The moon-boat drifted leisurely forward along the waterway, moonlight spilling across its deck and pooling inside the hood of Bai Long’s cloak.
“I’m Li Da, and this is Zhang Zi.”
The tall, lanky man—Li Da, was the type who got friendly with strangers in no time, chattering cheerfully away at Bai Long.
The guy in the ball cap was named Zhang Zi.
He shot Li Da a speechless glare, signaling him to stop slacking off and keep rowing.
Manual labor like rowing definitely couldn’t be foisted onto the woman who’d saved their lives, so Li Da and Zhang Zi had quietly claimed the job for themselves.
“Bai Long.”
Leaning against the side of the boat, Bai Long let one hand dangle naturally in the water.
The icy water slid through the gaps between her fingers, and the current gradually smoothed away the discomfort in her body.
She was a water-type esper, and being close to water made her feel comfortable.
“So where did this boat even come from?”
Li Da, fresh from a brush with death, kept babbling nonstop. “Was it just floating loose with no rope tied to it, and happened to drift over?”
Bai Long had no intention of explaining her powers, so she just went along with it. “Lucky, I guess.”
The current was like a lively fish, gently and softly coiling and circling between her fingers.
The tiny whirlpools weren’t conspicuous enough to draw notice.
Her ability wasn’t just gathering water in her hand. When her hand made contact with an external water source, she could control it within a certain range.
That was something she’d discovered through earlier experiments.
But with Bai Long’s current strength, a single hand wasn’t enough to manipulate the enormous volume of water in the waterway.
If one hand wasn’t enough, then two.
She pressed both hands against the curtain that had been soaked by the waterway’s water, artificially establishing a channel between herself and the waterway.
Steering the current to push the moon-boat down the waterway to come pick them up was no easy feat.
The massive drain on her ability left Bai Long drowsy, and the familiar pain crept bit by bit along the seams of her bones again.
Contact with water eased some of the pain, which was why she’d let her hand trail in the water.
Of the three of them, only An Ran had an esper ability.
Li Da and Zhang Zi were both ordinary humans.
“You said you came from a refuge zone, so there’s an organization protecting you?” Bai Long probed.
If they were connected to that armed military force, then she wouldn’t even need to bother going to the shelter.
“You couldn’t really call it that.” An Ran brushed aside her bangs. “Most of us already knew each other from before. We’re all from the same workplace.”
As they talked, the moon-boat neared its destination.
Li Da and Zhang Zi worked the oars, picking up speed as they swept down at the next fork.
A wide-open expanse slowly came into Bai Long’s view up ahead.
The clearing connected to a large stretch of factory buildings, all of it encircled by stone walls dozens of meters high.
Dead center in the stone wall stood a towering stone gate fully five stories tall, its deep gray weathered by years of wind and rain.
Directly above the gate hung a massive LED sign, now just dangling there since the whole city’s power was out.
From the corners of the gate, two quarter-circle arc grooves curved outward along the ground.
It wasn’t an ordinary door that human strength could open, it would probably take hundreds of people to barely force a crack in it.
“We’re here.” An Ran led Bai Long up to the gate.
“Worker ID 1086,” she called out toward some point overhead.
A few seconds later, Bai Long watched as the stone gate let out a thunderous, muffled rumble and slowly parted from the seam down its middle.
The gate showered down a haze of lime dust as it opened, revealing a gap just wide enough for one person to pass through.
“Hurry, let’s go.” An Ran was the first to step in behind the gate.
The stone gate was tall and thick.
As Bai Long passed through, she figured it had to be a good five meters thick.
“Little An and the others are back.”
“All three of them are fine, thank goodness!”
A crowd swarmed up behind the gate, tall, short, fat, thin, men, women, old, young, all of them.
They all wore the same clothes as An Ran’s trio: sea-blue jumpsuit work uniforms.
Quite a few had stains on their clothes, not recent ones, but the kind that looked accumulated over years.
They had to be work uniforms.
Bai Long swept her gaze around and met plenty of curious, wary looks.
“Little An, who is this…?”
A scruffy, stubble-faced middle-aged man took two steps forward from the crowd.
He had a head of grizzled buzz-cut hair, one hand resting on an iron bar, his gaze fixed on Bai Long sharp as a hawk’s talons.
Besides him, several other men also stepped up, shielding the women and children behind them.
“Uncle Zhao, don’t get worked up. This is the one who saved our lives.”
An Ran had been in the middle of handing over the supplies gathered on this trip to the person in charge. Seeing Uncle Zhao and the others tense up, she hurriedly raised a hand to soothe them, afraid they’d do something rash.
The moment he heard Bai Long was their savior, Zhao Xin let go of the iron bar in his hand.
His face filled with apology. “I’m really sorry, kid. You saved Little An and the rest of us, and we still—”
The men behind Zhao Xin quickly chimed in with apologies too.
None of them had realized that the scrawny little person in front of them was actually a young woman.
Bai Long waved it off, not taking it to heart.
So An Ran hadn’t lied, these people really did all know each other.
“We’re all workers from Hongyun Shipyard. I’m from the office.” An Ran led Bai Long over to a rest area. “Uncle Zhao and the others are shipbuilders.”
Bai Long caught a faint, savory aroma, and following it, she saw several women bustling around in front of a boiler.
The scene, so full of the everyday warmth of pre-apocalypse life, left her momentarily stunned.
An Ran noticed where she was looking and explained, “Those are the employees’ family members. We all live together in the staff dormitory out back.”
Hongyun Shipyard was far from the city center, so it had specially built dormitory buildings to house its employees along with their families and children.
In the clearing, a few kids chased and roughhoused.
Their mothers, passing by, each gave them a knuckle-rap to the head.
Clearly the cruelty of the apocalypse outside hadn’t yet touched this group of people.
An Ran got going once she’d opened up. “When the apocalypse first started, Uncle Zhao led people to seal the shipyard gates. A handful of stray zombies couldn’t break through that door. But there are a lot of us and food’s limited, so a few of us espers take groups out in batches to find supplies.”
Hearing her explanation, Bai Long realized not everyone here had an ability.
“How many… espers do you have?”
Bai Long paused, ever so subtly, but An Ran didn’t catch it. “Besides Uncle Zhao and me, there are two others.”
Bai Long abruptly stood up and said to a baffled An Ran, “I’m going to the restroom.”
Watching her stride off, An Ran felt rather puzzled. “The restroom isn’t over that way…”
…
Bai Long gathered both hands inside her cloak and hurried over to a deserted spot.
The cloak in front of her swayed.
Through the sliver of a gap it revealed, you could see her two hands pinning down a grayish-yellow tail wrapped around her waist.
The tip of the tail, like a golden retriever that had slipped its leash, was surging and probing toward the side pocket of her pants.
Bai Long smacked the tail-tip with one slap, then deftly tied it into a knot at her waist to keep it under control.
With the tail dealt with, she reached into her pocket, where a warm, heated breath of air lay nestled inside.
It was warm and smooth to the touch, round, the egg she’d brought back.
How was it still this hot?
Bai Long was puzzled. She was just about to take it out for a look when a sound came from the shipyard gate.
“It’s Hao and his crew, they’re back.” Zhao Xin and the others went up to greet them at the gate.
Bai Long stood at the back of the crowd, her gaze landing on the group that had just come through the gate.
This batch of people was clearly far larger than An Ran’s team, a good few dozen of them.
But judging by the expressions on Zhao Xin and An Ran’s faces, these people obviously weren’t all original shipyard employees.
“Hao, who are they…?”
With Bai Long as the precedent, Zhao Xin didn’t act rashly, he only asked the question cautiously.
“They’re students from the ocean university next door.”
Wu Hao scratched his head. “They were out surveying along the coast, and we happened to run into them.”
Wu Hao was only in his early twenties, about the same age as the college students behind him.
Still a green, hotheaded kid himself.
“You’re telling me you…”
Zhao Xin felt a pang of helplessness inside, but in the end, seeing that these kids were all about the same age as his own children, their clothes all torn and ragged, cheeks sunken and grimy, they’d clearly suffered plenty out there.
“I can let you in, but afterward you’ll have to pull your weight finding supplies too. Our food can’t support this many extra people.”
Zhao Xin couldn’t disregard the other shipyard employees and children.
The family building was already full of frail old people, women, and small children with no strength to fend for themselves.
Their rations had originally each been the responsibility of their own families.
Even so, these people were under heavy survival pressure, otherwise they wouldn’t have everyone able-bodied out scrounging for supplies.
“Of course, of course. We’re already so grateful just to have a place to take shelter.”
The man leading the students stepped forward and extended his hand to Zhao Xin.
“My surname is Cheng. I’m a teacher of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering at the ocean university.”
“I’m Zhao Xin.”
Zhao Xin shook his hand briefly and quickly let go, then turned to the shipyard people and said, “Get a few people to check whether any of them have wounds on their bodies.”
The smile on Cheng Qian’s face stiffened for a second, but in the end he didn’t object.
The students all submitted to the inspection.
Bai Long’s body still ached. She fiddled with two eggs in her hands to distract herself, and from where she sat off to the side, she saw Zhao Xin lecturing Wu Hao.
“Hao, it’s not that I want to get on your case, but look at the times we’re living in, do you really still think you can save everyone?”
The furrows on Zhao Xin’s brow ran deeper than the ripples on the sea.
“Uncle Zhao, they’re all just students. And we checked them, they’re all fine, aren’t they?”
Even after being chewed out, Wu Hao still wore a cheerful grin.
“Were we supposed to just watch them out there becoming zombie chow? You didn’t see how wretched they were, they nearly got wiped out in one swoop.”
“Fine, fine, fine. So now somehow it’s my fault instead…”
Someone tapped Bai Long on the shoulder.
An Ran stood behind her, holding a bowl of clear noodle soup.
“Try our Auntie Wang’s cooking. It’s the best in the whole shipyard.”
The clear broth gave off curling wafts of fragrance, the pale-yellow, slender noodles sprinkled with a few bright-green flecks of scallion.
There was even a golden, crisp-fried egg added on top.
In the apocalypse, a hot bowl of noodle soup with an egg was already a luxurious life.
“And for that we have to thank you for finding the eggs.” An Ran winked, pressing her lips into a smile.
“Thank you.” Bai Long took the bowl. The moment she sat down, she noticed a few students nearby looking her way.
Their eyes were fixed straight ahead, locked onto the noodles in her hands.
Whatever they were thinking was written all over their faces.
Bai Long lifted a big chopstick-load of noodles.
The fine, soft noodles were evenly drawn, every strand coated in broth, smooth and savory-salty on the way down.
Her ears were sharp, she could already hear those few students audibly swallowing, their stomachs growling.
“Stop staring. Teacher Cheng is calling us to gather up.”
“It smells so good, boo-hoo. I was just about to work up the courage to charge over and ask if they could spare me a bite!”
“Once we go out for supplies later and find some, maybe we’ll be able to trade for it.”
“To be honest, if I went out right now, I don’t even know whether the zombies would be eating me or I’d be eating the zombies…”