Chapter 49: Gathering and Separation
Song Yuqing’s immediate, burning instinct was to sprint after her and track Sister Qin down.
She hadn’t forgotten the baseline rules of this parallel timeline; just as another version of herself actively existed in this world, an alternate version of Sister Qin was naturally present as well. However, one glaring discrepancy immediately caught her eye: the clothes the woman was currently wearing were the exact same garments Sister Qin had worn the day they first met in the ruins.
If the woman she had just seen was genuinely the Sister Qin native to this hyper-advanced parallel world, there was absolutely zero chance she would be wearing such rugged, post-apocalyptic survival gear. Based on the elite, pristine aesthetic standards of this timeline, those clothes simply wouldn’t exist.
Although her interactions with Sister Qin back home had been brief and their relationship hadn’t been deeply forged over time, Song Yuqing admired the woman from the absolute bottom of her heart. She flatly refused to accept the narrative that Sister Qin had simply been swallowed up by Lin Han’s spatial void and erased from existence. For a hardened, brilliant survivor like her to meet such a sudden, anti-climactic end felt entirely wrong—like a cheap twist in a child’s story.
Song Yuqing frantically pushed her way through the bustling pedestrian crowd, her eyes scanning the faces, but the woman she hadn’t seen in nearly a month was nowhere to be found.
Just as a heavy wave of disappointment hit her and she was preparing to abandon the search, a small group of seven- or eight-year-old children spilled out from an alleyway across the street. And standing right in the center of the energetic huddle, shepherding them along, was Sister Qin.
“Sister Qin! Sister Qin! Can we please just walk around the shopping district for a little longer before we head back?!”
“Yeah, please! We barely ever get clearance to come out into the city!”
The children chattered excitedly, tugging at her sleeves, but Sister Qin’s expression remained perfectly calm and resolute.
“No, absolutely not. We established a firm operational agreement before we left the compound. We are returning exactly at the designated extraction time.”
The children let out a collective groan of profound disappointment, but not a single one actually dared to disobey her directive. They all fell into line, obediently following Sister Qin toward a heavily battered, rusted-out transport van parked on the curb.
Throwing caution to the wind, Song Yuqing ignored the flow of pedestrian traffic and sprinted across the avenue. The absolute millisecond Sister Qin reached for the handle to slide the heavy side door shut, Song Yuqing’s hands violently clamped onto the window frame to block it.
The moment their eyes locked, a spike of cold regret hit Song Yuqing’s chest. What if I just made a massive, impulsive mistake? What if the woman standing right in front of me isn’t actually my Sister Qin? Did I just drag myself into another catastrophic legal mess in this timeline?
But the micro-expressions flashing across Sister Qin’s face told a different story. Song Yuqing saw a sudden, violent collision of pure shock, overwhelming excitement, and desperate, white-knuckled restraint buried deep within the woman’s eyes. Sister Qin wasn’t looking at her the way a stranger would.
It’s her. I know it.
“Who are you? What exactly is your business here?” Sister Qin demanded, her brow furrowing into a harsh, defensive glare.
“I… I desperately need a ride.”
Sister Qin cast a quick, protective glance at the huddled children sitting in the back of the van, then turned her gaze back to the visibly trembling, nervous girl blocking the door.
“Get in,” she ordered slowly.
Without a shred of shame, Song Yuqing aggressively squeezed her way into the back of the cramped transport, wedging herself directly between two of the kids. Her eyes unconsciously kept darting toward the rearview mirror to catch Sister Qin’s reflection, but terrified of exposing the connection too early, she guiltily snapped her gaze out the passenger window. She desperately wanted to cut straight to the chase and verbally confirm the woman’s identity, but she was deeply terrified that explicitly acknowledging the dimensional overlap might violate one of Master Fu’s classified corporate protocols. She decided to carefully test the waters first.
“So, where exactly is your final destination?” Sister Qin asked, intensely analyzing Song Yuqing’s reflection in the rearview mirror as she merged the van into traffic.
“Well… where exactly are you guys heading?”
“Out toward the outer-grid suburbs. We run a local orphanage.”
“Wow, what an incredible coincidence! That is exactly where I’m headed too,” Song Yuqing lied smoothly. Deep down, she was curling her toes against the floorboards in pure, awkward cringe; she could palpably feel how utterly deliberate and manufactured her response sounded.
“Seriously. I am,” she added quickly, trying to salvage the delivery.
“Auntie, why on earth would you want to travel out there?” the young boy sitting squished next to Song Yuqing asked, scratching his head in genuine confusion. The suburban grid was completely alienated from the pristine, high-tech world of the inner city. The divide was as stark as the sky and the deep underground. Why would a wealthy civilian willingly choose to visit the slums?
“Address me as Sister,” Song Yuqing blurted out, her vanity briefly flaring.
“Right. Auntie,” the child replied, completely ignoring the correction.
“So what exactly is your operational business out in the fringe sectors? Judging by your profile, you clearly aren’t a local resident, are you?” Sister Qin pressed, her eyes narrowing with sharp, calculated suspicion.
“I am currently operating out of a different grid entirely. I deployed out here to track down a close associate of mine… her name is Qin. She vanished from my sector about a month ago…”
Screeech—!
Sister Qin violently slammed her boot onto the brake pedal. The heavy van lurched to a brutal halt, throwing everyone in the cabin violently forward against their restraints.
“Sister Qin! Watch the road!” a little girl shrieked from the back bench.
“My apologies,” Sister Qin muttered. Her voice was remarkably steady, but she didn’t offer another word of explanation, simply shifting her foot back to the accelerator and continuing the drive.
Song Yuqing’s heart hammered against her ribs. She was now absolutely, one hundred percent certain that the woman gripping the steering wheel was the exact same Sister Qin from her ruined timeline. Her mind was swarming with a million desperate questions, her anxiety spiking higher by the second. Noticing Song Yuqing anxiously shifting her weight and nervously shuffling her boots, the children sitting beside her assumed she was feeling claustrophobic and considerately slid closer to the windows to give her more breathing room.
The suburban sectors weren’t actually located that far from the metropolitan core, but the deeper they drove into the fringe, the more severely the infrastructure degraded. Sitting in the back of the rusted van felt exactly like riding in an ancient, un-sprung wooden carriage; every single pothole sent a violent jolt up Song Yuqing’s spine.
“I can’t believe a dilapidated zone like this actually exists in this timeline,” Song Yuqing murmured, staring out the window at the sprawling, desolate ruins of the abandoned housing blocks.
“Yeah,” Sister Qin replied, her eyes locked dead ahead, her knuckles completely white as she gripped the steering wheel. “This specific transport vehicle has a long, battered history, so the suspension is completely shot. Just grit your teeth and bear the turbulence.”
Song Yuqing leaned her head against the glass. She had genuinely believed this parallel world was an absolute, flawless utopia, but it turned out she had simply been blinded by the neon lights of the inner city, completely oblivious to the shadows cast below.
Perfection is a complete myth, no matter what dimension you’re in.
The heavy van eventually turned off the cracked asphalt and began navigating a deeply rutted, muddy service road. The lane was incredibly narrow, the overgrown, thorny branches of the dead brush aggressively scraping against the vehicle’s rusted chassis.
The van finally ground to a halt outside a massive, highly dilapidated two-story concrete complex. Stepping out of the vehicle, Song Yuqing’s eyes immediately locked onto a weathered, heavy stone monument erected near the front entrance. The faded, deeply engraved characters read: Sanctuary for the Unawakened.
“Is this the actual orphanage?” she asked.
“Hold your questions until we’re secure,” Sister Qin instructed sharply. She rapidly shepherded the children out of the van and through the heavy front doors, with Song Yuqing trailing silently behind.
The interior of the complex was stark and utilitarian, featuring a series of basic classrooms, open physical training halls, an industrial kitchen, and rows of cramped dormitories. It was incredibly spartan, but it clearly possessed all the baseline infrastructure required to sustain life.
Sister Qin immediately delegated the older teenagers to run martial arts drills with the younger children in the courtyard. Once the kids were occupied, she grabbed Song Yuqing by the arm, dragged her into a small, isolated administrative office, and violently threw the deadbolt.
“Song Yuqing… what the hell are you doing here?!” Sister Qin spun around to face her, her entire body visibly trembling, her eyes rimmed with sudden, heavy tears.
There was absolutely zero doubt left. The woman standing right in front of her was the exact same Sister Qin who had spent hours manually welding the heavy iron security frames onto the exterior of God’s Supermarket.
The two women stared at each other for a long, heavy moment before simultaneously breaking into smiles. Song Yuqing’s smile was radiant, brimming with pure, unadulterated relief and joy. But Sister Qin’s smile was incredibly fractured and deeply bitter.
“Sister Qin! When the rumors hit the camp that Lin Han had violently swallowed you into his spatial anomaly, I honestly believed you had already been…”
“Lin Han… ha…” Sister Qin let out a dry, humorless laugh. “It’s a remarkably long story.” She gently pulled Song Yuqing toward a pair of worn chairs, forcing herself to take a deep, stabilizing breath before she finally began to unravel the timeline.
That fateful afternoon, Sister Qin had deployed out onto the highway alongside the primary zombie hunter vanguard. The elite psychics in the squad had aggressively ostracized her for lacking elemental abilities, and she possessed far too much pride to grovel for their acceptance, so she had splintered off to clear a sector entirely on her own. Completely by chance, her path crossed with Lin Han’s convoy. At the time, she had absolutely zero intelligence regarding his identity or his rank within the compound. She was simply trying to pass through the grid when she noticed him pull his transport over and begin violently screaming at one of his subordinates in the dirt. Sister Qin fully intended to just quietly walk away, but right as she turned, she heard Lin Han explicitly mention Song Yuqing’s name—his voice dripping with pure, toxic disdain. Infuriated by the slander against her friend, Sister Qin immediately confronted him. The verbal argument rapidly escalated into a brutal, close-quarters physical brawl.
Lin Han and his elite guards were absolutely no match for Sister Qin’s devastating, martial arts-driven combat prowess. But right at the exact second she was about to completely break their defensive line, Lin Han panicked and violently materialized a localized spatial void, swallowing her whole.
“I honestly thought I was dead. But when I finally opened my eyes, I found myself stranded in this sector,” Sister Qin explained, her bitter smile returning. “I possessed zero understanding of the physics required to bridge the dimensions and return home, so I had absolutely no alternative but to adapt and survive in this timeline.”
“I can take you back right now!” Song Yuqing blurted out excitedly. In her rush of adrenaline, she completely forgot the unyielding, hardcoded systemic rule: her spatial corridor was strictly inaccessible to any living human baseline.
A millisecond after the words left her mouth, she remembered the restriction, letting out a sharp click of her tongue in deep frustration.
“Wait… you actually have the capability to bridge the timelines?” Sister Qin asked, her eyes widening. Up until this second, she had firmly believed her transfer was the result of a random, permanent tear in the spacetime continuum.
“Yeah. I physically cross over into this dimension using my spatial vault to run bulk supply procurements for the shop.”
Sister Qin fell into a heavy silence, her dark eyes flickering rapidly as she processed the revelation.
“I’m not going back.”
The distant, joyful laughter of the children running drills echoed faintly through the thin walls of the office.
“Is your decision anchored entirely to those kids?” Song Yuqing asked gently. “Because Liu Xiaona is still back at the shop, and he…”
“Liu Xiaona is a fully grown, capable adult. He possesses the skills required to protect himself in the waste. But these children are utterly defenseless minors.” It didn’t matter which dimension she was trapped in; Sister Qin’s core instinct to fiercely protect the vulnerable like a den mother was an absolute, unyielding constant.
Song Yuqing felt a sharp pang of unease. Sister Qin was actually willing to permanently sever her ties to her home world and abandon her closest allies, all for a group of orphans she had known for less than thirty days.
“Are you the only adult supervisor operating this facility?”
“Yes. I am the sole provider keeping them alive.”
In this hyper-advanced timeline—a full century after their initial apocalypse—ordinary civilian baselines lacking elemental superpowers were legally and socially classified as an inferior underclass. Any infant born into the grid without an active genetic mutation was immediately abandoned by the state to die in the fringe sectors.
“Are you absolutely certain about this?” Song Yuqing asked softly. If Sister Qin’s resolve was truly set in stone, she would never attempt to manipulate or guilt her into returning. Everyone possessed the fundamental right to dictate their own survival path. And frankly, regardless of how dilapidated and impoverished this suburban shelter was, it was still an infinitely safer environment than the ruined wasteland they called home. At the very least, this timeline wasn’t plagued by hordes of flesh-eating zombies or catastrophic, reality-breaking climate shifts.
“If you are genuinely determined to remain here and hold the line, I completely respect your choice. However, you need to exercise extreme tactical caution regarding the possibility of crossing paths with your own alternate self in this timeline.”
“Yeah. I know.” Sister Qin immediately averted her gaze, staring hard at the floorboards. Her reaction was incredibly stiff and highly abnormal.
Song Yuqing narrowed her eyes. “Have you already encountered her?”
