Zombies were circling outside the base. Afraid Academician Jiang would be torn apart and eaten, Qin Zhen didn’t dare linger. She got on her bike and left.
Her sense of direction wasn’t very good, but before they came to Dayu Base, Fu Qi had warned her that she might need to escort Academician Jiang away on her own. He had even given her special training for it. All Qin Zhen had to do was find the place where they had hidden the vehicle.
The vehicle was hidden in a remote village. The reason they had hidden it there was that Fu Qi had said Dayu Base wouldn’t let people leave easily. They were essentially stealing someone away, and after the theft, they would have to run. Transportation was crucial.
You had to hand it to Fu Qi—he really did think of everything.
But the more carefully he planned everything, the more irritated Qin Zhen became. She wanted to speed wildly to vent her frustration, but she was worried that Academician Jiang was old and couldn’t handle the jolting, so she didn’t dare ride too fast.
They had been traveling through the night for a while when she suddenly saw flickering headlights in the distance. It seemed to be a convoy of vehicles, speeding toward Dayu Base.
“That should be the government force sent to take over Dayu Base,” Academician Jiang suddenly said from the back seat.
Qin Zhen stopped and asked, “How do you know?”
Academician Jiang countered, “How many people did you bring to rescue me from Dayu?”
“Two.”
“That’s exactly why.” Academician Jiang was an elderly woman with a kindly face. She smiled and said, “It’s a private base, practically a local emperor’s fiefdom. How could the government possibly send only two people?”
Ye Xunqing was extremely ambitious and had been becoming more and more outrageous lately. The government had wanted to take over Dayu Base for a long time, but had never found the opportunity. On the surface, Academician Jiang’s abduction seemed to have benefited Dayu Base. In reality, it had given the government a chance to step in.
“I’m only an old woman, so I don’t know the exact details,” Academician Jiang continued. “But since Miss Ye let me out, that means she must have been involved as well… There are probably several places in Dayu Base in turmoil tonight. The deeper the internal conflict, the more serious the situation becomes, and the easier it is for outside forces to intervene.”
Qin Zhen understood.
Some princesses had no choice and could only be sent away for a political marriage. But Ye Hui, the base princess, was different. She had chosen to overthrow her biased father and useless cousin.
So she had been on their side from the very beginning.
As for their apocalypse’s First Squad, besides rescuing the important figure Academician Jiang, they also had the crucial mission of leading the charge and lighting the fuse.
And the people from Country A who had been relentlessly pursuing Fu Qi were the matches.
Once internal chaos and an external battle erupted at the same time, casualties were inevitable, and wherever there were casualties, zombies would emerge. Now that gunfire was ringing out throughout Dayu Base and everything had descended into chaos, the government convoy that had been stationed outside for some time could enter under the perfectly respectable pretext of “rescue.”
What was more, those troublesome people from Country A would also suffer a devastating blow that night.
It was truly killing one, two, three… several birds with one stone.
“So complicated!” The zombie’s brain started itching again.
“Who says it isn’t?” Academician Jiang sighed. “But there’s no other way. Wherever there are people, there will be conflict.”
Qin Zhen had originally thought Fu Qi was hateful for playing tricks on her and sending her off ahead of him. But after hearing about the struggle involving so many different forces, she felt that, given her own brain, staying far away from the center of the chaos as soon as possible was the best choice.
She suddenly wasn’t so angry anymore.
But that wouldn’t do. She had promised herself she would knock Fu Qi’s front teeth out.
“Academician Jiang, do you have senile, de-de-mentia?” Qin Zhen asked.
Academician Jiang replied politely, “Thank you for your concern. Not at the moment.”
“Then please help me re-re-member one thing,” Qin Zhen said. “When Fu Qi comes ba-back, remind me to beat him up… No, twice!”
The first beating was for tricking her by saying they were going to form a marriage alliance. The zombie had just remembered that when Fu Qi first went to question Ye Hui, what he had said was that they should stand on the same side. The idea of a political marriage had been something she herself had foolishly guessed!
Fu Qi had merely gone along with it to tease her!
How infuriating!
That had caused her to embarrass herself in front of Ye Hui. The grudge had to be settled.
The second beating was because he had so many considerations but hadn’t told her about them in advance. He absolutely had to be beaten for that.
Qin Zhen had nearly forgotten to count one of her grudges. Luckily, she had decided to find someone with a good memory to remind her.
Qin Zhen turned to look at Academician Jiang and solemnly instructed her, “Please be sure to re-remind me.”
Academician Jiang nodded and said yes. Then, with an expression full of grandmotherly affection, she said, “Don’t worry, young lady. We have a specialist in senile dementia at the research institute. I’ll have her take a look at you when the time comes.”
Qin Zhen: “…I don’t have se-senile dementia!”
She just tended to forget her grudges whenever she calmed down!
“All right, all right, you don’t,” Academician Jiang said, looking at her fondly. “A stutter is nothing to worry about either. We have someone at the base who can help with that.”
Qin Zhen: “…”
Academician Jiang looked like a learned, elegant, and perfectly proper old lady. How could she be so utterly tactless? Someone really ought to give her a copy of How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence.
Thinking about the precious backpack she had recovered, only to lose again, Qin Zhen’s mood sank. She didn’t feel like talking anymore and continued hurrying along with Academician Jiang.
The zombie’s brain wasn’t very useful. After traveling through the night, it wasn’t until dawn was just beginning to break that she remembered: since Dayu Base was going to be taken over by the government, she could simply send Academician Jiang back.
Academician Jiang disagreed, saying that the base would be too chaotic immediately after the handover and that it was safer outside.
“Do you think it’s sa-safe now?”
Qin Zhen was asking this while helping the old lady climb a tree.
They had no choice but to climb. They had taken a wrong turn halfway and wasted a great deal of fuel. Then they had run into a huge horde of zombies. With their fuel running low, the motorcycle couldn’t go very fast, so they could only find a place to hide for the time being.
The old lady was advanced in years, but she was full of energy and had a booming voice. Her voice carried so far that the zombies in the distance began drooling and charged toward them like mad.
After finally getting the old lady up into the tree, Qin Zhen began climbing herself.
Who could have imagined that one day a zombie who lived underground would actually need to climb a tree?
Of course zombies didn’t know how to do that. Qin Zhen huffed and puffed, getting stuck halfway up the trunk. In the end, she could only step on the heads of the zombies crowding beneath the tree and use them as footholds to climb up.
Once she made it up, she felt a little guilty, so she pretended to pant heavily.
“You’re a good girl, young lady. You know how to respect the elderly and care for the young.” The old lady was brimming with energy. As she continued smacking at the zombies clustered below with a branch, she spared some attention to praise Qin Zhen. “The combat squads before you would just go ‘whoosh’ and jump up, then use a rope to haul me up.”
That method was certainly much faster and safer, though it did treat the old lady rather like cargo.
Qin Zhen hadn’t realized there was such a convenient method and regretted it bitterly. She shouted, “Thanks for the tip! Next time, I’ll do that too!”
The old lady burst out laughing.
Qin Zhen had no idea what was so funny. She thought that humans really had all gone mad. Anyone who had survived was probably a lunatic.
The old lady asked again, “Young lady, are you a new member Captain Fu recruited? I’ve never seen you before.”
Qin Zhen replied, “Don’t mention hi-him to me!”
She was beginning to suspect that Fu Qi had sent her ahead with this old lady because he didn’t want to deal with the eccentric woman himself.
The old lady laughed again and said, “He’s a good child, just a little too saintly. Do you have some sort of relationship with Zhang Xiping from Beiyue?”
Qin Zhen knew why the old woman had called her a “saint.” Whenever she rode her bike, she kept dodging the zombies instead of viciously plowing into them, and she hadn’t even fired the gun Ye Hui had given her.
When the old woman asked why she wasn’t shooting, Qin Zhen agonized over it for a long while before saying that she was a Buddhist and couldn’t kill living things.
In the end, it was the old woman who picked up the gun and shot the zombies herself. Bang, bang, bang—every shot hit its mark. Afterward, she even used the empty gun to smash the zombies over the head. She was ferocious.
Fu Qi had explained to Qin Zhen that “saint” had also become a derogatory term in their era. The zombie was displeased and no longer wanted to pay attention to the old woman.
The old woman continued talking to herself. “Hey, little girl, does Zhang Xiping still forbid the people in his base from killing zombies?”
“He doesn’t allow them to kill zo—zombies?” The zombie’s curiosity was instantly piqued.
How strange! Someone else was just like her!
Could Zhang Xiping be a zombie too?
The zombie grew excited and hurriedly asked, “Who is Zhang Xiping? Where is he?”
“You don’t know Zhang Xiping? He’s from the Beiyue Base…”
Qin Zhen had always been planning to return underground, and she had only recently begun learning about the current state of human survival. Her time was limited, and she had started with matters related to their missions. Fu Qi hadn’t gotten around to telling her about the other bases yet.
Only after hearing the old woman explain did Qin Zhen learn that Zhang Xiping had originally been a researcher at the National Research Institute of the North City Base. Because he firmly believed that zombies were, at their core, human beings and deserved to be treated with respect, he refused to allow the people at his base to shoot them. As a result, everyone had always regarded him as a lunatic.
Unable to stop other people, he had left the research institute and begun working on his own. He established a small private base near the North City Base—the Beiyue Base.
One of the base’s rules was that zombies could be blocked or driven away to keep them from biting people, but they could not be killed.
To humans, this behavior truly seemed like madness. To zombies, however, it was perfectly normal. Zombies and zombies had never had any real conflict in the first place.
While suspecting that the other person might also be a zombie, Qin Zhen couldn’t help feeling a little inferior.
They were both zombies, so how had he managed to establish his own base and make it thrive without arousing the slightest suspicion from the humans? Meanwhile, she could only serve under Fu Qi, trapped in a tree by a horde of zombies while listening to this excessively talkative old woman ramble on and on.
“He created the ba—base himself?” Qin Zhen asked enviously. “That’s amazing.”
“No,” the old woman said. “Both his parents worked at the National Research Institute, and he himself is a genius in virus research. The North City government couldn’t bear to lose such a talent, so they had people build the Beiyue Base for him, made him its leader, and gave him a whole bunch of manpower to coax him into continuing his research.”
…Were they trying to fool an idiot?
“Did it actually work?”
“It did.” The old woman gave her a look that clearly said, You know how it is. “He’s a genius, after all. It’s perfectly normal for someone to be a bit of an idiot outside their field of expertise.”
“Exactly.” Qin Zhen agreed. Privately, she muttered to herself, No wonder you’re such a loony old woman too.
“Little girl, you and Zhang Xiping…”
“We have nothing to do with each other! Absolutely noth—nothing at all!” Once Qin Zhen learned that Zhang Xiping had parents and was merely an abnormal human, she had lost all interest in him. She didn’t want to hear another word about him.
The old woman seemed rather disappointed. She said, “Oh,” and ended the topic concerning the foolish genius. But perhaps because she was getting on in years and had so much to say, she asked again after a while, “By the way, little girl, what’s your name?”
Qin Zhen said, “Little Zombie.”
“Oh, Little Zhang. So you’re related to Zhang Xiping.”
“…Zombie! Zombie, zombie, zombie, zombie!”
The old woman looked puzzled for a moment, then quickly gazed at Qin Zhen with maternal affection. “Miss Zhang is such a lively and optimistic girl. You still have the energy to act cute at a time like this.”
“…”
Miss Zhang wanted to throw the old woman down to the zombies.
