Chapter 103

That said, Gao Yuxuan’s “long-distance energy projection” wasn’t completely wrong. It was just that his superpower hadn’t reached that level yet.

The security guard Cao Jiacai’s fire-based superpower had been leagues ahead of Wu Jiancheng’s right from the start, so Wu Jiancheng couldn’t help keeping an eye on him.

After the second outbreak of the zombie virus, the property management company had ten survivors in total:

Manager Wang, Yang Xinyan, Aunt Pan, two cleaners, and five security guards, including Cao Jiacai and Little Fang.

There weren’t many of them, but their rate of superpower awakening was remarkably high:

Aunt Pan had an earth-based ability.

Cao Jiacai had a fire-based ability.

Of the other security guards, one had an earth-based ability and another had a metal-based ability.

Four of the ten were superpowered.

Of course, it was inaccurate to discuss the rate of superpower awakenings by dividing people into groups such as “property owners” and “property management employees.”

The virus didn’t care whether someone owned an apartment here or worked here.

Compared with the property owner Wu Jiancheng, the security guard Cao Jiacai’s superpower was crushingly stronger.

Moreover, unlike Gao Yuxuan, who was mentally trapped by one particular idea, Cao Jiacai had continuously tested his powers ever since awakening them. Eventually, he discovered that flames could travel through wood.

His original weapon had been something similar to a police baton, supplied by the property management company. It was probably made of plastic, because the moment he ran fire through it, it gave off a foul smell.

Then he tried a steel pipe. It conducted electricity, but fire couldn’t pass through it.

Finally, he tested a mop handle. The flames traveled from one end to the other in an instant!

He had found the right material!

His current weapon was a mop handle with the mop head removed.

As the saying went, “The longer the weapon, the stronger the advantage.” When a zombie lunged at him with its bloody maw wide open, he thrust the long stick straight into its mouth. Not only did it serve the same blocking and distancing function as a U-shaped fork, but the flames rising from his hand instantly formed a fireball and shot down the wooden shaft into the zombie’s mouth.

The zombie howled as flames poured from its eye sockets, ears, nostrils, and mouth.

Before long, its brain had been cooked through, and it dropped dead.

Wu Jiancheng: “...”

Wu Jiancheng searched all over the supermarket for a mop!

Unfortunately, an entire row of them consisted of modern plastic mops.

After circling around to the back of the shelves, he finally found some traditional mops. He used scissors and pliers to remove the mop heads.

In the end, he was left with a bare wooden stick. He tried it out, and the flames passed through with remarkable ease—smoothly, just like electricity through a wire or water through a pipe.

Wu Jiancheng abandoned his steel pipe and used the wooden stick in combination with his fire-based superpower to kill two zombies in a row. He was feeling delighted when he turned around—

Cao Jiacai had advanced again.

Cao Jiacai pointed his long wooden stick at a running zombie. Although there was still some distance between them, he sent out a fireball.

The fireball traveled along the wooden stick like a plane taxiing down a runway. The instant it left the stick, it actually accelerated!

With a bang, the fireball shot into the zombie’s mouth. After all, zombies were always running around with their mouths hanging open, making for a clear and convenient target.

Of course, Cao Jiacai’s aim was also exceptionally good.

But this was exactly the long-distance energy projection Gao Yuxuan had exhausted himself trying to achieve.

Wu Jiancheng turned around and decided to give it a try as well. After fighting for so long, the fireballs he could produce were already larger than those from yesterday and that morning. When he tested whether he could project one through the air, the fireball did manage to leave the stick—but the moment it broke free, it visibly shrank.

Wu Jiancheng pushed his superpower as hard as he could. A needle-like pain throbbed through his head.

He glanced over at Cao Jiacai. Why did Cao Jiacai look so relaxed?

Cao Jiacai had begun to feel that the long stick was a bit cumbersome.

He went and swapped it for a rolling pin.

The shorter stick really was more convenient. Cao Jiacai thrust it out, and a fireball flew away. He thrust it out again, and another fireball flew away.

He looked just like a wizard from a foreign movie.

Guo Jun/Gao Yuxuan: “...”

The two electric-type ability users exchanged glances and began experimenting in perfect tacit understanding.

Once again, Guo Jun came out ahead of Gao Yuxuan. Instead of condensing into a ball like fire, his blue-white current crackled outward from the pointed end of the crowbar.

He could even control its shape—stretching it into a line to reach as far as possible, or spreading it into a net like a shield.

Gao Yuxuan was far behind. The electricity he could release from the end of his steel pipe reached a much shorter distance.

Then he discovered something. “Why is yours a different color from mine? Have you measured the voltage?”

Guo Jun said, “If I had time to measure the voltage, I’d rather use it to find a bathroom.”

He had been holding it in for a day and a night.

Gao Yuxuan carried a voltage tester with him, so he immediately pulled it out and took a reading.

“Damn, 110 volts!”

No wonder the color was different. Gao Yuxuan had been practicing all morning and had only reached sixty or seventy volts.

“How long ago did your superpower awaken?” Gao Yuxuan asked unwillingly.

Guo Jun thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Has it even been half an hour?”

Gao Yuxuan: “...”

Gao Yuxuan was determined to find the underlying pattern!

That was precisely what he and Zhao Yi had been researching!

By this point, there weren’t many zombies left inside the supermarket.

The moment Mo Li saw Jiang Cheng enter, he went over to find her. Through their telepathic link, he told her: “People. People.”

Jiang Cheng led the others behind Mo Li. They killed the zombies and rescued two people from an office.

Mo Li: “People.”

Jiang Cheng followed him again and rescued someone trapped in a restroom.

Mai Duoduo was a large supermarket with plenty of space. The group rescued more than a dozen survivors from various locations.

Several of those rescues had been guided by Mo Li.

Song Jingshuo praised him as well. “This cat is remarkably intelligent.”

By then, only a handful of zombies remained. Everyone had deliberately left them alive so the superpowered people could practice.

Whenever Cao Jiacai fired a single fireball, he was rewarded with a round of cheers.

Zhao Yi sighed to Aunt Pan, “Indoor combat really isn’t favorable for earth-based abilities.”

There was hardly any earth indoors. The floor was concrete.

Aunt Pan said, “Is that so?”

She squatted down and placed a hand on the ground.

The others used their weapons to drive a zombie toward them.

Eventually, they discovered the third-generation zombie hiding among the others. This one had developed intelligence. Surrounded and driven forward by the group, it turned around and saw Zhao Yi and Aunt Pan standing motionless nearby.

The third-generation zombie charged toward them.

Zhao Yi tightened his grip on the steel pipe, preparing to fight. He was a little nervous. During the previous disaster, he had been responsible for all sorts of miscellaneous tasks, so Jiang Cheng had kept him in the rear to handle logistics. He had very little frontline combat experience.

Suddenly, Aunt Pan let out a furious shout.

With that shout, the concrete floor instantly thrust upward into a stone-spire-like shape.

It happened to trip the third-generation zombie, which fell flat on its face and slid straight to Zhao Yi’s feet.

Zhao Yi: “...”

Someone shouted, “Hit it!”

Zhao Yi scrambled through a flurry of movements and finally beat the zombie to death.

Aunt Pan stood up and agreed with Zhao Yi’s earlier assessment. “You’re right. Fighting indoors really isn’t ideal for us. We’re better off outside.”

Zhao Yi: “...”

Aunt Pan said, “I was trying to make a ground spike and impale it in one go. Look at what you managed to make.”

Some rural farmers installed ground spikes or animal traps to defend against wild animals.

Zhao Yi now felt as though the entire world was against him.

He had already tried it when they first entered the supermarket. On a concrete floor, all he could do was barely raise something shaped like a plate—and even that took a tremendous amount of effort.

The inherent hardness of the recipient material would rebound onto the brain of the person using the power. If he pushed too hard, his head would ache terribly. It felt like his nose was about to start bleeding again.

Zhao Yi had already noticed that, when it came to superpowers, college students were utterly defeated by manual laborers.

And both he and Gao Yuxuan were master’s degree holders!

S City, Guangxiu District, No. 14 Middle School.

The students hiding in the classrooms on the first floor were the first to get their hands on weapons.

The windows on the first floor could be seen from outside, so the children were clever enough to draw all the curtains. After barricading both the front and back doors, they sat along the walls beneath the windows. When night came, they simply lay there and fell asleep.

The next day, they heard all kinds of sounds outside. Shadows of zombies kept passing back and forth across the curtains, but no one dared lift them, afraid that the zombies would spot them, smash through the windows, and get inside.

There were zombies in the corridors too. The students had nowhere to run.

After Student Council President Huang Xuetao’s broadcast, there had been no further word. The children on the first floor waited anxiously.

Then, all of a sudden, someone knocked on the glass.

“Is anyone in there?”

The children felt as though they were hearing the voice of heaven itself. They pulled open the curtains and saw several ninth-graders outside, each of them gasping for breath and carrying a bundle of iron rods.

“Open the window! We brought you weapons!”

“We’re going to charge into the school building in a little while! Be brave too. We’ll work together from inside and out and wipe out the zombies in the corridors!”

“Do you have any tape? Here, take some tape. Use your exercise books to make arm guards!”

Every child received an iron rod. It was heavy in their hands, and somehow, that weight filled them with confidence.

Their blood began to race.

“Okay! We’ll do it together!”

No adults remained in No. 14 Middle School. A group of children began saving themselves.

In the corridors, the students faced the head of discipline, tears streaming down their faces.

The man mockingly nicknamed “Shit Fatty” by the students had been savagely torn apart and eaten by the other zombies. His once plump, rounded body was now full of ragged hollows, with white bone and internal organs exposed in places.

Yet the exposed areas had mutated just like his skin. The flesh in the open wounds seemed to have solidified, no longer bleeding or rotting.

He had become one of the zombies.

The students wept.

“Director Shi, we’re sorry.”

Crying and apologizing, the children raised their weapons and charged...

The battle lasted until one in the afternoon. The students of No. 14 Middle School reclaimed control of the campus.

Everyone gathered on the athletic field, feeling as though they were in a dream. They had actually killed the zombies and won the battle without any adults to help them.

They hugged one another, cried, and celebrated.

But what were they supposed to do next?

Someone was the first to suggest, “Let’s go rescue the high school!”

This was the middle school campus of No. 14 Middle School. The high school campus was just one block away.

Whenever special circumstances arose—for example, when one of the school buildings or cafeterias was undergoing renovations—the two campuses would borrow classrooms and cafeterias from each other.

Besides, sixty percent of the high school students had advanced directly from the middle school.

The suggestion immediately won everyone’s approval.

When you were young, it was easy to get swept up in the moment. Having just won a battle, they began imagining themselves heroes.

The crowd grew excited, and everyone unanimously decided to go rescue the high school!

Little Huang, however, decided to drop out.

“I’m sorry, but my father is already gone, and my mother only has me. I have to go save her.”

“Good luck, everyone.”

The middle school’s self-rescue operation had been led by Senior Huang Xuetao, and the students all trusted him deeply. They were reluctant to see him leave.

Wu Shuchen went so far as to call out, “Senior, wait for me!”

The boy, who looked like an elementary school student, summoned every ounce of his strength. Even as his nose began to bleed, he used his superpower to create a set of iron shoulder armor modeled after an adult’s protective gear for Senior Huang Xuetao.

It protected his shoulders, the back of his neck, and his ears, guarding against a sudden zombie attack.

Although Senior Huang possessed the ability to sense danger, if he was going to save his mother, he couldn’t simply avoid every threat. He could only charge straight into danger.

Little Huang’s eyes grew a little sore.

He was reluctant to leave his classmates too. But he also knew that he wasn’t a superhero. Their strength lay in their unity and courage, not in whether he was the one leading them.

His classmates helped him put on the shoulder armor. Someone even donated a shoelace to fasten it securely.

They escorted him to the bicycle shelter.

Little Huang swung onto his bicycle and tucked the iron rod, stained with zombie blood, behind his waist. He looked back at everyone.

“Goodbye,” he said. “Take care.”

Who would have thought that, at their age, they would already be saying words like those?

Who could predict what fate had in store?

Some of the students began to cry.

“You take care too!”

They watched Little Huang ride away. Once they had wiped away their tears, the children who had just finished crying shouted, “Let’s go! To the high school!”

With exercise books strapped around their arms and iron rods clenched in their hands, the children bravely walked out of the campus. Along the way, they killed the zombies in the streets.

They had not even made it out of the block when they encountered a group of high school students coming toward them.

Both sides were stunned.

The high school students asked, “What are you doing?”

The middle school students replied, “We were coming to rescue you! What are you doing?”

“We came to rescue you!”

The high school campus was in much better shape than the middle school.

Many high school girls were even a head and a half taller than a first-year middle school boy like Wu Shuchen. High school students’ bodies had already developed to nearly adult proportions. In fact, for many people, high school was the physical peak of their entire lives.

The high school’s self-rescue effort had begun with the baseball team.

Because there was a baseball team, there were baseball bats—and those bats became the first weapons used in their rescue operation.

Then, one superpower after another awakened. The students quickly figured out how to improve and use their abilities, putting them into battle.

Thanks to that fighting strength, several of the high school’s teachers had survived. They even had adults on their side.

The older students and younger students met halfway, finding one another as if they were long-lost family. They cried and laughed together.

Many of the high school girls looked at the first-year middle school students as though they were adorable little chicks.

It was enough to break their hearts.

The teachers asked, “Have you eaten? Do you have anything to eat?”

Only then did the middle school students realize that they were so hungry their stomachs hurt. The high school students didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Come on, let’s go to the high school.”

“Our cafeteria aunties are still here. They’re cooking right now!”

“Come on, we’ll go eat together!”