Chapter 128: Chapter 128: First Zero-Dollar Shopping

Lu Zhen took his younger brother and headed to the second floor, which was occupied by a supermarket and a high-end grocery store. However, it was still unknown whether there were vegetables or fruits left. Even if it was just the frozen type.

Leng Pan used a water blade to slice off the lock on the door of the first skin care products store and walked inside like she owned the place. The store had different types of skin care products and a significant variety of products.

There were facial serums, face and body creams, shampoos, facial masks, lotions, and even sunscreens. Looking at the array of all these products, Leng Pan almost felt jealous of herself.

These were high-quality and high-end products that the Leng Pan in the book, being a young lady born with a silver spoon in her mouth, could buy as much as she wanted.

However, the struggling Leng Pan from the real world works a slave-like job from 9-5 and earns a meager salary, only enough to pay for rent and food for a month, without much savings left.

At this moment, standing in the shop and doing zero-dollar shopping for beauty and hair care products, she felt somewhat emotional.

But she also knew that she didn’t have the time to reminisce and started putting things in her space. She had not stored anything in the space since it expanded the last time due to fear of being discovered.

But now that she didn’t have to be so cautious, she could store as many things as possible. Even if her family couldn’t use them all, they might form a team with others in the future who would need them. They might also use them as currency for exchange for something useful to them.

So, she didn’t even bother looking at what she was taking. She simply put away everything she saw.

Within a few minutes, the store was empty. She had placed a few products in the backpack she was carrying just for show in case her brother-in-law got curious and asked about them.

From the first store, Leng Pan went to other shops selling the same products from different brands. The only similarity was that all the products came from high-end brands that worked magic on the skin.

She then followed her husband and brother-in-law to the second floor.

Apart from the supermarket and grocery store, there was only a fresh juice bar.

She didn’t see her husband immediately after walking in and she was not in a hurry. She first entered the juice bar to see if there was anything worth taking there.

What made them lucky was that this building had a backup power system that could last up to a month in case electricity was cut off.

Thus, even though the area the mall was located in was affected by two meteorites that had fallen on some power lines and a transformer that ended up blowing up, the backup power had been on the entire time.

It had been a little more than a week since the meteorites crashed through space undetected by the satellites and any military radar and fell to Earth.

It was also that long that zombies had been roaming the earth and people started living in fear.

So, many things were still intact. People were only starting to come out now to look for supplies after running out of the ones stored in their houses.

Therefore, when Leng Pan entered the fresh juice bar, everything was the same as when the apocalypse began.

However, it looked like the employees had left in a hurry and didn’t clean up before leaving. There was leftover juice in cups and others in the vending machines.

The vending machines were the kind that looked like huge containers where about ten or twenty liters of juice would be poured after being squeezed and processed so that customers could serve themselves.

Moreover, because the machine ran on electricity and had a cooling system, the juice would remain cold throughout. Now that the machine had not been turned off when the employees left in a hurry, the juice in the machine was still cold and fresh.

This was quite a gain. She didn’t even bother putting the juice in bottles and directly placed the whole machine into the space.

There were also fruits on the counter and some on the shelves behind it. Unfortunately, because they had been in the open all this time and weren’t stored properly, they had started to spoil. Hence, she didn’t bother with them.

She went directly to the refrigerator and opened it only to find it filled to the brim with fruits of all kinds and some fresh and tender vegetables.

These should be the vegetables, like baby spinach and celery, that were used to make juice.

Without standing on ceremony, the whole fridge went into the space. Leng Pan collected a few other things including sugar and other supplies used to enhance the flavor of the fresh juice before leaves.

Walking towards the grocery shop, she didn’t forget to check if any zombies had escaped the net.

However, she saw some traces of burning on the floor and realized that her husband had cleared the way ahead of her. Therefore, she could shop without worrying about zombies suddenly attacking her.

The grocery store had many shelves. Each shelf held a different kind of vegetable. Unfortunately, apart from the ones holding potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes, onions, and some tomatoes, which must not have been fully ripe when brought here, that remained fresh, the others with greens had changed color.

Luckily, there were still green and purple cabbage, which don’t spoil easily, that could be used as a green leafy vegetable.

Leng Pan took the packaging papers placed on every shelf and packed some large portions of the still useful vegetables and put them aside before storing everything else in the space.

The ones packed would be moved to the truck and used at home for the time being.

On the other side of where the vegetables were, there were those huge cooling machines that look like refrigerators that are usually found in supermarkets where fruits and vegetables with a short shelf-life like broccoli, bok choy, capsicum, cucumbers, peas, oranges, apples, promenades, kiwi, and others are placed.

These cooling machines were also full of fruits and vegetables and Leng Pan did the same thing she had done with the vegetables.

She packed some of them, making sure with their current consumption it could last them at least two weeks, before putting everything else in the space.

In this way, the whole grocery store was almost cleared by her. However, Leng Pan still had a conscience and knew that other survivors would start looking for some fruits and vegetables soon to supplement their diet, so she left some of the products that do not spoil too fast.

This way, even if these products remain there for another week, they would still be good enough to eat.

Once she was done with her private business, she went to the supermarket to look for her husband. She knew that since she hadn’t seen him and his brother in the other two shops, they must already be inside the supermarket.

She remembered Lu Tao saying that there were survivors inside. She wondered if they had rescued them or not.

Thinking of this, she hurried into the supermarket. However, the scene she witnessed upon entering wasn’t what she had expected.

There were actually more than fifty survivors inside. Both men and women, old and young. These people had been locked in here after the meteorites began falling.

Or, to be more precise, they had been afraid to go out in case a meteorite fell on them while escaping. So, they hid inside the supermarket thinking that once the chaos was over, they could leave.

They had not expected a zombie infestation that caused people to start mutating and turning into man-eating monsters.

They had witnessed the horror of zombies firsthand because they weren’t such a small group of fifty survivors at first.

More than two hundred people were hiding together but some had mutated and turned into zombies.

Because they didn’t know the danger of being close to someone who had been infected, some tried to help their friends and family members who had accompanied them shopping and ended up getting bitten.

By the time they realized that getting scratched or bitten by the infected individuals would cause them to turn as well, almost half of them had already been affected.

After becoming zombies, people would turn mindless; hence, they had no understanding and only became bloodthirsty monsters. They realized soon enough that they couldn’t reason with them.

It was the first time that they had to harden their hearts and kill their loved ones. If they didn’t make that decision then all of them would turn.

Unfortunately, some people who had been scratched hid their wounds and ended up turning into zombies among the others which ended up reducing their number even further.

By the time they had eliminated all the infected people, only fifty-two remained.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep