Chapter 134

Yesterday, Su Yu’s protective barrier suddenly underwent an explosive breakthrough.

Zhao Yi and Gao Yuxuan spent a long time afterward trying to figure it out.

Su Yu’s ability had been classified as a form of mental power, and it was clearly heavily influenced by her inner desires—in fact, one could say extremely so.

The tiny zombies at Gaoxin Elementary School had dealt a tremendous blow to people’s minds.

Li Jiangbing had sighed every time he shoveled away one of those little heads.

Su Yu had obviously been under immense mental pressure. So much so that she hadn’t gone to the kindergarten afterward.

Then they remembered that she was majoring in education.

She was someone who ought to devote herself to teaching, not to slaughtering zombie elementary schoolers.

Actually, Zhao Yi and Gao Yuxuan had wondered whether the girl had been on the verge of a mental breakdown at the time. But after getting into the vehicle, they had secretly observed her and decided that she didn’t seem like it.

All the way there, Su Yu had held a little girl in her arms. Her features looked both gentle and resolute.

If she really had broken down, then she had already completed the reconstruction of her inner self.

By the looks of it, both her superpower and her mind were incredibly strong.

Her thoughts had taken form, becoming a protective barrier.

This opened up a whole new line of thought for Zhao Yi and the others.

If a mental-power user could achieve a breakthrough in their superpower by shattering and reconstructing their mind, then what about other superpower users?

They thought about it for a long time, but it was difficult.

Zhao Yi said, “I can’t exactly eat dirt, can I?”

Nor could he bury himself in dirt.

Still, Zhao Yi couldn’t eat dirt—but Gao Yuxuan could touch an electrical contact.

And not just an ordinary one, either. The 220 volts in people’s homes didn’t amount to much for him. He still hadn’t reached that level yet, but Guo Jun already had.

Gao Yuxuan felt that he needed to give himself a sufficiently powerful shock.

He decided to touch a high-voltage line.

But he didn’t dare tell Zhao Yi. Zhao Yi had said that if he was ever going to touch an electrical contact, he absolutely had to call him.

Zhao Yi definitely wanted to observe from close range.

But Gao Yuxuan was afraid something might go wrong.

High voltage was no joke.

As an electrical superpower user, he was confident that high voltage couldn’t kill him.

But Zhao Yi was another matter.

So he didn’t dare tell Zhao Yi.

Instead, he secretly called Guo Jun.

Guo Jun thought it sounded interesting. After all, Gao Yuxuan would be the one touching the electrical contact, not him. There was no harm in giving it a try.

The two men sneaked out in the dead of night.

“Good thing you didn’t come,” Gao Yuxuan said. “The high-voltage arc was strong enough to break through the air. If you’d been there, you’d have died for sure.”

“Only Brother Jun could take it.”

Zhao Yi: “...Brother Jun?”

Gao Yuxuan: “Brother Jun saved my sorry ass.”

Naturally, they had prepared some equipment, such as insulated poles.

But neither of them had expected the arc to be that powerful.

Gao Yuxuan had gotten stuck to it. His entire body had crackled and flashed, and he felt as if he were about to be burned to a crisp.

The arc had broken through the air. Only Guo Jun could withstand it. If Zhao Yi had been there, he would have died on the spot.

Guo Jun used an insulated pole to knock Gao Yuxuan’s hand loose, saving his life.

Gao Yuxuan was still shaken. “Ten kilovolts is still too high for me. I overestimated myself a little.”

For an ordinary person, ten kilovolts would have turned them into charcoal in an instant. Fortunately, he was an electrical superpower user. All he had suffered was singed hair and blackened fingernails.

Zhao Yi said, “Let’s interview you about the experience.”

“Pure terror. Nothing but terror,” Gao Yuxuan said. “So no matter what you’re doing, you need a teammate covering your flank. You never know when they might have to save your sorry ass.”

Zhao Yi said, “I want to know what it feels like to have high-voltage current pass through your body.”

“Well...” Gao Yuxuan pondered. “How should I put it? I was dazed and seemed to see my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. Or maybe I experienced a kind of freedom, soaring through the sky...”

Song Jingshuo said blandly, “In heaven, you mean.”

Gao Yuxuan: “...That’s not entirely wrong, I suppose.”

He continued, “But the moment the power was cut, it all went downhill. Damn, you have no idea how hot and stuffy that little room in the substation was. We couldn’t move, so we just lay there...”

“Hold on.” Song Jingshuo was always good at noticing details that other people overlooked. “The substation?”

Gao Yuxuan: “...Yeah!”

Song Jingshuo said, “Our residential compound’s substation?”

Gao Yuxuan, his hair standing up in an afro, said, “Yeah!”

Zhao Yi didn’t believe him. “I turned on the TV when I got up this morning to see whether there had been any announcements. The electricity at home was working fine.”

“That’s why I went to touch the electrical contact in the middle of the night,” Gao Yuxuan said. “I’m not an idiot. If we’d cut the power during the day, it would have caused everyone a lot of trouble.”

The power outage in the middle of the night had gone unnoticed.

After the two electrical superpower users had lain on the ground and panted until they recovered, they began repairing the damage.

Their main goal was to avoid affecting anyone else.

“The substation had a complete stock of spare parts, and everything was organized logically and clearly,” Gao Yuxuan said admiringly. “Master Luo’s work ethic is truly meticulous.”

Master Luo’s only disadvantage was his lack of education. If he had gone to college, he absolutely would have become an outstanding engineer.

Gao Yuxuan continued, “We replaced the high-voltage disconnect switch. Then I saw that there were still enough spare parts. I figured that ten kilovolts was too much for me, but it might not be too much for Brother Jun. So I suggested that he give it a try too.”

Gao Yuxuan smacked his lips in regret. “Brother Jun was too cautious. He refused to try.”

Zhao Yi and Song Jingshuo: “...”

Anyone who saw Gao Yuxuan’s current state wouldn’t want to try it again either.

Guo Jun was currently the strongest electrical superpower user in the two residential compounds.

He had also broken through at Gaoxin Elementary School the previous day and could now directly blast a zombie’s head apart.

As long as he wasn’t surrounded by zombies on all sides, he could basically fight a number of them alone while wearing armor and emerge unscathed.

He had no particularly urgent desire or ambition to become stronger.

In fact, Zhao Yi and Gao Yuxuan weren’t pursuing “strength” either.

Their real pleasure didn’t come from becoming stronger. It came from studying superpowers themselves.

There was endless fun to be found in it.

As Gao Yuxuan talked, electricity crackled continuously in his mouth.

When he became excited and started speaking too quickly, two tiny streams of electricity even shot out of his ears.

At least he was still alive, and he didn’t seem to be suffering any serious problems.

Zhao Yi focused on the results of the experiment. “How do you feel? Did it work?”

The moment the subject came up, Gao Yuxuan became smug.

He raised his index finger. A small ball of electricity hovered above its tip, fine currents constantly flickering across its surface.

Zhao Yi and Song Jingshuo immediately noticed the difference.

“Blue?”

The core of the little electric ball was white, but its outer layer seemed to be wrapped in a blue membrane. The tiny currents that flickered continuously were blue as well.

Guo Jun’s electricity had been blue from the very beginning. Gao Yuxuan’s current, however, had always been white.

Now the blue in Gao Yuxuan’s electricity was unmistakable.

Zhao Yi was both delighted and amazed. “It really worked.”

“Actually, if Brother Jun had taken a little longer to pull me off,” Gao Yuxuan said, “I think I could have gotten even stronger.”

For once in his life, he had experienced what it felt like to be a battery being charged.

That much powerful energy had surged into his body, racing through his blood vessels.

The source of his superpower deep within his brain—or, more precisely, his superpower’s energy pool—had been forcibly expanded. The pathways through which energy traveled in his body had been forcibly widened as well.

The electrical current he could unleash was now far stronger than before.

Gao Yuxuan himself felt that he should now be on par with Guo Jun: a single electrical strike ought to be enough to blast open a zombie’s skull.

Song Jingshuo said coldly, “Why couldn’t it just kill you outright?”

Gao Yuxuan was brimming with confidence. “I’m not going to die. I believe in fate. Heaven gave me an electricity-based superpower, so there’s no way I can die from an electric shock.”

Gao Yuxuan would never admit that, at the time, he had genuinely thought he was a goner.

That blow from Guo Jun, knocking his hand away from the live electrical panel, had truly saved his life.

Zhang Lesi came over, surprised. “That’s a pretty cool new look. Why are you still carrying an electric current?”

Gao Yuxuan spoke with such animation that, once he got worked up, he couldn’t stop the tiny sparks from occasionally flickering across his body.

It did look cool.

Zhang Lesi suddenly reached out and poked him with her fingertip.

Zhao Yi cried out and reached for her hand!

He managed to grab it, but Zhang Lesi’s fingertip had already touched Gao Yuxuan’s shoulder.

Song Jingshuo then watched the two of them jerk together as if they were touching a live electrical panel.

No, not “as if.” They were touching a live electrical panel.

Gao Yuxuan quickly took a step back and pulled Zhang Lesi’s hand away.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m still having a little trouble containing the leakage.”

Zhao Yi hurriedly let go as well.

The current shot through his finger. It felt like an electric drill boring into it. The jolt was brief, but it still hurt.

Zhang Lesi shook her hand and grimaced. “Can you control it or not? If you can’t keep it contained, sit farther away from us later, okay?”

Gao Yuxuan apologized profusely.

Zhang Lesi quickly found Su Yu, who was sitting on the ground but kept craning her neck to look into the distance.

Far away, the little ones were playing.

Someone had found them a ball, and a group of children were kicking it around.

Zhang Lesi tossed a magazine onto the ground, sat down beside Su Yu, and glanced over as well. “Is everything all right?”

Su Yu said, “Jiang Cheng said he’s fine, and that Mo Li would keep an eye on him.”

Mo Li was practically a celebrity now. Whenever he strutted around the neighborhood with his tail held high, patrolling his territory, everyone made way for him.

When Jiang Cheng told him to spit out what he had swallowed from Cao Jiacai, he turned around and spat it out.

When Jiang Cheng raised a hand, he would shrink down and leap onto Jiang Cheng’s shoulder.

Clearly, he had developed intelligence—or at least something very close to it.

Zhang Lesi said, “If Jiang Cheng says it’s fine, then it’s fine.”

Su Yu felt the same way. “I know. I just can’t stop myself from looking.”

The children were too young and needed supervision. The female residents had decided that one person would sleep in the children’s dormitory with them every night, just in case something happened.

They took turns.

Su Yu had been the first one on duty the night before.

In the middle of the night, she discovered that several of the children were secretly crying.

“We’ve already posted notices on the neighborhood forums where they live, asking people to help locate them,” Su Yu said.

The children came from several different neighborhoods.

Their parents couldn’t be reached, so Su Yu had posted missing-person notices on each neighborhood’s forum. She included the children’s names, their parents’ names, and their phone numbers.

If their parents were still alive but had merely lost their phones in the chaos, perhaps they would see the posts and find their way here.

Su Yu sighed. “There’s so little information online this time...”

The internet had always been a tool used by only a portion of the population.

During the previous zombie outbreak, many people had been at home. This time, however, countless people were stranded outside and unable to return. To get online, they first had to find a computer with internet access.

The amount of available information had dropped drastically.

Most of it consisted of pleas for help:

“My name is xxx. I’m trapped in xxx Tower. Please, can someone come rescue us?”

Things like that.

The subject put a damper on their moods, and it wasn’t something they could solve anyway.

The two of them decided to change the subject.

Zhang Lesi said, “Don’t you think Zhao Yi is kind of handsome?”

Su Yu: “...”

Su Yu turned to look at her.

Zhang Lesi asked, “You don’t?”

Su Yu thought about it. “He’s... all right, I guess?”

“No,” Su Yu said. “We’ve known him for so long. What made you suddenly decide he’s handsome?”

Ever since the first zombie disaster, Zhao Yi had been a well-known figure in the neighborhood. He was also widely recognized as one of its heroes, having made an indelible contribution to keeping the neighborhood’s environment in order.

Zhang Lesi grinned. “I used to think he was just the quiet type who worked his head off. That’s not my type. But after hearing him talk about his superpower the other day, I realized he was actually pretty articulate. And he’s funny, too—not the bookish nerd I’d assumed he was.”

Su Yu said, “There’s no way he could be a bookworm if he hangs around with Gao Yuxuan.”

Zhang Lesi asked, “You don’t think he’s handsome?”

Su Yu said, “He’s all right.”

Zhang Lesi pressed her. “Then who do you think is handsome?”

Su Yu paused.