Chapter 120

They regrouped that afternoon. When Aunt Pan arrived, her clothes were still speckled with cooking oil.

She looked like an ordinary rural migrant worker. Usually, women her age worked as housekeepers, cleaners, cooks, or something along those lines.

Who would have guessed that she was actually a formidable earth-type superhuman?

Seeing the grease spots on Aunt Pan’s clothes, Jiang Cheng turned to Li Jiangbing and asked, “Is Aunt Pan still cooking for the property management office?”

“She is,” Li Jiangbing said. “I’ve even joined her for meals.”

At noon, he had taken a basin to collect his food, then carried it home to eat. That way, he didn’t have to look at Cao Jiacai’s face while eating.

The “basin” was actually the inner pot from a rice cooker.

“But Auntie doesn’t wash the dishes anymore,” Li Jiangbing continued. “Cao Jiacai arranged for us to take turns.”

Jiang Cheng paused. “Cao Jiacai arranged that?”

“Yep.” Li Jiangbing snorted.

Jiang Cheng nodded. She suddenly remembered that Manager Wang had indeed been unusually inconspicuous over the past few days.

So inconspicuous, in fact, that she could barely remember there was such a person. Whenever she needed something from the property management office, she either went to Aunt Pan, Little Fang, or Yang Xinyan.

“We have to find a way to get Auntie out of this,” Jiang Cheng said.

A society thrown into chaos was not necessarily a society without order. New forms of order would emerge spontaneously. Manager Wang was still around, but Cao Jiacai had already become the de facto head of property management.

Yet Aunt Pan, who was just as powerful a superhuman, was still huffing and puffing away, cooking for them.

“Huh?” Li Jiangbing gave her a hesitant, rising-toned response.

Jiang Cheng looked at him questioningly.

Li Jiangbing answered honestly, “Auntie’s cooking is really delicious.”

That was why Cao Jiacai had arranged for everyone to take turns washing the dishes instead of replacing Aunt Pan.

Aunt Pan was simply too honest.

Song Jingshuo walked over. “What are you talking about?”

Jiang Cheng asked him, “Do you cook for yourself at home?”

“I do.”

“Don’t you find cooking annoying?”

Song Jingshuo’s cooking was good, which meant he must actually enjoy it. He said, “It’s all right.”

“Lately, I’ve somehow started finding cooking really bothersome. It’s strange. I cooked for such a long time before too...” Jiang Cheng suddenly understood.

That was why she had abruptly lost her enthusiasm for cooking.

She had indeed spent two months cooking before, but during the previous disaster, all she had really done was cook rice and eat it with salted eggs, canned food, or pickles. The only actual cooking involved was making a pot of rice.

Now, conditions had improved. They had vegetables and meat, which meant they were supposed to eat proper meals.

But when you were cooking a proper meal for just one person, you spent an hour preparing it and five minutes eating it.

Back when she had been working, she had only needed to cook one meal a day—dinner—and even that was often bought outside.

Now, she had to prepare three meals a day.

Jiang Cheng folded her arms. “...We need to find a solution to this cooking problem.”

Li Jiangbing suggested, “Why don’t you share meals with Su Yu? She really likes cooking.”

Song Jingshuo’s gaze drifted away slightly.

His relationships with people had taken a strange turn over the past few days. Somehow, he had grown close to several people he had once been rather distant from.

He had already heard all the gossip from them: Su Yu had taken the initiative to invite Li Jiangbing to share meals, only to be coldly rejected by him.

Everyone was exasperated with him!

The original plan had been to take one hundred people to Yujing Xiangyuan. After contacting Xia Hui’s parents and asking about the situation in their residential compound, they learned that there were very few zombies inside, and not many in the buildings either.

Xia Hui’s parents had simply been spectacularly unlucky.

The family next door had originally been one of the lucky ones—a family of five who had all survived the first zombie disaster.

Then Vice Mayor Zheng ordered the schools to provide remedial classes for the children. But the parents of this family felt that life was difficult enough as it was and didn’t want their child to be worked so hard. They took the child out of school and planned to go traveling as a family, so the child could see more of the world.

They had left their door open and even dragged their suitcases out. While they were waiting for the elevator, the second wave of the zombie virus struck.

No one knew who had transformed first or who had been bitten later. In any case, all five members of the family had ended up becoming zombies together, blocking the door to Xia Hui’s parents’ apartment.

Xia Hui was stranded in the city and couldn’t return, so he thought of asking Jiang Cheng for help.

After all, Zhou Wang had taken just over thirty people and cleared out Jixiang Jiayuan. That showed just how light the disaster inside this residential compound really was.

The hardest-hit areas were downtown, along with commercial and industrial districts.

As a result, plenty of people wanted to go. By the end, the crowd had swelled to nearly two hundred.

Some had obtained new metal armor, which made them look especially imposing. Others gathered together to study how to use the crescent shovels.

Finally, Jiang Cheng said, “Let’s go.”

To reach Yujing Xiangyuan, they didn’t need to take the long way around outside. They could simply cut through.

In short, they would leave through the east gate of their own residential compound and enter Jixiang Jiayuan through its west gate. After crossing Jixiang Jiayuan, they would leave through its east gate and arrive at Yujing Xiangyuan.

Zhou Wang brought his people to meet them inside their own compound.

Jiang Cheng looked at her group, then at the people Zhou Wang had brought. In the end, she decided, “The uncles and aunties don’t need to come. Let the young people go.”

In the end, the only elderly person in Zhou Wang’s group who went with them was Uncle Eighty.

The old man had only recently awakened his superhuman ability. After doing eighty pull-ups, he had earned the nickname “Uncle Eighty.”

Technically, he was old enough for everyone to call him Grandpa, but “Uncle” made him sound younger.

Uncle Eighty was delighted to accept the name.

He was a metal-type superhuman.

Why? Because when he was young, his favorite military exercise had been practicing with bayonets.

The weapon Uncle Eighty made for himself looked somewhat like an ancient spear. He shortened it slightly for easier use—it wasn’t as long as the ones seen in television dramas—but made the spearhead much longer.

Put simply, Uncle Eighty had made himself a bayonet on a long shaft.

He followed the main group toward Yujing Xiangyuan, marching with great vigor and enthusiasm.

The fighting at Yujing Xiangyuan was not particularly intense.

Just like Jixiang Jiayuan, the compound was mostly occupied by elderly people whose children no longer lived with them.

The large group had an overwhelming advantage.

When the residents of Yujing Xiangyuan saw them arrive, some of them even came downstairs to help.

One of them was a lightning-type superhuman.

Everyone asked him, “You have superpowers. Why didn’t you come downstairs and fight the zombies yourself?”

Why had he waited until the young people from the youth apartment arrived before finally coming down?

The man replied, “No one else came down, so I didn’t either.”

If even one person had taken the lead, he might have followed. The problem was that no one had been willing to lead.

This was where Zhou Wang’s value became apparent.

Without him, Jixiang Jiayuan would probably have ended up just like Yujing Xiangyuan.

Not to mention that he had also built connections and formed an alliance with the youth apartment to secure their protection.

When human beings gathered together, having a leader or not having one often led to completely different circumstances.

The crescent shovels proved to be extremely useful.

Li Jiangbing charged forward with a crescent shovel in hand. A zombie came straight at him, and Li Jiangbing charged straight at it.

The man had not even arrived yet, but his shovel had!

Using the momentum of his sprint, he swung the shovel and sent the zombie’s head flying into the air in a single blow.

Everyone was startled.

Li Jiangbing himself was startled too. “Holy crap?”

The weapon was so effective partly because its shape was genuinely suited to killing zombies, and partly because it was simply incredibly sharp.

Young Wang had sharpened it to perfection.

Xia Hui’s parents were successfully rescued.

“Thank you, thank you!” His parents kept pressing their palms together and expressing their gratitude. “Xia Hui said you would come, but we never dared believe it. And now you’re really here.”

These few zombies were nowhere near enough to kill.

There were simply too many people. They even started fighting over the zombies.

Li Jiangbing had someone help restrain a zombie, then moved in to test something. He gave up after two seconds and severed its neck with a shovel.

No one else knew what he had been testing.

Jiang Cheng tried it too.

Living creatures couldn’t be stored in her storage space—but what about zombies?

The test proved that zombies couldn’t be stored either, but a zombie’s corpse could.

Since the only way to kill a zombie was to destroy its brain, Jiang Cheng guessed that there must still be active cells in a zombie’s brain. That caused the storage space to classify it as a “living” organism.

From a human perspective, though, even a living zombie was already dead beyond dead.

Zhou Wang finally learned what Jiang Cheng’s superpower was.

No wonder Zhao Yi had called Jiang Cheng special that morning.

He thought Jiang Cheng’s superpower was exceptionally useful. Any combat-type superpowered individual who also had a storage space like Jiang Cheng’s would be an unbeatable combination.

They could survive completely on their own in this world.

However, there had been no reports of anyone possessing two superpowers.

So Jiang Cheng could only have this one: a storage space.

It was certainly an excellent superpower, but... Zhou Wang felt that Jiang Cheng, as the leader of a group, was still lacking something. No matter how useful a superpower was, if it wasn’t combat-oriented, it somehow fell short.

Zhou Wang observed the superpowered people from the Young Apartment and discovered that many of them were improving at an astonishing rate.

A few of them were especially powerful: Guo Jun, Aunt Pan, and Cao Jiacai.

This was bad.

Zhou Wang didn’t know whether Jiang Cheng had realized it, but the three strongest superpowered people in the Young Apartment were not property owners.

Most of the time everyone spent at Yujing Xiangyuan was devoted to searching for zombies.

They had to inspect every household in the buildings.

The underground parking garage also had to be searched.

They even had to glance into every corner of the residential compound’s grounds.

In reality, there was very little actual fighting.

What no one expected, however, was that the people from the Young Apartment would end up arguing among themselves.

Calling them “their own people” wasn’t entirely accurate, because, as Zhou Wang had realized, some of them weren’t property owners.

The argument was between Zhao Yi and Gao Yuxuan on one side, and Cao Jiacai on the other.

Zhao Yi had always been even-tempered.

Before that morning, everyone’s impression of him had been: “He does a lot of work and doesn’t say much.” The meeting that morning had changed many people’s opinion of him.

Zhao Yi wasn’t the kind of top student who was all grades and no ability. He was a top student with both excellent grades and real capability.

It was simply his personality. He rarely spoke to people he couldn’t see eye to eye with. For instance, he had seldom spoken with Song Jingshuo in the past.

But he truly did have a good temper. A man as mild-mannered as him was now, unusually, losing his temper.

“Do you have any idea how flammable the insulation on the building’s exterior walls is?”

“When you joined the property management company, didn’t you receive fire-safety training?”

Across from him, Cao Jiacai looked completely unconcerned.

“What’s there to fear? I can just grab the flames and pull them back.”

“And what if you make a mistake?” Zhao Yi snapped furiously. “Once the insulation on the building’s exterior catches fire, the flames can reach more than a dozen floors within mere seconds!”

“You can only control fire from close range. If a fire spreads rapidly up a high-rise like this, even if you take the elevator after it, you still won’t catch up!”

“You can control the size of the flames. Why did you have to make them so big?”

“We’re here to rescue people, not put on a show!”