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

”Ah! So many new toys!” The little girl immediately ran toward the toys with the kind of speed only a child could manage. Her little shoes slapped the floor a few times as she hurried over, then she knelt down and started looking at everything one by one like she had walked into treasure.

Yan Laojin and Yan Cijin went to the room to change the sheets and blankets, since the previous ones belonged to Lin Zhongsheng. Bai Li simply took them out and threw them out the living room window. At this point, there were only zombies outside, so there was no fear of anything being thrown from a height. If any unlucky zombie got hit by a blanket, that was just too bad. In this world, people were no longer concerned with the dignity of a bed sheet.

Bai Li glanced outside while she was doing it. The sky was already getting darker, and the buildings across the way looked more and more like dead blocks of concrete. A few windows were still lit, but most of the lights had gone out. Every apartment building in the area felt like it was holding its breath. Nobody knew which floor still had water, which family still had food, or which person would start shouting tomorrow because they had finally run out of patience.

Bai Li played with the little girl for a while, and seeing that Yan Laojin and the others had finished tidying up, she quickly said, ”Auntie, I have circulating water in my bathroom, you can go take a shower in my bathroom first.”

Yan Laojin looked over at her daughter, then at Bai Li, and smiled. ”Then I’ll go first.”

Yan Cijin immediately said, ”Mom, you go first. I’ll take LiLi with me later. She’s been playing wildly all day and is all smelly.”

The little girl, who happened to hear this, jumped up in place. ”No, I smell the best!”

The three adults all laughed.

The little girl seemed very proud of herself, and she ran back toward Bai Li’s arms like she wanted her support. Bai Li crouched slightly and caught her easily. ”Yes, yes, you don’t smell bad at all. Our LiLi is a fragrant little dumpling.”

”Hehe, Auntie is the best,” the little girl said sweetly.

Yan Cijin saw the way the little girl clung to Bai Li and couldn’t help but feel a little soft inside. It was not just because the child liked Bai Li. It was because Bai Li was genuinely patient with her, genuinely gentle, and genuinely careful in a way that came naturally rather than as some kind of performance. Yan Cijin had seen plenty of people pretend to be good around children, but Bai Li wasn’t pretending. Bai Li really seemed to like LiLi, and she liked her in a way that felt warm and steady, the kind of warmth that made Yan Cijin’s heart quietly sink and lift at the same time.

Yan Laojin went to take a shower first. While the water was running in the bathroom, Bai Li stayed in the living room with the little girl. The child opened one toy after another, murmuring to herself like she was busy with a very important task. Bai Li sat beside her and occasionally helped her straighten out a pile of tiny blocks. The room felt busy in a gentle way. It was no longer the same empty place that had only held supplies and tension. Now there was a child’s voice, a faint water sound from the bathroom, and the soft sound of plastic toys touching the floor.

Once Yan Laojin finished her shower and went back to her room, Yan Cijin took the little girl to the bathroom. Bai Li used the little quiet time to turn on the computer in her own room and check the surveillance footage in the hallway. The screen showed the same old dim corridor. It was still only Lin Lei and his mother wandering around, looking nervous and restless, going back and forth like people who had too much time and too many bad ideas. They would stop every now and then, glance at someone else’s door, and then hurry away as if they were afraid they had been seen.

Bai Li narrowed her eyes slightly.

The building had been getting strange for a while now, and she did not buy the act those people were putting on. In the beginning, everyone had still been trying to stay polite. They had asked for water, asked for food, asked to borrow things, and tried to keep their tone soft. But after the water outage started getting worse, after people realized the taps were not going to come back anytime soon, the way some of them spoke had changed. Polite words had started hiding ugly thoughts. A few people had already shown their true faces in small ways. A little greed here, a little resentment there, and once enough pressure built up, those things could turn into real trouble.

Bai Li quickly browsed various news online. Some places had water outages, some had started losing power, and some cities even had nuclear reactors that had been breached by zombies and were already contaminated. In short, it was chaotic.

She clicked through a few more pages, her face still calm but her eyes getting colder each time she read something worse. A water shortage report. A line about a city where emergency supplies could no longer reach a district because the roads had been blocked. A message about a power station that had been forced offline. A short video with blurry footage of a crowd fighting over a truck of bottled water. There were still people on the internet arguing about whether the whole thing would pass, whether the government could solve it, whether this was just another temporary disaster.

Bai Li almost wanted to laugh at that.

Temporary?

She knew better now.

The world had already broken, it was just breaking in pieces.

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to be continued.