The Zombie Queen's Second Chance

For the next couple of weeks, Chu Lixue's life was pretty monotonous. Each day, aside from Sunday's, Chu Lixue and her group would continue to work on reinforcing and building new walls.

Slowly, the amount of food stamps, that Chu Lixue had, begun to grow. Since their group was for most of the time working outside of the safe zone, their salary was paid daily. After all, who would want to wait a whole month if they weren't sure they'd even be alive at that time.

Aside from the food stamps, Chu Lixue also managed to save some crystal nucleuses. At the beginning, she thought that after taking them home, she would use them privately, but that idea quickly disappeared.

While she didn't know how it was for other people, but she herself, could only use a specific number of nucleuses to help her grow, every day. While that amount slowly continued to grow, she still couldn't use all of her crystals.

For example, during a work day, when she had to continuously use her abilities, her limit was 4 Tier 1 Earth Crystal Nucleuses. A month ago, her limit was one crystal less. On Sundays, when she didn't have to use her ability, her limit very slowly grew from one crystal nucleus, to two.

'Slow and steady, huh? At the very least I can see that I've got more energy now', she thought.

What Chu Lixue didn't know however, was the fact, that if the ability holders directly working for the military were to know about her progress, they would simply want to cry. What she believed to be slow, for others, was still a very fast improve rate.

During this time, Chu Lixue also continued to improve the strength of her other ability. However, because she neither had time or a place where she could freely use it, her speed was much slower this time. She also didn't have any Wood Crystal Nucleuses, so when she did practice, she couldn't recover as fast as when she worked with her Earth ability.

Next Sunday, after waking up and washing herself, Chu Lixue began to organize her thoughts, 'Since I finally have some money, it's time to use it for new equipment. I'm already getting sick looking at this empty apartment all the time...'

A week ago, her group finished building and reinforcing walls around the Residential District. Since the military was clearing it out during the time they worked on the walls, today the whole district was already incorporated into the base.

Aside from obvious advantages for the base, like more living space for the survivors, the thing that Chu Lixue was the happiest about, was the market. Not only would the military sell some resources to the public there, but there was also a section for survivors to sell their own stuff.

Chu Lixue decided to go there today, and see if she could find any of the things she needed.

Before going out, Chu Lixue made a list for herself to make sure not to forget anything, which contained a full toolset, a variety of other tools, a set of solar charging equipment and some rolls of privacy window film. She also needed some material to build shelves for the plants she planned to grow. But she couldn't grow them from wind, so she also needed to buy seeds and water purification filters.

What should be prioritized during the Apocalypse? Chu Lixue firmly believed, that the most important thing should be clean water. The next thing would be food, and only on the third place would she put hygiene and clothes.

Water sources became contaminated shortly after the Apocalypse began. In the last month, Chu Lixue noticed that the base encouraged water purification by freely distributing filters. While she was already a zombie, so she wasn't scared of being infected, she still asked around how to build a homemade distillation system. It was time and resource consuming, but Chu Lixue still needed to get it done, no matter the cost.

Food was getting sparser each day, and even the military had to work around this issue. Since they couldn't really buy it from other bases, their only choice was to cultivate their own crops. However, most of their crops, while edible, are usually different in color and taste from their natural counterparts.

Chu Lixue has once tried food made out of these crops, inside a military canteen, provided for people working outside the walls. It was her first, and at the same time last time she went there to eat. The food simply tasted bad. Not different, just bad. However, it's not like the military can just stop growing these mutated crops.

Nobody wants to eat food that tastes bad, but they simply have no choice. Their scientists decided, that while the new food tasted badly, it provides a large number of calories, so the people had no choice but to swallow their grievances.

"It wouldn't hurt to try, right? Perhaps with clean water and my ability, I can grow plants that won't mutate as much as the ones from military...", she muttered, hoping that her idea was correct.

Chu Lixue truly didn't need to eat any food, but as a foodie, that didn't stand well with her. In her previous life, during her off time, she would go around trying different cosines. While she doesn't expect to get a 5-stars dinner service, at the very least she would be happy with food tasting normal.