How to Raise a Baby in an Apocalypse - Chapter 415

Little Mint and Zhao Ru hurry over and help An Ran up.

Little Mint is so anxious she cries out repeatedly, “Sister, sister, what’s wrong with you, sister!!!”

Zhao Ru frowns as she urgently checks An Ran’s limbs, turns her face, opens her eyelids, looks into her pupils, and asks, “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

“I’m okay!” An Ran says through gritted teeth, her face pale. She takes a deep breath and says,

“Help me up.”

With their support, An Ran stands up. The three of them lean on the second-floor railing, watching the fat thorn balls that now seem to have gained a metallic effect. After devouring the little mice on the ground, they roll toward the largest female rat, engaging in a fierce battle between plant and rat.

Some fat thorn balls pierce the mother rat, while others bounce off her hard fur. Those that pierce quickly absorb the flesh and blood inside. After a short while, the mother rat dies.

Several more large rats appear, but the fat thorn balls surge across the floor with them. Their hard thorns clatter densely against the marble tiles like rain.

Zhan Lian, standing at the entrance, grows worried. He hasn’t heard any movement in the mall for a long time, so he hurries back to check. He is startled by the sight of steel thorn balls rolling everywhere. Several roll to his feet and circle his ankles. He kicks them aside and enters the mall.

Inside, he finds the place long overrun by rats. It isn’t that his wife hasn’t called for help—it’s that she doesn’t need him at all.

“Are you okay?” Zhan Lian asks, standing among the rolling fat thorn balls and looking up at An Ran on the second-floor railing.

An Ran’s face looks better now. She feels that the copper-skinned zombie crystal cores she absorbed are almost completely released.

She nods and says to Zhan Lian, who is about to be surrounded below, “I’m fine. You can bring the crystal cores from your car—the ones you’ve been keeping in the trunk.”

She clearly feels that as the sharpness of the fat thorn balls’ golden spikes fades and the blessing of the metal attribute diminishes, it’s because the energy from those copper-skinned zombie crystal cores inside her is nearly spent.

So, she needs more copper-skinned zombie crystal cores.

Of course, she won’t tell those around her how painful it is for her—a wood-type mutant—to absorb the energy of copper-skinned zombie crystal cores. With the situation critical and Xiangcheng so strange, An Ran won’t be so weak as to cry out in pain now.

Zhan Lian stands on the first floor, looking up at An Ran with a frown. He can’t shake the feeling that her face is too pale. Still, he follows her instructions and retrieves the big box of copper-skinned zombie crystal cores from his car.

Originally, he dumps all the crystal cores he collects, messy and mixed together, into this storage box. As a typical tough guy, he never cares whether the cores look nice or whether their color is vibrant—any crystal core he obtains is his, so he just tosses them casually into this box.

The box stays in his car. Sometimes the car parks somewhere for days without him checking inside. He is very casual about it.