Discussing The Correct Posture To Enjoy Dog Food

Chapter 151 - Banana Flavored Boss Gong (11)

Translated by Hua Li ^_~

A little over a month ago, on the day the apocalypse broke out.

C City, department store.

“Mom, yes, yes, I’m listening. Find a big-chested one… Seriously, Mom, why compare with Fatty Tang? His chest is practically a dairy cow’s—that’s no sight to come home to!” Bao Zi spoke into the phone wedged between his shoulder and ear as he rummaged through his wallet, slipping out various cards with one hand and guiding a shopping cart with the other. “Alright, I’ll go meet her. Sure, I can meet someone new every day for a month! So… could you maybe lift the freeze on my card now?”

“No wife, no money—one hand brings a bride, the other brings a card, or no deal!”

“Mom, wait—hello? Mom?”

Hearing the dial tone, Bao Zi let out a curse and pulled out all the luxury goods over a hundred bucks from his cart. As the cashier scanned the remaining items, he coolly added, “Forget those, just bag what’s left.”

The cashier gave him a look and wordlessly packed up what was left—only a case of bottled water and some instant noodles, mentally wishing him the best.

He paid without a second thought, carrying his “valuable goods” into the elevator down to the basement parking lot.

When he finally reached his car and put it in gear, he noticed the fuel gauge blinking empty. Decked out head-to-toe in designer, a gold watch on his wrist, and yet he was broke enough to not afford gas.

After a frustrated curse, Bao Zi called his aunt for help, offering his best sweet talk. But just as he mentioned borrowing money, his aunt—Mrs. Tang herself—chuckled and said, “Little Bao, your mom’s right here next to me, why don’t you ask her yourself?”

“Auntie, no, wait—”

“Get back here for your blind dates, and no wife means no money!”

“Mom??”

The call was cut off, leaving Bao Zi scowling at the phone. Just as he was about to smash it in frustration, there was a deafening boom overhead!

The ground started shaking violently as the lights in the basement parking lot burst with a loud pop.

Instinctively, Bao Zi ducked down, shrieking, and when he dared look up again, the place was filled with panicked voices and people frantically shouting,

“Was that an earthquake?!”

“Quick, we need to get out!”

“The exits are blocked!”

“The elevator’s broken!”

“Call the police!”

“I can’t get a signal—oh god, we’re done for…”

Bao Zi pulled out his phone and sure enough, no calls would go through. Never having experienced something so terrifying, he whimpered, “Mom! I’m sorry! Auntie, save me!”

*

After being trapped in the parking garage for over a month, he was finally rescued. Overwhelmed, Bao Zi sprinted towards the open arms of his broad, mighty cousin.

Only to see—

“What the heck, Fatty Tang! What plastic surgeon did you go to?!”

Bao Zi’s eyes practically popped out of his head.

Standing before him was a slim, sharp-looking man with a face so strikingly beautiful that it was almost intimidating.

Could this actually be the same cousin who used to be a hefty 150 pounds? Impossible! He had to be dreaming!

With a bemused expression, Gou Liang looked down at him and, with the trademark arrogance of the original Fatty Tang, declared, “Honestly? You wouldn’t understand this with your IQ.”

“Hey!” Bao Zi yelped.

Hearing that familiar tone, Bao Zi knew it couldn’t be anyone else. No one else could make that same irritating remark so confidently. He grabbed Gou Liang in a big hug, bursting into tears, “It’s really you! You’re the only one who could get on my nerves like this! How did you change so much? Wait, don’t even tell me yet, let me cry first… Fatty Tang, my dear cousin, I nearly died in that hellhole… I never thought I’d love you this much.”

Bao Zi could talk anyone’s ear off, and after a month of being trapped, he was nearly insane from the silence.

“Quit crying; it’s unbearable.”

“Your mom!” Bao Zi cursed back, but finally managed to pull himself together. Arguing with Fatty Tang again made him feel almost normal, the tension in his heart easing.

“How on earth did you end up looking like this after only a month? …Forget it, we’ll talk about that later. My mom, my aunt, where are they?”

Gou Liang hesitated for a rare moment before patting Bao Zi’s head and saying, “You sure have a lot of questions.”

“Why are you looking at me so… mushy?”

Gou Liang told him to eat, and Bao Zi reluctantly focused on the meal instead of his questions.

Taking a seat, he invited the other five survivors to join. Still, he couldn’t stop sneaking glances at Gou Liang, hardly believing what he was seeing.

He and the original Tang Tang had grown up together.

Bao Zi’s father passed away when he was very young, and Tang Tang’s mother had a close relationship with her own younger sister, often helping out. As a result, the two families were very close.

Tang Tang had displayed a clear intelligence above his peers from an early age. This rubbed Bao Zi, who was more of a mischievous kid, the wrong way. Frequently outwitted by Tang Tang, Bao Zi often resorted to teasing him about his weight.

Their bickering and name-calling were relentless but affectionate, and despite their constant arguments, the bond between the two was strong.

Later, Tang Tang became the chief engineer of the Tang family’s business. His parents, who were rarely seen by outsiders, grew even more withdrawn, and Tang Tang himself also grew more distant, only seeing Bao Zi during holidays. Although their relationship remained intact, they had little understanding of each other’s lives.

Despite this drift, there was no way Bao Zi could have unreservedly accepted Gou Liang’s transformation. Gou Liang had always worried about Shi Buyu, Yu Lin, and Zhou Gao seeing through the changes, so he avoided any dramatic shifts in personality. However, the drastic change in appearance couldn’t be so easily overlooked, forcing Gou Liang to take an alternative approach.

If Bao Zi could be made aware of Tang Tang’s “dramatic transformation” before meeting him, then no matter how shocked he was upon seeing it in person, he wouldn’t immediately assume that Gou Liang wasn’t the original Tang Tang.

The key to this strategy lay in Yu Lin and Zhou Gao.

As bodyguards for Shi Buyu’s father and brothers, they were no strangers to the Tang and Jia families in A City and must have crossed paths with them at various events.

Bao Zi also worked within the Tang family business, and Tang Tang’s father was fond of his nephew, often bringing him along. Even if Yu Lin and Zhou Gao couldn’t recall his face, they would at least recognize his name.

Using them to set up the story was the perfect plan.

However, Zhou Gao’s fiery temper made him less suited to the role of comforting survivors, while Yu Lin’s calm demeanor made him the better choice. Thus, after learning that Bao Zi was among the survivors, Gou Liang used the journey to C City to bring up Yu Lin’s “casual relationship theories,” taking advantage of his stirred emotions to subtly hypnotize him. During this moment, Gou Liang planted the memory of Bao Zi’s appearance and instilled the idea of bringing him up naturally in conversation.

Yu Lin really lived up to his expectations.

At this moment, Bao Zi stared at Gou Liang for a long time, then suddenly slapped his thigh and exclaimed, “Fatty Tang, I just realized you now look so much like my mom and Auntie! Especially those peach blossom eyes—it’s definitely the old Su family’s signature feature. Tsk tsk, why didn’t I inherit them? How did you manage to overshadow me? But hey, better this than looking like Uncle Tang’s family! Haha, I’ve said it before, the Su family genes are top-notch. Uncle Tang really scored big when he married Auntie.”

Always carefree, Bao Zi quickly accepted Gou Liang’s drastic transformation—though it was still hard to get used to. This odd mix of love and annoyance could only be felt for Fatty Tang.

Besides, what he had experienced over the past few days was far more shocking and unimaginable than Gou Liang’s “successful plastic surgery.”

Gou Liang didn’t respond to his teasing, instead handing him a bowl of soup.

After taking a sip, Bao Zi felt like his soul had returned to his body.

Shi Buyu, seeing that the two had more or less finished catching up, took the opportunity to ask about their experiences during the apocalypse.

Bao Zi, still shaken from recent events, set aside his usual bravado and began recounting everything with a heavy heart.

He and the other five female survivors had survived purely by luck.

When the apocalypse struck, they had initially thought it was an earthquake.

The ground shook violently, and they could feel the 18-story shopping mall above them collapsing in a deafening roar, sealing off the entrances and exits to the underground parking garage.

Fortunately, the shopping mall’s underground structure wasn’t shoddy. It provided them with a refuge, and since they had just finished shopping, they still had enough food and water to scrape by.

In the initial chaos, they waited for rescue, but after days of waiting with no help in sight, they gave up hope and started trying to save themselves.

Through collective effort, they managed to dig out a small exit after a month of being trapped.

This was just three days ago.

At the time, it had been agreed that the elderly, children, and women would leave first, with Bao Zi at the back of the line. But human nature is unpredictable, and everyone wanted to be the first to escape. Chaos soon broke out.

The five female survivors had been pushed aside by the men desperately trying to squeeze through the narrow tunnel. Seeing their injuries, Bao Zi couldn’t bear to abandon them and stayed back to help.

He called out to those who had already left, hoping someone would come back to help. To his disbelief, not a single person answered.

“I was so mad at the time!”

Bao Zi said, stuffing food into his mouth as he spoke, his words muffled. “Seriously, after all that time suffering together, how could they be so heartless? So I told the girls I’d go out and call for help. Good thing they were scared enough to hold me back, or I’d probably have ended up in that monster’s belly!”

As he spoke, he couldn’t help but shudder at the memory, clutching his chest before taking another sip of soup to steady himself.

They were trapped in the underground Level B2 parking garage. The tunnel they had dug out was barely large enough for one person to crawl through, and even then, it was a tight squeeze.

Fortunately, Bao Zi was slim enough to move through it. The five women, afraid he would abandon them like the others, tied a rope to his foot and secured the other end to a car before letting him crawl through the tunnel.

Bao Zi had been reluctant at the time but now felt it was a blessing in disguise.

“I’d crawled only two or three meters out when suddenly, something warm and slippery reached in. I thought it was someone from outside finally sending in a rope, so I grabbed it happily and started shouting that they shouldn’t pull yet—I needed to untie my foot first so the women could go up.”

But no matter how much he yelled, whoever was pulling the “rope” didn’t stop and kept dragging him forward.

As he moved, the women started pulling the other end of the rope, trying to pull him back. The tug-of-war left Bao Zi feeling like he was about to be torn apart.

In the chaos, Bao Zi shouted and fumbled, trying to cut the rope with a fruit knife he carried for self-defense. His inexperience caused him to cut his hand instead of the rope, and then, to his shock, the “rope” wrapped around his other hand suddenly “broke” with a terrifying scream!

The sound made Bao Zi’s scalp tingle. He instinctively shone his flashlight on it—and froze in horror.

That wasn’t a rope!

It was a tongue—a live one! And who knows what creature it belonged to!

“I was so scared I nearly wet myself! I was just screaming, and they realized I wasn’t crawling forward anymore, so they hit the gas and yanked me back!”

Wiping the sweat off his brow, Bao Zi said, “The second I was pulled back, that tongue came for me again—you guys have no idea how terrifying it was!”

The six of them were petrified, scrambling away from the tongue on hands and knees. Bao Zi had it the worst with that rope still tied around his leg, nearly getting caught again. At the critical moment, he mustered the strength to slice through the rope and run, narrowly avoiding getting crippled by the creature’s tongue. The thing was immensely strong, and they all saw with their own eyes how it flicked its tongue and sent cars in the parking lot flying!

If the tongue had been even a bit longer, hiding in the farthest corner wouldn’t have saved them.

They stayed pressed against the walls, unmoving for two whole days, not daring to make a sound. Just as they thought they might starve or die of thirst, the tongue finally left—just over an hour before they heard voices from above, “Survivors, this is the Jiuzhu rescue team. If you can hear us, please respond.”

Hearing those voices filled them with unspeakable relief.

But they didn’t dare move yet, fearing the tongue might come back, so they just shouted for help until finally, the broadcast acknowledged them: “We’ve detected human life signals, reported to command. Please remain calm; the rescue team is en route.”

Each minute felt like an eternity, but with the broadcast repeating and the creature gone, they felt a glimmer of hope.

As expected, there is always a road ahead, Gou Liang and the others came just in time.

“Bro, It’s so great that you found me!”

Bao Zi, on the verge of tears, said, “I’m so lucky to be alive… You have no idea how scary that thing’s tongue was! What on earth was it? Since when does China have monsters like that?!”

For once, Bao Zi wasn’t exaggerating; his dramatic description barely did justice to the terror they’d felt.

Gou Liang thought for a moment, then pulled up a suspicious creature on his handheld computer and asked, “Was it this?”

One look and Bao Zi scrambled to clutch onto Gou Liang, refusing to look back at the screen. Eyes squeezed shut, he yelled, “Yes, that’s it! That horrible thing! Don’t tell me there’s more than one of them? Bro, what on earth is going on here?”

The other five female survivors peeked over and all confirmed that it was indeed the same creature.

Satisfied, Gou Liang then showed them the whole image.

“…Well, you’re all quite lucky to have run into this one,” Yu Lin commented, giving a sympathetic sigh. “Bao Zi, you were even caught by it. How did you manage to…?”

The creature was called a “lizard-type beast.” It resembled a giant lizard, long but not massive, with fast reflexes but weak strength. It primarily attacked using its tongue and tail.

They were fortunate that their escape hole was small and deeply buried; otherwise, they’d have been lunch for sure.

Most likely, the people who crawled out first didn’t intend to abandon them—they probably were swallowed up before they could even scream.

Gou Liang added, “My cousin’s constitution is fire-based.”

That was when the others finally understood. Lizard-type beasts prefer water-based food but avoid fire, so Bao Zi’s blood might have scared it off momentarily rather than drawing it in.

This guy really was lucky to be alive!

Bao Zi didn’t understand most of what they were discussing. Now that his belly was full, he couldn’t hold back his questions any longer and turned to Gou Liang. “Fatty Tang, what about you? Is my mom okay? How about Auntie?”

The month spent underground had filled him with an immense dread, more unnerving even than the creature’s attacks. Even now, after being rescued, the feeling of impending disaster hadn’t lifted.

Gou Liang hesitated, glancing uneasily at Shi Buyu.

Shi Buyu took his hand and turned to Bao Zi. “Given what you’ve experienced, I think you’re ready for the reality outside.”

Bao Zi’s heart sank. He’d braced himself for the worst, but hearing that millions of monsters had taken over, humans were reduced to a rare few, and the apocalypse had already arrived—he and the other survivors fell silent in shock.

They were unable to comprehend, yet in their hearts, a horrifying sense of realization began to settle in. The terror penetrated them deeply.

Desperate, Bao Zi clutched Gou Liang, his voice trembling, “My mom… Auntie… what happened to them?”

Eyes red, Gou Liang opened his mouth but couldn’t bring himself to speak. He finally nodded, and seeing the emptiness in Bao Zi’s face, he managed to say, “They went peacefully, in their sleep, without much suffering.”

The moment Bao Zi heard this, it was as if a switch flipped inside him, and he wailed out loud. The other survivors, hearing no news of their loved ones, broke down sobbing as well.

Gou Liang, held tightly by Bao Zi, stood there frozen, unsure how to offer comfort. Shi Buyu, seeing how tightly Bao Zi held onto him, thought of Gou Liang sobbing uncontrollably in his own arms once, and refrained from intervening.

…They really are family, he thought.

It took a long while for Bao Zi to calm down, the grief slowly ebbing. For so long, he’d feared what would happen to his mother if he were to die, but now, to his shock, it was he who would have to face this alone.

“If I’d known, I wouldn’t have run away. It was just some blind dates—I shouldn’t have run…” Regret consumed him. He’d escaped to C City to avoid his mother’s matchmaking, and now, this separation was forever. “If only I’d stayed home, at least I’d have been with my mom when…”

Gou Liang murmured, “Auntie said running was pointless. She lined up over thirty potential matches, guaranteeing you wouldn’t see the same one twice for a month.”

Bao Zi fell silent, realizing she must have been furious enough to abandon any genuine intent for the matchmaking.

Remembering his mother’s unyielding strength now lost to him forever, Bao Zi broke into tears again.

Shi Buyu then explained the powers and Jiuzhu Base situation to them. Hearing that Gou Liang had determined he would likely awaken rare fire-based powers, Bao Zi finally started to regain his composure.

The world had indeed changed.

Holding the beast core Shi Buyu handed him, feeling the strange energy in his hands, Bao Zi could sense it.

Just as he was about to consume the core, however, Gou Liang stopped him.

Gou Liang said, “Jiuzhu will send a team to pick you all up tomorrow. When you wake, you’ll be safe at the base. Don’t worry; I’ve asked them to look after you.”

“What?”

The core forgotten, Bao Zi urgently asked, “Bro, we’re not staying together?”

Shi Buyu and the others were equally surprised. Bao Zi was Gou Liang’s only remaining family, and with his fire-based ability, he wouldn’t hold the group back. They’d already prepared themselves to welcome him to the team.

Gou Liang shook his head, offering no explanation.

Honestly, the original Tang Tang would never have had a “touch-starved” trait or enjoyed constant physical contact. Besides, he had always disliked excessive closeness.

Having Bao Zi around would just be an exhausting distraction. He wasn’t interested in putting energy into anything outside his mission.

“Don’t joke about this, Bro!”

He had never called Gou Liang “bro” so sincerely as he did now, his words filled with emotion, his voice breaking. “You’re all I have now! I don’t have anyone else! I can’t go anywhere else—I’ll stay by your side! I won’t be a burden, I swear, I’ll eat less and work harder…”

“You’re not a burden.”

Gou Liang interrupted, continuing, “Jiuzhu Base is safe, and they’ll take care of you. You might be a little slow, but that’s okay. We have a lot to do, and we can’t wait for you to catch up.”

“Are you even my real brother?”

Bao Zi was crying again.

No matter how hard he fought it, once he’d consumed the beast core, he fell asleep and, along with the other survivors and the insect beast eggs, was sent to Jiuzhu Base.

Watching the rescue plane disappear into the sky, Gou Liang kept looking up, as if lost in thought.

Shi Buyu held him, gently reassuring him, “Don’t worry; General Yao will take good care of him.”

Gou Liang nodded, saying, “I’m not worried. I just realized… I forgot to mention that the nickname ‘Fatty Tang’ is kind of outdated.”

Shi Buyu chuckled, kissing his dimple and said, “I’ll remember it for you. We’ll make sure to have a serious talk about it next time we see him.”

“Mm.”

Gou Liang sighed with relief, a faint smile returning to his face.

I am sorry for not updating for a long time. I am currently preparing for an important competitive exam which is in February. So I will only be updating sporadically. Thank you for all your support and I hope you’ll be patient enough to wait for me to get back to translating this novel.