Chapter 31: Evolution

Song You’ai frantically snatched Song Kexin’s phone and scrolled through it. "Oh no, Xiao Zhi sent a message twenty minutes ago! He said the village committee building has been blocked off by a horde of rotting corpses. He told us all to be careful and stay inside if we can."

Song Kexin’s eyes reddened with anxiety. "So my dad’s trapped in the village committee building? What are we going to do?"

"Don’t panic," Xie Ning replied calmly. "It means Uncle is relatively safe for now."

"We can’t lose our cool." Xie Ning drove the car into the Cultural Park and found a secluded spot to stop. "Mom, you and Kexin stay here. Lock the doors and don’t move. I’ll go to the village committee building and bring Uncle back."

"No way." Song You’ai was starting to panic. "I’m going with you. Kexin can stay here and watch the car."

"Sis!"

"Alright, that’s enough," Xie Ning quickly cut them off. "Don’t worry. I have a way to get Uncle out. I won’t fight them head-on; I’ll use my head. There will be no problem."

Xie Ning winked at Song You’ai. "C’mon, Mom. Don’t you trust me?"

Only then did Song You’ai remember that her daughter had a superpower.

’But could that small Space really be useful at a time like this?’ Song You’ai was still a nervous wreck, her heart pounding.

"Relax. It’s only a two-hundred-meter round trip to the village committee building. It’ll be fast. Twenty minutes. Wait for me!"

Song Kexin opened her mouth to speak, a nerve twitching violently in her brow.

Now, just hearing the phrase "twenty minutes" made her incredibly anxious.

Her cousin’s sense of time revolved around a single unit: twenty minutes. No matter how long something actually took, her answer was always "twenty minutes."

Xie Ning hopped out of the car, gave the two of them a small wave, and turned to run toward the village committee building.

She knew this area well. Even after twenty years, everything felt just as familiar now that she was back in the Song Family Pavilion.

The office building wasn’t far from the Cultural Park. If she took a shortcut through the wooded path and made two turns, she would be right at the back entrance.

However, the path was littered with zombies. Whenever Xie Ning saw a few stragglers, she dispatched them with maximum efficiency.

’Since Uncle said the zombie horde is blocking the entrance to the village committee building, I need to find a way to lure some of these things away.’

With that thought, Xie Ning veered onto a side path and made a break for the parking lot behind the building.

A moment later, the piercing blare of several car alarms echoed from the parking lot.

The immense noise immediately drew the nearby, roaming zombies in its direction.

Xie Ning seized the opportunity, ducking into the building’s back stairwell. The moment she was in, she thrust her long blade through the skull of a zombie in a suit and, without a backward glance, started running upstairs.

According to the text from her uncle, he was trapped in an office on the fourth floor.

’We have to get out of this building fast,’ she thought. ’Otherwise, the horde will just keep growing, and it’ll be too late to do anything.’

Xie Ning had just reached the second floor when she saw two female clerks in uniform stumbling toward her. One had an injury on her arm, and her face was flushed bright red, as if from a high fever.

The two had been trying to run downstairs, but after just a few steps, they saw several zombies lurching up the staircase toward them.

The other woman shrieked in terror, turned, and bolted.

The strange creatures crowded the bottom of the stairs, each trying to climb in its own bizarre way, tripping over the steps and falling one after another.

Suddenly, one of them managed to lift a foot onto the first step. It wobbled its way up another, and then quickly found its balance.

The other zombies, as if they’d discovered a new continent, began to copy the one in the lead, jostling and pushing as they learned to climb their way up.