Chapter 16: District 15.
Ji Lan suddenly stood up and slammed the table. "Jing Hongyu! You're the commander-in-chief, can you please be more serious? Stop playing with that crappy video game console of yours. This isn't just about the deaths of four psychics. Ci'an is less than 60 kilometers from the center of District 15, which is our base. To kill four psychics silently, there must be more than one high-level zombie. They could have gotten here from Ci'an overnight. Don't you have any sense of danger?"
Jing Hongyu lowered his head in shame, but in fact he was secretly muttering: How could the chief commander be scolded by the deputy commander every day...
"Tomorrow, all non-combat psychics must remain at the base on standby. You and I will each lead a vanguard team to Ci'an to find Team Seven. We must find the bodies of the deceased, alive or dead. We must give the families a clear explanation. If we do encounter high-level zombies, we must immediately surround and eliminate them, otherwise, future search missions will put others in danger."
"Yes, yes, what Senior Sister said is right. Let's do as she says."
No matter how much he grumbled, when something really happened, Jing Hongyu would still follow Ji Lan's arrangements.
Senior Ji Lan was the student union president for three consecutive terms at the university. She was calm and decisive in dealing with things. He had overcome all objections and only then had Senior Ji Lan become the deputy conductor. He was lucky to have this deputy conductor.
Jing Hongyu is very self-aware. He is a sunny and cheerful boy with powerful superpowers but no leadership ability. If the affairs of the survivor base are left to him alone, District 15 will definitely be in chaos.
As the night deepened, the sound of footsteps could be heard continuously on the ground. Zombies came out from their dark places and wandered through the empty streets, unconsciously searching for living things that could satisfy their urge to bite.
In the park, beneath the overgrown vegetation that had been neglected, there was an underground cavern about five square meters in area and one meter high. The scent of flesh and blood mixed with the fragrance of grass and trees emanated from the cracks in the soil. Occasionally, zombies would stop nearby, then move on if they couldn't find their target.
There was a quilt at the bottom of the cave to isolate the moisture from the soil. Shu Lan sat on it and shone a flashlight on the loess above her head.
It was her first time sleeping underground, and she asked anxiously, "Will it really not collapse, my dear?"
Shu Maomao held up his face and answered numbly, "Mommy, you've asked me this for the third time. If I don't want it to collapse, it won't collapse, and there won't be bugs and earthworms crawling in and covering us up, because I threw them into the lake."
Shu Lan decided to trust him, lowered her head, and asked him, "You ate a lot of candy today, didn't you brush your teeth yet?"
Shu Maomao nodded honestly.
"Take out your toothbrush and water cup. You must brush your teeth every day, especially after eating candy, otherwise it will be uncomfortable when you have a toothache in the future."
The mother and son hid in the corner of the cave and brushed their teeth with mineral water. Shu Maomao savored the taste of the toothpaste and commented: "This toothbrush is not as sweet as sugar."
Shu Lan said, "Of course, but children shouldn't eat too much sweets. Today is the first time, so I'll let you go."
"Why can't I eat too much? Can't I brush my teeth every day?"
Shu Lan lied to him: "If you eat too much, you won't grow taller."
"oh."
Between sugar and growing taller, Shu Maomao chooses growing taller.
Shu Lan lay down on the quilt with her arms open, and Shu Maomao rolled in, his small body pressed close to her, like a kitten snuggling up to a big cat.
"Mommy." His voice was soft. "Tonight's dish called wakame and the one called shiitake mushroom are both delicious."
They were all things he had never eaten before.
Shu Lan closed her eyes, sleepiness immediately flooding her mind. She replied vaguely, "Well... I'll do it for you tomorrow..."
Shu Maomao put her arms on himself, smelled the faint fragrance on her body, and fell asleep contentedly.
The night passed safely and soundly. In the early morning, a hole appeared in the ground. The little boy with a pot-covered head crawled out like a mole. After listening carefully to the movements nearby, he crawled out and turned to the hole and said, "Mommy, you can come out now. The zombies have already hidden in the house."
It was only after she left Ci'an that she realized how dangerous it was outside. Hordes of zombies roamed around at night, and places that seemed safe during the day became unsafe. The mother and son could only hide underground.
A gentle and beautiful woman with a low ponytail crawled out of the cave and stretched her arms lazily.
Ah! Finally, the day has come when I wake up in the morning to smell the scent of earth and vegetation instead of the stench of a garbage dump.
She thought that she had done something bad yesterday and would have nightmares at night, but she didn't have any dreams at all and slept very contentedly. Perhaps she was a bad person at heart, so she didn't feel guilty afterwards.
The mother and son squatted by the lake where earthworms and insect corpses were floating to wash. After wiping their faces with a wet towel, Shu Lan rubbed her face and found a branch to hang it on to dry.
She picked up dry branches from the ground and lit a fire. She first boiled the mineral water in the pot, poured in a little oil, and put in noodles, kelp, potatoes, tofu skin, and simply soaked mushrooms and seaweed that she had snatched from the space.
A pot of messy hodgepodge was cooked, similar to what we had last night, but the ingredients were much richer than when we were hiding in the garbage dump.
She looked at Shu Maomao, who was eating heartily from a pot bigger than his face, and felt sorry for him silently. Children born after the global biological mutation had a very thin diet and could not eat many kinds of meat. Any vegetarian dishes could easily satisfy his taste buds.
Shu Lan thought silently. She now had two options. One was to bypass the city and go to sparsely populated rural areas, look for vegetable fields that had not yet become extinct, retire to the countryside, and be self-sufficient by growing vegetables.
The second option is to hide in the city and not provoke the zombies, but rob them when the superpower team appears.
The benefits of the second path are definitely greater than the first, because in addition to stealing food, Shu Maomao, as a plunderer, can also steal superpowers.
But to be honest, Shu Lan is not so bad as to do anything to achieve her goals. She wants to live, and so do others. As long as others do not harm her interests, she does not want to kill people or steal their superpowers.
We can't go to the survivor base we just heard about either. It's hard to hide the secret that Shu Maomao has more than one superpower in a crowded place.
She thought about it over and over again, but couldn't decide what to do next. It seemed like there was no satisfactory place for her to stay in this huge world.
"I'm done."
A tender and crisp voice interrupted Shu Lan's thoughts. She took the pot and rinsed it with mineral water with a bit of heartache.
It had to be washed; she couldn't bear to cook a second meal in an unwashed pot.
But clean water is harder to obtain than food. In the past, whenever it didn't rain for a long time, Shu Lan was afraid that she would die of thirst.
It would be nice if Shu Maomao had a water-based ability...
Shu Lan suddenly had a new idea: "Baby, can you also take away the supernatural powers of people who died not because of you?"
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