Early the next morning, the two of them wasted no time loading up the car, prepping enough supplies to keep them from starving for a week, plus a few changes of clothes for them both.
“Meng-Meng said that once we get there we just go register at the Field-Testing Bureau directly. Auntie’s already approved us joining.”
Zhang Xiangyi sighed. No wonder everyone wanted to have connections, and everyone wanted to be a connection, it really was true that with the right person, things got easier.
If it weren’t for this relationship, they’d have to go through procedure after procedure like everyone else, instead of just showing up and registering like this.
“Meng-Meng?”
“Mm-hm.”
Xiao Xingzhi was driving, his gaze forced to linger on Zhang Xiangyi’s face, and yet he didn’t get so much as a single glance back from her.
Especially!
The corners of Zhang Xiangyi’s mouth were tilted slightly up, she looked to be in a great mood.
“You’ve barely known her any time at all, and already it’s Meng-Meng.”
Zhang Xiangyi didn’t reply.
Out of the corner of his eye, Xiao Xingzhi watched Zhang Xiangyi. When she still hadn’t answered after a good long while, he couldn’t help saying, “Anyone who didn’t know better would think you were her real older sister.”
“It’d be nice to have a little sister like that, actually.”
Xiao Xingzhi: !
Xiao Xingzhi pursed his lips, wanting to say something, then finding nothing worth saying, and in the end could only stew in his own anger.
He decided to ignore Zhang Xiangyi for one whole hour!
Jiangcheng’s tier-one shelter was on the city outskirts. At pre-apocalypse speeds, you’d get there fast, half an hour by car.
But it was the apocalypse now.
“Xiao Xingzhi, isn’t there a Huai’an Service Area along Yuanhuai Road?”
“Yeah.”
Xiao Xingzhi answered fast, and the moment he did he regretted it. This wretched mouth.
“Meng-Meng said the Huai’an Service Area has a scientist, a tier-one protected person for the shelter, and they seem to have lost contact over there.” Zhang Xiangyi frowned. “She asked if we could go nearby and take a look.”
The team sent to retrieve the scientist were pre-apocalypse special forces, a five-man squad, who had never once failed a mission before. But this time they’d gone out and lost contact.
Everyone at the shelter who could be spared had not come back. Now they were recalling people to mount a rescue.
But time was…
After reading the materials Lin Lingmeng had sent over, Zhang Xiangyi finally understood how something like this could land on players like them who hadn’t even officially joined yet.
There simply weren’t any other people left.
“There’ll definitely be danger if we go.” Zhang Xiangyi reminded him.
If it were just her alone, she’d go.
Danger and opportunity went hand in hand, and they were only being asked to go take a look nearby. If it got dangerous, run immediately, if you couldn’t get away, then your number was just up.
“Go.” Xiao Xingzhi’s brows relaxed a bit. As long as it wasn’t together with that Lin Lingmeng, nothing else made any difference to him. He even said cheerfully, “If we go and get the chance to rescue the person and bring them back, wouldn’t that be a major merit before we’ve even started the job? Promotion and a raise!”
Zhang Xiangyi: “……” Xiao Xingzhi being this excited was something she’d never seen coming.
“You think people who can make it as special forces are pushovers?” If even people like that had lost contact, then if the two of them could bring back any intel at all, it’d already be doing great.
Bringing the person back too.
Bringing the person back safely, no less.
Dream bigger, why don’t you.
Choked into silence for a beat, Xiao Xingzhi refused to back down. “What if, though?”
“Just drive.”
Xiao Xingzhi made several turns, then finally pulled onto a narrow little road, just wide enough for a single car.
Zhang Xiangyi watched the “scenery” outside and asked, “Aren’t we going to the service area?”
“Yeah, this way’s a bit shorter, and fewer people know about it.” Relatively speaking, fewer zombies too.
Zhang Xiangyi said nothing more. At the very start, before the game descended, the zombies that appeared out of nowhere had been numerous, but after the first game ended, the zombies had clearly thinned out.
Even though both the old rental neighborhood and Xiao Xingzhi’s villa were sparsely populated, the roads between wouldn’t be empty, plus the people hurt by zombies at the start would turn into zombies too.
No matter how you ran the numbers, zombies should only increase, never decrease.
But now?
The whole way over, Zhang Xiangyi hadn’t seen many, the occasional stray few got left in their car’s dust.
Strange. Too strange.
Could it be that the further along the game went, the more the zombies would vanish?
But after the zombies vanished, what then?
What kind of disaster would there be?
There was no way there’d be none, the game wouldn’t be that merciful.
Just before they reached the service area, the secondhand van slowly braked and stopped at the roadside.
“It’s only about a kilometer from here to the service area.” Xiao Xingzhi unbuckled his seatbelt, picked up the bottled water beside the driver’s seat, twisted it open, and took a sip.
“Bring a few bottles of water and some chocolate, leave the rest in the car.”
“Make sure to bring weapons.”
Zhang Xiangyi picked up the water beside her and twisted it open too, her gaze drifting onto Xiao Xingzhi. He drank with his head tipped back, the line from his jaw down to his Adam’s apple rolling slowly, an enticing curve.
Wait, enticing?
Zhang Xiangyi shook off the horrifying thought at the bottom of her heart, hurriedly drank her water and tossed it into her backpack, unbuckled, and got out of the car.
Having kept an eye on Zhang Xiangyi’s expression the whole time, Xiao Xingzhi couldn’t keep the corners of his mouth from curving up. Looked like all of it was paying off.
“What are you grinning about?”
“Ah, nothing, just thinking about rescuing the person and getting that promotion and raise. Just thinking about it makes me happy!” Hands on his hips, Xiao Xingzhi was a hair away from throwing his head back and laughing at the sky.
Zhang Xiangyi: “……”
Strapped with assorted knives, one holding an iron rod and the other a big cleaver, the two strolled toward the Huai’an Service Area.
Quiet. The whole way was quiet.
There wasn’t even a single car on the highway.
“Back to the car first.”
Looking at the service area within arm’s reach, Zhang Xiangyi swiftly reached out and grabbed Xiao Xingzhi’s arm.
Xiao Xingzhi was even quicker, he seized Zhang Xiangyi’s hand and bolted backward, and the two of them got into the car at top speed.
Back in the car—
“There’s not a single car in the whole service area?” He hadn’t seen wrong, had he…
Xiao Xingzhi murmured.
No matter the time, a service area would definitely have cars parked in it. More cars or fewer, sure, but there’d be cars.
And a service area always had people working in it. When the zombies broke out, some were bound to have fallen victim. How could it possibly be this quiet inside now?
And with no cars.
That was the biggest problem.
“Let me message Meng-Meng and the others first, then we’ll drive over.” Zhang Xiangyi quickly took out her phone and started typing, which was exactly why she’d had them retreat back to the car just now.
Report the information first, then drive over for a look, and decide from there whether to get out or floor it and leave immediately.
With the car, fleeing was faster than two legs anyway.
Xiao Xingzhi started the car again and drove over at a slow speed.
Zhang Xiangyi gripped the big cleaver tight in her hand, trying to draw some sense of security from it.
Outside the window it was the same as before, no cars, no people, no zombies, no sound.
Even as the car drove through, the greenery alongside didn’t stir in the slightest.
Zhang Xiangyi said, “Take the emergency lane, speed up a bit.”
Xiao Xingzhi silently stepped on the gas.
Pre-apocalypse, he’d have been finished.
Driving without a license, using the emergency lane with no emergency.
Perfect.
The speed picked up, but the plants in the greenbelt still didn’t change, standing as stiff and rigid as the highway signs beside them.
Because of the higher speed, they soon reached the service area.
Zhang Xiangyi’s expression turned a little grim. She quietly relayed her observation to Xiao Xingzhi before saying, “Get out?”
“Mm.”
Both of them opened their doors a touch more gently. Zhang Xiangyi glanced over toward Xiao Xingzhi, then walked to the roadside.
The plants were the common kind, red-tip photinia.
Zhang Xiangyi stood still for a moment, and only after Xiao Xingzhi came over did she slowly reach out a hand. Just as she was about to touch the leaves, she stopped again.
Her fingertips curled, hesitation in her eyes.
In the end, catching sight of Xiao Xingzhi’s restless, itching hand out of the corner of her eye, she made up her mind and got there first.
It felt just like an ordinary leaf to the touch, not solid, not rigid.
The wind stirred up by a quick wave of her hand could even make the leaves sway.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Could it be that the ones beside the service area are fine, and the problem’s out on the road?”
Xiao Xingzhi couldn’t resist reaching out to touch them a few times too, and even tore off a leaf, holding it up to the sunlight to look. “Real ugly.”
Zhang Xiangyi ignored his critique and said, “Go in?”
Xiao Xingzhi answered decisively, “Go in.”
The service area’s parking lot was huge. The two parked the car outside the service area, from here on they’d have to go on their own two legs.
The instant they stepped through that invisible gate of the service area, the scene inside changed at once.
The parking lot, originally empty, now had cars in more than half of its spaces.
Beside some of the cars there were people in twos and threes, and there were children chasing each other around. Look further in, and there was a bustling little mall.
Dining tables laid out with all sorts of food, steam wafting from the serving windows, people coming and going at the entrance of the little mall, and the long line queued up there.
The two of them stood frozen in place, their eyes full of wariness at the sight.
“I’m certain I didn’t blink.”
Zhang Xiangyi’s eyelid kept twitching. Her acceptance of all this was solid, the game really wasn’t simple, after all.
Not only were there zombies in the real world, but instances would now appear, using the world itself as the map?
This sudden change, how was it any different from a game instance?
Zhang Xiangyi immediately took out her phone, instinctively checking for signal, and only after looking did she remember that there’d been no signal since the game descended.
She logged into the “Survive” software again, and a pop-up window opened straight away.
—Player is not within the service area.
Just as she thought.
The two looked at each other, lost for words.
Xiao Xingzhi hefted the iron rod in his hand. “Say I walk in there carrying this, do you think they’ll take me for a terrorist, or some dangerous menace to society?”
When his gaze landed on the big cleaver in Zhang Xiangyi’s hand, Xiao Xingzhi fell silent at that.
“I don’t know about myself, but you definitely will.”
Zhang Xiangyi was dressed all in black, the top a fitted windbreaker jacket, her hair combed without a strand out of place, pulled up high at the back of her head, and her fair, sharply knuckled hand gripping tightly the big cleaver she’d polished till it gleamed before heading out.
Her gaze was dark and deep.
No matter how you looked at it, she looked like she was going off to kill someone.
“Tone it down a bit.”
Xiao Xingzhi reminded her in a low voice.
Zhang Xiangyi lifted the big cleaver, looked at it, then looked at the backpack slung across her body. “I don’t have anywhere to put it, though.”
There was no way she’d toss the thing either, it was her life-saving gear.
“Forget it, we’ll just say it’s fake.”
Zhang Xiangyi looked at that razor-sharp blade tip and guiltily glanced away.
The two of them headed toward the little mall.
Just as they were about to reach it, a child in a fuzzy little dinosaur outfit passed by them, a bubble machine in hand, the machine still puffing out strings and strings of bubbles, the child cheering happily: “Mama! Mama, look!”
“Slow down, slow down, don’t run so fast, you’ll fall.”
“I won’t!”
They’d thought the moment would just pass like that, but the child suddenly stopped in front of Zhang Xiangyi, eyes landing on the cleaver in her hand, and asked curiously, “Big sister, are you playing cosplay?”