Qin Zhen thought she understood humans pretty well, but after living among human society for several months, she discovered that humans were nothing like she had imagined.
Then again, when she thought about it carefully, it made sense. Humanity had suffered a devastating calamity, and the ones who survived were all freaks—at least, that was how they described themselves. After all, “the worst pests live the longest.”
Fu Qi was a major pest, and his points of interest were strange, too.
The Zombie had no intention of explaining herself. She waved a hand and said, “Stop being unreasonable.”
“I’m being unreasonable?” It was the first time in his life Fu Qi had ever been accused of such a thing. He began to question his entire existence.
The Zombie had eyes only for her phone. She ignored him, stretched out her hand to snatch back her little notebook, and then continued reaching for the phone.
Fu Qi refused to give it to her and insisted that she explain herself, leaving the Zombie utterly helpless.
She placated him perfunctorily. “All right, all right. I’ll move you, move you up one spot. Happy now?”
Fu Qi: “?”
Move his body up one spot?
The previous entry, as far as he remembered, was: “A new tomb must have at least five rooms. Otherwise, there won’t be enough space to live in.”
“You’d better just delete me,” he said.
“Ugh, you’re the one who told me to make a plan, and now that I’ve made one, you’re, you’re not satisfied.” The Zombie was getting impatient. She solemnly declared, “I’m telling you, I have a lot, a lot of things to do. I’m very busy. I really don’t have time to, to fool around with you!”
Fu Qi: “...?”
What was with that tone?
“Have you been secretly reading some kind of weird nonsense again?” Fu Qi’s gaze shifted to the Zombie’s crossbody bag, and he immediately noticed something wrong.
Her bag should have contained nothing but cosmetics, candy, and other odds and ends. So why was it bulging like that?
The Zombie noticed his suspicious stare and turned sideways to shield the bag. “Don’t be so sensitive!”
Fu Qi: “...”
Something was becoming more and more suspicious. He had a feeling that if he kept asking, she was going to say, “If that’s what you want to think, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Fu Qi, captain of the First Team in the apocalypse, highly educated, well-born, in the prime of his youth, single and childless—he had already experienced the hardships of raising a child, and now he seemed to be getting a taste of the miserable married life of having a cheating partner who argued sophistically and deflected blame.
He choked back a sigh and stared at the little crossbody bag for a moment before ending that strange exchange and asking instead, “What is it you need to do?”
The Zombie patted her closed notebook. “Didn’t you, you see it? I only have one, one hour every day that I can use to think and do, do other things... You’ve already wasted a very, very long time of mine. Hurry up and give me the phone, or I won’t, won’t have time to play!”
So that was how it was?
She spent twenty-three hours a day playing on her phone, while talking to him was lumped in with all those other chores and counted as part of the remaining hour?
Fu Qi genuinely couldn’t understand what was so entertaining about a phone that could only be used for remote communication and receiving a limited amount of simple information.
This internet addiction... If this were before the apocalypse, when the internet was still functioning on a large scale, Qin Zhen would surely have become the first zombie in history to suffer from myopia.
The fact that stories from history had survived for so long clearly meant they had something to them. Captain Fu decided that he ought to imitate Mother Meng and do his best to eliminate the negative influences surrounding the Zombie.
“Sit properly.” He started the car and began turning it around.
“What are you doing?” the Zombie asked. She didn’t actually care much about the answer, though, because her next sentence came immediately after: “Give me my phone.”
Fu Qi refused. In an even tone, he said, “We’re turning back to return the phone to that temporary team leader.”
Qin Zhen was horrified. In a panic, she came up with a perfectly respectable reason to stop him. “Then how, how, how are we supposed to con, con, contact Little Chen?”
“We don’t need to contact them anymore.” Fu Qi turned the steering wheel as he spoke. “We’ve already agreed on a meeting place, and I’ve memorized the route.”
“But, but what if something unexpected happens...”
“Then we’ll borrow a phone from the next base we pass through.” Fu Qi looked helpless and sighed. “You’re too addicted. If this were before the apocalypse, they’d probably send you to an internet-addiction rehabilitation center. It’s a terribly dark place. You know about electroshock therapy, right? People can die from it.”
The Zombie wasn’t human, so she wouldn’t die.
Fu Qi had anticipated that she would think that way, so he added, “And you’d be reported in the news and have people pointing fingers at you.”
Of course, that was all a thing of the pre-apocalyptic world. If they were being honest, no one cared about internet addiction anymore.
As he drove, Fu Qi kept an eye on the Zombie’s reaction. He watched her expression shift from worry to hesitation, then to silence, after which she began sneaking glances at him. Seizing the opportunity, Fu Qi delivered the fatal blow.
“Besides, that phone is state property. You know that, right?”
Stealing state property meant going to prison.
That one sentence completely deflated the Zombie. She muttered, “Fine, I won’t play. Why are you, you making such a big deal out of it?”
Fu Qi said frankly, “How else am I supposed to scare you if I don’t make a big deal out of it?”
The Zombie was rendered speechless. After a while, she turned around and snarled at him, “Then stop driving! I said I won’t play anymore, so why are you still going forward?”
Fu Qi laughed and pulled the car to a stop. “I’m tired from driving, and my brain’s a little foggy. Darling, it’s your turn to drive for a while, isn’t it?”
The Zombie climbed out of the car glumly to switch places with him.
She had barely made her way around to the driver’s side when two zombies caught her scent and charged over. She lowered her head, pulled two talismans from her crossbody bag, and slapped them toward the zombies’ foreheads.
Unfortunately, she was in a bad mood and had forgotten to peel the double-sided tape off the backs of the talismans. Naturally, they wouldn’t stick to the zombies’ heads. The moment she loosened her grip, the talismans drifted away on the wind.
The Zombie flew into a rage. “You wretches! How dare you bully me, too!”
She then brandished her peachwood sword and beat the zombies to the ground.
Fu Qi laughed at the sight. He thought back over the people Qin Zhen had encountered since leaving the tomb and realized that, apart from the early period when she hadn’t known that his little brother was a Taoist priest, practically everyone she had met afterward had been capable of countering her.
For a supposedly savage zombie that was said to eat human flesh and drink human blood, she had truly fallen a long way.
To prevent the Zombie’s violent instincts from being awakened, she needed a little consolation now and then.
Thus, when Qin Zhen finished beating up the zombies and opened the car door, she found a jewelry box sitting on the driver’s seat. She let out a small “Huh?” and climbed in. When she opened the box, she found a necklace and a bracelet inside.
She didn’t recognize the brand, and it wasn’t important anyway. She weighed them in her hand and asked, “How much are they?”
“I didn’t look closely when I took them, but this brand...” Fu Qi said. “The two together should be worth forty or fifty thousand.”
The Zombie’s eyes lit up. She quickly turned sideways and had Fu Qi put them on her. As he fastened the jewelry, she said, “So you hit, hit me, then give me candy. You’re bullying me.”
“That’s called giving someone a sweet after hitting them with a stick,” Fu Qi corrected her. “It’s a method for taming people. Not good. You shouldn’t learn it. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m reasoning with you, and after we finished talking, I was worried you’d feel sad, so I came over to comfort you.”
“Isn’t it all the same?”
“Fine. Then give them back.”
Of course, there was no chance she would return them. Anything valuable that fell into the Zombie’s hands became hers.
She also asked Fu Qi where he had found them. When she learned that the huge shopping mall they had visited earlier had an entire floor filled with luxury jewelry stores, Qin Zhen’s eyes went round. She nearly ignored the captain’s orders and forced them to turn back.
They didn’t turn back, but the aftereffects remained. Once they were on the road again, she kept thinking about heading toward the city center.
Fu Qi tried to bluff her. “Gold and luxury goods are all recorded. Once the apocalypse is over, the government will take inventory and sort everything out. We can’t just steal them… After I took them, I left a note at the scene. I’ll have to pay the mall back someday, too.”
“You’re trying to trick me again!” Qin Zhen said. “When you took the clothes, you didn’t—didn’t leave any note… And what if we don’t—don’t survive until the apocalypse ends? How would you pay them back?”
When it came to money, the Zombie’s brain was remarkably sharp. She continued, “My burial objects aren’t worth anything anymore. Gold and things like that definitely aren’t worth anything either. No one will care.”
Back when she was still in her tomb, Fu Qi had indeed told her that human values had undergone a major shift, and that her antique burial objects were no longer worth anything.
…If only he’d known, he would have lied to her and said that all antiques belonged to the state, and that selling them privately would land a zombie in prison.
Fu Qi said, “If they’re worthless, why are you still thinking about them?”
“I’m going to build a golden tomb.” The Zombie was filled with beautiful dreams of an extravagant golden mausoleum. She patted Fu Qi on the shoulder and generously declared, “When the time comes, I’ll give you a small room, too. It’ll be made of gold.”
“A golden mausoleum? You’re pretty greedy.”
The Zombie was indignant. “You humans chase after luxury cars and villas! Why can’t zombies do the same?”
As a princess, it wasn’t unreasonable for her to want an underground golden palace.
“Fine, fine, fine.” She had an endless supply of twisted logic, and Fu Qi couldn’t argue with her. He could only agree to take her treasure hunting once they reached the next city.
Qin Zhen was brimming with anticipation, but the journey ahead didn’t go smoothly. The north was cold, and it began snowing heavily not long afterward.
The snow blocked the roads, making it impossible to move on. Fu Qi and Qin Zhen had no choice but to find a nearby village and stay there.
The village had plenty of cellars and farmland. With those two things, there would be crops and seeds that were easy to store, which meant they would have food.
Once the food problem was solved, everything else was minor.
They couldn’t play on their phones, and the village was backward. There weren’t even any novels. Qin Zhen searched several times and found only some elementary school textbooks and childish toys. They weren’t fun, but they were just barely entertaining enough.
Every day, she either went out to look for food and kill zombies, read elementary school textbooks, study makeup, or think about the various matters in her plan. She was living a very fulfilling life.
Besides that, since she wasn’t afraid of the cold, she insisted on taking a bath every day. She also found a huge pile of body wash in the village and kept herself smelling wonderfully fresh at all times.
Life was easy, but when two people spent enough time together, there were bound to be some friction.
That night, after the Zombie had taken a lovely bath, she sprawled on the bed and flipped through an elementary school textbook by flashlight. Once she heard Fu Qi’s breathing settle into a steady rhythm, she carefully unzipped her shoulder bag—and immediately flew into a rage.
“Fu Laoqi!” She jumped off the bed, seized Fu Qi by the collar, and demanded loudly, “Where’s the stuff in my bag?!”
Fu Qi woke up and lay flat on his back, calmly meeting her gaze. “What stuff in your bag?”
“My…” The Zombie froze.
The last time they’d gone to the mall, Fu Qi had secretly taken some bracelets and necklaces. She, too, had secretly taken a novel. Having learned from Fu Qi’s example—and afraid he would confiscate it and throw it away—she had painfully limited herself to a single book, hiding it carefully in her bag. Every day, she only dared to take it out and read in secret after Fu Qi had fallen asleep.
Now the book was gone. Fu Qi must have thrown it away while she was bathing!
“Your what?” Fu Qi said without changing expression. “As far as I remember, your bag only had makeup and candy in it. Which one is missing?”
Qin Zhen: “…”
How hateful!
She reluctantly released Fu Qi and said, “N-nothing’s missing. I was just playing a prank to scare you.”
Fu Qi said, “That was truly terrifying. You almost scared me to death.”
He even pretended to rub his chest.
Qin Zhen was furious. She began plotting how to get her revenge when she noticed the phone beside them light up.
Afraid that the phone might run out of power and miss some important messages, Qin Zhen hadn’t played with it at all over the past few days. Now that it had lit up, she could finally use it openly. She hurriedly abandoned Fu Qi and picked up the phone, only to find a message from Chen Xiang.
“The Thunder Squad has lost contact. The higher-ups are looking for someone to go investigate. Captain, are you and Xiao Jiang going? Their last location was the central hospital downtown, right ahead of you!”
Fu Qi asked Qin Zhen, “Are we going, sweetheart?”
“Yes!” Qin Zhen replied.
Of course she was going. For no other reason than the words “downtown” alone nearly ensnared her soul.
“Then let’s go.” Fu Qi smiled. After a moment’s thought, he added, “The Thunder Squad has never liked our team. They might pick a fight with us when we get there. Is that all right?”
Qin Zhen didn’t answer. She returned to the bed and began rummaging through her shoulder bag.
“Sweetheart?” Fu Qi called, but still received no response.
The room was dark, and he couldn’t see what Qin Zhen was doing. He called again, “Little Zombie?”
“What did you call me?” Qin Zhen turned her head. She was still wearing her pajamas, but now she had a pair of sunglasses on her face. In a cold, imposing voice, she said, “Call me Zombie Sis!”
Fu Qi: “…”
He nearly burst out laughing.
Still, that was an impressive display of spirit. Little Zombie’s fighting spirit in the face of the enemy deserved praise.
Captain Fu straightened his expression and said, “Yes, Zombie Sis!”
