Zhang Qiang’s eyes bulged like brass bells.
A nice person? She must have some serious misunderstanding about what a nice person was.
For all his loud carrying-on a moment ago, the instant Meng Shiwan actually spoke of killing him, he lost his nerve.
“I, I, I…”
He hadn’t managed to spit out anything coherent when the people secretly watching couldn’t hold back any longer.
Since Meng Shiwan had told them not to appear before her again, they could only hide behind the shelves and shout.
“Zhang Qiang, hang in there! As long as you hold out to the end, you’ll live!”
“Zhang Qiang, don’t give up so easily! Just hold on, and I’ll cook you a feast every single day from now on!”
“Yes, yes, yes! As long as you live, I’ll even spoon-feed you every meal!”
If Zhang Qiang died, any of them could very well be the next unlucky soul.
Whatever it took, they couldn’t let Zhang Qiang die.
Meng Shiwan had only been scaring him. She got up and went back to dragging out the halved zombies.
Zhang Qiang went quiet now, no longer daring to beg her to kill him.
He simply shut his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the bloody scene before him.
Take life and death lightly, and maybe, just maybe, you’d survive.
Meng Shiwan hauled out a dozen-plus zombies and didn’t spot a single crystal core.
She could only return to the bubble-tea shop, rinse the blood off herself with the hose, and go on eating hot pot.
She looked at the empty fatty-beef box and the empty bowl, a little uncertain. “I barely had a few bites of the fatty beef, how’s it gone?”
Taxue lay on the table, paws hugging its round, stuffed little belly, and rolled over to keep pretending to be asleep.
But its swishing tail gave it away.
Meng Shiwan found this funny and said with a perfectly straight face, “A sleeping cat holds its tail up straight. Taxue, are you really asleep?”
Taxue’s swishing tail froze mid-swing, then curled up between its legs and silently rose skyward.
“Pfft—” Meng Shiwan struggled not to laugh. “Looks like Taxue really is asleep.”
She’d known Taxue could understand human speech, it only tilted its head and played innocent when it didn’t want to listen.
What a clever little rascal.
Taxue found holding its tail up exhausting, and before long it couldn’t keep the act going. It pretended to wake, saw Meng Shiwan had come back, and pattered over to nuzzle her arm in delight.
Meng Shiwan sighed. “Little drama queen. Still eating? I’ll fish you out another piece of chicken, but I’ll rinse it, it’s too spicy.”
Taxue swished its tail. Eat, eat, eat.
Up on the second floor, the survivors were a little bewildered.
They’d all heard the screams from downstairs and the droning of the power saws.
The zombies wandering the second floor, drawn by the commotion, were surging toward the first.
Four people, two men, two women, hiding in a claw-machine arcade could clearly see, through the slats of the blinds, the zombies out in the corridor moving toward the escalator.
A girl with her hair in a bun said softly, “What are they doing downstairs? A pig-slaughtering scene wouldn’t make that much noise. Are they trying to get themselves killed?”
Anyone who’d survived this long knew at least a little about zombies.
You couldn’t get too close to them, couldn’t make noise, or they’d fix on you.
Yet the racket downstairs seemed determined to draw every zombie in the whole building down there. If that wasn’t a death wish, what was?
The boy beside her wore glasses and knit his brows in thought. “We need to get to the first floor too. The supermarket’s down there, and it’s packed with supplies.
“While the zombies’ attention is drawn off, let’s go down the other side, scout the first floor first. If it’s safe, we sweep the supermarket first and cover Yuning while she gathers supplies.”
Another girl beside them said excitedly, “With a chosen one like Yuning around, even in the apocalypse we’ll live just fine.”
The bun-haired girl, hailed as the chosen one, wore a smile touched with pride.
She, Su Yuning, was this world’s Heaven-chosen girl.
She’d had the day off, and Su Yuning had made plans with her best friend to go shopping, each bringing along her boyfriend.
She didn’t expect a zombie outbreak. Fortunately the claw-machine arcade had been nearly empty, and sensing something was wrong, they’d shut the doors and hidden at once, escaping disaster.
At the same time, Su Yuning had felt something change in her body, until she found she could enter, at will, a vast white space no one else could see.
Only then did it dawn on her: this was one of those apocalyptic abilities from the novels, and a rare spatial-type ability at that.
A zombie outbreak, awakening a spatial ability, conveniently standing in a resource-rich mall, boyfriend and best friend at her side.
Wasn’t this the picture-perfect chosen one, the standard-issue novel heroine?
Full of soaring ambition, she felt certain she’d accomplish great things in the apocalypse.
Seeing no sign of zombies outside, the four quietly opened the door and headed the opposite way, going down the far side.
When the other survivors saw them slipping off, they gritted their teeth, opened their own door, and followed close behind.
They had to get to the first floor.
The second floor held electronics, clothing, and the like, no food.
They’d been hungry for a full day and night. If they wanted to survive well and long-term, the first thing that came to mind was the supply-rich supermarket downstairs.
With the zombies drawn off by the commotion below, now was the safest time to leave.
Even if the supermarket got jammed with zombies pouring in, no matter, there was a food street nearby, and hiding in any random shopfront would at least keep their bellies full.
They kept feeling that with the saws downstairs droning on and on, something was off.
It didn’t seem like an accident, more like noise someone was deliberately making.
Treading as lightly as they could, they went down the other exit, searching for a way into the supermarket.
Every entrance was barricaded.
Scanning the street, they saw zombies with split-open heads lying about in twos and threes, someone had clearly cleared the place.
They’d thought it was dangerous out here, but after wandering a full circle, they didn’t see a single living zombie.
“I know where the supermarket’s loading dock is. Let’s go try our luck there.”
At these words the crowd seemed to see hope, and followed the man.
A whole throng arrived at the passage mouth and saw a large pink RV.
Someone gasped, “I remember this vehicle! Yesterday morning it ran over close to a thousand zombies in the square, a scene straight out of a Rakshasa hell. [1] a Buddhist hell of blood and carnage jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2841314_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2841314_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); The owner’s a real force of nature.”
“The car’s parked here, so the owner must be in the supermarket. Let’s be careful, scope it out first. If the supermarket’s fallen and there are too many zombies, we run.”
Gingerly skirting the bodies on the ground, they moved inward.
Su Yuning’s boyfriend, Lin Hao, stopped as he passed one of the corpses.
Su Yuning, walking on into the passage with the crowd, asked, puzzled, “What is it?”
Lin Hao crouched to examine one of the bodies. “This man, he’s not a zombie. He died from having his throat slit by a sharp weapon.”
Zhao Yu, another young man in the group, widened his eyes a fraction. “If he wasn’t infected with the zombie virus before death, he wouldn’t have mutated into a zombie afterward. That means this man was murdered, there’s a killer in the supermarket.”
It was only the second day of the apocalypse. To them, murder was still a horrifying, terrible thing.
No matter how big the conflict, you didn’t kill.
References[+]