"Clear the debris," Han Zheng commanded, his deep baritone cutting through the stunned silence of his squad. "Double-check the perimeter. We pull out the moment the vehicles are secure."

"Yes, Commander!" Lieutenant Chen responded, his hands still faintly radiating the residual heat of his thermal awakening as he gestured for Xiao Li and the other soldiers to assist him. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

As the men moved to comply, Lin Qing’s cold eyes drifted down toward the shadows beneath the heavy transport truck. Her gaze locked onto Li Mei, who was still trembling violently against the tires. Lin Qing didn’t address the malicious scream that had aimed to distract her. Instead, her voice cut through the air with detached pragmatism.

"Where is your father?" Lin Qing asked flatly.

The question hit Li Mei like a physical blow. Her pale face drained of what little color it had left, and a sharp, suffocating wave of internal horror washed over her features. Deep beneath her layers of terror and calculations, a rotting core of guilt clawed at her throat.

When the mutated cats had first breached their isolated quarters in the deep western corridor, her father had instantly recognized the danger. The old military cook hadn’t hesitated; he had shoved his daughter toward the exit, screaming at her to run for her life while he threw himself into the path of the clawed beasts to buy her time.

And Li Mei hadn’t hesitated either. She hadn’t stayed to fight, nor had she looked back to help him. She had run blindly, abandoning her own father to be torn apart so she could secure her own survival.

Now, trapped beneath the weight of her own cowardice, she couldn’t face the ugliness of her actions. To survive the psychological rot, her mind instantly twisted that guilt into an intense, venomous entitlement.

"He’s gone," Li Mei choked out, her voice cracking as she crawled out from beneath the truck. The tears flowing down her face were real, born from a volatile mixture of grief and self-hatred. She scrambled to her feet, stumbling toward the center of the staging area.

Recognizing that her social leverage was completely gone, she immediately played the victim card, throwing her hands out as she wept hysterically. "They tore him apart! I barely escaped! Please, you can’t leave me here! Look at me—I have no one left! If you leave me in this concrete grave, I’m going to die!"

The elite soldiers paused, their expressions tightening as they looked at the weeping woman. A palpable wave of reluctance rippled through the entire squad. These were seasoned combat veterans who had spent the last two weeks watching civilization actively rot; they had seen countless civilians weaponize tears to leech off resources.

Taking an unawakened, emotionally unstable civilian into the brutal, ice-choked mountain passes was an operational liability they simply couldn’t afford.

Old Wang spat aggressively onto the concrete floor, his face twisted in deep annoyance. "Commander, we can’t take her," he muttered under his breath, ensuring his voice carried enough weight for the team to hear. "She’s a liability. We’re already packed to the brim, and every extra mouth means less fuel and fewer rations for the kids. She’ll break down the moment a tire blows in the blizzard."

Zhou Ming and Sun Hao nodded in grim agreement, their hands resting firmly on their rifles as they stared coldly at the sobbing girl. The squad’s collective stance was unyielding; they were an elite unit on a high-stakes mission, not a rescue convoy.

Every instinct they possessed told them to leave her behind to fend for herself in the relative shelter of the depot.

Sensing the hard, unyielding wall of indifference from the squad, Li Mei’s frantic mind pivoted. She knew tears wouldn’t buy her a seat in the convoy, but resources would.

"I have his stash!" she gasped out, wiping her nose with a trembling, grime-stained sleeve. "My father was the head military cook! He locked away all the premium supplies before the evacuation! I have the keys to the dry reserves in the sub-kitchen! Salt, pepper, high-grade bouillon cubes, dehydrated garlic, dried chili flakes... real spices! Stays preserved for years! I’ll give you all of it! Everything! Just don’t leave me behind!"

The mention of a premium spice stash caused a sharp, subtle shift in the air. In the initial two weeks of the apocalypse, bland, cardboard-tasting military rations had already become a grueling psychological burden.

Real spices weren’t just a luxury; they were a massive morale booster for an elite squad operating in sub-zero temperatures, an invaluable currency for bartering with other factions, and a critical resource for preserving raw meat if they managed to hunt wildlife down the line.

Without any means to preserve food indefinitely, high-quality spices were worth their weight in gold.

Even with the lucrative offer, the squad remained deeply hesitant. Lieutenant Chen frowned, crossing his arms. "Spices are good, but they don’t solve the security risk. An unstable element in the back of the transport can jeopardize our movements if we hit an ambush."

Han Zheng’s eyes narrowed slightly. He turned his head, his dark gaze bypassing the weeping girl entirely to land firmly on Lin Qing. Because Li Mei’s malicious shout had almost gotten his wife killed mid-air, he wasn’t going to make an operational call that compromised Lin Qing’s position or safety.

"She almost threw you to the beast," Han Zheng noted quietly, his voice low but carrying a terrifying weight. "What’s your assessment?"

Lin Qing adjusted the sling of her rifle, her deadpan expression completely unbothered by Li Mei’s desperate stare. She didn’t harbor any resentment, nor was she moved by the girl’s tragic performance. To Lin Qing, Li Mei was simply a volatile anomaly with a low survival value, but the transactional offer of the spice cache was highly logical.

However, Lin Qing was far from a saint. Beneath her pragmatic exterior, a cold thread of calculation uncoiled. Li Mei had explicitly tried to orchestrate her death using Han Ye as bait. Letting such an insult slide without consequence wasn’t in Lin Qing’s nature. She was already mentally mapping out a small, silent revenge—a calculated lesson in survival that would ensure Li Mei paid dearly for her malice without disrupting the convoy’s logistics.

"We don’t take dead weight, and we don’t adopt liabilities," Lin Qing stated smoothly, her voice cutting through Li Mei’s hopeful gasp like a razor. "We can take the spices and secure her passage, but she doesn’t come with us to our final destination. We drop her off at the nearest human settlement or fortified town along the pass. From there, she’s on her own."

As Lin Qing spoke, she purposely glanced toward the freezing baggage truck, a faint, imperceptible glint in her eyes. Her revenge would be simple but agonizing: she would ensure Li Mei was assigned to the absolute coldest, draftiest corner of the supply transport, starved of any extra blankets, and given nothing but the barest, most unpalatable unseasoned rations for the duration of the trip.

While the squad enjoyed the benefits of the spices she had traded away, Li Mei would feel the literal and figurative bite of her actions every single mile of the journey.

Li Mei’s heart violently hitched. She desperately wanted to stay glued to the Commander’s powerful unit, but looking at the icy, absolute finality in Lin Qing’s eyes and the glaring reluctance of the surrounding soldiers, she knew that pushing for more would result in being left to rot in the dark.

"Yes! Yes, that’s fine!" Li Mei agreed frantically, nodding her head so hard her disheveled hair flew across her face. "Just the nearest town! Drop me at the nearest town and I won’t bother you anymore! I’ll show you where the stash is right now!"

Under Han Zheng’s strict supervision, the soldiers quickly moved into the sub-kitchen, utilizing Li Mei’s keys to extract the heavy, airtight metallic cases of spices. The sheer volume of the haul was undeniable, making the transactional trade entirely worth the minor inconvenience of an extra passenger.

The heavy crates were manually hoisted into the back of the primary baggage truck, packed tightly alongside the diesel jerrycans.

Li Mei was pointedly ordered into the cold, cramped rear cabin of the transport vehicle, isolated from the primary structure. Lin Qing personally oversaw the placement, making sure Li Mei was situated right against the drafty metal wall, exactly as she had planned.

As the girl climbed inside, shivering instantly from the chill, her grief over her father’s brutal death completely morphed into a toxic, festering hatred directed entirely at Lin Qing. In her mind, she hadn’t done anything wrong; she had simply tried to survive, and the fact that Lin Qing had stripped her of her permanent ticket to safety was an unforgivable offense.

By the time the convoy finally roared to life, the heavy iron blast doors of the transit depot groaned open, exposing the vehicles to the blinding, white fury of the northern mountain blizzard.

Inside the civilian SUV, the atmosphere was quiet and heavy. Gu An sat in the backseat, her small face still slightly pale from the physical toll of her brief kinetic barrier activation. Up in the passenger seat, Han Ye leaned his small forehead against the cold glass of the window, watching the military transport truck ahead of them roll out into the snowbank.

Through the tinted glass of the truck ahead, Han Ye could subtly discern the silhouette of Li Mei staring back toward their vehicle.

The little regressor’s eyes narrowed, turning into two deep, bottomless pools of pitch-black darkness. His tiny fingers tightened against the leather armrest, a cold aura of death settling over his frame.

Han Ye had lived through the brutal, unforgiving future of the previous timeline; he knew exactly what kind of rot grew from a desperate human who carried a grudge. Li Mei had already weaponized her voice once to try and get Lin Qing butchered by a mutated beast. She was a venomous viper, an unstable wildcard sitting right in their middle.

Lin Qing didn’t care about the girl’s petty malice because Lin Qing operated on logic, relying on her absurd, passive luck and her own subtle punishments to manage the path. But Han Ye didn’t operate on luck or petty discomforts. He operated on the absolute termination of threats.

’You want to play games, Li Mei?’ Han Ye thought to himself, a dark, chilling smile tugging at the edge of his internal consciousness as the SUV rolled forward into the freezing mountain pass. ’Just wait until we hit the next town. I will personally take care of you for trying to touch my mother.’