissue apart every day just to harvest her blood.
“They forced me to teach them how to articulate human speech. Haha… it’s hilarious, isn’t it? The more proficient they become at disguising themselves as human baselines, the more I start to look like a feral zombie.”
“Oh my God…” Nanjiao’s stomach sank, deeply disturbed by Chen Ke’s horrific plight and the increasingly apocalyptic future of the human race.
“Are there any other survivors trapped here?” Song Yuqing asked.
“There used to be. But none of them lasted.”
Chen Ke spoke with absolute detachment, as if the horrific trauma she endured daily was merely the plot of a movie that had absolutely nothing to do with her.
The two Zombie Kings had somehow deduced that consuming the cooked flesh of mutated pigeons allowed them to exponentially accelerate their elemental evolution. Consequently, they ordered Chen Ke to deploy into the ruins every day to harvest the birds and roast them. The single reason she hadn’t been slaughtered yet was because the zombies lacked the fine motor skills required to pluck feathers or manage a fire.
“So you’ve essentially become the Zombie Kings’ personal chef?” Nanjiao blurted out, his jaw dropping in pure disbelief.
“Yeah. Pathetic, right? I only survive by scavenging whatever meat scraps they leave on the bones.” What Chen Ke chose to withhold, however, was that consuming the residual pigeon meat had slowly begun to infuse her own system with an extraordinary, unnatural layer of physical strength—an anomaly that Song Yuqing’s sharp eyes immediately picked up on.
“Gaha…” Gaha murmured softly, her tight fists finally relaxing as a wave of genuine sympathy for the woman hit her chest.
“I can’t offer you much in this state,” Nanjiao said, reaching into his robes to pull out a small glass vial packed with white pills, tossing it over to her. “But these are specialized cognitive sedatives for the infected. They might help ease the transition.”
Chen Ke didn’t even reach out to intercept the throw. She simply watched the bottle clatter against the concrete and roll into the dirt, letting out a mocking laugh.
“Save your medicine. It’s completely useless to me now. At this point, the single thing keeping me breathing is the desperate desire to violently exact my revenge on that bastard Lin Han!”
Song Yuqing fell into a heavy silence, shooting a quick, pointed look at Nanjiao and Gaha that signaled it was time to extract. If they lingered in this putrid market any longer, things were going to go sideways fast.
“Don’t even think about running out on me!” Chen Ke barked, her raspy voice hardening with every syllable. “You’re going to give me your word right now that you’ll help me flush Lin Han out of his hole. Otherwise, I will immediately call those two Zombie Kings back here to turn the three of you into a pair of matching corpses… You don’t possess the raw power required to defeat them. They hold absolute mental authority over almost every single walker in this town.”
No wonder! Song Yuqing realized. The zombies we encountered on the highway today seemed strangely docile. They’ve already been integrated into a unified military horde by the Kings! If this were a normal sector, we would have been forced to fight our way through countless blockades just to cross the street!
“Fine. Let’s touch base here again in two days,” Song Yuqing agreed, offering a swift, compliant nod. Her response was so immediate and casual that Nanjiao whirled his head around to stare at her in pure astonishment.
Without another word, Song Yuqing turned on her heel and marched out of the abandoned market, with Nanjiao and Gaha trailing close behind her flank. The moment they cleared the perimeter of the vegetable stands, she aggressively accelerated her pace.
“Are you seriously planning to fulfill that psycho’s terms?” Nanjiao panted, struggling to keep up.
“Not a chance.”
“Aren’t you even a little terrified that she’ll sell us out to the Zombie Kings out of spite?”
“Not in the slightest.” Song Yuqing was naturally apprehensive about the horde’s capacity, but she held an absolute ace up her sleeve: the unyielding, reality-bending protection matrix of God’s Supermarket.
“Wait, do you still want to swing back to the internet cafe to scout for that hardware?”
Nanjiao opened his mouth to reply, but Song Yuqing cut him off before he could formulate a sentence.
Pointing a finger toward a shattered storefront across the avenue that housed a generic internet lounge sign, she instructed: “Go hit that block and run your search. Gaha and I are heading straight back to base.”
Nanjiao stood frozen, completely powerless to counter her directive. Song Yuqing and Gaha—the inseparable duo—rapidly vanished down the lane, leaving him stranded on the pavement without even waiting for him to catch his breath.
“Why the hell does she always do that?” Nanjiao grumbled to himself, thoroughly baffled by the abrupt abandonment.
In truth, Song Yuqing was simply terrified of exposing her own physical vulnerability. Her executive pride was massive, and she flatly refused to show her haggard, exhausted state in front of Nanjiao, considering they were still relative strangers who had only recently finalized a business partnership.
Song Yuqing and Gaha breached the threshold of God’s Supermarket well ahead of the programmer. The sky outside remained locked in that unnatural, deep midnight ink, and both Little Meat Bun and Liu Xiaona had already retired to their dormitories to sleep. Following the storefront’s recent tier upgrade, the structural soundproofing across the residential corridor had clearly undergone a massive optimization; the thunderous, alternating snoring of the bear and the driver was completely muted. Song Yuqing’s eyelids were incredibly heavy. After a rapid, perfunctory wash, she collapsed onto her mattress and instantly lost consciousness.
Her deep slumber dragged on for ten continuous hours. If Nanjiao hadn’t begun aggressively pounding against her bedroom door while hollering at the top of his lungs, she probably would have happily slept for another ten.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Manager Song, get up! Open the door!”
“What is your emergency?” Song Yuqing groaned, utterly helpless against the noise. She aggressively rubbed the crust from her eyes and threw the door open, only to freeze.
Standing on the threshold was Nanjiao, sporting a massive pair of dark circles under his eyes. He was triumphantly clutching a heavy, metallic computer chassis under one arm, while his other hand was overloaded with an assortment of intricate electronic components. He held his chin high, his face filled with absolute, maniacal pride.
“Today is the historic day I officially construct the Doomsday Online Shopping Platform for God’s Supermarket!” Nanjiao declared boisterously. “And as for you, manager! Your task list for today is finalized: get your butt out to the vault and start taming those mutant pigeons!”
