Chapter 13: Warehouse: Doesn’t It Creep You Out?

“Good thing… it’s… winter…” Ji Li panted, bending to grab a zombie’s collar.

“True.” Gao Lan neatly dug out a core, dropped it into the plastic bag, and glanced at him. “You holding up? Want to swap?”

Since few zombies remained, Gao Lan hadn’t used her skill. She and Ji Li had started digging cores first thing in the morning, digging until the corpse mountain collapsed, exposing the fire door—and through the gap, they’d come face to face with zombies straining to climb at the sound.

After that it was fight and dig in turns, until the last zombie fell.

The zombies were gone, but the work continued. Over a hundred corpses piled in the corridors and stairwell—forget the smell, the visuals alone were horrifying.

But for the cores, they not only had to face it all, they had to haul away every cored-out corpse: first, to avoid missing any cores; second, to clear a path.

“I’m… fine.” Ji Li straightened up and pounded his lower back.

Seeing his state, Gao Lan thought for a moment, then summoned the System and began submitting cores. “Here’s the plan: I’ll submit a hundred cores to buy two Space Bracelets, upgrade them, and we’ll use them to haul corpses.”

“Wait wait wait!” Ji Li panicked and grabbed her arm. “Sister, don’t waste points! And once it’s held corpses, how can it hold anything else?”

“Why not?” Gao Lan shook him off without a care and kept submitting cores. “Didn’t the item description say so? The Space Bracelet can’t store living things—bacteria and viruses can’t get in. Oh, and the cores for the bracelets come out of my share.”

“That’s not the issue!” Ji Li thrust his palm in front of Gao Lan, trying to block the quest submission window. “Sister, those are CORPSES! Doesn’t it gross you out?”

Gao Lan gave him a helpless look. “Little Brother, not everyone is as fastidious as you. Besides, once the hauling’s done, you throw it into your original bracelet to upgrade it—then it’s not gross anymore, is it?”

…It’s even MORE gross, okay?!

Ji Li wanted to stop her, but he couldn’t see other people’s System interfaces, and all Gao Lan had to do was turn her face away to submit cores.

After a few failed blocks, Ji Li deflated—but still insisted, “Fine, then we split them one each. Otherwise I won’t use mine.”

Gao Lan: “…Fine, fine, one each.”

Soon both bracelets were bought, upgraded, and handed to Ji Li.

With the bracelets, hauling corpses became far easier, and the core-digging speed shot up—Gao Lan kept exclaiming how stupid pure manual labor had been.

With the bracelets’ help, Ji Li and Gao Lan worked until nine at night, clearing the left corridor and stairwell of zombies almost completely.

Gao Lan pounded her lower back and stood with Ji Li before the fire door, looking up the stairs.

“Tomorrow—search for supplies first, or push through and dig out every last core?”

Ji Li thought about it. “Cores first. They’re the System’s hard currency, and we still need that Safe House Repair Card.”

“Fair. Then let’s finish it all tomorrow and start scavenging.”

“Deal.”

On the sixth day of the Zombie Apocalypse, with the Space Bracelets’ help, Ji Li and Gao Lan dug from morning until afternoon, finally extracting every last Zombie Core. The corpses were stacked in the offices, and the two sat exhausted on the stair landing leading to the first floor, dividing the spoils.

“413 in total. I’ll take one extra and owe you.” Gao Lan pushed the pile short by one core toward Ji Li.

The “no need” on the tip of Ji Li’s tongue was utterly scattered by that pile of cores, and he couldn’t help laughing.

206 cores. Plus the 32 he’d received after killing the zombies at the left fire door the day before, he now owned 238 Zombie Cores in total.

Ji Li gleefully opened the quest interface, submitted 10 cores, and received his Food and Water and point rewards. He now had 740 points in the System Shop, plus 228 cores.

Buying Safe House modules was still far off, but the Repair Card was well within reach.

Ji Li bagged the cores and stuffed them into his delivery uniform pocket, then peeked downstairs.

“Want to check out the first floor?”

Gao Lan pocketed her cores and picked up her golf club. “Let’s go!”

Down the stairs to the first floor, within two steps they realized there couldn’t possibly be any straggler zombies here—because the first floor was this New Media Group’s cafeteria.

Unlike the single corridor flanked by offices upstairs, the first floor was one open space. The kitchen and storeroom appeared to sit beneath the stairs leading to the second floor, with dining tables and chairs filling the rest.

There should have been a door between the stairwell and the cafeteria, but now both glass doors lay shattered on the floor, a U-Lock pressed beneath the broken glass—silent evidence of the survivors’ desperate struggle to live.

“Over there too.” Gao Lan patted Ji Li’s shoulder, gesturing across at another glass door, equally shattered.

“The zombies must have crushed the doors pushing through. They were just ordinary double glass doors.” She pointed at the door frame’s bearings.

Ji Li nodded. “An internal cafeteria wouldn’t need sliding doors and access control anyway—too inconvenient when you’re rushing for food.”

Gao Lan smiled. “Let’s check the storeroom. Maybe there are supplies.”

The two rounded the serving window into the kitchen and were hit by a wave of rot.

But after his trials through mountains of corpses and seas of blood, Ji Li felt he was no longer his old self. Confidently, he pulled open the big double-door refrigerator—then slammed it shut instantly.

Seeing Gao Lan’s confusion, he said, deadpan, “Trust me, you don’t want to know what’s in there.”

Gao Lan raised an eyebrow, walked over, and pulled the door open herself. “Oh. It’s just slime from mold and liquefied rotting food. What’s the big deal.”

Ji Li: “…Stop. Please, stop.”

Gao Lan shook her head, closed the fridge, and pointed at a metal door by the wall. “That should be the cold storage. I’ll check it—you stop touching things.”

Touch things? Ji Li wouldn’t dare. He stood rooted, watching anxiously as Gao Lan pulled open the metal door—then beckoned to him, face full of delight.

“Little Ji, come quick! We hit the jackpot!”

Ji Li instantly forgot what he’d just seen and rushed over, poking his head in—a whole storeroom full of rice, flour, and cooking oil.

“Cafeterias buy meat daily, but rice, flour, and oil get consumed in bulk and store well—buying in bulk is much cheaper… There’s seasoning here too!”

Gao Lan’s delighted voice drifted from behind the shelves. Looking at all these supplies, the thought Ji Li had once suppressed could no longer be contained, and he called out toward the shelves:

“Sister, let’s trade! Let’s test the Player Backpack’s stacking limit!”

At that, Gao Lan immediately spun out from behind the shelves. “Deal! Trading what?”

Ji Li looked around. “Rice. Looks like there’s the most of it.”

“Okay. You sell, I buy?”

“Either way.” Ji Li walked to the shelves and inspected the rice.

It was all vacuum-sealed Rice Bricks, four kilos per bag, from brands he didn’t recognize—most from one called Fragrant Rice Land. A rough count came to about a hundred bags. With rice from a few other brands, roughly five hundred kilos total.

Stored in the Time-Stop Space, that was enough to feed one adult for seven or eight years.

After agreeing on the experiment procedure, the two summoned the trade interface face-to-face. Gao Lan entered 1 Point, while Ji Li carried his interface to the shelves and began stuffing Rice Bricks into the trade item slot.

To Gao Lan, it looked like Ji Li pushing rice into empty air—and the rice actually vanished. Utterly magical.

The vanished rice appeared as holographic images in the grey-blue box before Gao Lan. The 【Confirm】 and 【Cancel】 buttons below had already lit up, signaling the trade could proceed—but Ji Li didn’t stop, continuing to stuff rice into the box.

Soon, a “2” appeared at the bottom right corner of the rice brick hologram, and Ji Li grinned.

Just as I thought.

He stuffed every last Rice Brick into the Trading System; the number froze at 102. Ji Li pressed Confirm, Gao Lan followed, and the trade succeeded.

Gao Lan immediately pulled up her System interface, checking as she spoke: “No tax deducted on my end. The rice in my backpack auto-split into two stacks—99 bags and 3 bags.”

Ji Li rubbed his palms together. “Great, great—99, very game-like. No tax on mine either. So there IS a tax threshold. Let’s continue.”

They traded again with rice of a different brand but the same spec—same spec. Gao Lan shook her head: “No good. Won’t stack.”

That judgment logic looked awfully familiar… wasn’t it exactly like his Duplication skill!

Ji Li swallowed the quip on his tongue and said to Gao Lan, “Sister Lan, this batch of rice should stay with you… Don’t object yet, hear me out.”

“Since the experiment proved different brands can’t stack, we’d better not split it half and half. Who knows if we’ll ever find the same brand again—and whether different batches of the same brand stack is also uncertain.”

Ji Li pointed at the other supplies and continued, “The flour stays with me, you take the rice. Once we’re in the city and find a big supermarket, we can trade for anything. We’ll split the oil and seasonings half and half. Deal?”

Gao Lan thought for a moment, then pulled out the few extra bags of rice: “Your call. But keep these bags yourself—the vacuum’s still intact, they’ll keep long-term.”

Ji Li didn’t refuse, storing the loose bags—about a hundred kilos in all—in his bracelet.

Then they traded again, and Ji Li exchanged 1 Point for 99 bags of wheat flour.

With a kitchen, he could make hand-pulled noodles, steam buns, fry pancakes! Ji Li was still happily daydreaming when he looked up—and saw the stainless steel stovetop beyond the metal door.

“…”

His gaze slid silently away, and he followed Gao Lan in inventorying the remaining supplies, completely ignoring the fact that they were standing in a kitchen.

A kitchen THIS filthy? Chef Ji couldn’t bring himself to work here!

After all the bustle, Ji Li’s final haul was 99 bags of 5-kilo flour, 21 bags of 4-kilo rice, 15 barrels of 5-liter cooking oil, 30 bags of 500-gram salt, 25 bottles of soy sauce, 23 bottles of vinegar, and 18 bottles of light soy sauce.

There were also oyster sauce, sesame oil, chicken bouillon, MSG, canned pickles and the like—not much, but enough to keep one person eating for years.

“Just no meat or vegetables.” Ji Li was deeply disappointed.

Gao Lan sighed in satisfaction too. “Forget those two. All the meat and produce rotted away—unless we forage and hunt ourselves.”

“Hunting…”

At the word “hunting,” Ji Li’s movements visibly stalled. Gao Lan noticed and turned. “What’s wrong?”

Ji Li hesitated a beat, then shook his head. “Nothing. Sister, shall we head upstairs now?”

Gao Lan gave him a look and walked out of the storeroom. “Upstairs? With a kitchen this big, it’d be a waste not to search it properly!”

Ji Li: “…”

Sister, you really have NO standards!