Commander Li had stopped believing in getting rescued three days ago.

Maybe even longer, considering how hard it was to tell the passing of time in this hellhole of a basement. Here a second felt like an hour and and hour felt like a week.

But he absolutely refused to even entertain the idea of giving up.

In fact, Commander Li Wenqiang didn’t know how to give up. He had spent too many years clawing himself upward through the military ranks for something as simple as exhaustion or fear to break him now.

But there was a difference between continuing to fight and believing reinforcements were coming.

The only thing he regretted was not realizing that the hotel had become a graveyard long before he and his men took their first step inside.

At first, it had looked like salvation.

After all, it was a fortified building in the center of Rongdu complete with generators, food storage, reinforced conference rooms, underground maintenance access, medical supplies, and enough space to shelter civilians while military evacuation routes were organized.

For the first twelve hours, everyone believed they could hold it since there was nothing and no one inside... or at least, that was what they believed.

But then the zombies started bringing people inside. That had been the first sign something was wrong. The second sign came when the infected stopped trying to force their way into barricaded rooms.

Instead, they waited patiently, like they already knew hunger would do the work for them and force the humans outside.

By the second day, panic had fully set in.

Anyone with powers quickly burned through them too fast to be of use after the first two hours of the siege. The civilians that they had found inside had exhausted themselves trying to fight back, and even those without powers attempted to break through the conference room plexiglass only to discover the reinforced walls were nearly impossible to damage without sustained ability use.

Which only made starvation hit faster and harder. Li had no idea when the last time he had eaten anything, then again, as a fighting power user, he was almost useless in this situation.

What he witnessed happening after that would have made any government agency weep with jealousy.

The zombies continued to gather survivors in even greater numbers, making sure to sort them into different classes first, and then separated them even more from the strongest to the weakest.

Those with too much of a fight in them were put in the conference rooms while those who had just given up were moved into the lower floors of the building...

This floor, if he was going to be specific.

When he realized that nobody had come back from the basement, he was determined to figure out why. Gao Sheng had pretended to be weak enough that he had been dragged away... but he never came back.

Li was aware that there were other military teams in the building, but without a way to communicate with anyone, he had no idea what they had discovered.

After that, Li stopped chasing answers and prioritized survival instead.

But not the civilians... of course he would help if he was able to, but he was determined to take a page out of Rouxi’s book and look after his own men instead.

He would not put another one of the men who trusted him in danger in order to save someone that couldn’t give a fuck about them.

But then him and his team were dragged into the basement anyway.

Commander Li leaned back against the concrete wall behind him and slowly rolled tension out of one shoulder while the underground bunker around him remained wrapped in exhausted silence.

Chen Minghao slept sitting upright nearby with his empty hands folded loosely across his lap. Li couldn’t remember the last time he had ever seen Chen Minghao without a gun in his hands. That was disturbing on a whole other level.

Sun Ming cleaned blood from a combat knife under the weak glow of a lantern while Luo Xin worked farther across the room treating infected bites everyone already knew were hopeless.

One thing that did surprise him was seeing Colonel Wei Guang stuck in the same situation. More or less.

The man still didn’t seem to understand that this was the time to conserve energy for whatever happened next. Instead, the big shot stood near the generators arguing quietly with another one of his officers about ration distribution.

Didn’t he understand that there was no rations left?

But apparently, that man still believed that structure mattered, that following the rules was enough to keep you breathing. Honestly, Li admired that about him, even if it was slowly getting people killed.

Li closed his eyes for just a moment when he heard the sound of the steel doors at the far end of the underground room groaned open again.

Another delivery... more civilians... maybe more military... but whatever they were... they were cannon fodder.

Most of the soldiers barely looked up anymore. Every group eventually looked the same: terrified civilians, exhausted survivors, people too weak to fight properly... it was starting to break their spirits when they had nothing left to break.

Li almost looked away himself, but then, at the last second, he saw her.

Shen Rouxi walked through the doors surrounded by zombies like she had accidentally wandered into the wrong hotel conference after looking for free snacks.

Jian Yuche stayed close beside her while Wei Lingyun scanned the underground shelter with the expression of a man debating arson as a valid solution to all current life problems.

Zhou Chenghai and Xu Zhenlan followed behind them looking irritated more than frightened, which honestly said far too much about the kind of people Li kept encountering around Rouxi.

The the point of the matter was that every last one of them were alive.

They weren’t starved, they weren’t broken or weak or anything of the thousands of things that could have happened to them in the months that he had last seen them.

Rouxi looked around the basement once before her eyes landed directly on him.

Then she smiled brightly and lifted one hand. "Hey! Commander Li," she called cheerfully across the underground shelter. "Long time no see."

Something inside Li loosened so suddenly it almost hurt and his shoulders dropped before he could stop them.

It was relief.

Pure.... instinctive... relief.

Rouxi was here.

He was no longer carrying the world on his shoulders.

Because Li had already seen what happened when Shen Rouxi stopped pretending to be harmless.

He had watched the earth in her front yard open like the mouth of hell itself while hundreds of zombies vanished screaming into a crater deep enough that even now he still wasn’t entirely convinced it had been real.

Entire hordes of zombie animals that shouldn’t exist were swallowed whole while Rouxi stood there looking vaguely inconvenienced by the interruption to her day.

The thing down here... whatever was on the other side of the hole in the wall in front of him was dangerous.

Li knew that.

People were dragged into the black hole and never came out again.

But Shen Rouxi?

Shen Rouxi was the first person Li had seen since the apocalypse began who made him think survival might actually still be possible.

Captain Zhao Yicheng noticed his reaction immediately and his gaze snapped toward Rouxi before slowly widening. "...You’ve got to be kidding me," he muttered under his breath.

Nearby, Chen Minghao sat up straighter while Wang Junjie nearly dropped the knife he had been cleaning. Even Liu Zhenyu looked less exhausted.

The shift moved through Li’s soldiers almost instantly and Li could clock every emotion. Hope, relief, safety, security.

One small little girl walked into a room and some of the most hardened men felt... safe.

It seemed like it should be ridiculous, but that, too, was Rouxi.

Colonel Wei Guang noticed several seconds later and his entire face darkened the moment he recognized Rouxi. "...You have got to be fucking kidding me."

Li felt his eyes open wide at that statement. Wei Guang looked personally offended by her existence, but for the life of him, Li couldn’t figure out exactly why he felt that way.

Maybe he thought he had to feed her?

Wei Guang immediately pushed away from the generators and stalked toward the new arrivals while glaring directly at Rouxi like she had shown up specifically to ruin his week.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Wei snapped. "Do you have any idea how dangerous this place is?"