Chapter 48: What I Really Want to Do
“Why don’t you take a proper nap first?” Song Yuqing suggested, genuinely worried that Nanjiao might drop dead from sudden cardiac arrest right in front of her counter.
“No way,” Nanjiao replied, fighting through his crushing exhaustion. “I need to stay right here and watch you log our merchandise inventory into the database backend.”
Song Yuqing stared at him, bewildered. “Is the interface moving that fast? You’ve already coded the entire front end?!”
She hadn’t expected Nanjiao to be such a workaholic. He was practically running on fumes, yet he seemed even more desperate to launch this digital e-commerce platform than she was. Was there another motive…?
“I’m on an incredibly tight timeline,” Nanjiao sighed, rubbing his temples. Survival in the apocalypse wasn’t easy. As a rare wood-type psychic who also doubled as a top-tier network engineer, he was constantly routed between various state-owned strongholds to deploy server nodes.
Honestly, he found his stay at God’s Supermarket incredibly luxurious. He was well-fed, slept in a perfectly climate-controlled environment, and got to see Gaha every single day. But his time was running out. The heavy burden on his shoulders concerned the literal future of human civilization.
With Nanjiao breathing down her neck, Song Yuqing immediately set to work counting their stock and logging the data. She drafted Liu Xiaona to help, assigning the driver to audit the retail floor shelves while she managed the massive warehouse stashed inside her spatial vault. She had briefly considered pulling Liu Xiaona into the space to expedite the count, but despite multiple system trials, the spatial corridor stubbornly refused to grant entry to any living human baseline other than herself.
Wait a minute, Song Yuqing muddled over as she worked. If the space completely rejects human lifespans, how did those mutant pigeons manage to hitch a ride inside?
Her gaze naturally drifted over to Gaha and Little Meat Bun. She immediately checked the giant panda off the list; the second the bear entered the vault, his primal urges would likely take over, and he’d start hunting down her new avian delivery fleet. That left only one option.
“Gaha!”
The moment the zombie girl caught her eye, she nodded excitedly, her purple dreadlocks flying. Me! Take me! I want to help!
Nanjiao muttered a quiet complaint under his breath, “Unbelievable. Talk about a stingy, petty, black-hearted capitalist… only inviting people into her private dimension when there’s hard labor to be done.”
“Gaha!” Gaha sharply slapped her pale hand over Nanjiao’s mouth to muzzle him. Manager Song would never do that! She obviously has her operational reasons!
Song Yuqing simply pressed her lips together, choosing to ignore the programmer’s grumbling. She had kept her spatial mechanics close to her chest before as a tactical trump card, but she was fully confident now that the store’s strict safety protocols would completely shield her registered employees from any dimensional anomalies.
Taking Gaha’s cold hand, she anchored her core and initialized the transfer. Up to this point, the operation ran perfectly smoothly. But a glaring bottleneck quickly surfaced. Though Gaha was ecstatic to assist and carefully patrolled the inventory rows, her neural networks no longer processed human language or numbering systems. Song Yuqing watched in deadpan silence as the zombie girl paced solemnly between the crates, intensely counting items on her pale fingers, only to completely lose track of the math every three seconds.
Song Yuqing: ⊙﹏⊙
“Alright, step back and let me handle the ledger,” Song Yuqing sighed, taking over the physical tally herself.
Recognizing she was useless for data input, Gaha happily pivoted to property maintenance, beginning to clean up the massive, chaotic mess left behind by the mutant birds. While shoveling a particularly dense mountain of pigeon droppings in a dark corner of the vault, her broom struck something metallic. Peeking closer, she unexpectedly uncovered a stack of over a dozen automated security gates hidden beneath the waste. It was the milestone reward Master Fu had officially promised her earlier, and Song Yuqing had completely forgotten about the shipment. She couldn’t exactly blame herself for missing the drop; managing the unruly pigeons had simply hijacked her entire focus.
By the time Song Yuqing finalized the stock count, Gaha had thoroughly restored order to the vault, returning the storage grid to its pristine condition. Still, the isolated sector housing the avian fleet continued to produce a non-stop barrage of waste.
The duo exited the spatial corridor. The absolute second they stepped back onto the shop floor, Little Meat Bun caught the sharp scent of pigeon lingering on their clothes. Terrified of repeating his embarrassing predatory relapse from earlier, the giant panda bolted down the highway-style corridor and slammed his bedroom door shut.
Watching his heavy silhouette retreat, his posture looked remarkably lonely, as if the poor bear were deeply depressed by his own primal, flesh-eating desires.
Without a functional camera on hand, Song Yuqing was physically incapable of uploading product images to the digital backend. She was forced to temporarily restrict the listings to plain text—cataloging the exact merchandise names, tactical uses, and credit valuations on the interface. Nanjiao lamented his lack of foresight, deeply regretting that he hadn’t thought to scavenge a high-end digital camera from the tech vaults at Base Zero before deploying into the field.
Song Yuqing smoothly integrated their premium raw meats and specialty coffee selections onto the digital platform. Since the distribution relied on a heavy avian delivery service, she tacked on a convenient logistics premium, charging an extra zombie carcass for every e-commerce item ordered. As for the automated security gates that would be deployed at the destination terminals to self-report valuations, Master Fu would simply execute a backend patch to modify their programming.
“Is this structure aligned with the baseline market?” Song Yuqing turned to verify with the programmer. Even if Nanjiao claimed her markup was an absolute violation of consumer ethics, she was fully prepared to hardcode the prices anyway.
“Honestly, compared to the predatory pricing models enforced by other spatial users across the grid, your stock is an absolute steal,” Nanjiao replied flatly.
Curiosity piqued, Song Yuqing leaned against the register. “How exactly do the alternative spatial mutants retail their inventory?”
“A standard baseline rate of five high-tier crystal cores for a single bottle of unpurified drinking water,” Nanjiao stated truthfully. “And mind you, that exorbitant markup is the direct result of strict government price caps.”
Song Yuqing couldn’t help but let out a quiet whistle. Truly, there was no such thing as an honest merchant in the apocalypse. Compared to those wasteland price gougers, Master Fu’s default valuation matrix was so completely generous it bordered on a massive corporate deficit. Then again, since it was the AI’s bottom line absorbing the loss, she didn’t harbor a single objection.
But a secondary thought flashed through her mind: if she systematically jacked up the prices across both her online and offline channels, wouldn’t she clear her monthly target of three thousand zombies significantly faster?
“Cease your corporate delusions immediately. An indentured laborer who has literally signed a contract selling their soul to the establishment has absolutely zero business calculating profit margins,” Master Fu’s cold, disembodied voice ruthlessly shattered her internal monologue.
Song Yuqing: “…”
Upon catching wind that Nanjiao’s network construction tour was drawing to a close and he would soon be departing for his next destination, Chen She and the Xie brothers swarmed the programmer. They persistently pestered him, demanding to tag along on his cross-country trek to secure asylum inside Base Zero. Rather than offering a definitive confirmation or a hard rejection, Nanjiao simply remained neutral.
Taking his silence as an executive green light, the group immediately initialized their travel preparations. Given the perilous length of a trans-continental highway run, they naturally required an immense stash of premium resources. Steeling their reserves, they braved the brutal, biting arctic cold of the alleyway, deploying into the ruins to aggressively hunt stray walkers to trade for survival gear.
The sudden influx of vibrant, noisy people had initially caught Song Yuqing off guard, but she had grown entirely accustomed to treating them like everyday guests. Now that the entire crew was simultaneously preparing to pack their bags and leave, a sharp wave of sentimental reluctance hit her chest.
Chen She’s gaze was fixed on the horizon. “The world is massive, Manager Song. I want to venture out and see what’s left of it.”
Xie Hao nodded firmly. “Same here.”
Xie Zetian adjusted his coat, his eyes flashing with ambition. “I am going to orchestrate a massive political comeback!”
Even though the daily lifestyle inside the newly upgraded tier of God’s Supermarket provided an absolute pinnacle of comfort, the guards and the teenager understood the underlying trap. In a ruined world, the absolute most dangerous strategic error a psychic could make was to languish inside a cozy sanctuary for too long. Otherwise, the brutal, shifting reality of the waste would silently eliminate you before you even realized you were falling behind.
It was the classic phenomenon of a frog being slowly boiled in warm water; a life of unearned comfort ultimately ruins your survival instincts.
Song Yuqing and Liu Xiaona briefly compared their own cozy situations to the raw ambition of the departures, feeling a sudden pang of mild embarrassment. It’s the literal apocalypse, yet we’re perfectly content hiding behind a cash register instead of exploring the wild frontier.
“I need to discover my true purpose out here. I want to find what I’m genuinely meant to do,” Chen She stated with profound gravity. In the brief span of forty-eight hours, the intense weight of his temporal awakening seemed to have aged his features, stripping away the last remnants of his childhood innocence.
Seeing that their resolve was completely unyielding, Song Yuqing abandoned her attempts to convince them to stay. Instead, she set to work assembling a massive care package for their journey, stuffing heavy winter rations and high-grade cold-weather gear into their bags.
Xie Hao offered a cheeky, playful grin. “Do we secure a loyal client discount on these crates, Boss Song?”
“Absolutely zero discounts,” she shot back smoothly.
“In that case… do you mind officially dispensing my new prosthetic limb before I clear the sector?”
Song Yuqing paused.
“Come on, you explicitly swore you’d source the hardware weeks ago! You even pocketed my deposit!” Xie Hao whined, completely abandoning his tough security guard persona. He trailed her step-for-step across the shop floor, relentlessly muttering his grievances directly into her ear.
Grinding her teeth against the non-stop nagging, Song Yuqing mentally contacted the ceiling, aggressively pleading with Master Fu to authorize an early release of her monthly dimension-jump privilege.
Faced with her relentless bargaining, the AI finally conceded, making a rare corporate exception strictly to preserve the flawless commercial reputation of God’s Supermarket.
Within seconds, the spatial vortex opened, and Song Yuqing plunged back into the parallel world—the highly developed, metropolitan dimension that had nearly broken down because of her initial systemic interference, where her alternate self actively existed.
She navigated straight to the high-tech commercial supermarket of the parallel timeline, burning her entire accumulation of store points to purchase a massive haul of premium inventory: shelf-stable luxury foods, advanced clinical trauma medicines, heavy winter tactical suits spanning multiple sizes, and a top-tier, cybernetic prosthetic arm custom-engineered to perfectly interface with Xie Hao’s severed limb. Naturally, she didn’t neglect her own cravings, stashing dozens of fresh bamboo-shoot pork buns and frozen dumplings into her vault.
Right as she prepared to initialize her return transfer, her sharp eyes caught a brief, shocking glimpse of a familiar silhouette shifting through the bustling civilian crowd outside the glass storefront.
The profile looked flawlessly, terrifyingly identical to Sister Qin.
Before she could even draw a breath to call out, the figure seamlessly melted into the thick of the crowd, vanishing from the timeline entirely.
