Chapter 52: Gathering and Separation (Part 4)
Little Meat Bun lay nestled in the branches of the tree, watching the hustle and bustle inside God’s Supermarket with a thoroughly wronged expression. The moment Nanjiao successfully secured the last of the mutant pigeons inside his transparent plant capsule, the giant panda let out a sharp cry, scrambled down the thick trunk, and forcefully squeezed his heavy frame into the huddle.
I want to join in the fun too! You stinky birds completely wasted my leisure time!
As he dropped from the canopy, his heavy paws had managed to harvest a handful of the Chinese tallow tree’s fruit. No one had quite noticed when these round, spherical seed pods had quietly matured, but they were perfectly smooth and compact—the absolute ideal size to fiddle with in his palms.
I’m gifting these to you.
Little Meat Bun solemnly handed the tallow fruit over to Xie Hao. Out of all the travelers preparing to clear the sector, he had known the guard the longest.
“Go ahead and take them. You can use the tallow extracts to manufacture candles or soap on the trail,” Song Yuqing explained, watching the exchange. Intrigued but slightly confused, Xie Hao carefully slipped the hard seed pods deep into his winter coat pocket.
Imitating the tight embraces the humans had exchanged earlier, the giant panda waddled forward, offering a series of heavy, clumsy goodbye hugs to every single member of the departing vanguard. Song Yuqing couldn’t help but break into a loud chuckle; her mascot truly possessed impeccable corporate manners.
Even though the unnatural, ink-black sky showed absolutely zero indication of turning into daylight, Nanjiao privately calculated that it was strategically best to initialize their march immediately. While the rest of the hunters were still locked in casual conversation, he quietly took point, guiding his floating, transparent plant capsule out into the alley. He was terrified that lingering would compromise his resolve to leave, so he deliberately avoided making eye contact with Gaha.
The absolute second the programmer cleared the threshold, Xie Hao, Chen She, and the rest of the squad scrambled to follow, terrified that the tech geek would carelessly abandon them and slip out to see the frontier alone. Besides, the baseline law of the wasteland was absolute: there was safety in numbers. Navigating a pitch-black highway grid as a unified platoon meant they could effortlessly anchor each other’s flanks if an emergency triggered.
The core clerks of God’s Supermarket stood gathered across the threshold, silently tracking their silhouettes as the customers vanished down the lane.
“Goodbye, my friends… Goodbye, my friends… Goodbye, my friends…~” Master Fu crooned over the communication array. The AI was remarkably elusive, yet he always managed to identify the absolute perfect dramatic window to burst into song.
Following this separation, Song Yuqing had zero statistical data to predict when their paths might cross again. But she wasn’t particularly sad. From a pure business perspective, she harbored a highly optimistic theory: she fully expected this group of hardened psychics to function as a walking, breathing billboard network, aggressively driving future commercial traffic back to God’s Supermarket.
Once Nanjiao’s vanguard had fully cleared the mouth of the alley, Song Yuqing pulled Liu Xiaona aside to officially update her on Sister Qin’s status. She kept the summary strictly practical, omitting her dark theories regarding the pear tree, simply clarifying that the blacksmith was alive and well, operating as the sole director of a dilapidated sanctuary to protect a legion of abandoned, unawakened orphans in a parallel timeline.
Liu Xiaona’s face lit up with pure, unadulterated relief at the confirmation that her mentor was alive. They had both survived highly traumatic, isolated childhoods; consequently, the driver understood Sister Qin’s protective instincts perfectly. Even if the blacksmith desperately desired to return to her home timeline, she was structurally locked out from crossing Song Yuqing’s spatial corridor, considering the dimensional vault was hardcoded to accept only non-human elements and advanced infected like Gaha.
“Man… it is an absolute tactical tragedy that our baseline human frames are restricted from breaching your vault,” Liu Xiaona sighed heavily, her heart aching with the desire to cross the grid and assist her old mentor.
“Gaha…” Gaha murmured softly, her gray pupils widening in sudden apprehension. She began processing the horrifying physics of the dimensional transfer, privately wondering what would happen if her own asymmetrical, half-dead corpse were to suddenly materialize inside a pristine parallel timeline. It would be a total nightmare—imagine a rotting, advanced walker violently dropping straight out of a clear sky onto a civilian shopping mall…
With the massive influx of lingering customers officially cleared from the floor, the interior of God’s Supermarket suddenly felt incredibly hollow and deserted. Song Yuqing stepped behind the counter to balance the monthly ledger. The current data analysis was grim: their active take-in for the month sat at a pathetic two hundred zombie carcasses, every single one of them standardly contributed by the group that had just marched out the door. How on earth was she supposed to harvest the remaining twenty-eight hundred kills to clear Master Fu’s massive new metric? Navigating between the remote survival camps to anchor Nanjiao’s network hubs and returning to Base Zero would take the programmer until the absolute end of the month at the earliest.
Bored out of her mind, Song Yuqing initialized the new computer terminal Nanjiao had assembled behind the counter, idly clicking through the interface to test the backend logic. There was virtually nothing to play with; the only operational program was the newly minted e-commerce shopping matrix. And at this current stage, the digital portal was completely vacant—radiating the silent, freezing energy of an electronic graveyard.
Man, if I had only ordered Nanjiao to design a colorful, high-end graphic interface before he packed his bags, this dashboard would look infinitely more lively, she thought, staring at the blank layout.
Suddenly, a nostalgic pre-apocalypse memory flashed through her mind. Before the meteorites broke the world, prominent online retail conglomerates always integrated highly engaging promotional video loops directly onto their product detail interfaces to drive sales. Wait… what if I pick up my old commercial directing tools and shoot a high-yield promotional cinematic for God’s Supermarket? She had an abundance of operational downtime on her hands anyway.
Her creative gears began turning at breakneck speed, rapidly mapping out a complete structural framework for the commercial. Directing content was a discipline she had dominated for years; she was so intensely familiar with the pre-production workflow that a brilliant conceptual outline materialized in her mind within seconds.
The single logistical asset she currently lacked was a functional recording device. A high-end DSLR rig would be optimal, but in a tight pinch, a standard civilian smartphone camera would suffice.
Time to mobilize!
Song Yuqing sprinted back to her residential quarters, frantically rummaging through her old crates to unearth her smartphone, which had been collecting dust for weeks. The lens architecture on the consumer device certainly couldn’t capture cinema-grade high-definition footage, but this was a ruined, post-apocalyptic wasteland—not a single consumer on the digital grid was going to file a complaint regarding technical video resolution.
The single bottleneck was that the internal battery core had long since drained to absolute zero. Song Yuqing immediately resolved to shepherd Little Meat Bun and Gaha out into the municipal commercial center to scavenge for high-compatibility charging cables. Who knows? If their luck held out, they might even stumble upon an intact, industrial-grade recording rig inside a camera vault. If Nanjiao could locate pristine monitors and server motherboards intact across the southern suburbs, she certainly wouldn’t lag behind his record.
Executing her plan without a moment’s delay, she ordered a highly reluctant, dark-fearing Liu Xiaona to hold the line and guard the storefront perimeter, before marching out past the alleyway barricades flanked by the giant panda and the zombie girl.
Meanwhile, Nanjiao’s vanguard had successfully breached the outer boundaries of Chen Town, every single hunter’s nervous system completely on edge. They had been navigating the dark avenues for nearly an hour, yet their scouting sweeps had yielded absolutely zero zombie activity. The ruined streets of the municipality felt as uncannily peaceful as a pre-apocalyptic midnight—a quiet, nostalgic evening right after a localized power grid failure.
If they chose to adopt an overly optimistic mindset, they could easily trick themselves into believing the local walker population had undergone a natural extinction phase, allowing them to comfortably stroll out of Chen Town without drawing breath.
But the seasoned fighters understood the underlying data.
This was the terrifying, suffocating silence that always preceded a catastrophic storm…
Not only was the highway grid completely devoid of any signs of living biology, but the mutant pigeons trapped inside Nanjiao’s transparent botanical capsule were growing increasingly frantic. The birds were violently thrashing their wings, desperately slamming their skulls against the translucent plant membrane to break out.
“Form a tight perimeter! Weapons hot!” Nanjiao hissed, his internal radar screaming that a lethal presence was closing in on their coordinates.
“Don’t psych yourself out, man,” Xie Zetian muttered, though his trembling voice betrayed that he was mostly just trying to comfort his own escalating panic.
Through the heavy, blinding darkness, a subtle ripple in the air currents suggested something had just blasted past their rear flank at extreme velocity.
“Did anyone else just lock onto that trajectory?” Chen She whispered. He rotated his torso slowly, scanning the pitch-black void behind his shoulder. The asphalt was completely bare; there wasn’t a single scavenger silhouette or standard walker frame in sight.
The psychics exchanged a series of deeply unsettled glances, a few low-tier members instantly harboring a desperate urge to abandon the march and sprint straight back to the safety of the supermarket.
Chen She kept his eyes wide, his focus narrowing as he covertly activated his temporal attribute, manually rolling the local timeline back by exactly three seconds.
The localized time-distortion instantly mapped the anomaly for the entire squad. Through the temporal playback, everyone clearly witnessed the silhouette of an advanced zombie flashing past their position at such a terrifying velocity that its physical frame left behind a clean, vibrating double-image in the air.
“Was that… an actual walker? There’s no way in hell…” Xie Hao stammered, his knuckles whitening around his broadsword.
Had the infected evolved to such a catastrophic cognitive and physical threshold? A movement velocity of that tier meant even the single fastest Olympic track-and-field athletes from the old world wouldn’t stand a fraction of a second’s chance of escaping their line of sight.
Is the human race structurally programmed to lose this war?
“Engage! Defensive formations!” Nanjiao roared, being the first to break the paralysis. He violently thrust his palms forward, launching a barrage of thick, thorny vines to pursue the direction of the blurred trajectory.
“We need to execute an immediate retreat! Move!” the middle-aged psychic flanking Chen She shrieked, his combat instincts completely fracturing. The single reason low-tier hunters could consistently best standard walkers in the ruins was because human baseline mobility vastly outpaced the clumsy, uncoordinated lunges of the undead. Now that a variant possessing god-tier, hyper-velocity acceleration had broken cover, he knew with absolute certainty that he was completely outmatched.
“Hiss—!!!”
Within a single millisecond, the darkness violently shattered. Hundreds of advanced zombies simultaneously erupted from the windows and rooftops of the surrounding commercial blocks, launching themselves down like a ravenous, coordinated wave of paratroopers.
Having never witnessed a tactical ambush of this magnitude, the vanguard’s formation instantly threw itself into total disarray. The psychics frantically unleashed every single scrap of elemental power stored within their reserves, throwing a chaotic barrage of fireballs and lightning strikes into the encroaching undead wall, violently smashing every single carcass their attributes could friction against.
Seeing the zombie wall closing in with an unstoppable, mechanical momentum, Xie Hao slammed his alloyed prosthetic arm into the dirt, violently summoning a massive, reinforced earth wall to block the primary avenue. He funneled the absolute maximum of his psychic reserves to structurally reinforce the barrier, but the sheer, crushing volume of the horde was astronomically too high. The heavy earthen wall began to violently sway and crack under the immense physical pressure. Evolving rapidly, several variants began systematically forming structured human ladders against the base of the barrier, aggressively scaling the concrete facade to breach the top line.
“I need immediate heavy support over here! Fire mission!” Xie Zetian screamed, desperately swiping a metal pipe to defend his personal radius.
Chen She’s unique temporal attributes couldn’t be channeled for wide-scale kinetic crowd control at his current developmental stage. Steeling his nerves, he fiercely gripped a heavy steel kitchen knife, positioning his boots into a rigid martial arts stance. If a single variant successfully breached Xie Hao’s earth wall, he was fully prepared to sprint forward and manually hack the monster’s skull apart.
Directly outside the perimeter of the crumbling barrier, hidden deep within the shadows of a collapsed storefront, Chen Ke stood silently alongside the two Golden-Eyed Zombie Kings. Their unblinking, amber eyes stared coldly at the human defense line. Moving with a chilling, military-like precision, the dominant King casually flicked his decaying fingers, methodically directing his hyper-velocity zombie units to strike the earthen wall in a rhythmic, continuous bombardment.
“Hiss—!!!”
The secondary Zombie King let out a sharp, guttural rattle, his severe tone sounding exactly like an officer commanding his frontline troops to accelerate the siege.
Meanwhile, tucked away inside a narrow, adjacent alleyway less than fifty yards from the slaughter, a heavily reinforced tactical transport vehicle sat idling, its high-powered headlamps completely extinguished to blend into the darkness.
Lin Han sat calmly inside the armored cabin, his fingers rhythmically tapping against the steering wheel as he listened to a series of frantic status updates streaming from Ah Hu.
“Commander Lin, the vanguard’s defense line is collapsing! The horde is closing in—there are literally thousands of them out there!”
