"Hey, Honghong, don't be in such a hurry to leave! Let's chat..."
"Honghong, don't go! Where does that woman from earlier live? Tell me, will you?"
The man caught up to her and reached out to pat Hao Hong on the shoulder. The next second—
Hao Hong kicked him down the stairs, sending him rolling down more than a dozen steps.
Hao Hong stared at him coldly. "Touch me with those filthy hands again, and my mother will chop your arm off! Get lost!"
After getting kicked, the man had wanted revenge. But remembering that Hao Jun had dozens of brothers under him, and that Hao Hong herself was hot-tempered and not someone to be trifled with, he left cursing under his breath.
Hao Hong hadn't wanted to bother with this bastard in the first place, but he kept bringing up Jiang You again and again.
And he did so with that utterly disgusting look and tone.
The moment he asked where Jiang You lived, Hao Hong knew exactly what he was thinking.
It felt like she had swallowed a fly—so disgusting she could barely stand it.
Women had it hard, especially in the apocalypse. For women to survive was even harder.
She never looked down on survivors who traded their bodies. Everyone was just trying to survive. Some sold their bodies, some sold out their blood relatives, and some abandoned their own kindness. Who was more noble than anyone else?
But she equally despised every man who couldn't keep his lower half in check.
Damn it, disgusting trash!
Hao Hong spat viciously at his shifty-eyed retreating back.
Ever since the apocalypse began and order collapsed, in less than a month, Hao Hong felt as though she had already seen every disgusting thing she would encounter in her lifetime.
Having lived for more than twenty years in peaceful times, she had never imagined people could be this vile.
She had known the man she had just kicked away even before the apocalypse.
He was the owner of a nearby fruit shop, with an honest-looking face. Whenever she ran into him coming and going, he would always greet her politely.
He looked like a gentle, decent man.
But she would never forget how, when the apocalypse broke out, this man
had shoved his own wife and child into a horde of zombies to buy himself time.
Nor would she forget how, after losing the restraints of the law, he had gradually revealed his true colors.
If Hao Jun hadn't repeatedly warned her not to casually get into conflicts with other survivors—especially since this man was a rare ability user and a member of Thunder Team—
Hao Hong truly would have chopped that bastard in front of her into pieces.
Meanwhile, Jiang You walked to the residential complex's wall. With practiced ease, she stepped onto the edge of a flowerbed, pushed off hard, grabbed the wall, and flipped over it.
She couldn't be bothered to leave through the main gate. Going through the gate meant unlocking it and locking it again afterward. What a pain.
A few zombies wandered around the entrance like idiots. Whenever they saw a person, all they could do was go, "Huh huh huh."
Jiang You had barely landed on the ground
when a zombie nearby noticed her falling from the sky.
Takeout delivery?!!
The zombie rushed at her with its mouth open in excitement, ready to eat. The next instant, a cold flash streaked past, and half its mouth fell to the ground, opening and closing.
Jiang You stomped the head on the ground to pieces, then strode away.
The Tier 2 zombie she killed yesterday had finally given her her first crystal core. So today, she had come out again, hoping to search around and find a few more Tier 2 zombies.
But Tier 2 zombies weren't cabbages. How could they be so easy to find?
Her footsteps were light and quick, her shoes making almost no sound against the ground.
In the apocalypse, walking around with loud thuds wasn't a good habit.
She had to be like a cat—light when stepping down, swift when lifting her feet, moving soundlessly through the world.
Jiang You still tried her best to avoid zombies unless one spotted her and attacked first.
Otherwise, she wouldn't take the initiative to provoke them. Mostly because she couldn't be bothered to chop them up.
She felt like a fruit farmer waiting for the fruit to ripen. These Tier 1 zombies were like green fruit on the trees, still not ready to eat.
She was waiting for them to grow and ripen.
Once the zombies became Tier 2 zombies, she could start harvesting.
Unfortunately, zombies like that old man from yesterday seemed to be something one could only encounter by chance.
She wandered outside for a long time today without finding a single Tier 2 zombie.
Ability users among humans were weak in the early stages, and zombies were likewise weak in the beginning.
It was an opportunity nature had left humanity, preventing the gap in strength from becoming so great that it led directly to extinction.
A zombie bared its teeth and approached. Jiang You raised her blade and swiftly cut off its head, then pushed the corpse aside as she prepared to leave.
If you think this book is good, remember to add it to your bookshelf so you don't lose it next time.
Suddenly, as she glanced up, she saw something move on the third floor of the building opposite before swiftly slipping through a window.
Not sure. Better take another look.
The floor-to-ceiling windows there had all been shattered, leaving the entire room exposed. No one could possibly be living there.
Besides, she had just seen a dark shadow sway past the balcony.
Judging by its size, it couldn't have been a person.
Could it be another form of Tier 2 zombie?
Or a mutated animal?
If it was a Tier 2 zombie, even better—she could just dig out its crystal core.
If it was a mutated animal, she could catch it and bring it back as an extra meal for Da Zhuang.
That guy loved eating most of all.
No sooner said than done, Jiang You immediately headed for the building across from her.
That building had once been a five-star hotel. When Jiang You entered, she ran into two survivors who had just come out.
One of them was a middle-aged man in his forties, covered in injuries with a bruised and swollen face. He had clearly been beaten.
When he saw Jiang You, he froze for a moment.
"Jiang You?"
The man called out uncertainly, "Jiang You, is that you? I'm Teacher Tan!"
Jiang You glanced at him, then calmly turned away and walked straight upstairs.
"What are you doing?"
The other companion tugged at the middle-aged man. "You know that person from before?"
The man shook his head in confusion. "I must have been mistaken. I thought she was one of my former students."
Thinking of that dark, skinny student at school who wore old clothes every day, he felt that the fair, clean-looking girl from before—who looked as though she were still living before the apocalypse—couldn't possibly be the same person. He must have mistaken her for someone else.
His companion looked enviously in the direction Jiang You had left.
"That woman just now, if I'm not mistaken, was an ability user—and a pretty powerful one at that.
You can tell just from the fact that she dared to run around alone and still stayed so clean.
The Boss I used to follow was a fire-type ability user. He could attack zombies with fireballs. He was badass.
Too bad he ended up dying at the hands of his own younger brother. Sigh, these days, you can't even trust your own brothers."
"Stop talking and hurry up. We need to meet up with Boss and the others before dark, then leave together at daybreak! This is our only chance to evacuate. If we miss it, we probably won't ever get out again."
Their voices gradually faded into the distance.
The man limped along. Judging by the injuries on his body, he probably wouldn't live much longer.
Jiang You had actually recognized the man who had greeted her earlier.
That man had been her school's Second Brother teacher.
Once after school, Jiang You had seen him in the multimedia classroom with a girl. He had even been touching the girl's thigh, while the girl sat there with red eyes as if she had been crying.
Children that age already understood the things they were supposed to understand.
So Jiang You immediately went to the principal's office to report him.
But in the end, that teacher claimed Jiang You had falsely accused him.
Even the girl from that day testified that she had merely gone to ask the teacher about a question she didn't understand after school.
Jiang You had simply misunderstood.
Jiang You knew she was lying, because afterward, she had sought Jiang You out and threatened her not to tell anyone about it, or she wouldn't let her off.
She hadn't actually known what had happened after they entered the multimedia classroom, nor did she know what kind of entanglement existed between the two of them. She had only wanted to do what she could based on what she had seen.
As a girl, she had always been more vulnerable to harm than boys from childhood onward.
But many things in this world were inherently complicated, not simply matters of right and wrong.
From then on, the Second Brother teacher had constantly targeted her. Even when she attended class properly, she would still be punished and made to run laps around the field.
Even when someone else threw a paper ball at her, the Second Brother teacher, despite seeing everything that had happened, still accused her of cheating.
He would call her stupid as a pig in front of her classmates, spread word everywhere about how she had "wronged" him, and insult her with all kinds of extremely humiliating language.
From that time onward, she had probably understood one thing.
That was: mind your own business, and respect other people's fate.
A long time had passed. To someone who had lived two lives, many of the people she had once bitterly hated in her youth no longer meant much.
It was like looking at a stranger, without the slightest ripple of emotion.
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