Chapter 618 - 608: Zombie 3

By now, Moira Lynch had already formed a plan in her mind.

Whether she’d act on it, though, depended on what she found once they reached the survivors’ base.

As dusk crept in, the group decided to spend the night in a village they passed along the way.

"Think there are any survivors here?"

"Probably not."

"But this place looks way too clean. Nothing like the other villages we’ve been through."

It really was unsettlingly clean.

Aside from the absence of people, everything looked exactly as it must have before the zombie outbreak. Even the glass in the windows was completely intact.

Whoever had lived here clearly hadn’t left in a hurry.

James Shaw ordered his team to sweep the village as usual, looking for anything useful.

And just as that implied — the villagers had taken their time leaving, hauling away all their food and valuables. What the team managed to scrounge up was minimal, but not nothing.

Moira found a root cellar in the backyard of one of the houses. Inside were plenty of potatoes and cabbage, along with some dried noodles and cured pork.

James Shaw and the others were practically beside themselves — the moment they laid eyes on those strips of hanging cured meat, mouths started watering.

Actual meat.

Since the apocalypse hit, getting enough to eat at all was a struggle. Meat was a distant dream.

James Shaw directed his team to haul everything out of the cellar.

"Moira, sharp eyes as always — but how did you even know there’d be a cellar back there?"

How did she know? She’d scanned it with her spiritual power, obviously.

Moira smiled. "I spent some time in the countryside when I was little. Back then, almost every family had a root cellar. And farmers tend to hoard food — it’s just habit.

The people in this village seemed to have left on their own terms. They took everything visible, sure, but that wouldn’t have been everything. So I figured it was worth a look. Didn’t expect to actually find one."

James Shaw seemed to buy it, and immediately sent his team to search the rest of the village for more cellars.

Moira herself had no interest in the cellars. These people weren’t going to let her go hungry anyway.

So while everyone else went hunting for storage pits, she went looking for things she could actually use.

In one of the houses, she turned up a large-capacity travel backpack — perfect for carrying her things.

Just then, a flash of white darted past behind her.

Whatever it was had been aiming for a sneak attack — but Moira spun around and caught it clean.

A Ragdoll Cat?

Blue eyes, a fluffy coat — a genuinely stunning Ragdoll Cat, the kind that looked permanently lit by a soft-focus filter.

Its white fur was caked in dust, giving it a dingy, bedraggled look, like a princess fallen on hard times.

The cat hissed at her from between her hands, putting on a fierce front that carried absolutely zero threat.

She flipped it over.

A female. Good. She’d bring her back for Pip — save him the embarrassment of keep fawning all over Calico like some lovesick idiot.

Poor Pip. In his desperate campaign to win Calico’s heart, he’d actually stooped to helping her raise her kittens.

Kittens that were most definitely not his.

Not that the looks were what caught Moira’s attention in the first place, or why she wanted to take the cat with her. She’d noticed it because this was an awakened cat — one with a gift.

Two gifts, actually.

A cat. With a dual awakening. Was that even reasonable? Completely reasonable, as it turned out.

From what Moira could tell, one of the Ragdoll Cat’s abilities was something like Charm — she’d inadvertently used it on Moira multiple times already.

It just hadn’t worked, because Moira’s spiritual power was too high-level to be touched by it.

The second ability appeared to be Air Manipulation.

Tsk. A cat, sitting on abilities that broken.

Should she be grateful it was just a cat, or disappointed it was only a cat?

"Listen up, little one — you’re coming with me from now on. Otherwise, I might just decide cat meat sounds pretty good." (She was lying.)

With that, Moira ignored the cat’s struggling — such as it was, which wasn’t much — and forcibly formed a contract with her.

The Ragdoll Cat reacted as if the contract had startled her senseless, writhing frantically in Moira’s grip.

Seeing this, Moira pulled out her secret weapon.

She reached into her Space Button and produced a nutrient liquid.

The moment it was opened, the cat went completely still. Those sapphire eyes locked onto Moira’s hand — specifically, the nutrient liquid in it — with naked, desperate longing.

"I know you understand me. Behave yourself, and I’ll give you this."

"Mrow~"

A soft little sound — agreement, more or less.

Once the cat had finished the nutrient liquid, Moira warned her not to use her abilities casually from here on out, and to pass herself off as an ordinary, unremarkable cat.

"Mrow~"

Then Moira tucked her into the backpack.

She even found a few spare clothes to line the bottom, so the cat would at least be comfortable.

Once all that was sorted, something tugged at Moira’s attention — a faint sense of something — and she broke into a run toward the outside.

James Shaw and the rest of the group were all gathered in front of a single building.

Above the entrance hung a plaque bearing four characters: Thorne Ancestral Hall.

An ancestral hall was always a place of gravity and solemnity.

And yet from inside this one came the intermittent snarling and shrieking of zombies.

From the sound of it, there were a lot of them. Putting that together with the state of the village, James Shaw had a pretty good idea of what had happened.

The people locked in that hall were almost certainly the village’s own dead.

Their families had watched them turn, couldn’t bring themselves to end it, and so had locked them all in here — leaving them in the care of their ancestors.

James Shaw gave the order, and every last zombie inside was put down. Being locked up didn’t earn them any mercy.

After all, no one could say for certain what trouble they might cause eventually. Better to cut it off at the root now.

The night’s haul of food put everyone in good spirits, and dinner was pork stewed with glass noodles, loaded with vegetables. Every single person ate their fill — Moira included.

When they set out the next morning, James Shaw had the team pack out everything — food, clothing, blankets, all of it.

As he put it, clothes and bedding were supplies too, and the base was short on everything right now.

If they had the manpower, he’d have stripped the window glass out of the frames as well.

And at last, after all of it, the group finally made it back to the base.

"Why is there an extra person?"

The person handling registration glanced up at Moira and asked.

"She’s a survivor we came across on the road. Got separated from her family, so she came back with us." James Shaw explained.