Chapter 30: Excuse Me, Do You Buy Pork?
Page 1 of 3
After finally being released by the garrison, half a day had already passed. Lu Li dragged her utterly exhausted body onward with difficulty.
That wretched Jiang Linyi. Seeing the smug panel floating before her eyes, Lu Li hated it so much she wanted to tear it apart.
When she turned onto the street where the antique shop stood, the marketplace had undergone a complete transformation. Cao Forging, Li Electromechanical, Wilderness Protection... One useful-looking shop after another had been arranged by the system. Every establishment even had an enormous sign hanging above its entrance. But why did the writing on them include phonetic spellings? Had literacy really declined that badly?
Looking at the spotless marble tiles covering the entire street, Lu Li even felt ashamed of her own filth after spending half a day rolling around in feces. She was wondering whether she ought to tidy herself up a little more when—
Her gaze swept past the entrance, and she caught sight of the person who had tormented her for half the day. The garrison troops who had just reduced her to such a miserable state were stationed outside the door.
Seeing the man once again dressed in a neat uniform, Lu Li began to tremble. The soldiers at the entrance had done nothing to her, yet the man who looked exactly like the male lead from a novel had set his sights on her.
Her body might be the natural enemy of humankind, but she was a good person—an exceedingly good person! Once upon a time, she had never even violated a traffic regulation!
Feeling the man’s needle-like stare, Lu Li trembled from head to toe. Yet with the antique shop only a few steps away, she forcibly suppressed the shaking of her thighs and leaned on the child for support.
“Hello. May I go inside?”
The man gave her an alluring smile. Lu Li lost control and began trembling right in front of him, prompting the people stationed there with him to stifle their laughter while shaking along with her.
“Brother Han, look. Your charm has declined. You’ve scared the poor girl to tears.”
The man noticed Lu Li’s unnaturally dark eyes and awkwardly rubbed his nose.
“Long time no see.”
Not long at all. It had only been a short while since they were in the interrogation room, where he had subjected her to harsh questioning for half a day and nearly forced her to speak. Fortunately, the system had kept her under control.
Lu Li was already somewhat traumatized whenever she saw him. She silently edged farther away, and immediately felt that the air around her had become less suffocating.
Picking up a pen, she asked, “Is there any other procedure I haven’t completed? I can do it. We can continue, as long as you let me out.”
At the order of his superiors, Quan Mo had been forced to interrogate a mute, and even he found the situation absurd. Recalling the way she had just been driven nearly to the point of climbing over him to bite him, Yu Bai felt a pang of guilt.
Once everything had been confirmed to be a misunderstanding, he had not wanted anything more to do with the aftermath. But since he owed someone a favor, he had deliberately changed shifts to clear his head.
Page 1 of 3
Page 2 of 3
And then they had run into each other again!
Quan Mo forcibly composed himself and spoke in a strictly official tone.
“Are you going home?”
La la la. Lu Li no longer dared entertain the idea of snapping off another cedar branch, but she spotted a withered, drooping twig overhead.
After obtaining the cedar’s permission, she rose and reached upward. The half of a plum she had carefully tucked away slipped from her pocket and fell to the ground.
Lu Li hurriedly bent down, but the plum continued rolling through the dirt, making several turns before acquiring a small insect as well.
She had never intended to eat it, yet seeing her only delicious morsel fall onto the ground still made Lu Li ache as though she could no longer breathe.
The porcupine spotted the fruit, and its beady eyes went rigid. Even its flamboyant hairstyle collapsed for an instant.
Lu Li lay on the tree, watching the porcupine prepare to pounce and the insect get ready to take a bite. Forgetting even the willow branch wrapped around her wrist, she hurriedly climbed down to retrieve it.
Her movement startled the porcupine awake. It rubbed its little black paws together, its quills standing erect one by one. Then, at maximum speed, it charged recklessly toward the half plum.
The instant its front paw entered the cedar’s shadow, there came a sharp crack. The porcupine dodged in time, and a pinecone scraped past its paw before exploding against the ground.
Lu Li, halfway down the tree, stopped climbing. Her leg remained suspended in midair as she struggled to decide whether to go up or down. If that pinecone had struck her, she would certainly have been killed. She had no speed mutation, after all.
After becoming what might be the only remaining zombie in the world, Lu Li had spent a day adapting to her new state. She felt that she had probably gained only a strength mutation. She had also become stupider—and grotesquely deformed!
The porcupine retreated from the shadow. Its beady eyes met the fox-like eyes framed by false lashes, and sparks seemed to fly between them.
Both sides feared the cedar and neither dared move.
The insect bit into the plum. Its mouthparts paused for an instant, then it began chewing with satisfaction before taking another large bite. Lu Li burned with frustration at the sight, but she did not dare descend. After she had provoked the cedar once and been threatened with its needles, there was no guarantee that the next time she pushed her luck, she would not end up with her skull split open.
Hanging from the tree, she exerted force with her wrist until the tendons stood out. The willow branch twisted uncomfortably, then climbed toward Lu Li’s face.
Seeing the swaying branch, Lu Li froze for a moment. She had said so—becoming a zombie really did make her brain prone to crashing!
“Sister Willow, could you bring that half plum back for me? I’m willing to negotiate.”
Page 2 of 3
Page 3 of 3
The willow branch impatiently twitched and extended toward the fruit.
Seeing that the plum was about to be taken away by Lu Li, the porcupine panicked completely. It no longer cared that this was the cedar’s territory, curling into a ball and charging straight over.
The clattering never stopped. Pinecones bombarded the ground in a relentless barrage, and Lu Li was struck on the backside by a fragment.
She had no time to inspect the injury. She nimbly kicked against the trunk and scrambled upward, then retreated onto the branch where she had been sitting. Facing the pine needles all pointed directly at her, she gave an awkward laugh.
“Brother Pine, I was only exercising! I absolutely wasn’t trying to escape!”
The pine needles trembled, then returned to their original positions.
Rubbing her aching backside, Lu Li fretted. It was easy to climb up, but difficult to climb down!
The clattering below continued without pause, like a dense hailstorm. A porcupine was not a hedgehog; the instant its quills touched a pinecone, they were flung away, piercing the cone and sending it hurtling in the opposite direction. Yet in that brief moment, before the porcupine could grow new quills, another wave of pinecones came crashing down at a terrifying speed.
The porcupine could not extend its quills as quickly as the pinecones fell. The hard objects struck it again and again as it wailed in agony. It tried to retract the few quills it had left, but even those could not withstand the pinecones falling like cannonballs. When one struck the porcupine, its flesh sank inward by several inches, and then the pine nuts scattered, driven by immense momentum into its skin and flesh.
Lu Li rubbed her head, which was buzzing. She felt pain on the porcupine’s behalf.
The porcupine that had been so fearsome moments ago, acting as though it ruled the entire world, now lay limp and curled into a ball. Every quill had been fired away, and it was completely unable to move beneath the bombardment.
The pinecones continued to fall. Seeing that her contribution worth one hundred thousand points was about to die and become a lump of minced meat, Lu Li hurriedly waved her hand and climbed down despite the danger.
“That’s enough, that’s enough, Brother Pine! If you keep hitting it, it won’t be worth anything anymore!”
She tumbled and crawled her way to the ground. The instant she finished speaking, the falling pinecones stopped. The final one rolled noisily to a halt beside her foot.
With a mouthful of words still trapped inside her, Lu Li choked and forgot what she had wanted to say.
She cautiously took one step forward. Nothing happened.
Then she tentatively walked several more paces. The cedar still stood perfectly upright. If not for the horrifying devastation covering the ground, Lu Li might have thought everything that had just happened was merely an illusion.
After confirming that the cedar would not attack her, Lu Li hurried over to the quill-less porcupine and reached out a finger toward it.