Surviving the apocalypse with a wife and a system! [GL]

The whole scene felt strangely split in two. Outside, Bai Li was cutting down zombies and being watched by a whole building full of panicking people. Inside, LiLi was asking little questions and waiting with the kind of patient trust only a child could manage. Both sides belonged to the same disaster, but they looked completely different. Bai Li was the one holding the line downstairs. LiLi was the one keeping a tiny piece of normal life alive upstairs. And somewhere between the two, the residents of Building 9 were still typing in the chat, still trying to bargain, still trying to hold onto whatever hope they could get their hands on.

The loudest messages in the group were now full of requests. Some wanted food. Some wanted cigarettes. Some wanted water. Some wanted Bai Li to send things up at once, as if the simple fact that she was fighting downstairs meant she was obligated to help everyone. Bai Li looked at all of that from time to time and only felt mildly annoyed. She did not have time to become everybody’s rescue line. She still had zombies to deal with, and she still needed to think about whether she should go back upstairs later and bring LiLi something small to make the little girl smile again. That thought stayed with her for a second longer than she expected.

Because of LiLi, the building did not feel completely hopeless. The child had no idea how much her little presence helped. She only knew the simple things. A gentle hand on her head. A promise to play later. A kitten in her arms. A familiar face coming back through the door. That was enough for now.

Bai Li had killed for a while, and the motions had started to make her arms feel a bit tired, so she walked toward the small supermarket to rest and regroup. The courtyard was still dangerous, and more zombies were still pouring into the community courtyard from outside.

Bai Li returned to the small supermarket, blocked the entrance, drank a bottle of electrolyte water, and then turned on the air conditioning to rest. She had taken most of the useful items, but there was still a lot of food in the refrigerator. Bai Li thought for a moment and decided to take it back first; otherwise, if she left it there and someone else took it, she would have worked for nothing.

The cold air from the air conditioner hit her face and arms, and Bai Li let out a slow breath as her body finally got a chance to relax. The small supermarket was quiet now, much quieter than the courtyard outside where zombies still wandered and where the sound of people shouting from the building kept drifting down from time to time. The air inside smelled faintly of frozen food, cardboard, and the plastic scent that always came from stores like this. Bai Li stood with one hand on her hip for a second, rolling her shoulders to ease the ache there. She had been fighting for a while, and even though her body had been strengthened, that did not mean she could ignore tiredness completely. It just meant she could keep going longer than normal. At the moment, that was enough.

She drank a few more mouthfuls of the electrolyte water and glanced toward the refrigerators again. The food there was too useful to leave behind. In a situation like this, food was not just food anymore. It was time, safety, comfort, and one less thing to worry about when the building got even worse. Bai Li had already seen how fast people could change when they got desperate. The building group chat had turned into a strange mess of greed, fear, pleading, and fake politeness in less than an hour. If she left useful frozen food here and some other person noticed it later, there was no reason to expect they would save it for her. So she made up her mind.

They could eat this for the next few days. Thinking this, Bai Li put everything from the two freezers into her spatial storage.

She moved from one freezer to the next, opening each one and checking what was inside. Some things were packed neatly, some were crammed in, and some had clearly been shoved in too fast by somebody trying to save them before the world fell apart. Bai Li did not care about the neatness. She cared about whether something could still be eaten later. Frozen dumplings, meatballs, some fish balls, small packs of sliced meat, a few bags of dumpling wrappers that had been kept cold enough to still be useful, and a couple of trays with half frozen portions of ingredients all went in. She sorted them in her mind as she pulled them out. If it could still be made into a meal, she kept it. If it looked too thawed or too messy to be worth the trouble, she left it behind without much regret.

After a moment’s thought, Bai Li found a large plastic bag and filled it with some frozen food from her spatial storage, planning to bring some food to the elderly couple on the 9th floor later. After all, they had never taken advantage of her misfortune in the group chat and had even spoken up for her.

That decision came with no hesitation once she thought of them. The old couple on the 9th floor had not joined the noise in the group chat. They had not tried to guilt her. They had not pretended to be especially close to her either, but they had at least kept their boundaries and their decency. That mattered. In a building full of people suddenly acting shameless because the world was falling apart, those two had still looked and sounded like the kind of people who remembered what respect was. Bai Li had no soft heart for everyone in the building, but she was not going to forget who had stood quietly on the right side when others were being ugly.

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to be continued,

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