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

Chapter 222: Collecting cores.

But his voice did not carry the same fear it would have if he had seen a normal person doing this. It was closer to disbelief. He knew Bai Li was strong, but seeing it with his own eyes was another matter entirely.

He could also tell she was not fighting in a rushed, sloppy way. Bai Li’s attacks were aggressive, yes, but they were still controlled. She was using the zombies to practice. That was the strangest part. The battlefield looked wild from far away, but if you paid attention, you could see that Bai Li was not simply slashing at anything moving. She was choosing when to attack, when to retreat half a step, and when to force the zombies into tighter angles so she could cut through several of them without wasting effort. In other words, she was fighting like a person who had already figured out that the apocalypse was going to punish hesitation.

A zombie stumbled over a fallen body and reached for her legs. Bai Li lifted one foot and kicked the creature in the chest with enough force to send it rolling backward across the pavement. She did not stop there. The moment her body came back down, she lowered her sword and drove the blade straight into another zombie’s throat. Blood sprayed in a dark line across the ground. She yanked the blade free, turned her shoulder to slip past a grabbing hand, and then cut horizontally across the neck of a third zombie trying to come at her from the left.

The corpse count kept climbing.

Someone on the tenth floor shouted from an open window, "She has already gone past thirty, right?"

Another resident answered, "At this rate, it is going to be forty soon."

Wang Zhichao typed furiously, "I told you all, she is still killing them! She is not even slowing down!"

A woman on the balcony across from Wang Hao stared with pale lips and whispered, "Why does she look so calm?"

Nobody answered her. Nobody could.

Below, Bai Li caught a zombie by the jaw with the flat side of her sword, shoved its head aside, and used the opening to slash through the side of its neck. Then she turned in place, the blade following the turn of her body like an extension of her arm. Another zombie came in too close, and she ducked just enough for its claws to pass over her head. When she straightened, she slammed the hilt of the sword into its face, then immediately finished it with a quick stab that ended the fight in a heartbeat.

The smell of blood and rot floated upward in waves now, unpleasant and thick. Wang Hao wrinkled his nose, but he still could not make himself step away. The scene below had a weird kind of terrible pull to it. Bai Li looked unstoppable. Her clothes were already stained, her hair was slightly loosened from the movement, but her eyes stayed sharp and focused. She seemed like a person who had completely detached from fear in that moment and replaced it with something colder and more useful.

That was when another resident in the building finally said what several of them were already thinking. "She is not here to grab supplies, is she?"

The balcony went quiet for a second.

No one wanted to say it out loud at first, because it sounded too strange and too bold, but the answer was becoming obvious. Bai Li had not come down simply to fetch food or household items from the supermarket downstairs. If that had been the case, she would not have gone so far out into the courtyard. She would not have actively drawn zombies toward her. She would not have spent so much time killing them one after another. She was doing something else entirely.

Upstairs, Yan Cijin had already noticed the same thing.

She had seen the messages racing through the group chat and felt her concern spike immediately. Bai Li had gone downstairs earlier to gather supplies. That was the official reason. But Bai Li’s personality was practical and direct. She did not waste time if she could avoid it. If she had only wanted food, she would have taken it and come back up quickly. She would not have gone into the open like this and started fighting with such intensity unless there was another purpose behind it.

Yan Cijin walked to the balcony and looked down carefully.

The courtyard below was a battlefield. Dead zombies were scattered across the pavement in an ugly trail, and Bai Li was still moving through the few remaining ones with the same relentless energy. She was not wasting her movements. She was not showing off. She was striking each zombie in the most efficient way possible while also making sure the others had no chance to trap her. The open space made it easier for her to shift angles, but she still stayed within a range that let her draw the monsters in and cut them down.

Yan Cijin watched for a while, and then an idea surfaced in her mind.

If Bai Li had truly only been after supplies, the pace would have been different. She would have been heading back already. But the number of corpses on the ground told a different story. Bai Li was clearly using the zombies as targets for something else. A source of materials. A source of benefit. Something that only someone with enough knowledge and enough courage would think to pursue in the middle of a disaster.

Crystal cores.

The thought settled in her mind with surprising ease. It almost fit too well. Bai Li was not acting recklessly without reason. She was hunting. Every zombie she killed meant another chance to gain resources. The way she kept pressing forward, the way she ignored the easier path of simply taking the supplies and leaving, all of it pointed to the same answer.

She was collecting crystal cores.

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TO BE CONTINUED.