When they gathered in the afternoon, Sister Pan still had spots of cooking oil on her clothes.
She looked like an ordinary rural woman working in the city—the kind of older sister or auntie who usually did housekeeping, cleaning, or cooking.
If no one told you, you’d never know she was a formidable earth-type superpower user.
Jiang Cheng spotted the oil stains on Sister Pan’s clothes and turned to ask Li Jiangbing: “Is Sister Pan still cooking for the property management?”
“Yeah,” Li Jiangbing said. “I even chip in.”
At lunchtime today, he’d taken a bowl—the inner pot of a rice cooker—to get his food, then carried it home to eat. That way, he didn’t have to look at Cao Jiacai’s face while eating.
“But now Sister Pan doesn’t have to wash the dishes anymore,” Li Jiangbing said. “Cao Jiacai has everyone take turns.”
Jiang Cheng paused slightly: “Cao Jiacai arranges that?”
Li Jiangbing snorted: “Yeah.”
Jiang Cheng nodded. She realized that over the past two days, Manager Wang’s presence had indeed become very low.
So low that she couldn’t even remember he existed. Whenever she needed something from the property management, she either went to Sister Pan, or Xiao Fang, or Yang Xinyan.
Jiang Cheng said: “We need to find a way to get Sister Pan out of this.”
In a disordered society, it wasn’t chaos that emerged—but a new order that formed spontaneously. Manager Wang was still there, but Cao Jiacai had already taken charge of property management.
Yet Sister Pan, equally strong as a superpower user, was still slogging away cooking for them.
“Huh?” Li Jiangbing’s tone went up, clearly hesitant.
Jiang Cheng shot him a questioning look.
Li Jiangbing said honestly: “Sister Pan’s cooking is really good.”
So even though Cao Jiacai had everyone take turns washing dishes, he hadn’t replaced Sister Pan.
Sister Pan was just too honest.
Song Jingshuo came over: “What are you talking about?”
Jiang Cheng asked: “Do you cook for yourself at home?”
Song Jingshuo: “Yeah.”
Jiang Cheng asked: “Don’t you find cooking annoying?”
Song Jingshuo cooked well, which meant he actually enjoyed it. He said: “It’s alright.”
Jiang Cheng said: “I’ve suddenly found cooking really annoying these past two days. Strange—I’d been cooking for so long before… Oh!”
She finally realized.
She’d been wondering why she’d suddenly lost interest in cooking.
She’d said she’d been cooking for two months before, but actually, during the last disaster, it was just rice + salted eggs / canned food / pickled vegetables. The only real cooking was steaming a pot of rice.
This time, conditions were better—there were vegetables and meat. That meant proper meals.
But cooking proper meals for one person meant an hour of cooking for five minutes of eating.
Back when she had a job, she only needed to make dinner—and she often ate out, not bothering to cook.
Now, it had become three meals a day.
Jiang Cheng crossed her arms: “…We need to figure out this cooking problem.”
Li Jiangbing suggested: “Why not partner up with Su Yu? She really likes cooking.”
Song Jingshuo’s gaze drifted a little.
His interpersonal relationships had taken a weird turn over the past couple of days—he’d inexplicably started getting close to a few people he’d previously kept at arm’s length.
He’d already heard the gossip from them: Su Yu had actively invited Li Jiangbing to partner up for meals, and Li Jiangbing had ruthlessly turned her down.
Everyone was frustrated at him for wasting the opportunity!
The original plan for going to Yujing Xiangyuan was 100 people, because they’d already contacted Xia Hui’s parents and asked about the situation inside the complex.
There were very few zombies in the complex, and not many in the buildings either.
It was just that Xia Hui’s parents had drawn the short straw—
The neighbors next door had been a lucky family of five who had all survived the first zombie outbreak.
Then Mayor Zheng had ordered schools to make up classes for the students. But the parents of this family felt that life was already hard enough—their child shouldn’t have to live so stressed—so they took leave for their kid and were preparing to take the whole family on a trip to see the country’s great sights.
The door was open, suitcases were dragged out, and while they were waiting for the elevator, the second wave of the zombie virus hit.
Nobody knew who turned first and who got bitten afterward—but in the end, all five of them were neatly accounted for, blocking the entrance to Xia Hui’s parents’ door.
And Xia Hui was trapped in the city with no way back, so he’d thought to ask Jiang Cheng for help.
Keep in mind, Zhou Wang had cleared out Jixiang Jiayuan with just over thirty people. It showed just how light the disaster was inside residential complexes this time.
The hardest-hit areas were the city center, business districts, and industrial zones.
In the end, so many people wanted to go that the crowd swelled to nearly 200.
Some were sporting new metal armor that gave them a real boost in morale. Others huddled together, figuring out how to use the crescent-moon spades.
Until Jiang Cheng said: “Let’s move out.”
To get to Yujing Xiangyuan, they didn’t need to go around the outside—they could just take a shortcut.
Simply put: exit the east gate of their own complex, enter Jixiang Jiayuan’s west gate, cut straight through Jixiang Jiayuan, and out its east gate—right into Yujing Xiangyuan.
Zhou Wang brought his people to meet them in his own complex.
Jiang Cheng looked at her own team, then at Zhou Wang’s crew, and finally decided: “Uncles and aunties don’t need to come—just the younger folks will go.”
In the end, only one elderly person from Zhou Wang’s group went—Uncle Eighty.
The old man who’d just awakened his superpower and earned the nickname “Uncle Eighty” for being able to do 80 pull-ups in a row.
His age was such that everyone could have called him Grandpa, but calling him Uncle made him sound younger.
Uncle Eighty happily accepted the nickname.
Uncle Eighty was a metal-type superpower user.
When asked, he said his favorite thing in the military back in his youth was practicing with bayonets.
The weapon Uncle Eighty made for himself resembled an ancient spear—shortened a bit for ease of use, not as long as the ones in TV dramas. But the spearhead was much longer. In essence, Uncle Eighty had made himself a long-handled bayonet.
He strode out proudly with the main force toward Yujing Xiangyuan.
The fighting intensity at Yujing Xiangyuan was low.
It was exactly the same as Jixiang Jiayuan—all empty-nest elderly.
The large team’s numbers were overwhelming.
Some residents of Yujing Xiangyuan saw them and came downstairs to help as well.
One of them was even an electricity-type superpower user.
Everyone asked: “You have a superpower—why didn’t you come down and fight the zombies yourself?”
They only came down after the Youth Apartment people showed up?
The person said: “Nobody else came down, so I didn’t either.”
If just one person had taken the lead, they might have followed. The problem was—there was no leader.
That’s where Zhou Wang’s value came in.
Without him, Jixiang Jiayuan would probably have ended up like Yujing Xiangyuan.
Not to mention that he’d also brokered an alliance with the Youth Apartment to seek protection.
When humans gather together, having a leader versus not having one often leads to vastly different outcomes.
The crescent-moon spades proved extremely effective.
Li Jiangbing charged forward with his spade as a zombie rushed at him. He ran straight at the zombie.
Before he even reached it, the spade struck first!
Using the momentum of his sprint, he swung the spade and sent a zombie head flying into the air!
Everyone was startled.
Even Li Jiangbing himself was startled: “What the hell?”
It worked so well for two reasons: first, the weapon’s form was indeed very suitable for killing zombies, and second—it was really, really sharp.
Xiao Wang had done an excellent job sharpening them.
Xia Hui’s parents were successfully rescued.
“Thank you, thank you!” His parents kept pressing their palms together in gratitude. “Xia Hui said you’d come—we couldn’t even believe it. But you really came.”
There simply weren’t enough zombies to go around.
Too many people had shown up—there was even a case of people fighting over zombies.
Li Jiangbing had someone hold a zombie still for him, then leaned in and tried something for two seconds before giving up and chopping its head off with his spade.
Nobody knew what he was testing.
But he wasn’t the only one—Jiang Cheng tested something too.
Living beings couldn’t be stored in her space—but what about zombies?
The experiment showed that zombies couldn’t be stored either—but zombie corpses could.
Recalling that the way to kill a zombie was to destroy its brain, Jiang Cheng guessed that a zombie’s brain still contained active cells, which her storage space judged as “living” organisms.
But from a human perspective, even a live zombie couldn’t be more dead.
Zhou Wang finally learned what Jiang Cheng’s superpower was.
No wonder Zhao Yi had said this morning that Jiang Cheng was special.
He thought Jiang Cheng’s ability was particularly good. If any combat-type superpower user could also have a storage space like Jiang Cheng’s, that would be an absolute game-changer—a trump card.
You could survive entirely on your own in this world.
But so far, no one had heard of anyone having two superpowers.
So Jiang Cheng could only have this one—storage space.
It was certainly a great ability, but… Zhou Wang felt that as the leader of a collective, even the best non-combat superpower just felt like it fell short somehow.
Observing the Youth Apartment’s superpower users from the sidelines, Zhou Wang noticed that many of them were improving at a very fast pace.
Among them, a few were particularly strong: Guo Jun, Sister Pan, and Cao Jiacai.
That was bad.
Zhou Wang didn’t know if Jiang Cheng had realized it—but the three strongest superpower users at the Youth Apartment were not residents.
Most of the time spent at Yujing Xiangyuan was spent searching for zombies.
They had to check every unit door-to-door.
The underground garage needed to be cleared too.
And every corner of the courtyard had to be given a once-over.
The actual combat time, on the other hand, was very short.
But unexpectedly, the Youth Apartment people even ended up arguing among themselves.
To call them “their own people” wasn’t entirely accurate—because, as Zhou Wang had realized, some of them weren’t residents.
The argument was between Zhao Yi and Gao Yuxuan vs. Cao Jiacai.
Zhao Yi had a pretty good temper.
Before this morning, everyone’s impression of him had been “works a lot, talks little.” This morning’s meeting had changed many people’s view of him.
Zhao Yi was by no means the type of high-scoring, low-ability student—he was high-scoring and high-ability.
It was just his personality—he didn’t talk much to people who weren’t on the same wavelength. For example, he used to rarely speak to Song Jingshuo.
But his temper really was good. Such a good-tempered person, rarely seen angry, was now losing his cool—
“Do you have any idea how flammable exterior wall insulation is?!”
“Didn’t you receive fire safety training when you joined the property management company?”
Across from him, Cao Jiacai looked utterly unconcerned.
“So what? I can just grab the fire back in one go.”
“And what if you make a mistake?” Zhao Yi said sharply. “Once the exterior insulation catches fire, it can spread to over a dozen floors in mere dozens of seconds!”
“You can only control fire at close range. In a fast-spreading high-rise fire like that, even if you take the elevator, you won’t be able to keep up with its speed!”
“You can clearly control the intensity of the fire—why do you have to make it so huge?!”
“We came here to save people! Not to put on a show!”
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