Before the group in the lab office had left the cafeteria, the aunties had made sure each of them tucked two steamed buns into their pockets.
At noon, they’d each eaten one bun and saved the other as backup.
Now that rescue had arrived, and with armor and superpowers on their side, they wolfed down the remaining buns in a few bites, then picked up their weapons: kitchen knives, rolling pins, crowbars.
“Let’s go!”
During the last outbreak, Xiao Dan and her husband had fought alongside the Youth Apartments crew and had some experience with formation tactics.
She made a battle plan: when the door opened, the two in front would use chairs to push back any zombies trying to charge in, then the group would fight their way out.
But just as they’d planned—when the door swung open and zombies were about to surge in—they vanished right before their eyes.
Everyone stood there dumbfounded.
A few seconds later, a leopard-sized black cat sauntered in.
“Ah—a cat!” Wang Yunya couldn’t help gasping.
“Such a big cat!”
“Still not as big as the one outside, though.”
“How many cats are there?”
“Did the whole cat squad mutate together?”
Moli adjusted his size to fit the situation. Out in the open, a larger body had more impact against a zombie horde. But inside a building, being too big was cumbersome, so he shrank to leopard size for agility.
But the people in the office had no idea that this cat was the same elephant-sized one they’d seen from the window.
They thought there were several different cats.
Suddenly, a blur of motion—a gust of wind swept past, and another person appeared beside the cat.
Xiao Dan exclaimed with joy, “Brother Zhou!”
It was Zhou Wang—that wind-like uncle.
Wang Yunya was also excited. “Uncle Zhou!”
Zhou Wang said, “Everyone okay? Come on, if you’re fine, follow me.”
He turned. “Li Zi! Li Zi, lead the way!”
Wang Yunya couldn’t help asking, “Uncle Zhou, how are there so many powerful cats? There was a huge one outside just now.”
She’d never seen a cat that big in her entire life—as big as an elephant!
Like something out of a sci-fi movie.
“It’s the same one. Just one cat,” Zhou Wang said. “It can change size.”
He felt endless admiration.
Jiang Cheng—that girl was deep. You never knew what trump card she had hidden.
No wonder she hadn’t seemed flustered at all when he warned her about Cao Jiacai.
People like Zhou Wang and Song Jingshuo could guess that Moli hadn’t just evolved today.
Probably not even during this outbreak.
Jiang Cheng had simply chosen today to reveal him.
She’d been holding this card the whole time, and only now played it.
Zhou Wang said, “You’ve seen him before—it’s Jiang Cheng’s cat from Youth Apartments.”
Xiao Dan and Wang Yunya could hardly believe it. “That one?”
Jiang Cheng from Youth Apartments—lots of people in the surrounding neighborhoods knew her.
The image of the little black cat often perched on her shoulder had also become familiar.
That little black cat was actually this amazing?
Zhou Wang said, “I turned into a speedster. A cat getting big isn’t that strange.”
Yes—after the second outbreak, so many humans had gained superpowers that accepting Moli’s mutation came fairly easily.
People were just relieved that animals hadn’t turned into zombies instead.
Wang Yunya herself was already a fire-type user, and several others in the office had powers too—so they adapted quickly.
Everyone headed out together.
The hallway was littered with zombie corpses. The ones that had vanished from sight a moment ago had been taken down by Moli in a flash.
Zhou Wang gave them a quick rundown. “There are many types of superpowers—categorized by element: metal, wood, water, fire, earth—plus special ones. I’m wind-type—I control airflow.”
“Those buses? That’s a few metal-types inside operating them. The idea actually came from Jiang Cheng—super practical.”
“You saw it yourselves.”
Xiao Dan asked, “Brother Zhou, any word from the government?”
Zhou Wang sighed. “I’m afraid we can’t count on the government this time.”
Xiao Dan’s heart sank. She hesitated, then asked, “Did anyone else make it back to the neighborhood?”
She had left the neighborhood to find her daughter at the school.
When she drove to Xueqian Street and saw all the mother zombies, she knew she couldn’t break through. A small car was too easy for second-gen zombies to latch onto—too dangerous.
They’d learned that lesson during the last outbreak.
Luckily, she reacted fast—threw the car into reverse, ignored traffic rules and scratches, and turned around. She shook off the zombie horde on Xueqian Street, circled behind the stadium, and made her way to the middle school.
She knew the general situation back in the neighborhood. Before she left, it was just Zhou Wang leading a dozen or so able-bodied people—the rest were elderly.
She herself counted as able-bodied.
But she couldn’t abandon her daughter.
Some people said, “Go.”
They understood her drive to save her child.
Others said, “Don’t go.”
They thought it was suicide—that staying in the neighborhood was safer.
She ignored them and came anyway.
Her husband was unreachable—likely dead in the city. She figured she’d die with her daughter if it came to that.
Now it looked like no one would die—at least not today.
But what about the future?
Zhou Wang counted. “As of this morning, six had come back, then seven, eight, nine… yeah, nine total.”
Only that many? Xiao Dan’s heart sank further.
Zhou Wang said, “The other place has more—Youth Apartments, over four hundred.”
He sighed with emotion. “Look downstairs—two hundred people came to rescue you.”
Zhou Wang was always sighing. He sighed a lot.
Everyone stopped and looked out the hallway window.
Several big buses had driven in. Crowds of people got off—pouring out like a tide.
Some wore white plastic armor, others silver metal armor—they looked like a futuristic task force, really cool.
Everyone carried weapons.
Many of them had identical weapons—like ancient Chinese polearms from TV dramas. What were they called? Crescent spades?
They looked very effective.
Xiao Dan’s heart stopped sinking—hope began to rise.
When the cafeteria doors opened again, many students were crying with anxiety.
They asked, “Where’s Wang Yunya? Zhang Minghe? Xu En?”
Wang Yunya walked in behind the adults. “Here! Over here! We’re all alive!”
The students cheered and rushed over to embrace them—laughing and crying, pushing the rescuers aside.
The cafeteria aunties wiped their tears.
Jiang Cheng walked in and looked around. “A cafeteria…”
Song Jingshuo: “Perfect.”
Li Jiangbing: “…What are you two talking about?”
Song Jingshuo: “About never leaving empty-handed.”
Jiang Cheng stepped on Song Jingshuo’s foot and walked past without changing expression.
Song Jingshuo maintained his elegance and poise.
Jiang Cheng walked straight to the wall, where a row of wheeled tray carts stood—each with four racks, each rack stacked with forty or fifty stainless steel cafeteria trays.
The tray carts vanished right in front of Jiang Cheng.
Song Jingshuo said to Li Jiangbing, “See? Never leaving empty-handed.”
Li Jiangbing: “…”
He said, “You know, I kind of miss how you used to be…”
Shirt and tie, luxury watch, gentle eyes, all fake politeness.
Li Jiangbing almost felt nostalgic.
But those days were gone. Gone for good.
Take everything you can.
Youth Apartments was starting a communal kitchen.
These stainless steel trays could be used either as tableware or as raw material for the metal-type users.
Take the chopsticks too.
Take the soup buckets.
Those big iron woks were really nice.
And the meter-long spatulas.
Take it all!
The survivors were stunned. “What is this?”
Zhou Wang: “Spatial-type superpower.”
The middle schoolers: “That’s so cool.”
Jiang Cheng kept going until her head ached from the space being “stretched” to its limit, then finally stopped.
She looked at the students—a few parents among them, and two aunties.
Li Jiangbing stood with his hands on his hips. “Not a single teacher?”
The students looked down. “The teachers told us to run to the cafeteria because there was food there—we could last for days. They stayed behind to hold the zombies off. Later, we closed the doors, but only zombies came banging on them…”
During the first outbreak, people had starved to death.
Not at Youth Apartments, not at Jixiang Jiayuan—but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened elsewhere.
Not every neighborhood had been as lucky as those two, securing supplies from the very start.
For many survivors, the memory of the first outbreak wasn’t “fear”—it was “hunger.”
When everyone woke up to find the zombie virus had returned, the teachers made a quick judgment: “The cafeteria has thick walls, strong doors, and food!”
They chose the cafeteria as a shelter for the students.
Their choice was right.
There were over ninety middle schoolers in the cafeteria.
Anyone attending Gaoxin Middle School lived in the tech district.
What now?
Jiang Cheng asked the students what they wanted.
“I want to go home.”
“Me too. Can I have a knife? Our problem was we had no weapons.”
“Same. Using stools was really hard—could only defend, couldn’t attack.”
Without weapons and armor, humans facing zombies—unless they had an overwhelming numbers advantage—were at a severe disadvantage.
With weapons—and armor—everything changed.
Most of the middle schoolers wanted to go home.
Even if they’d tried calling and couldn’t reach their parents, they still wanted to go home.
The desire to return home was unwavering.
With over a thousand students in the school, Jiang Cheng hadn’t taken all the stainless steel trays—she’d left some behind because she needed space for other things.
Cui Haiyang, Old Eighties, and the other metal-type users began making armor and weapons on the spot from the trays.
Earning wave after wave of “Wow~” from the students.
Wu Jiancheng gave hands-on lessons to a few fire-type students on how to use rolling pins as tracks to accelerate fireballs for ranged attacks.
Gao Yuxuan gave one-on-one coaching to the only electric-type student—explaining the difference between precision training and intensity training, plus control techniques for electric snakes and webs.
Sister Pan told two earth-type students: “You can’t have distractions in your mind. You have to focus entirely on it—tell it exactly what shape you want it to take. The clearer your mind, the more it obeys you.”
In the end, everyone had their own armor and weapon.
The weapon of choice was uniformly the crescent spade. The more people used it, the more they realized its advantages—many abandoned their various other weapons and switched to it.
The adults said, “Come on, let’s take you home.”
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