News of Brother 005.
Shen Wuqiao grabbed the little girl’s thin arm, so frightened she forgot about the System, and dragged her to run.
But the little girl quietly made a hushing gesture at her, signaling her to stand still.
“Shh~”
Clearly, this little girl born in the Post-apocalyptic Era had more survival experience than she did.
[Detected abnormal host heart rate. Low-tier mutant rats ahead. Hearing: keen. Smell: moderate. Vision: essentially lost. Staying quiet gives an 80% chance of avoiding danger.]
Shen Wuqiao held her breath and suppressed her trembling. Sure enough, she saw several Mutant Rats circle around ten meters away, then run off toward some movement in the distance.
She finally let out a long breath. This place was no longer safe to stay in—only eight minutes remained of the hour.
“I’m heading back. You should go back too. It’s not safe here.”
“Mm-hm.” The girl nodded.
The two parted ways, and Shen Wuqiao immediately ran back.
Rushing all the way, with a few scares but no real danger, she made it back to her convenience store in the final minute.
While no one was around, she first counted her gains by the wall at the back of the store.
[Detected host has picked up 6 spicy strip packaging bags. Reward: 60 bags of large gluten strips, small gluten strips, and large spicy sheets.]
[Picked up 3 self-heating hot pot containers. Reward: 30 boxes of deluxe self-heating hot pot.]
[Picked up 3 soda water bottles, 6 cola bottles, 3 orange juice bottles, 4 green tea bottles, and 2 iced tea bottles. Reward: 180 bottles of assorted beverages.]
[Picked up 6 sausage casings, 7 spicy squid packaging bags, 4 spicy dried beef packaging bags, 8 sachima packaging bags, and 6 French soft bread packaging bags.]
[Picked up 3 white sugar packaging bags, 3 dried noodle packaging bags, and 5 spicy hot pot base packaging bags.]
[Picked up 1 rice packaging bag. Reward: 10 bags of 5kg Northeastern rice.]
Excellent. She had rice now.
Too bad there was no rice cooker.
It seemed that to pick up better things, she would have to go into the city.
As a useless invalid at the moment, that was definitely not possible. She needed to upgrade the store and recruit helpers as soon as possible.
The haul from this one-hour trip was pretty good. The store currently had 56 types of goods—still a ways off from 80. She would try to gather them all in one go tomorrow.
After the shopkeeper returned, the convenience store automatically exited stealth mode. Within less than half an hour of restocking and reopening, nearly a hundred people came trickling in.
“Oh my god! It’s real—there really is a convenience store here!”
“I saw Coke! Is this real? Someone pinch me, quick!”
After asking prices and confirming they could afford to buy, this crowd nearly went mad, scrambling over each other to exchange for points.
“These things are way cheaper than at the base. The base hasn’t even seen these rarities in the past two years. Let me buy first!”
“Everyone line up! No line, no sale~” Shen Wuqiao clapped her hands, signaling everyone to form a line.
“Ha~ You bunch of idiots are actually lining up obediently to buy? There’s just one girl here with no Supernatural Ability. Why not just rob her?”
A horse-faced man in an old black leather jacket, a cigarette butt dangling from his mouth, swaggered to the front of the line.
The hand in his pocket suddenly drew a fully automatic pistol, its Black Hole of a muzzle aimed at Shen Wuqiao.
“Hand over all the cigarettes, instant noodles, and clean water in there, now!”
Shen Wuqiao stared at the gun muzzle, her breath frozen—but she couldn’t show weakness on her face. “Causing trouble in my store comes at a price. You’d better put that weapon away.”
“Heh, and what are you going to do about it?” The man sneered, his index finger tightening on the trigger.
[High-threat dangerous individual detected. Initiating forced expulsion program—Advanced Level.]
Crack—
A blue arc of electricity warped the space in front of the gunman’s chest. The person standing closest to him could even feel the air pressure around them increase dozens of times over.
The pistol in his hand dropped onto the counter with a clatter—and the man himself, twenty meters away, exploded into a cloud of blood mist.
Everyone in the line held their breath, eyes wide. Even the person at the end of the queue had blood speckled across their face.
The moment that firework of blood burst open over the Wasteland, the system’s mechanical voice rang out across the area outside the convenience store:
[Those who refuse to trade by the rules will be blacklisted and expelled! Those who threaten the shopkeeper’s life—death!]
The once-crooked queue straightened up perfectly within two seconds.
In the silent air, that invisible pressure mixed with the smell of blood made everyone’s scalp prickle.
The system’s tactic of killing the chicken to scare the monkey, with so many witnesses around, was indeed very effective. Shen Wuqiao recovered from her lingering fear and got back to business.
She believed that what happened today would serve as a warning to anyone with ill intentions!
Sister Lan and her squad returned just in time to witness this shocking scene.
She turned expressionlessly toward the aloof Lin Feng. “See that? What did I tell you? If you’d dared make a move that day, that would’ve been your fate.”
Lin Feng rubbed his nose. “I was just saying. I never actually planned to rob her.”
The energetic Keke had already run over impatiently. “Sister Lan, come quick! The shopkeeper has new stock—sausages and self-heating hot pot, plus cola and iced tea!”
“I want instant noodles with sausage, and a bottle of orange soda.”
“It’s the end of the month. We need to set aside some Crystal Cores to buy Anti-Pollution Agent. Instant noodles will do—save the rest for the start of next month!”
Sister Lan walked over with steady steps and placed her Crystal Cores at the window. “Four cups of instant noodles, four bottles of water.”
Shen Wuqiao handed the items over. “140 points—14 Junior Crystal Cores.”
“Sister Lan, what’s that Anti-pollution Medicine you mentioned? Do all of you have to take it?”
Lin Feng stepped forward to pack up the water and noodles, looking at her with a strange expression. “I’m getting more and more curious about where you came from. You don’t even know about Anti-pollution Medicine—don’t tell me you’ve never taken it?”
Shen Wuqiao shook her head. No one had ever told her she needed to take medicine regularly!
Seeing that she clearly had no idea, the others all looked as if they’d seen a ghost.
“Impossible. Even if you don’t have a Supernatural Ability, ten years without taking Anti-pollution Medicine even once—how could you not have mutated?”
[Host, ever since the red mist descended, human genes have mutated due to pollution sources. Benign mutations become Ability Users; malignant mutations become Zombies. There are also some humans with no mutation at all—but whether mutated or not, everyone carries pollutants inside them.]
[Because the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe all contain pollution sources. Once the Pollution Value reaches a certain threshold, they will undergo malignant mutation. That’s why they need to regularly take a special agent each month that clears pollution.]
Shen Wuqiao’s mind was spinning. Then—could she have been polluted too, without even knowing it?
[Host, you have the only natural antibody in your body, plus the system’s protection, so you haven’t been contaminated. But you’d better keep it secret.]
She smacked her forehead and laughed awkwardly in embarrassment: “Silly me, of course I’ve taken the Anti-pollution Medicine. I’ve just been so busy lately that I mixed it up.”
“I knew it. How could you not have turned into a Zombie without taking that medicine? But I heard the price of the medicine has gone up again—it used to be 100 Junior Crystal Cores per vial, now it’s 120.” As Keke talked about this, even the instant noodles in her hands lost their appeal.
“They’re betting on the fact that we’ll have to buy it no matter how high the price goes. Shen Jin, the only Level-8 Ability User at Light-Chasing Base, lost control of the contamination in his body, and now he’s suffering from superpower backlash. Rumor has it he’s already turned into a monster.”
Clatter—Shen Wuqiao dropped the pack of sachima in her hand onto the ground.