Jiang Cheng felt her nose getting wet.
She opened her eyes with some difficulty and saw that Mo Li was licking the tip of her nose.
When he saw she was awake, he let out a “meow” that actually sounded somewhat gentle.
He was worried about her.
Jiang Cheng closed her eyes and rested for a moment in the lounge chair.
When she opened them again—no wonder her eyes felt uncomfortable; there was sunlight.
The clouds had completely cleared, and outside was even brighter than it had been in the afternoon.
Jiang Cheng moved Mo Li off her chest, picked up her phone from the floor, and checked the time. She had been unconscious for less than an hour.
Something suddenly flickered before her eyes.
Jiang Cheng froze, focused, but there was nothing there. Just her small apartment.
It flickered again.
Jiang Cheng held her breath.
Concentrating, the thing appeared again, though unstable.
Jiang Cheng closed her eyes.
She could still see it—it wasn’t actually “before her eyes,” but in her mind.
Jiang Cheng cleared her thoughts and focused.
The image, like a TV with poor reception, finally stabilized.
A space.
A space with no shape, but whose boundaries she could perceive.
She sensed that its volume was about the size of her bathroom.
She relaxed her focus, and the image wavered and faded from her mind.
She could still vaguely sense the connection between the space and her mind, but she had to concentrate to visualize it clearly.
What was this?
As Jiang Cheng thought “What is this?”, a small crack opened in the sealed memories of her other world, and a sliver leaked through.
[Storage Space].
Jiang Cheng understood instantly.
Understood and felt familiar.
Jiang Cheng believed that before she transmigrated to this world, in that other world, she must have possessed something similar.
Jiang Cheng stood up and looked out at the courtyard through the floor-to-ceiling window. Within her field of view, the courtyard was empty.
She was probably one of the first to wake up again.
She opened her computer, created a post on the residents’ forum:
[Those who have woken up, check in here]
[Building 2, Unit 0306 – Jiang Cheng]
After posting, she rubbed her temples and concentrated on sensing the storage space.
Then relaxed.
Then concentrated again.
Like an old TV with a bad signal—you have to smack it a few times.
After a few minutes of this back-and-forth, the old TV’s signal stabilized.
Something between her and this storage space had stabilized.
[Psychic Link]—the words flashed in her mind.
What an apt description.
But Jiang Cheng couldn’t find any related content in “Jiang Cheng’s” memory or cognition. This wasn’t something that originally existed in this world.
Had she brought it over from the other world?
Jiang Cheng glanced at the water cup on the table.
She tried, but the cup didn’t respond at all.
She placed her hand on it, her fingertips touching the cup. The next moment, the cup vanished from sight and was stored in the storage space.
[Not very useful.]
This evaluation surfaced in her mind.
It came from the intuitive feeling of those locked-away memories from the other world.
She must have possessed—or at least used—a better storage space in that other world.
She couldn’t say exactly how much better, but surely it didn’t require physical contact with the object to store it. Such a limitation was far too restrictive.
Li Jiangbing also woke up.
He was lying in bed. He had made it home, and the feeling of losing consciousness had come faster than expected. While he could still move, he’d gotten comfortable and lay down on the bed.
Sure enough, when he woke up, his back didn’t ache and he wasn’t sore.
And he hadn’t turned into a zombie!
It was only in that instant before losing consciousness that he’d thought: Wait a minute, I could turn into a zombie too, right?
Oh man, if I turned, I wonder if Jiang Cheng could take me down.
I’m too big—might be a bit of a hassle. She’d have to jump up to chop me.
But thank goodness I didn’t turn.
It’s just that my head hurts like crazy this time. The feeling in my brain is like having a pebble in my sneaker—every step, a sharp pain. My body feels hot too, like I have a fever.
Li Jiangbing rubbed his temples and went to the bathroom, turning on the faucet to splash some water on his face to cool down.
But as the tap water gushed out, he felt something strange.
Li Jiangbing froze, then stuck his hand under the stream to feel it.
After a moment, he focused, pulled his hand back, and raised it to his eyes.
A ping-pong-ball-sized sphere of water hovered and rolled in his palm—crystal clear, glittering and translucent.
It was adorable.
Li Jiangbing was dumbfounded.
It took him a long time to snap out of it. His first thought was to run and show Jiang Cheng right away!
But then he suppressed the urge—what if Jiang Cheng had turned into a zombie?
Oh man, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Let Song Jingshuo help Jiang Cheng find peace. That guy could definitely go through with it.
Song Jingshuo also woke up.
With a splitting headache, he sat up in the elevator.
He glanced at the display—the elevator had stopped at his floor.
He rested with his eyes closed for a while, waiting for the pain to subside before standing up. He had no weapons on him, so he pressed his body flat against the side wall and pressed the “door open” button.
Fortunately, the hallway was clear of zombies.
After confirming, Song Jingshuo sprinted out of the elevator, clutching his door key, and rushed to his front door to unlock it.
Once inside, he slammed the door shut and finally felt completely safe.
He scanned his home. On a display cabinet in the living room, there used to be a nice sculpture.
Later, he’d removed the sculpture and put his cleaned armor on display instead.
To commemorate that special time.
Great—the full set of armor was there, and weapons too.
And he hadn’t turned into a zombie.
Song Jingshuo first went to his computer and opened it. Sure enough, he saw Jiang Cheng’s check-in post on the forum.
Why was Jiang Cheng always the first to wake up?
That thought flashed through Song Jingshuo’s mind.
He opened the check-in post and saw that Li Jiangbing had already checked in.
There weren’t many responses yet—just a scattered few—but several were familiar names, like Su Yu and Wu Jiancheng. There were also a few names he recognized but couldn’t put faces to.
Good. As long as Jiang Cheng and Li Jiangbing were both okay, that was enough.
The next question on his mind was: How did Jiang Cheng predict the zombie virus in advance?
He knew that among the survivors of this second outbreak, many would be asking the same question.
Everyone would want to know why.
Seeing Jiang Cheng alive on the forum, Li Jiangbing was overjoyed.
He called Jiang Cheng: “I’m coming over! I have something to show you!”
Jiang Cheng: “Put on your armor before you come.”
Just in case any neighbors had turned.
Li Jiangbing put on his full set of armor.
The second virus outbreak would surely create many more zombies. There might be fighting soon.
Fully geared up and weapon in hand, he cracked his door open to check.
Clear. On tiptoe, he darted quickly to Unit 0306 and knocked lightly: “It’s me, it’s me.”
Jiang Cheng was already waiting at the door. She opened it a crack, sized him up, and let him in.
“Jingshuo’s awake too. He checked in on the post.” She walked over to the desk, bent down, and glanced at the computer.
She refreshed the page and a few more new check-in replies popped up. People were gradually waking up.
Hearing that Song Jingshuo was also fine made Li Jiangbing even more relieved.
With the iron triangle intact, there was nothing to fear!
He was eager about something else: “Jiang Cheng, Jiang Cheng! Let me show you something!”
Jiang Cheng turned her head to look at him, one hand resting on the desk.
Li Jiangbing extended a loosely clenched fist in front of her face and opened it.
In his large palm, a tiny water sphere hovered and spun.
“I think I have superpowers!” Li Jiangbing couldn’t contain his excitement. “As soon as I woke up and touched water, I got this—how should I put it—this feeling. I feel like I’m connected to the water somehow. You know, I can’t really explain it.”
The consequences of slacking off in school and having poor language skills were now showing.
Jiang Cheng straightened up and gazed at the hovering water sphere.
The moment her storage space appeared, it had triggered her memory perception—she knew she had definitely used something like it before.
But the phenomenon before her eyes didn’t awaken any cognitive memory.
She wasn’t familiar with what was happening. In terms of this world’s knowledge system, the word “superpower” was indeed the only way to describe it.
She asked: “Specifically? I mean, how does it form? How do you control it? Can you only do this much? Is there an upper limit?”
Her storage space had an upper limit.
Although she couldn’t see it visually, she could perceive the invisible boundaries and the “size” of the space.
The volume of items that could be stored was capped.
Before Li Jiangbing arrived, she had already tried storing large items like the bed, sofa, coffee table, and dining table.
She had quickly observed and summarized some characteristics of the storage space.
For example, the items stored were not restricted by shape.
Based on her perception, the space’s volume was roughly the size of her bathroom.
If she stuffed her bed into the bathroom, the sofa wouldn’t fit anymore, because the shape wouldn’t allow it to squeeze in.
So after putting the bed in, even though there was still plenty of space in the bathroom, the sofa couldn’t be squeezed in.
But the storage space was different. It wasn’t affected by shape—the sofa, bed, and coffee table all went in stacked together.
Inside, they all floated in a suspended state.
After some thought, Jiang Cheng concluded that what truly determined “capacity” wasn’t volume, but mass.
If that were the case, it made sense.
She later stuffed a few more things in and tested the threshold.
After receiving Li Jiangbing’s call, she released everything and restored the room to its original state.
Not a trace remained.
Li Jiangbing was stumped by her questions: “Huh?”
He had just been so excited to rush over and show Jiang Cheng this marvel that he hadn’t thought about any of it.
Being put on the spot, he had to rack his brain on the fly: “It’s like, when I touch water, I get this feeling.”
Jiang Cheng: “A sensation.”
Li Jiangbing: “Yeah, yeah, yeah! That’s the word—sensation! Like there’s some kind of… uh… a connection between me and the water…”
Jiang Cheng: “A psychic link.”
Li Jiangbing: “Exactly! That’s it!”
Li Jiangbing continued: “So I just focused on that sensation and concentrated, and by ‘thinking’ about it—like molding clay—it obeyed and became like this.”
“Huh?” He suddenly realized something. “How do you explain it so clearly?”
Words like “sensation” and “psychic link.”
Especially “psychic link.”
Jiang Cheng reached out a finger and poked the tiny water sphere.
The moment she touched it, the water sphere vanished.
“Wait, wait, wait???” Li Jiangbing was shocked. “Where’d it go? Where’s my ball?”
The water sphere was still in its spherical form inside the storage space, exactly as before.
But the moment Jiang Cheng opened her hand and released it into her palm, the “ball” lost its cohesion, turned into a puddle of water in her hand, and trickled through her fingers.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa?” Li Jiangbing was both surprised and delighted. “You have superpowers too!”
Just then, a cry for help rang out from the courtyard: “Help! Someone! Can anyone help!”
Both Jiang Cheng and Li Jiangbing ran to the floor-to-ceiling window and looked down.
Because people lived at varying distances, those who had believed Jiang Cheng’s warning had returned at different times.
Song Jingshuo had been lucky to pass out in the elevator—he wasn’t the last one into the neighborhood. A few people had arrived even later than him and had the misfortune of losing consciousness out in the open.
Now two of them had woken up: one hadn’t turned, and one had turned.
The turned one was chasing the unturned one.
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