Crazy Training

Wang Jinbao and the others had run into Scarface yesterday, after the zombies appeared.

At the time, he and several other security guards had been carefully fishing food out of the water in the hallway when several heads suddenly surfaced.

They were so frightened that they threw away their poles and turned to run.

But with guns pressed against them, they did not dare move.

The ones who had emerged from the water were Scarface and two others.

All three were covered in blood and still wore prison uniforms.

The blood had clearly stirred up the zombies sleeping in the water. Right behind them, waves of zombies were struggling up from the water in a dark mass.

Luckily, zombies swam slowly. Otherwise, the three of them might not have escaped.

But no matter how slow they were, there were simply too many of them.

The instant Scarface and his two companions saw the guards, their eyes lit up. They held them at gunpoint and made them lead the way to somewhere safe.

There had originally been four security guards. They hesitated for only a moment before two of them were shot dead and thrown into the water.

With two more corpses in the water, the zombies became even more frantic.

Seeing this, Wang Jinbao and Li Yang hurriedly changed their tune and led Scarface's group to the house they had claimed earlier.

That was how they avoided being hacked to death on the spot.

This house had originally belonged to a family of four: an old woman, her son and daughter-in-law, and her granddaughter.

But before the heavy rain began, the young couple had taken their daughter to an amusement park out of town and had not made it back yet.

Wang Jinbao and the others knew this old woman too. Her legs were not very mobile, and she usually loved stockpiling bags and boxes of food at home.

The older generation had known hunger, so many of them liked to keep extra food at home for peace of mind.

Unlike young people nowadays, who were used to ordering takeout or eating out.

Eight out of ten people could open their refrigerators and find nothing but water and drinks—not even an egg.

That was why, after the zombie outbreak, when they realized the patrol officers had stopped coming around, they had dared to break into the old woman's home.

At first, the old woman refused to let them in, but Wang Jinbao worked for property management and had a spare key.

He simply unlocked the door and went in.

The old woman cursed them viciously, and after the security captain hit her a few times, she died just like that.

Wang Jinbao had been terrified when he first saw those criminals. But after calming down and thinking it over carefully, he felt that running into Scarface and the others might not have been bad luck after all.

It was an opportunity!

The apocalypse was here now. Whoever had the biggest fist called the shots!

And Scarface was skilled, ruthless, and vicious.

The security captain had been the strongest among them, but so what if he was strong?

No matter how good your martial arts were, they could not beat a kitchen knife.

And no matter how fast a kitchen knife was, it was not faster than a bullet!

Wang Jinbao knew that the nearest prison in City A was several kilometers away. The fact that they had managed to run all the way here already proved what they were capable of.

He knew his own limits. He was just an ordinary man.

He was not good in a fight, nor could he run faster than anyone else.

Rather than struggle on his own, he might as well acknowledge a Big Brother and follow him from now on!

As the saying went, it was good to rest in the shade of a Big Tree.

If he picked the right thigh to cling to, would he still have to worry about not living well in the future?

The moment he made up his mind, he immediately offered Dong Lingling, whom he had secretly loved for years, to Scarface.

Only after Scarface and the other two had finished eating and returned to their room to rest did Wang Jinbao and Li Yang dare pick up their chopsticks.

The old woman's home had a large stockpile of food and daily necessities.

On top of that, the neighborhood committee had distributed living supplies the day before yesterday, and they had not been idle either, fishing up plenty of food from the water. They had not gone hungry these past few days.

There was also a pile of supplies stacked on the floor.

The alcohol fuel block burning beneath the hot pot and the hot pot base had originally been in the old woman's home, while the vegetables came from the refrigerator.

The refrigerator had lost power yesterday, and the meat had started to smell a little off, but it was still edible.

Sliced thin and boiled in the hot pot, the rich beef tallow flavor masked it well enough that no one could really taste it.

Only half a Chinese cabbage and a few potatoes remained, so they all went into the pot as well.

If they kept them any longer, they would rot.

Li Yang stretched his chopsticks into the pot to fish around and said in a voice low enough that only the two of them could hear, "Jinbao, you've liked Dong Lingling for years. Didn't you say before that you would help her when she was in danger and make her fall for you? Why did you suddenly give Scarface her information today?"

Wang Jinbao fished around in the pot for ages, only to find that Scarface and the other two had cleaned out every last bite, leaving behind nothing but a few scraps of vegetables.

Damn it, they ate the hotpot and left me the hotpot base!

For fuck's sake, I cooked the meal myself, and even the hotpot balls were the ones I fished out of the water myself!

And they actually only left me some hotpot broth. Are they even human?!

In a foul mood, he ladled hotpot broth over the leftover rice and ate while lowering his voice to speak to Li Yang.

"What the hell do you know? Compared to our future, what's a woman worth?

"If we make something of ourselves following Big Brother Scarface, and rule our own territory in the apocalypse someday, what kind of women won't we be able to get?"

Li Yang nodded and said with a smile, "You're still the clever one!"

Then, as though he had thought of something, he asked, "But there are quite a few young girls in our neighborhood. Why didn't you tell Big Brother Scarface about all of them?"

Wang Jinbao shot him a glare.

"What do you know? You can't hand over all the good stuff at once. If we give it all away, what use will we have left?

"Besides, can those little brats who don't know anything compare to married women?

"You'll understand once you've had a taste. When you're young, you don't know how good mature women are, and mistake young girls for treasure."

Wang Jinbao shoveled down rice with a resentful expression, trying to eat as much as possible. There was not much rice left in the kitchen—at most, enough for another meal or two. Whether they would be able to eat rice again after that was anyone's guess.

After catching up on sleep, Jiang You resumed her training.

When she heard screams, she pretended not to hear them and kept training.

When someone knocked on the door, she ignored it and kept training.

When zombies rammed the door, she opened it, slaughtered them, and kept training.

Before meals, she practiced boxing.

After meals, she lifted iron.

Her entire being was immersed in the exhilaration of sweating and the pull of her muscles.

By the next morning, she had not yet woken up when she suddenly heard a buzzing sound. It felt like something had landed on her eyelid, making it itch.

The moment she opened her eyes, she saw a thumb-sized flying insect circling above her head.

Wait, it was not a flying insect.

Looking more closely, she realized it was a green-headed fly.

Damn fly!

Coming at me again?!

Jiang You frowned and irritably raised her hand to swat it dead. But as her hand swept through the air, a faint breeze suddenly blew past.

The white gauze curtains swayed slightly with it.

That wasn't right. The windows in the room had all been sealed, and there was ice inside to keep it cool, so the fan was not on.

Where had that wind come from?

Could it be...

Jiang You's heart skipped a beat as she lowered her head to look at her hand.

That wasn't right. In her previous life, her ability had only appeared more than a month later!

But...

She had already been reborn. That proved that the course of many events could change. Maybe...

Jiang You's heart pounded wildly, so hard she felt she could barely hold it down, as though it were about to leap impatiently out of her chest.

She took several deep breaths and spent a few seconds calming herself.

Then she closed her eyes and sensed her body.

A few minutes later, joy appeared on Jiang You's face. That familiar feeling was indeed inside her body.

She waved her hand again, drawing on the energy within her body at the same time. Another faint breeze brushed past, stirring the loose strands of hair at her forehead.

"It's an ability!!"

"My ability awakened early!"

Jiang You stared at her hand in disbelief, but the moment she looked at it, she froze.

She had been too immersed in the shock of her ability awakening early to notice it before, but now that she had calmed down and looked carefully...

She discovered something deeply strange.

Were these hands before her—fair and delicate, without any traces of chilblains, calluses, or even the slightest scar—really hers?

Jiang You had been fairly fair-skinned in childhood photos. But after her parents died, malnutrition combined with the fact that whenever her aunt was displeased, she would send Jiang You to help out at relatives' stalls, leaving her under the sun all day. Her skin gradually became yellower and darker.

Later, when the apocalypse broke out, simply staying alive was already difficult enough. Who had time to care about their skin?

So she spent day after day exposed to wind and rain, growing even darker.

The kind of black that was black as charcoal, so black it reflected light even under the sun.

But now, these hands were white—so white they looked paler than a corpse three days dead.

Just like... the sickly white she had turned after the doctor on Forbidden Island fused her with the genes of all kinds of unknown creatures...

A tempest raged in Jiang You's heart.

She hurried to the bathroom mirror and looked at the person reflected inside.