Yin Xuan was very fast.
Although she was not a speed ability user, the stamina of a second-rank ability user allowed her to move swiftly even while carrying large bags and holding a chicken, keeping a safe lead over the zombie horde.
It had taken her one hour to ride here, and it would take about two hours to return. When she reached the dandelion-covered range around Butterfly Garden, it was four in the afternoon. From far away, she shouted at the dandelions, “I’m a good person! I brought you snacks!”
Sure enough, the dandelions did not attack her and allowed her in.
Several hundred zombies charged grandly into the drifting dandelion clusters. Before they had even rushed fifty metres, they collapsed one after another. Their bodies were occupied by dandelion fluff and quickly corroded and decomposed.
Because the dandelions looked so ethereal and fairy-like, this scene did not even feel bloody. It only felt like dirt being naturally cleared away.
Inside Senyu Residential Complex, Fu Erdie watched this scene through binoculars, as well as the girl in the dandelion field who wanted to approach the complex but hesitated. She used the broadcast to invite her over.
The girl visibly brightened and ran toward the complex gate.
At this moment, there were still many ability users outside the complex who had not finished charging. They saw the tightly vine-covered gate suddenly open from the inside. A spider plant, looking strangely like it was imitating the movements of a stick figure, stood at the entrance and received the excited girl running over.
Ability users: Hm?
What was going on! Why were they still sitting outside in rows while someone else had run inside and was being received?
Don’t think they didn’t know — this girl had been sitting with them charging devices that morning!
What had she done to gain Butterfly Garden’s favour?
The group became restless and began asking around.
An ability user with particularly good hearing mentioned footsteps several kilometres away, so everyone sent this person to check the source of the sound.
Leaving aside how the ability users guessed, after Yin Xuan was welcomed in by the spider plant, she remained in an excited state.
Butterfly Garden!
This was the most special and powerful team in C City — no, perhaps in the entire central region of Hua Country! And it had really let her in!
Unlike the large areas of diseased and dead plants outside, the plants inside Butterfly Garden were extremely lush. There were no mosquitoes. Walking in, one only felt freshness, nature, and cleanliness. The ground was spotless.
Although some plants curiously came closer to examine her and occasionally startled her, this was also what made Butterfly Garden special. It made her feel both curious and somewhat awed.
Butterfly Garden had many green belts and small gardens. Basically, beneath every building there was a patch of grass, and some tables, chairs, and benches were placed around the gravel paths.
The spider plant brought her to a small garden with stone tables and chairs under Building Two, then pushed over a cup of water and a plate of fruit.
Yin Xuan’s throat moved. “Th-thank you.”
The plant-type ability user in her team was best at growing cabbage, and second-best at growing sweet potatoes. So over the past year of the apocalypse, they had been eating cabbage and sweet potatoes, cabbage and sweet potatoes, every day until their taste buds were almost numb. And even then, they could not always eat their fill.
Looking at the fresh, just-produced peach, Yin Xuan endured and endured, but still could not control herself and bit into it.
The soft, juicy sweetness of fresh fruit filled her entire mouth. Yin Xuan felt as if even her skin had unfolded!
She could no longer care about politeness and ate the peach in big mouthfuls, then went on to eat the banana and pear beside it.
Only when the fruit plate had nothing left but pits and cores did Yin Xuan burp in satisfaction. Finally, she noticed another girl sitting beside her.
This girl — she had seen her from afar before. If her eyes were not mistaken…
“Butterfly Principal…!” Yin Xuan’s voice trembled with excitement. “Sorry, you must be laughing at me. I… I couldn’t hold back…”
Fu Erdie shook her head, indicating it was fine.
“Were those few hundred zombies something you deliberately lured here from somewhere?”
The ability users outside the complex were all acting properly. At a glance, they clearly wanted to build a good relationship with Butterfly Garden and avoid making enemies. This ability user might have seen the plants corroding zombies before, so she had deliberately lured zombies over.
Sure enough, the girl before her nodded. “At noon, I saw that horde of zombies chasing two ordinary refugees. It looked like they had already been chasing them for a long stretch. I thought your plants were good at corroding zombies and seemed able to level up by absorbing zombies, so I took it upon myself to lure the zombies here. I hope I didn’t make trouble while trying to help.”
“No, thank you.” Fu Erdie refilled the water cup opposite her. “In the future, if you encounter ordinary zombies, you can lead them all toward Butterfly Garden. We have extra fruit here. If you like, you can take some back.”
Yin Xuan’s eyes lit up, but she still held back and declined. “I didn’t do anything much. It was mutually beneficial. I shouldn’t accept rewards without merit.”
Fu Erdie felt goodwill rise in her heart. “It’s not without merit. Every time I go out, I want to lure back as many zombies as possible to feed the plants that can’t move. Three hundred zombies isn’t much, but thank you.”
Yin Xuan looked at Fu Erdie, who was dressed cleanly, then at the fresh, quiet, safe complex, then at herself — dirty, barely eating enough every day, without enough water and only able to bathe in a polluted river. After hesitating for a moment, she cautiously extended a probing foot. “Principal, does your Butterfly Garden still need new employees?”
Before Fu Erdie could respond, Yin Xuan hurriedly stated her attitude. “I can endure hardship. I can do anything you ask. For example, work like this, going out to lure zombies — I’m willing to do it! As long as there are no ability zombies and they’re all ordinary zombies, I can bring these plants snacks at any time!”
Yin Xuan clasped her hands together and looked pleadingly at Fu Erdie. “As long as you give me a clean, safe place to live, I can endure any hardship!”
Fu Erdie raised her brows. “You want to live here?”
“Mm-hm!” Yin Xuan nodded repeatedly, then smiled bitterly. “Although we don’t have ability zombies or large-scale ordinary zombies threatening us outside, the environment is still very poor. Our team is considered decent, with both water-type and plant-type users, so our basic food and drink needs can be met. But for bathing, we have to draw water from a river full of human and fish corpses. Whether we wash or not, our bodies feel creepy. Without a healing ability user, if someone gets sick or develops lesions because of the river water, we can only squeeze out just enough food and water for everyone and exchange it with the neighbouring ability-user team.”
“Of course, teams with healing ability users don’t necessarily live comfortably either. They either don’t have water-type ability users, or their plant-type ability users can only grow crops like rice, which can’t be eaten directly. It needs processing and cooking, taking a lot of effort before teammates can fill their stomachs.”
“Among the dozen or so ability-user teams I’ve come into contact with, almost none have a complete set of different ability users. Everyone can only exchange resources when needed and barely maintain survival.”
This was Fu Erdie’s first direct contact with these ordinary ability-user teams. Hearing this, she was curious. “Have you not tried complementing each other and becoming one large group?”
Yin Xuan’s face was full of helpless bitterness. “We tried, but it got ugly. For example, our team mainly lacks a healer. A healing ability user once came to join us, but he was dragged back by his original team. Because of that, the two sides fought, and each side had one person seriously injured. Then that healing ability user had limited ability and could only save those with lighter injuries. In the end, neither of the seriously injured people survived, and he was forcibly taken back by his original team leader.”
“Later, another team took a liking to our plant-type ability and wanted to merge with us. Before merging, they said everything nicely. They said they only needed us to supplement three jin of grain shortage every day. But after merging, we discovered that their original plant-type user was mainly attack-focused. Much of the food they grew was poisonous and couldn’t be eaten. They only lacked three jin of grain a day when they were in their best condition. Most of the time, they lacked five or six jin.”
“But for us, producing two or three jin was already our limit. We simply couldn’t directly produce five or six jin to exchange for their team’s healing ability!”
“At the beginning of the year, we encountered a third-rank ability user who wanted to organise a group. He wanted to pull useful people from other teams and form a five-person squad. He would be responsible for combat. Another relatively famous ability user in our area, who could grow apples and potatoes, would be responsible for food. A water-type ability user with a relatively high water output would handle water. A fire-type ability user would be responsible for making fire and roasting potatoes. A healing-type ability user would handle treatment. It was a perfect team. But his perfection meant the collapse of four teams that would be broken apart.”
“No one was willing to give way. And teams with good relationships with those four teams that would be dismantled were also afraid that, after those people were taken away, they could no longer exchange supplies. Everyone united and fought that third-rank ability user, suffering heavy casualties.”
Thinking of it now, Yin Xuan still felt upset. “The team we often borrowed healing abilities from lost a younger brother who was only fourteen or fifteen. After that, everyone tacitly stopped talking about merging.”
Ordinary people had the hardships of ordinary people, and ability users were not smooth sailing either. Especially these solo or small-group ability users, who were only first-rank or second-rank. Even without deadly external threats, they still faced countless life problems.
Fu Erdie had a very good impression of this young woman and wanted to send her more fruit. Then she heard Yin Xuan mutter that there did not seem to be many zombies nearby recently, and she did not know where the two people at noon had provoked those zombies from.
After Fu Erdie asked in detail, she learned that two ordinary people riding bicycles had passed by while fleeing.
Fu Erdie raised her brows. “Ordinary people fleeing toward the city?”
The fact that C City had no zombies should only be known by some well-informed ability users. Ordinary people knew too?
Yin Xuan said, “They probably heard the recent news that zombies in many large cities have been moving toward bases one after another. It’s not just C City. Quite a few cities are emptying out now. People who want to move can survive as long as they don’t collide with the path of a zombie tide. So I’m also curious where those two fled from.”
Fu Erdie’s heart moved. “About how old were they? What did they look like?”
Yin Xuan said, “One was in her twenties, one in her thirties. The one in her twenties had darker skin. The one in her thirties was thinner. But both of them should still have some strength. They could ride bicycles on mountain roads, which is already impressive for ordinary people.”
This description seemed very much like Zhao Xiaolu and the hardware store owner downstairs.
Better to search and be wrong than miss them. Fu Erdie immediately asked Yin Xuan to get on the electric vehicle with her and go to the other fork road in the mountains to look for them.
At this moment, on a bend in a mountain road on Qingfan Mountain, one bicycle stood by the roadside, while the other bicycle had overturned into a pit twenty metres down the sloping hillside.
“Qin Huai! Don’t worry about the bike. Come this way!” Zhao Xiaolu poked at a weed-covered slope with a wooden stick. “This ground is solid. You won’t step into empty air!”
But Qin Huai held onto the luggage on the bicycle’s rear seat, especially the grain, and refused to let go.
Her face was covered in scratches from various branches. After the violent jolting from rolling off the road, she had even briefly lost consciousness for half a minute.
But after waking, she did not cry. She only held herself together and tried to pull the bike back up.
From afar, the slope looked like just one slanted surface. Only after falling down did they realise it was not as simple as it looked. Dead trees, bushes, weeds, and vines tangled together. To pull the bike up, they did not even know where to find leverage.
“Don’t worry about it. Come up first! You’re bleeding!” Zhao Xiaolu was anxious and wanted to jump down to forcibly pull her up the slope.
Qin Huai raised a hand to stop her. The face that had been numb and expressionless all this time finally showed a hint of collapse. “We only have this little food and these two bikes left. If we don’t care about them now, we won’t get far! No, to be precise, I won’t get far! You ride your bicycle and go first! I… I’ll slowly climb up…”
“What are you saying!”
Zhao Xiaolu jumped down the slope and struggled through the bushes and weeds toward the direction where the bicycle had overturned. “If we’re blaming anyone, blame me. I was the one who let go of the brakes while escaping and dragged you into rushing downhill! Your brakes weren’t as good as mine, so you were the one who fell! And at the start, if you hadn’t given me the newer bike, the one who fell would definitely have been me!”
She reached a relatively stable spot five or six metres from the pit where Qin Huai was and threw out a climbing rope. “Don’t worry about so much. Come up first!”
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