Chapter 63: On the Shelves! All of It Is on the Shelves!
Song Yuqing was clearly overthinking things. Nanjiao knew how to handle the delivery pigeons far better than she did.
These five birds were remarkably strong and healthy. Even when weighed down by cargo several times their own mass, they remained bursting with energy.
“Go on! Stay safe out there!” Song Yuqing pointed toward the exit, and the pigeons obediently formed a neat line before launching themselves into the dark sky.
I just hope they can make the journey to Base No. 35 without running into trouble, she thought, watching them vanish.
Meanwhile, over at Base No. 27, Lin Han woke up from a deep, restful sleep and walked over to stretch in front of his window.
“Huh? What the hell is that?”
He blinked, spotting a strange cluster of shapes streaking across the sky not far away, vanishing into the gloom in the blink of an eye.
He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was. After all, the wild pigeons his people occasionally managed to snare were completely untrained; they lacked the ability to travel thousands of miles a day. To Wan Youzhi and Lin Han, the primary value of a pigeon lay squarely on a dinner plate. Eating them was supposed to give their superpowers a nice boost and accelerate their evolutionary progress.
Maybe it’s just some flying-type mutant? Lin Han thought, quickly dismissing the sighting. He had far more pressing matters to worry about.
Ever since Ruan Fanfan and Zhang Lei had arrived, Wan Youzhi had been showing them blatant favoritism. He was constantly pulling them aside to interrogate them about the inner workings of the God’s Supermarket, as if he suddenly found the intelligence Lin Han had previously gathered to be completely unreliable.
A heavy wave of paranoia washed over Lin Han. What if Wan Youzhi decided to dump him entirely and try to win over Song Yuqing instead? He couldn’t let that happen!
He had tried to subtly grill Ruan Fanfan and Zhang Lei to see if they had noticed anything else unusual inside the supermarket, but the duo had kept their lips sealed, looking at him with deep suspicion. When he tried to push further, Zhang Lei had casually thrown a counter-question about Chen Ke, hitting Lin Han right in his sore spot. Unwilling to revisit the sheer humiliation of that encounter, Lin Han had been forced to awkwardly back off and keep his distance from them.
Back at the supermarket, after seeing the birds off, Song Yuqing returned to her computer to check the logistics log. Sure enough, the manifest had updated to “In Transit.”
After a moment of deliberation, she decided to re-list the handmade soap on the digital inventory, though she switched the listing format from an immediate buyout to a pre-order system. She knew an influx of water-type psychics would soon be desperate for this antidote, so she intended to keep Liu Xiaona chained to the soap molds for the next few days to maximize production.
While she was at it, Song Yuqing decided to list the Truth Soup as a pre-order item as well. However, she set the price point significantly higher. After all, the Truth Fruit was a rare, hard-to-come-by commodity with immense strategic value.
Twenty zombie souls in exchange for a single bowl of Truth Soup.
Song Yuqing manually tweaked the pricing code three times before finally releasing her mouse with a satisfied smirk. She still had a substantial stockpile of the red berries left, and it would be a crying shame not to monetize them.
“Put them on the shelves! Put all of it on the shelves!” she muttered happily. She knew exactly how to squeeze the maximum utility out of her assets.
With the digital storefront fully optimized, Song Yuqing locked up the supermarket’s main doors and shooed Gaha and Little Meat Bun off to bed.
From the bathroom, the muffled, cheerful humming of a song drifted out. Liu Xiaona was currently taking a long, luxurious bath with a fresh bar of tallow soap, thoroughly enjoying herself.
Unable to pry the bathroom away from her, the new hunter had resorted to occupying the kitchen, using the sink to scrub himself down.
Passing by the doorway, Song Yuqing glanced inside and froze. As the man vigorously rubbed the soap over his face, the dark melanin washed away to reveal a strikingly handsome, fair-skinned countenance. She had initially pegged the hunter as a rugged man well into his late thirties or early forties, but with the black grime completely stripped away, he turned out to be a clean-cut youth barely in his twenties.
“Hey, just so you know,” Song Yuqing called out, “the official corporate rate is three soaps per zombie soul.”
“I have a name, you know. It’s Zhang Hua,” the young man muttered, rinsing his face under a small stream of water from the faucet.
Song Yuqing nodded. “Got it. Well, Zhang Hua, when you’re finished cleaning up, head over to the building next door to sleep. Just remember to lock the door behind you.”
After spending the day working alongside him, she felt reasonably confident in his character, judging him to be an honest, grounded guy. “Oh, I forgot to mention—there’s an actual, fully functioning bathroom in the building next door too.”
Hearing this, Zhang Hua looked down at the bar of soap in his hand, then at the foamy, pitch-black water swirling down the kitchen sink. He gave an embarrassed, sheepish nod and quickly slipped out the door with his soap.
With the polar night dragging on for days without a break, Song Yuqing was beginning to lose all sense of time. It was pitch black when she went to sleep, and it remained pitch black when she opened her eyes.
Pulling out her phone, she checked the lock screen. It read 4:00 PM on May 3rd.
The wallpaper was a bright, cheerful photo of her posing alongside her parents. Back then, she had just graduated from university, convinced that a glittering, boundless future was waiting for her.
Shaking off the sudden wave of nostalgia, Song Yuqing got out of bed and stepped out into the shop. Liu Xiaona and Gaha were already awake and hustling, having gathered another batch of tallow fruits to grind down into paste.
“Awesome job, guys! Here’s a little performance bonus.” Song Yuqing manifested a fresh cucumber from her spatial storage and handed it over. Worried that Liu Xiaona was running on too little sleep, she affectionately stuffed two plump tomatoes directly into her mouth.
Meanwhile, Zhang Hua was sitting quietly by the supermarket window, contentedly slurping a bowl of instant noodles. Noticing Song Yuqing’s gaze on him, he panicked slightly, worried she might think he was freeloading. He hastily swallowed his mouthful of noodles to clarify.
“I managed to kill two zombies just outside! I used the cores to buy the soap and this bowl of noodles.”
It had been the very first time he had ever taken the initiative to hunt monsters on his own. Back at Base 16, going out to fight was a miserable, forced chore; it would often take him three to five agonizing days just to coordinate a kill on a single zombie. He simply couldn’t compete with the offensive-type psychics, leaving him trapped in a spiral of self-doubt. If it hadn’t been for his utility as a literal human water dispenser, he would have despised himself for being entirely useless.
“Eat slowly, don’t choke,” Song Yuqing said with a warm chuckle. “So, what are your plans moving forward?”
In truth, she would have been more than happy to recruit another literate, educated clerk to help run the God’s Supermarket.
“I’m going to track down a different settlement,” Zhang Hua replied earnestly.
To him, it was no different than life before the apocalypse. Back then, a person needed to find a job to support themselves; now, they needed to find a proper base to survive—or rather, to find a community where they could keep each other warm.
“You don’t want to stay here with us?”
Zhang Hua looked visibly moved, but after a brief struggle, he ultimately shook his head. “If I stay here, there’s a high chance I’ll run into my old boss again. I’d rather put as much distance between us as possible.”
Song Yuqing didn’t press the matter. Some paths simply weren’t meant to cross for long.
Walking over to the terminal, she pulled up her chat logs with Nanjiao and requested the exact coordinates for Base No. 35 on Zhang Hua’s behalf.
“I think you should pivot and head toward Base 35 instead,” she suggested, showing him the map. “The overall treatment and living conditions there should be vastly superior.”
“Thank you so much!” Zhang Hua bolted upright, his gratitude far beyond words. He went so far as to snap into a crisp, rigid military salute.
Song Yuqing chuckled awkwardly. “Uh… that’s really not necessary.”
Before officially setting out, Zhang Hua had detoured through a nearby zombie-hunting sector to test his limits. Strangely enough, after consuming the magically charged food from the God’s Supermarket, he could feel a distinct baseline improvement in his internal reserves. Fighting the undead felt significantly lighter—his chronic back pain had vanished, and his lingering anxiety had completely melted away.
Shortly after Zhang Hua departed with his supplies, Little Meat Bun finally rumbled awake from his nap. Well, technically, he was forcefully rousted by Song Yuqing.
“Up you get, Little Meat Bun! Time to go harvest some more fruit and pound it down!”
The little creature dragged himself out of bed with an immensely reluctant whine, pausing to execute a massive, dramatic stretch. Sleeping was his absolute favorite pastime, but Song Yuqing’s commands carried a lot of weight.
He shuffled out to the courtyard, unsteadily scaling the trunk to forage through the thick leaves. To his surprise, a fresh, abundant crop of tallow fruits seemed to have sprouted overnight.
Back inside, Song Yuqing leaned lazily against the checkout counter, pulling up the supermarket’s ledger to count her earnings. The store account held a grand total of exactly 120 zombie souls—a frustratingly far cry from her monthly target of 3,000.
“I strongly advise against over-relying on digital shopping networks,” Master Fu’s voice suddenly echoed in her mind, overlapping with a bizarre, electronic remix filter. “If the network experiences a sudden localized blackout or catastrophic failure, your sales goals for the month will completely tank. Never forget that your brick-and-mortar storefront is your true foundation.”
Song Yuqing’s eyes narrowed. Wait a minute… does this old spirit know something he isn’t telling me?
