Several vehicles stood outside the supermarket when Chen Ye arrived.
There were modified off-road trucks, sedans, and even a heavy bus. He recognized them instantly; these belonged to the convoy.
Keeping a vehicle running was troublesome in the apocalypse, whether it needed gasoline or electricity. Finding fuel or somewhere to charge was difficult. He had just seen two off-road vehicles continue ahead in search of a gas station.
Since escaping Jiang City, Chen Ye had passed countless abandoned luxury cars—models he had only ever seen on the internet—left to rot by the roadside.
Survivors had tried to drive those cars away, but real life was different from the movies. Most had been abandoned after running out of fuel. This was one reason so many people traveled with the convoy on bicycles.
Ordinary people struggled to gather supplies.
His tricycle stood outside the supermarket.
His belongings were still scattered in the cargo bed. When he had emptied his backpack earlier to loot the grocery store, he had dumped everything out. Now, his life’s possessions lay exposed.
It seemed the despicable couple—Jiajia and Qiangzi—had also entered the supermarket.
The supermarket looked large. The four o’clock sun lit a small patch near the entrance, but he could not make out the dark interior.
So many people had gone inside. It should have been noisy, chaotic. At the very least, there should have been the sounds of scavenging.
But it was unnervingly quiet.
Chen Ye made up his mind. He would skirt the entrance, test his luck, and see if he could gather supplies from the periphery. In this world, you either took risks or you starved.
As for Jiajia and Qiangzi, he wouldn’t let them leave this place alive. But revenge could wait. Survival came first.
The Convoy’s Second Iron Rule: Gather as many supplies as possible.
In the apocalypse, supplies were everything.
He emptied his backpack again, strapping the lightened load to his shoulders. Crouching low, Chen Ye approached the entrance, his Hand Crossbow raised and ready. His eyes darted left and right, scanning for movement. At the first sign of trouble, he would run.
As he ventured deeper, he realized his plan had a flaw.
The supermarket was enormous, far larger than he had anticipated. And the shelves near the entrance had been picked clean. Only the aisles deeper in the gloom still held goods.
Nearby, two people moved between the shelves, taking things and stuffing them into bags. Chen Ye raised his crossbow, then lowered it. They were not Jiajia and Qiangzi and had done him no wrong. They could only carry so much, and there were plenty of supplies nearby. There was no need to do anything stupid.
He slowed his pace, creeping toward the food section.
Several people were already there. When they saw him, they gestured for him to stay quiet.
Before Chen Ye could react, a familiar, chilling sensation washed over him. The hair on his arms stood straight up.
This feeling again.
Ahead, a figure wandered between the aisles, murmuring softly.
Except for the taller shelves used in warehouse supermarkets, ordinary shelves were around 2.2 meters high. Yet half the girl’s body rose above them.
She had to be over three meters tall.
No human grew that large.
There was only one possibility.
Anomaly.
Her loose hair hid her face. She wore a white dress, her body swaying like a puppet.
She carried a huge pair of scissors.
Snip. Snip.
The blades opened and closed rhythmically, the sound sharp and grating in the silence.
“Where are you?~~~”
“Where are you?~~~~ Come out, let’s play together!”
She kept murmuring the words in a drawn-out, eerie voice, as if talking to herself—or to the little mice hiding in the dark.
Chen Ye understood why the other survivors were terrified into silence. A drop of cold sweat slid down his temple.
He had just escaped the Weeping Paper Effigy, only to walk straight into the domain of the White-Dress Scissor Lady.
His heart hammered against his ribs.
The Scissor Lady turned a corner, her body pivoting slowly, mechanically.
Chen Ye crouched lower, mirroring her movement on the other side of the aisle to stay out of her line of sight.
From this new angle, he realized the food section was crowded.
Jiajia and Qiangzi were nowhere in sight. The enormous man was there, though, trying to curl up his bulk. He looked rather dim, and the sight would have been funny if he had not been so tense.
No way! Chen Ye thought. You’re a giant yourself, and you’re scared?
Suddenly, the Scissor Lady stopped.
Her head, a curtain of black hair, snapped toward Chen Ye’s direction.
Two points of crimson light burned through the veil of hair.
Everyone froze.
They stood as though rooted by a spell. Tension filled the air, and cold sweat spread across their foreheads.
Seconds stretched into years. If she saw them, they were dead. All of them.
Finally, the Scissor Lady moved again, resuming her mechanical patrol.
A collective, silent exhale rippled through the survivors. They began to move again, playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the monster.
He could not keep this up forever. Chen Ye quietly took a tub of beef-flavored instant noodles and put it in his bag.
The others followed his example. Some had woven sacks, others backpacks. They quietly filled them while watching the Scissor Lady.
Chen Ye followed behind them. They had all survived the apocalypse this long and managed to avoid attracting the Scissor Lady’s attention.
Just as he was getting into a rhythm, he bumped into the back of the survivor in front of him.
The group had stopped dead.
Chen Ye looked past them.
Blocking the aisle was a child, maybe seven or eight years old.
Its skin was the pale gray of a corpse three days dead. Two circles of rouge burned abnormally bright on its cheeks. Its eyes were pools of pure resentment.
The Weeping Paper Effigy.
It had followed him.
“Ah~~~~!”
A scream shattered the silence of the supermarket.
The cry roused things lurking in the dark.
The White-Dress Scissor Lady, over three meters tall, stiffly turned her head toward them.
A piercing chill swept over Chen Ye, leaving his hands and feet slightly numb.
Snip snip!~~~
The scissors clicked and clacked through the supermarket.
“Hehe… So you’re here! Want to play together?”
The Scissor Lady strode toward them, crashing through displays, shelves toppling in her wake.
“Oh my god!”
“Run! I don’t want to die!”
Chen Ye grabbed his backpack, ready to turn and run.
Before he could turn away, he saw what happened in front of him.
SNIP!
The giant shears snapped shut.
The scissors cut two survivors into upper and lower halves. They seemed not to have understood what had happened. Their upper bodies hit the ground, and they crawled and struggled with their hands as blood pooled beneath them.
“Hehe… So good, so fun!”
“I want to play more!”
The scissors rose again.
SNIP!
Another survivor, a man in a suit and gold-rimmed glasses, was cut in half at the waist.
“Damn it! Fight!”
A furious roar erupted from the side.
The air in the supermarket suddenly grew heavy, charged with an explosive pressure.
Chen Ye watched the two-meter-tall man swell like an inflating balloon. In an instant, he was a three-meter giant, as tall as the Scissor Lady, his muscles like lumps of iron.
His presence was no weaker than the Scissor Lady’s.
Was this… a Sequence Beyonder?