The journey went smoothly, and they quickly drove out of the residential area where they had stayed for several days.
Worried that someone might come after them, Song Qing stepped hard on the accelerator and sped along for more than ten kilometers before finally slowing down.
She was so excited that she could hardly believe it. She was only a first-tier ability user, yet she had actually managed to escape the pursuit of Hua’an Base, one of the two major bases in the apocalypse, while taking the male lead with her!
“System, I must be one of the chosen ones, right?” she could not help boasting inwardly.
The System was also somewhat puzzled. After all, two years after the apocalypse began, the strongest ability users at Hua’an Base had already reached the fourth tier. How had they allowed a first-tier ability user to steal away the male lead, who could continuously generate profits for them, right under their noses?
It had already prepared itself for the male lead to be snatched away, for its Host to go through countless difficulties to raise her ability level, and then return to snatch him back. Yet in the end, the most difficult thing she had faced over the past few days was simply not having enough to eat?
Being made up of data, it did not understand all the twists and turns of human thinking. It only knew that praising its Host was something that could never go wrong.
“Mm-hmm, the Host must definitely be one of the chosen ones. Otherwise, how could you have been selected by the System to come to another world and save the male lead?”
“Hehe.” Song Qing was a young woman in her twenties, and she simply could not resist being praised. She could not help laughing out loud.
Jiang Chenyu, sitting in the passenger seat, turned his head to look at her, not understanding why she had suddenly let out such a strange laugh.
Realizing that she had gotten carried away and laughed out loud, Song Qing coughed twice and explained, “I’m just so happy. I didn’t expect us to get out of the residential area so smoothly.”
Smoothly? Over the past few days, Jiang Chenyu had used his mental powers to stop countless ability users.
The ability users from Hua’an Base had assumed that the building had already been thoroughly searched. After conducting several sweeping searches of the residential area without finding the person they were looking for, they had gradually shifted their manpower elsewhere.
Jiang Chenyu turned his head back and watched the scenery outside the car window rush past. His eyelids moved slightly, but he said nothing.
He had no intention of telling her about the ability users. Besides, he always felt that her strange laugh just now was not entirely because of this.
“Can your body handle it? The road is bumpy. Did it cause your wounds to split open?” Song Qing asked worriedly.
She had driven so recklessly just now partly because she wanted to get out of Hua’an Base’s sphere of influence as quickly as possible, but another reason was that she had previously worked in the city.
Whenever she drove, she either had to obey the speed limit or got stuck in traffic moving at a snail’s pace. She had never experienced driving at a speed of one hundred and eighty kilometers per hour. In her excitement just now, she had completely forgotten that there was someone seriously injured sitting beside her.
“I’m fine.”
Jiang Chenyu shook his head.
The moment he finished speaking, a zombie suddenly rushed into the path of the car. Song Qing slammed on the brakes.
After the screeching sound of the brakes, the zombie was knocked onto the front of the car. Its face was rotten, exposing its gums, and its terrifying appearance was pressed directly against Song Qing’s view. It even opened its mouth and excitedly let out a series of “gah, gah, gah” sounds at her!
“!!!”
Song Qing’s pupils shrank. She screamed and suddenly threw herself onto Jiang Chenyu in the passenger seat.
She buried her head straight into his chest, wishing she could curl herself into a ball and stuff herself into his arms. Her hands clung tightly to his firm arms, her fingertips turning white as her petite body trembled on top of him.
She had been living too comfortably these past few days and had completely forgotten that this was a world where she had to survive the apocalypse, with all kinds of terrifying zombies waiting for her.
The wounds Jiang Chenyu had finally healed were torn open by the force of her collision, like a small cannonball crashing into him. He let out a muffled groan of pain, the veins on his forehead throbbing.
He raised his head and glanced at the ordinary zombie outside the car window before lowering his eyes to the girl trembling in his arms. His expression darkened.
Should he just kill this useless little coward who could do nothing but scream and make noise?
At this moment, he had completely withdrawn his initial impression of her as resilient, bold, and perhaps somewhat calculating. She was simply a little coward who was afraid of everything she saw!
Why had he given up a perfectly good life and chosen to let this timid girl drag him around and put him through all this trouble every few days?
Thinking of the countless mysteries surrounding her, Jiang Chenyu took a deep breath and suppressed his killing intent. He raised his hand and gently patted her slender back.
“Don’t be afraid. It’s only a first-tier zombie. It can’t hurt us.”
His voice was gentle, though there was an undertone that sounded faintly like he was gritting his teeth.
Song Qing did not notice his dark mood. All she felt was the gentle force on her back and the warm, clear voice above her head.
Her fear gradually faded.
Song Qing’s timid nature had been with her from birth. She was most afraid of snakes and cockroaches, as well as ghosts, whether they were real or not. Now she could add zombies, which were countless times more terrifying than corpses, to that list.
When frightened by these things, her body would sometimes stiffen severely. Her mind would go completely blank with fear, leaving her unable to react at all.
The male lead was just too good! She had clearly heard his muffled groan of pain, yet he was still gently comforting her, the very person who had caused it.
She definitely had to protect him properly! She could not let him be betrayed by others and captured and taken back to a laboratory!
Song Qing summoned up her courage and pulled herself away from Jiang Chenyu’s arms. She got out of the car, took out an iron shovel, closed her eyes, and smashed the zombie that was lying on the front of the car, its leg broken from the impact, several times.
After the zombie had completely stopped making any sound, she pushed it off the car and then took a mop out of her space to clean the indescribable liquid from the front of the car.
She threw both the mop and the iron shovel onto the roadside, thoroughly disgusted by the liquid stuck to them. Anyway, she had plenty of hammers, wooden sticks, iron rods, and other tools for beating zombies stored in her space.
She quickly got back into the car, fastened her seat belt, and turned to Jiang Chenyu with a smile.
“The zombie is taken care of. Let’s go. We’ll find somewhere to settle down for a few days, get enough food, and then head north.”
Jiang Chenyu looked at her with a complicated expression.
“You’re leaving just like that?”
Song Qing nodded, not understanding.
“You don’t want the crystal?”
Jiang Chenyu truly could not understand her anymore. If her ability were at the third or fourth tier and she looked down on a first-tier crystal, that would make sense. But he could clearly sense that her ability was only at the early stage of the first tier.
A first-tier crystal was still very useful to her. Besides, crystal stones were used as currency in the various bases during the apocalypse. They could not only be used to increase one’s ability level but could also be exchanged for all kinds of things.
Crystal!!!
Only then did Song Qing realize what she had forgotten. She had only read one apocalypse novel, and several years had already passed since then.
She had forgotten most of the finer details about the level system in the novel. On top of that, her earth-type ability was so useless that she had completely forgotten the setting about using zombie crystals to increase her ability level.
She shouted in her mind, “System!!! Why didn’t you remind me about the crystals?!”
The System felt guilty and began producing garbled data. It had forgotten about the crystal setting too.
Over the past few days in the apocalypse, the Host had only killed two zombies at the beginning. After that, her days had been less like living in a world of zombies and more like surviving in a primitive world. She had simply thrown all kinds of random things into its storage space before going out to search for food.
As a result, it had neither the time nor the opportunity to think about zombie crystals.
The System guiltily remained silent.
The System could refuse to answer Song Qing, but Song Qing could not refuse to answer Jiang Chenyu.
She looked out through the car window at the zombie lying by the roadside with its brain smashed open. The thought of having to rummage through it for a crystal made her feel nauseous.
But she still had to do it. Gritting her teeth, she opened the car door and turned to Jiang Chenyu with a slightly awkward smile.
“I forgot just now. I’ll go dig it out now.”
From the way she looked completely resistant to the task, Jiang Chenyu could tell at a glance that she had never dug out a crystal before.
Song Qing cautiously got out of the car and walked over to the zombie. She took out a wooden stick and began searching through its head. Acid churned in her empty stomach, and she bit her lip tightly as the rosy color drained from her fair face.
Waaah, where exactly was the crystal? Why did something as precious as a crystal have to be hidden in such a terrifying place? It was so disgusting! She was going to be suffocated by the smell and scared to death!
Jiang Chenyu had originally intended to watch her indifferently as she dug for the crystal. But when he saw her pitiful appearance, his mental powers moved uncontrollably, pulling the crystal out and making it float in front of her.
Song Qing stared blankly at the blue, crystal-like object in front of her. Then, she excitedly took out a transparent bag, covered the crystal with it, and ran toward the car.
As soon as she got into the car, she excitedly hugged Jiang Chenyu before quickly letting go. She happily studied the crystal in her hand and looked up at him gratefully.
“Brother Yu, you’re the best! You knew I was scared, so you used your ability to find the crystal for me.”
She really could not stand rummaging through a zombie’s head to look for crystals. Looking at the blue crystal Jiang Chenyu had extracted with his mental powers, her eyes rolled around.
When she looked up again, her face was filled with an ingratiating smile. She grabbed his sleeve and shook it as she coaxed him.
“Brother Yu, from now on, I’ll be responsible for killing the zombies, and you’ll be responsible for taking the crystals out for me, okay?”
The girl looked at him expectantly. Her eyes were clear and watery, and paired with her fair, delicate little face, it was difficult to refuse her request.
But Jiang Chenyu was not one of those people. His temperament had already hardened after more than a decade of torment.
His eyes lowered to the slender, fair fingers pinching his clothes. He really wanted to tell her no, but the gentle big-brother image he had put on in front of her would never refuse her over something so trivial.
Jiang Chenyu thought with a slight headache, Had he dug himself a hole?
When she saw that he had not answered for a long time, Song Qing forced her eyes to redden and let a glimmer of tears gather in them. She looked at him pitifully.
“Please, Brother Yu. Say yes, okay?”
She had used this trick on her parents and younger brother countless times, and it had always worked. As long as she put on this pitiful expression, her parents and younger brother would agree to whatever she asked without exception.
“Fine. From now on, you can handle the hard work of killing zombies, and I’ll specialize in digging out the crystals for you.”
Jiang Chenyu gave a faint smile and placed his large, clearly defined hand on top of her dark hair, roughly ruffling it several times.
There was, undeniably, a little resentment behind it.
Song Qing did not care that the high ponytail she had tied up had been messed up by him. Thinking that she would never have to dig for crystals again, she felt completely relaxed. She straightened up, sat in the driver’s seat, and hummed a cheerful tune as she drove away.
Having the male lead’s mental powers to dig out crystals was simply the best!
Song Qing was not familiar with mental abilities. She thought this was simply one of the functions of mental powers.
If someone else had been there and seen that mental powers could actually retrieve objects from thin air, they would probably have been so shocked that their eyes would have fallen out.
After all, even the highest-level ability user at Zhuguang Base, a fourth-tier mental ability user, could not retrieve objects from thin air. They could only use their mental powers to control other people.
There were occasional zombies along the rest of the journey. Fortunately, they were all first-tier zombies, so Song Qing forced herself to endure the disgust and got out to deal with them.
The benefit was that she now had more than a dozen crystals of different colors. After absorbing some of them, she vaguely felt that her ability had reached the late stage of the first tier. She was only one second-tier crystal away from advancing.
The earth clumps she could condense had also grown larger. She could now throw one at a zombie and knock it down, then finish it off with another strike from her stick.
After driving for several hours, by noon, she could no longer stand the hunger and began looking for food along the way.
Unfortunately, the houses and shops along the main road had long since been stripped bare by passing survivors. She was unwilling to drive into the smaller roads, so she could only continue forward on an empty stomach.