Luring the zombies away wasn’t hard, especially since this old neighborhood didn’t have many zombies at the moment.
Without much effort, Zhang Xiangyi shook off the zombies and ran back, only to find that Xiao Xingzhi had already moved more than half the stuff.
Seeing that, she could only put in some extra effort herself.
“Anything else left?” Xiao Xingzhi stood at the driver’s-side door, gripping the clothes pole, scanning the surroundings with a grim face. “Think again, is there anything we’ve forgotten?”
Whenever they came back next, there was no telling, they might never come back at all.
Zhang Xiangyi understood that, of course. She pulled open the passenger door, light on her feet. “Nope.”
Big villa, here I come!
Watching the unusually excited someone, Xiao Xingzhi was speechless. The way she looked made it feel like they were just heading out on a trip, not fleeing for their lives.
The road was winding but smooth. Cars sat askew and crooked along both sides, and on the ground lay people in states too horrible to look at. The zombies wandering the road without purpose came charging at their car the moment they heard the sound.
On the “empty” road, the two of them were the only meal around, and the zombies were trying very hard.
“Go as fast as you can. No telling whether this car can hold up under that pack of lunatics pounding on it.” Zhang Xiangyi watched the rearview mirror, where more and more zombies came running after them, suicidally. Even when one fell and got trampled by the ones behind, countless others surged forward over it, one after another.
Insane…
“Hold on tight.”
Zhang Xiangyi instinctively gripped the seatbelt and grabbed the handle. She even felt the urge to yank the handbrake.
“Hey! Hel—”
Before the person could finish, the rushing zombies tore them apart and devoured them.
Zhang Xiangyi’s expression turned a little ugly, though mostly she was thinking that maybe that person’s brain wasn’t all there.
Couldn’t they see the huge crowd of zombies tailing the car?
And they still shouted for help in their direction?
After who knew how many turns, they finally went a stretch without a single zombie in sight. Only then did Xiao Xingzhi ease off the speed. “There’s a gas station near here. I’ll go deal with it in a bit. You watch the supplies in the car.”
“Sure.”
Zhang Xiangyi agreed without much thought. Whether it was going to get fuel or staying here to guard the supplies, neither was a hundred percent safe.
The instant Xiao Xingzhi opened his door, Zhang Xiangyi got out too, the big meat cleaver dangling from her hand. She leaned against the car door, keeping watch on her surroundings.
Suddenly remembering what Rabbit had said at the end, Zhang Xiangyi fished out her phone. That conspicuous app sat right on the main screen, taking up the biggest, center spot.
It was simple: a white background with a single red character, Survive, blood dripping from the strokes, and animated, no less.
Zhang Xiangyi: “……” She was suddenly hit with a very ancient feeling.
She tapped into the app. Along the bottom were five icons, left to right: Home, Shop, Trade, Forum, Mine.
The Home page was straightforward, covering a lot of ground, even the game instances currently online, how many starting players each instance had had, and how many were left now. Plus a newcomer’s handbook and so on…
Shop, exactly what it sounded like.
Trade, put bluntly, was a secondhand market, though you could also post quests, search for people, and the like.
Forum, simply put, was a bit like an online message board. Right now there were a few threads, the instances that had opened earliest, like the “Apartment 44” they’d just been through, whose reply count had already hit 999+.
As for Mine…
?
Why was there a top-up screen too?
Things being the way they were, there was still a microtransaction event going on?
At the thought of how she currently owed the game 200,000 in assets, Zhang Xiangyi suddenly felt like crying.
“Hey, miss.”
Zhang Xiangyi heard someone calling her, and looked up.
What met her eyes was a young man, not the sleazy sort, around her age. Of course, all of this was inferred from his voice and build.
After all… apart from a pair of eyes and two nostrils, there really wasn’t anything else showing.
“Do you know how to get to Yuting?”
Yuting?
Where’s that?
Zhang Xiangyi shook her head in confusion. There was a place like that nearby?
The moment she shook her head, the young man looked a little crestfallen, but he thanked her gracefully and left, so normal it was abnormal.
If this were before the zombie outbreak, before the game descended, it would have been perfectly normal.
“Zhang Xiangyi!”
She had no idea whether Xiao Xingzhi had gotten cocky, daring to shout her name at full volume at a time like this. Sparing a glance at the young man running over with a big fuel tank on his shoulder, Zhang Xiangyi composed her expression again and stepped up to help steady the tank.
“Can we still get more from there?”
“We can, but our car can’t fit it.”
Together the two of them loaded the tank into the back seat. Looking at the stuffed-full cargo space, there was nothing more that needed saying.
“Let’s head back first and sort everything out, take a look at the game rules, then make other plans.” The moment Zhang Xiangyi thought of the app interface she’d just seen, she figured the most important thing right now was to study the rules thoroughly. Only by understanding the rules inside and out could you find loopholes within them to exploit.
This was also why someone who studied computer science could recite legal statutes from memory.
Of course, she only did it to keep her own interests from being harmed, not to game the system.
Xiao Xingzhi had no objections. He’d just moved the stuff and knew what was in the car. There was enough in there to keep them eating for a good while.
Not going out to forage right away was fine too.
The car started up once more. This time there was no heart-stopping experience, the farther they drove, the fewer people there were.
Zhang Xiangyi studied her phone and was pleasantly surprised to find the battery had stayed at 100 the whole time. She’d been worried the systems would collapse and humanity would be thrown back, for a while at least, into an era with no internet and no communications.
She didn’t expect the battery to stay unchanged!
Was this some little perk the game was handing out?
When she mentioned it to Xiao Xingzhi, he said, “You think it’d be that kindhearted? Look harder at the rest.”
Only then did Zhang Xiangyi snap out of it. Right, the game wouldn’t be that kind, or it wouldn’t have pulled a zombie attack while everyone was still reeling.
No one knew how many had died at the very start, or, more precisely, no one knew how many fresh greenhorns had just been added to the zombie army.
“Heh… no signal.”
No signal meant no internet, which meant humanity’s online connections were severed.
“The full battery is just so we’ll use their software more…”
“What I want to know more right now is how they pulled it off.”
Zhang Xiangyi hugged her phone, eyes shining as she stared at the game software. If she could figure out this baffling game program of theirs, did that mean…?
At that thought, Zhang Xiangyi’s hands went a little weak.
Whether she’d succeed, she didn’t know, but just thinking about it felt amazing!
Turning the tables to become the master!
Still in debt?
What debt?
“Looking at it this way, the only way for everyone to contact each other right now is through this software of theirs. No telling what the country will do next.”
No signal, no Wi-Fi, a phone was the same as a brick.
“How do you turn on the radio?” Zhang Xiangyi realized something.
Xiao Xingzhi got it too, and reached up to switch on the car radio.
A grating burst of static.
Zhang Xiangyi felt a little tense inside, though she couldn’t say what about. She still hoped the country could deploy quickly, so she could go on carrying out her plans for the future, instead of being stuck in a daze like now.
She stared fixedly at the radio, but clearly, for now there was nothing but static, and switching channels made no difference.
The biggest payoff was getting to hear static of all different kinds.
After Xiao Xingzhi switched off the radio, he said, “I’ve got an old-fashioned radio at home, we can take another look once we’re back. For now, going by the time that’s passed inside the game, only a few hours have actually gone by in real life. The flow rates are different.”
Zhang Xiangyi sighed. She understood all of this.
She just felt a little dejected.
Before long, Zhang Xiangyi spotted a particularly serene grand gate.
The gate was a blend of Chinese and Western styles, ornately carved and painted, with two large characters written in an elegant, flowing hand.
Like Granny Liu entering the Grand View Garden [1] a scene from Dream of the Red Chamber: a poor country granny gawking, wide-eyed and out of her depth, at a lavish aristocratic estate jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2691990_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2691990_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });, Zhang Xiangyi flouted traffic rules entirely, rolling down the window and sticking her head out to look, Yuting.
Yuting!
“This place is called Yuting?” Zhang Xiangyi turned to ask.
“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you?” Xiao Xingzhi glanced outside. The security guard was nowhere to be found, there wasn’t a soul around, and no zombies either. He pushed the door open and got out at once. “No idea what’s so great about the name. Yuting, when I was little I couldn’t write it, and people even called me illiterate over it.”
So that young man earlier was heading here too?
Zhang Xiangyi didn’t dwell on it. Whether that guy could make it safely to Yuting was a question for later, and even if he did get here safely, they wouldn’t necessarily cross paths.
Once Xiao Xingzhi had the gate open, he got back in the car.
Zhang Xiangyi looked at the place, where every step revealed a new view, and the occasional zombie that emerged came chasing after them, she even found them cute.
It really was nice to be rich.
Soon Xiao Xingzhi pulled the car into the courtyard. The door locks hadn’t been tampered with at all. “Do you want to go check the doors and windows first, or move the stuff in together and then I’ll give you the tour?”
“Move the stuff first.”
It was all her stuff, and she felt a little bad about it.
“Heh, heh—”
The iron gate they’d just shut clanged loudly, clang, clang, clang, as zombies slammed into it. Zhang Xiangyi set down the heavy box in her hands and grabbed the big cleaver standing nearby. “I’ll go quiet them down.”
Xiao Xingzhi: “……”
With someone handling the zombies, his guard dropped a bit, and he sped up his hauling.
The zombies knocking at the gate looked to be a married couple, from which villa he couldn’t tell. With her in-game experience now, she chopped down zombies fast, precise, and merciless, one strike, one down.
Two zombies, no effort at all, she hadn’t even warmed up.
After a moment’s thought, she called inside: “I’m going to clear out the ones nearby.” So they wouldn’t be noisy at bedtime.
“Stay safe!”
Xiao Xingzhi hauled and grunted, hauled and grunted, and once he’d finally gotten everything into the living room, he flopped straight down on the sofa without caring whether it was dusty.
Exhausted.
Good thing he worked out regularly, or today might well have finished him off.
But after lying there a while, he didn’t see her come back. He grabbed the clothes pole and headed out, called a few times at the door with no answer, and even the zombies’ “heh, heh” had stopped.
Where on earth had Zhang Xiangyi cleared off to?
She’d better not have cleaned out every zombie in the whole villa district.
Xiao Xingzhi locked the door, grabbed the clothes pole, and went off to find her.
At that very moment, Zhang Xiangyi had just rescued someone.
A girl, her face streaked with tears yet still tough, was trying to fight her way out. To not give up even in such a hopeless spot, Zhang Xiangyi liked that, so she’d stepped in to save her on the spot.
At the time the girl had been holding a wooden stick she’d pried off from somewhere, studded with plenty of rusty nails, in one hand, and a badminton racket trembling in the other, hemmed in by zombies.
More precisely, “hemmed in” by three zombies.
After saving her, Zhang Xiangyi was about to leave, but the girl called her back and asked her a question.
Did she know Xiao Xingzhi?
References[+]