"Boom!"
The deafening slam of a door erupted behind him.
Lin Qi's heart jolted as he searched for supplies at the snack shop counter.
Darkness began to envelop him.
With a blood moon overhead and supernatural horrors awakening, every survivor struggling through the apocalypse understood that darkness meant death.
Without the slightest hesitation, he turned and rushed toward the entrance.
Through the glass doors, he could clearly see a rolling shutter closing rapidly!
Beneath it was the lower half of his best friend's body, about to disappear from view!
"Li Xing! What are you doing!"
Lin Qi shouted as he charged toward the entrance, the back of his shirt already soaked with cold sweat.
As the glass doors closed, Li Xing secured them with an iron chain.
Behind the shutter, which had yet to fall completely, Li Xing sneered with utter mockery. "Heh, Lin Qi, you outdid me in everything back at school. Now it's the fucking apocalypse, and you're still doing better than me! How am I supposed to sleep at night if you're alive?"
"Li Xing, have you lost your mind!? What the hell are you talking about? Open the door right now!" Lin Qi practically roared, clinging to one last shred of hope.
His only answer was the heavy crash of the shutter hitting the ground.
And Li Xing's final, mocking words. "I've got to say, there really is one thing I'm better at than you."
"That girlfriend you loved with all your heart? She's long since learned the shape of my cock!"
"You really thought she ever cared about you? You're just a sucker paying for our food, drinks, and fun! Hahaha..."
Li Xing's voice faded into the distance along with his footsteps.
Lin Qi clenched his fists until they creaked, filled not only with anger, but disappointment.
"Phew."
He took a deep breath and quickly composed himself.
This wasn't the time to think about that. He had to escape the snack shop being swallowed by darkness.
Lin Qi reacted quickly. Once he understood that Li Xing had utterly betrayed him, he grabbed a wooden stool from the shop and smashed it hard against the glass doors.
"Crash!"
The glass doors were fragile, so fragile that a single blow shattered them across the floor.
Lin Qi stepped through the doorframe, shards crunching beneath his feet.
He gripped the bottom of the rolling shutter with both hands and pulled with all his strength.
The shutter didn't budge!
"Damn it."
Feeling the resistance from the shutter, Lin Qi knew Li Xing must have tampered with it.
"Something I can use as a crowbar..."
His gaze swept rapidly through the snack shop, searching for anything useful, while he prayed inwardly.
He hoped luck would favor him.
Please, don't let there be a horror in this shop...
Heaven seemed determined to work against him. The more he feared something, the more likely it was to appear.
"Tap, tap."
"Tap, tap."
The distinct footsteps sounded especially jarring inside the sealed snack shop.
They came from the kitchen!
Beneath the curtain screening off the kitchen, vague outlines began to emerge in the darkness.
"Thump, thump-thump-thump."
In the silent darkness, Lin Qi could even hear his own heartbeat clearly.
He stopped what he was doing and abandoned his attempt to force the shutter open.
Since the apocalypse began, horrors had appeared in all manner of forms.
Some attacked indiscriminately, while others killed according to rules.
For ordinary people, encountering a horror that attacked indiscriminately meant certain death.
Only against rule-based horrors could ordinary people find a slim chance of survival by discerning their rules.
Lin Qi prayed inwardly, praying that the horror about to appear was a rule-based one!
"Tap, tap."
"Tap, tap."
The footsteps drew closer and closer.
Behind the kitchen curtain, the horror finally revealed itself.
He was a fat man around six feet tall, with a chef's hat marking his former occupation.
The chef horror's face hadn't changed much, except that his eyes had lost their luster, covered in a dense, ghastly white.
His chef's uniform was covered in dark brown stains.
Except...
Except that, for some unknown reason, his belly had been ripped open from left to right. Blackish-red intestines dragged across the floor, tracing streaks of blood as he walked!
In the chef horror's right hand was a notched cleaver, with fragments of bone still wedged in the notch.
Just looking a few moments longer made Lin Qi's stomach churn.
But he didn't dare move too much or make the slightest sound.
"Tap, tap."
"Tap, tap."
Every footstep from the chef horror seemed to land on his heart.
He drew closer and closer.
Lin Qi's heart sank. Heaven hadn't favored him.
The ghastly thing before him was definitely coming for him!
An indiscriminate killer!
"Fuck!"
Lin Qi cursed, his last shred of hope utterly shattered.
He sprang up and kicked hard at the edge of the rolling shutter.
"Bang!"
"Bang, bang, bang!"
Under his frantic kicks, the shutter finally began to give a little.
Unfortunately, it was still too slow. Far too slow!
The thick stench of blood began to envelop him, and the heavy footsteps stopped behind him.
Lin Qi whipped his head around to see the chef horror's cleaver already raised high, his whitened eyes utterly devoid of emotion.
Am I going to die!?
At the very brink of despair, Lin Qi yanked out the dagger behind his back. "Even if I die, I'm taking a chunk out of you!"
He knew it was all futile, but he still swung the final strike of his life!
As expected, the dagger moved swiftly, so swiftly that it passed straight through the chef horror's body as though cutting through an illusion, inflicting not the slightest harm.
The chef's cleaver descended. There was no fear on Lin Qi's face. His despair dissipated, leaving only calm. "Everyone has their fate. Guess I'm just unlucky. What a joke. Those two traitors still get to live happily ever after..."
Lin Qi was ready to meet his death.
But the instant the cleaver touched him, something unexpected happened.
For some unknown reason, a virtual screen abruptly appeared before his eyes.
Without any preamble, an advertisement began playing on the screen...
Stranger still, the moment the advertisement appeared, the butcher's descending cleaver passed straight through his body, as though the two of them were on separate layers!
Unfortunately, as the advertisement appeared, he also lost control of his body, forcibly locked in place by the ad...
An utterly absurd thought formed in Lin Qi's mind. Does watching ads give me invincibility frames? Like how no one's allowed to interrupt the protagonist's transformation?
As a young man of the new century who had been bombarded with all kinds of information since childhood, he readily accepted the bizarre spectacle before him.
His gaze shifted from the cleaver to the female presenter talking nonstop on the virtual screen.
[Want to become extraordinary!!!] [Want to gain the power to fight horrors!!!] [An opportunity that comes once in a million years! Buy it and regret it for a moment; miss it and regret it for a hundred years!!!] [Today's special price for our family here isn't 9.8, or 98-just 998, and you can take an extraordinary ability home!!!] [What are you waiting for? Place your order now!!!]
Before you continue