Meng Shiwan walked right past him, picked up a potted plant from a shelf nearby, turned, and left, not even sparing the man a proper glance.
By the time she’d nearly wheeled the cart out of the passage, she could still hear the lingering, shaken voices inside the supermarket.
“Newcomers, let me warn you, of all the people to provoke, don’t provoke that woman. She’s a lunatic, kills without blinking.”
“That scared me half to death just now. I thought there’d be blood splattered on the spot. What on earth possessed you to provoke her?”
Meng Shiwan’s fearsome reputation had sunk deep into their minds, now they flinched at the mere sight of her.
They always felt that one wrong word and her trowel would come swinging over to slit their throats.
Meng Shiwan parked the cart beside the RV and first carried the potted plant back on board.
She likewise stuck a magnetic disc under the pot and fixed it beside the little fish tank.
It was a succulent arrangement, a few round-leaved succulents in a square pot, with a layer of green moss, and a little colored ceramic mushroom set on the moss as decoration.
Once the pot was in place, Meng Shiwan couldn’t wait to summon the RV’s cutaway diagram, and found that, sure enough, an expandable option had appeared at the pot’s position.
Her guess had been right, the pot could very likely expand into a farm.
Unfortunately she had no crystal core right now, so all her excitement was for nothing.
Meng Shiwan could only rein in her feelings and carry the supplies into the RV.
The cured meats and sausage, white sugar, honey, and such went into the half cubic meter she’d freed up in the fridge.
The trash bags, sanitary pads, and other everyday supplies went into the small patch of space cleared on the second floor.
The table salt went bag by bag into the newly expanded one-cubic-meter space on the second floor.
Once she’d put it all away, Meng Shiwan couldn’t wait to pull on her poncho, put on her swim goggles, grab her trowel, and go hunt zombies.
She urgently needed a crystal core now to expand the flowerpot and see exactly what would happen.
Outside the mall, the first- and second-floor zombies were all cleared, now she could only go to the third floor.
The zombies upstairs should have been partly drawn down earlier by the chainsaw trap she’d built, so there shouldn’t be too many left.
She didn’t build another trap and chose to charge straight up.
Shifting aside the cabinet blocking the escalator mouth, Meng Shiwan stepped onto the escalator and rode slowly up to the third floor.
The moment she stepped off, the fresh flesh and blood of a living human drew the attention of the third floor’s wandering zombies, and they lunged at her one after another.
Meng Shiwan roughly estimated there were about a dozen or so.
Several of them had their bellies torn open, intestines and organs dragging on the floor, lurching stiffly toward her.
The scene was quite revolting.
Meng Shiwan swung her trowel, cut off the heads of the nearest few, and ran toward a clothing shop.
She pushed the door and found it bolted from inside. A girl’s head poked out from behind the counter, glanced in terror at the zombies gathering outside, and quickly ducked back down.
Meng Shiwan turned. Zombies were surging in from both ends of the corridor, only a few meters away, about to be upon her.
Faced with over a dozen zombies converging on her, there was no way she could deal with them all in a short time.
One careless moment caught by them, and her life was surely forfeit.
In the deadly game with zombies, one had to be cautious, and cautious again.
Meng Shiwan gritted her teeth, vaulted over the railing ahead, and jumped straight down, her figure vanishing from sight.
“Aaah…!”
The girl secretly watching from inside the clothing shop screamed at the sight.
This was the third floor, with an open atrium design in the center, jumping from here meant falling straight to the first floor.
The mall’s floors were high, a girl falling like that, if not dead, would be half crippled.
The girl had never seen anyone leap to their death so cleanly and decisively, it truly frightened her.
After the scream escaped her, she realized things had gone wrong.
Sure enough, the zombies, having lost their target, heard the noise and began pounding wildly on the glass door.
The instant the glass shattered, she’d be torn apart and devoured by the horde.
The girl pressed herself tight against the wall in fright, face deathly pale.
Just as she despaired, she saw the slender figure in the black poncho, the one who’d just jumped, come back up the escalator.
That person circled behind the pack of zombies, swung the trowel, and cracked a zombie’s skull with one blow.
The girl nearly thought she was hallucinating.
Jumping from the third floor, not only unharmed, but back up and hacking zombies with such vigor?
Was this even human?
Meng Shiwan hadn’t fallen to the first floor, she’d used the railing to swing back to the second.
These were skills forged in the apocalypse, without some real ability, you couldn’t survive that long.
The girl in the clothing shop drew off part of the zombies’ attention, and with Meng Shiwan striking from behind, she cut down four or five of them in short order.
The dozen-odd zombies were no longer a threat to her.
When a zombie lunged at her, she’d back away first, and once she’d opened up distance, swing the trowel to burst its head with one strike.
In just a few minutes, she’d dealt with all of them.
She split their heads open one by one and didn’t find a single crystal core.
A little disappointed, Meng Shiwan went on up to the fourth floor to kill zombies.
There were a few more on the fourth floor than the third, about twenty-some.
Fortunately they weren’t densely packed, lunging in twos and threes, all dispatched by Meng Shiwan in short order.
Still no crystal cores.
“No way. Surely I can’t be this unlucky today.”
She looked toward the mall’s top level, the fifth floor.
There might be more zombies on the fifth floor, so Meng Shiwan didn’t charge straight up.
She rapped her trowel against the trash can at the fourth-floor escalator mouth, making a banging sound.
The fifth-floor zombies, hearing the noise, would lunge over and be carried down to the fourth floor by the descending escalator.
Meng Shiwan simply guarded the escalator mouth, cutting down each one as it came.
Seeing the zombies cleared, the fourth-floor survivors slowly poked their heads out of the shops.
Watching the slender black figure hack away with such abandon, they were all struck numb.
“A single zombie scares me so much I don’t dare breathe. This girl clears floor after floor of them, isn’t that too formidable?”
“Are the zombies we face really the same? One could take my life, she can take the lives of whole floors of them.”
“We’re all human, how can the gap be this big?”
Facing the survivors’ worshipful gazes, Meng Shiwan couldn’t feel happy, in fact she was a little irritable.
Reality had shown her that when a person’s luck was bad, it was truly bad.
She’d cleared three floors of zombies and genuinely hadn’t turned up a single crystal core.
When she urgently wanted to expand the flowerpot space and see what would happen, she’d cleared nearly a hundred zombies across three floors, and not one crystal core.
Meng Shiwan looked at the mall she’d now thoroughly cleared out and fell silent.
To go on hunting zombies, she could only go elsewhere, there truly wasn’t a single zombie left in this mall.
“Looks like it’s time to leave.”
The supplies she needed to stock were mostly stocked, and the storable space on the RV was basically all full.
There was no point in staying here any longer.
She walked out of the mall and saw the survivors pushing shopping carts and hand carts, gathering supplies from the other shops on the food street and stocking them in the supermarket.