Chapter 47: Pigeon, Tang Monk
“Tame the pigeons?” Song Yuqing couldn’t help but recall the horrifying image of the Golden-Eyed Zombie Kings voraciously gnawing on raw pigeon flesh. Perhaps these birds possessed some kind of unique evolutionary trait. If that were the case, employing them as delivery drivers wouldn’t actually be a massive risk. Otherwise, a flock of ordinary birds could vanish into the waste at any moment, taking her premium retail inventory right along with them.
“Don’t sweat the logistics,” Nanjiao smirked, raising a smug eyebrow. “When these variants actually push their limits, they can clock speeds of up to twenty thousand miles per hour.”
Song Yuqing’s jaw dropped. She hadn’t realized the birds were capable of moving at such a terrifying velocity. Back in the park, Nanjiao had snared them easily enough in his vine nets. She had desperately wanted to spend the afternoon lazing around the shop, but with her non-negotiable monthly target of three thousand zombie liquidations looming over her head, she had to pull herself together and get to work.
Following a brief crash course from Nanjiao on avian conditioning, Song Yuqing retreated into her spatial vault to confront the restless flock. The second she crossed the threshold, she realized her pristine storage area was already heavily blanketed in bird droppings, causing her to curse out loud. The meteorites had completely scrambled the pigeons’ biology, rendering their palates entirely unpredictable. To her immense financial pain, the birds were currently tearing into the high-end tea leaves she had been carefully hoarding in her inventory.
Muttering a mantra about her three-thousand-zombie quota, Song Yuqing concentrated her core energy, doing her absolute best to establish a telepathic link with the frantic birds. Nanjiao had explicitly stated that the golden rule of avian taming was simple: Sincerity is the key. The absolute second a spiritual connection was forged, commanding and guiding their trajectory would become a total breeze. While she couldn’t decode their vocalizations nearly as flawlessly as she tracked Little Meat Bun’s grunts, she still managed to successfully loop them into a basic conversation.
She partitioned her spatial corridor into two distinct zones: a training sector and a reward tier. She began systematically assigning basic delivery drills to the birds, commanding a small team of them to work in perfect synchronization to hoist a heavy oak table and transport it across the vault. The pigeons proved to be incredibly competitive. After a few clumsy attempts, their teamwork optimized beautifully, and they completed the transport drill in the blink of an eye. With the task finalized, they flew lazily over to the reward zone, eagerly pecking at the premium tea cakes Song Yuqing had broken open for them.
An advanced training regimen like this required several repetitive rounds of conditioning. Song Yuqing needed to be absolutely certain the birds viewed her as their alpha before she could release them into the real world to shadow Nanjiao across the different survivor strongholds. As for the finer details—like how the flock would receive remote orders or how the shop would verify successful drops—Nanjiao assured her that Base Zero had already engineered a solution. Every courier pigeon in their network would be outfitted with a specialized, high-tech helmet. A microchip nested inside the gear would interface directly with the bird’s neural pathways, seamlessly streaming navigational data straight into its brain.
While Song Yuqing was locked inside her vault conditioning the birds, the store clerks and their “neighbors” gradually dragged themselves out of bed. Everyone stood frozen on the shop floor, staring blankly out the display windows at the absolute ink-black darkness outside, thoroughly confused as to whether they had slept through an entire day or if the sun was simply refusing to rise.
Liu Xiaona stepped out past the threshold to run a quick diagnostic on the environment. She had initially assumed the massive white canopy of the new tallow tree was simply blocking out the natural light, but a glance at the sky proved otherwise. The only silver lining was that the suffocating, fifty-degree heatwave had violently broken; the ambient temperature had plummeted significantly, feeling remarkably close to a crisp, pre-apocalyptic autumn breeze.
Squatting near the register, Nanjiao was busy splicing together a colorful assortment of glowing plant roots. He offered a grim, detached remark without looking up: “Stop overanalyzing the sky. The sun hasn’t risen a single inch since yesterday morning.”
Meanwhile, over at Base No. 27, Lin Han and a man wearing a traditional Taoist headband were strolling leisurely through the elite villa district. Behind them, a heavy logistics detail was frantically moving crates—hurriedly transporting bulk inventory back up to the surface from the underground bunkers. The man in the headband was Wan Youzhi, the supreme commander of Base No. 7.
As it turned out, Wan Youzhi was Lin Han’s shadow benefactor, having supplied the mercenary vanguard that allowed the spatial user to violently overthrow Xie Zetian and seize absolute control of the compound. As for his motivation for backing the coup, it was born out of pure, calculated greed. Through the deployment of his rare precognitive psychic traits, Wan Youzhi had seen a vision of the future: Lin Han would eventually bring him an astronomical level of wealth and power. Backed by Lin Han’s destructive spatial capabilities and the heavy resource monopoly of Base No. 27, Base No. 7 would easily evolve into an unstoppable competitor against the legacy military strongholds. Wan Youzhi’s visions could only map out the immediate timeline; as for the ultimate endgame of the war—victory or total destruction—his limited psychic threshold couldn’t parse the data. But he was more than willing to take the gamble, eager to seize any window to ascend as the most powerful entity on the planet.
The precog paused, staring mysteriously into the pitch-black horizon. “Pigeons,” he murmured suddenly. “You need to organize an immediate detail to harvest as many mutated pigeons as humanly possible.”
Lin Han blinked, thoroughly confused. “Why? Are we harvesting them for meat? My spatial void is already fully stocked with premium livestock.”
“Standard livestock doesn’t hold a candle to the biological properties of mutant pigeon meat,” Wan Youzhi countered, his eyes narrowing. “Think of it as the literal flesh of Tang Monk, understand?”
Through his temporal visions, Wan Youzhi had witnessed a historic event scheduled to trigger two months down the line: two Golden-Eyed Zombie Kings would masterfully disguise themselves as human baselines, seamlessly infiltrating the high-security grid of Base Zero. Backed by a localized army of tens of thousands of advanced walkers, their sole strategic objective for launching the bloody siege was to violently seize the domesticated pigeon flocks cultivated inside the underground city.
“Consuming the meat of these specific variants forces an immediate, permanent evolution of a psychic’s elemental attributes, rendering their physical bodies completely immune to extreme fluctuations of heat or freezing cold! It is pure Tang Monk meat!”
Two months from now, the mystical properties of the pigeons would be woven into children’s nursery rhymes, circulating across every major survival base on the map.
“Where exactly are we supposed to locate a flock?” Lin Han asked. He couldn’t grasp the scientific mechanics behind the claim, but he had learned to obey Wan Youzhi blindly. Faced with a man who could literally map out the timeline, Lin Han simply followed his directives to the letter.
Back at the shop, Song Yuqing materialized out of her spatial corridor and instantly let out a massive, thunderous sneeze.
“Gaha…” Gaha murmured softly, stepping forward to tenderly pat Song Yuqing’s head, her eyes filled with genuine pity as she began plucking loose pigeon feathers from the manager’s hair.
Little Meat Bun waddled over, but the absolute second the dense, pungent scent of the mutant birds hit his nose, a thick stream of drool began to pool at his jaws, his black eyes flashing with a sudden, predatory greed. It was the absolute first time Song Yuqing had ever seen her mascot look at her as if she were a piece of raw prey. A complex, terrifying wave of pure shock and disbelief coursed through her system.
After a few highly tense seconds, the giant panda snapped back to his senses. Realizing his own primal abnormality, he aggressively slapped himself across the face twice, grabbed Song Yuqing by the arm, and forcefully shoved her straight into the bathroom. He cranked the shower handle to high, pivoted on his heel, and slammed the heavy door shut behind him.
Song Yuqing stood rooted to the tiles in a total daze, taking a long time to fully process the interaction. The bear hadn’t been drooling because he wanted to wash her clean and eat her; he was desperately trying to force her to scrub the suffocating scent of the mutant birds off her skin before his instincts completely overrode his loyalty.
The bear… wants to eat pigeons?
Song Yuqing recalled the horrific scene of the Zombie Kings voraciously feeding on the birds in the abandoned market, and a knot of deep, terrifying doubt began to tighten in her gut.
Roughly an hour rolled by before Song Yuqing finally stepped out of the bathroom. She had thoroughly changed her clothes, dried her hair, and applied her full skincare routine, double-checking her reflection to ensure there wasn’t a single trace of the avian scent lingering on her skin.
Meanwhile, the common room had undergone a drastic shift. Liu Xiaona, Little Meat Bun, Gaha, Nanjiao, the Xie brothers, and Chen She were all huddled tightly together in a massive heap in the center of the floor, desperately shivering to share body warmth. Song Yuqing hadn’t initially picked up on the drop in temperature, but a glance through the display window revealed a shocking sight: the narrow alleyway of Bell Street was already heavily blanketed in a thick layer of fresh snow.
“Don’t panic, everyone. The storefront’s central climate control system is initializing right now,” Master Fu announced over the speakers, his comforting voice breaking the silence.
“What the hell is happening to the weather?” Song Yuqing demanded.
“The global ecosystem has fractured,” the AI replied flatly. “Winter has arrived ahead of schedule.”
A pitch-black midnight sky and a freezing, arctic winter.
Identical to the sudden onset of the blistering heatwave, the catastrophic climate shift had hit the planet without a single second of warning, catching humanity completely off guard.
Song Yuqing rapidly accessed her vault, pulling out a bulk supply of heavy winter apparel she had scrounged from the parallel world and distributing the gear to the shivering crowd. While the generic sizes were completely misaligned, the thick fabric was more than enough to successfully block out the biting cold.
Liu Xiaona, Xie Hao, and the rest of the burly hunters looked absolutely ridiculous, their massive frames stuffed into coats that were several sizes too small, but the children’s apparel fit Chen She absolutely perfectly.
Looking thoroughly embarrassed, the giant panda wrapped a massive, oversized winter coat completely around his heavy head. He shuffled slowly over to Song Yuqing’s side, hanging his head low as a series of soft, whimpering whines escaped his jaws. He gently grabbed her hand and pressed it against his crown, putting on a highly coquettish display to beg for her executive forgiveness.
“Alright, alright! I’m not mad at you,” Song Yuqing softened, smoothing down his fur. “Just promise me you’ll never lock a predatory glare onto me like that again! You scared the life out of me.”
She chose to keep her dark theories regarding the pigeons completely to herself. She understood how unpredictable human nature could be in a crisis; if the surrounding hunters caught wind that consuming the birds could grant supernatural climate immunity, every single soul in the sector would immediately abandon their duties to hunt the flock down, causing absolute chaos.
“Ahem!” Nanjiao cleared his throat loudly, deliberately trying to hijack Song Yuqing’s attention.
While she had been locked away training the flock, the programmer had successfully assembled a high-end computer terminal for the shop, mounting the system securely behind the primary cash register. He had even channeled his flora manipulation to cultivate a series of specialized, glowing plant fibers, weaving the roots into a dense transmission medium that functioned identically to a fiber-optic cable for regional data processing.
Song Yuqing stared at the terminal, a look of genuine, profound admiration finally cutting through her eyes as she evaluated the programmer.
Nanjiao flashed her a wide, exhausted grin, the massive dark circles framing his eyes wrinkling as he beamed with pride.
