CHAPTER 552: 456 HUA XIUNING REALLY LOOKS MORE AND MORE LIKE A FOOL

Gong Yi was somewhat unwilling, but he had to admit Hua Mi’s considerations were right.

The next day, he could only carry on with sending his brother and sister to school as usual.

Sitting in the car, Gong Yi watched as his sister got off and was immediately surrounded by Qin Jianqiang and a group of children. The children were chattering loudly around his brother.

Although they were also paying attention to his sister, her focus wasn’t on the group of children.

Gong Yi felt uneasy, he sighed deeply and did not leave until the group of children had all disappeared at the school gate. He sat in the car for a long time before finally driving away, not in the mood to go to the garrison camp for work.

During the break, Boss Gong took Qin Jianqiang and his sister to the playground to play football. The sister soon drifted away from the crowd of kids and crouched on the edge of the playground in the distance, looking at the flowers and grass on the ground.

Two older boys nearby, seeing Boss Gong and Qin Jianqiang engrossed in their play, exchanged a glance and approached the sister.

"Xiuning, do you want to come and play?"

Boss Gong, who was running on the playground, suddenly stopped and turned his head to look at the two bigger boys with an icy gaze.

Qin Jianqiang leaned over and asked, "What’s wrong, Boss?"

Boss Gong said coldly, "Nothing, not for now."

At that moment, Qin Jianqiang’s attention shifted to his sister, and he cursed under his breath, "Damn, our sister is being bullied again."

Saying that, he took a few kids with him and advanced towards where his sister was.

The two larger boys, seeing that Qin Jianqiang had people coming up, couldn’t coax the sister to a secluded place anymore and immediately ran off.

Boss Gong frowned and signaled to the kids beside him, "Keep a close eye on those two, see what they’re up to."

After scaring off the two boys, Qin Jianqiang returned triumphantly, "Boss, I chased them all away."

Boss Gong nodded and reported the incident to his parents when he got home.

Upon hearing this, Gong Yi grew even more anxious. He grabbed his crew cut and once again proposed to Hua Mi,

"You see, so many bad people are targeting my sister, and we can’t always rely on brother to protect her. Let’s secure her safety. Let her take a break from school starting tomorrow. I’ll take her to the garrison camp to practice martial arts."

His brother immediately said, "I don’t want to study anymore either. I want to join the garrison."

Gong Yi slapped his brother on the forehead, "What nonsense are you spouting?"

Hua Mi gave Gong Yi a disdainful look. If Gong Yi continued to raise the children this way, even if Xiuning wasn’t autistic, she would become so under his care.

"Don’t rush, you two. Just take a look and give the child a little time,"

Hua Mi addressed the father and son, then turned to the brother with further instructions, "Next time this happens, let your sister handle it on her own. You don’t need to step in unless there’s blood."

Everyone treated the sister like a fool. If Boss Gong, Qin Jianqiang, and their friends always protected her, her character would become delicate and ineffective like a parasitic plant.

Hua Mi believed that even if the sister was just an ordinary person, without any superpower, and even if her intelligence was just average, or perhaps even below the developmental level of other children, considering she was just an ordinary kid from the apocalypse era,

she too needed some setbacks and hardships to understand that there are some people in this world who are naturally bad.

Some children don’t need much worrying over by their parents. They seem to grow up without any hardships, safely becoming adults with the strong hearts of those forged through relentless trials.

But some children, they must go through ups and downs and setbacks before they can learn to protect themselves and open their hearts to the world, to better interpret themselves.

Children’s growth is fraught with growing pains.

Hua Mi set aside the matter of her sister and took out the documents to review, quickly focusing on the reports submitted by Chi Chuan.

Chi Chuan controlled the transportation network of the Xiang City Base, so he was relatively well-informed about the situations in the various safe zones. His people would collect and report on all the peculiar incidents that occurred within these zones.

In the safe zones, a crisis hotline had been set up for survivors to make emergency calls.

When some survivors encountered crises in the safe zones and called the hotline, people at the Xiang City Base would issue missions in the mission center based on the content reported through the hotline.

Hua Mi would occasionally take a look.

She pointed to a strange incident reported by Chi Chuan in the document and said to Gong Yi, who was in a state of anxiety,

"There’s a report here that near their safe zone, there’s a patch of plants where several survivors have entered and then disappeared without a trace. I think we need to investigate this."

What she feared was that the plants had started to mutate. Although in Hua Mi’s previous life—after the Zombie outbreak and mutant animals—the mutation of plants took place many years later.

But in this life, animal mutations had already happened much sooner, so plant mutations would undoubtedly accelerate as well.

Hua Mi had already prepared for this possibility.

She said with a serious face, "If even plants start to mutate, then there will be fewer and fewer survivors in the world. After all, the survivors are not yet prepared to face the ultimate extinction of humanity."

"What do you mean by human extinction?"

Gong Yi finally snapped out of his anxious state.

He didn’t understand what Hua Mi was talking about at all.

Hua Mi handed the documents to Gong Yi, letting him see for himself whether the plants might mutate.

Gong Yi was shocked. The world was full of lush flowers and plants—even their own yard was filled with blossoms.

And now Hua Mi was telling him that all these might mutate?

Was the apocalypse pushing the survivors to a point where they had no way out?

Gong Yi rubbed his face and finally collected his emotions, planning to gather his garrison to check out the mutated grassland.

He turned and picked up his sister, his face full of worry as he anxiously asked,

"Daddy has to go to work now. Can you take good care of yourself? Can you not let anyone bully you?"

His sister nodded her head with a beaming smile, her cute and naive look only increasing Gong Yi’s concern.

His adorable daughter, how would she ever cope in this cruel apocalypse?

The next morning, it was Hua Mi’s turn to take her sister and brother to school. Watching the two little ones hold hands and get out of the car, Hua Mi parked to the side and got out to buy breakfast.

A few older boys stood whispering on the school gate’s edge. They watched as Boss Gong led his sister into the school, exchanging glances that conveyed meaning without words.

For such an able-bodied child, given their agile skills, they would have long been able to walk without being led.

Hua Xiuning looked more and more like a fool the more they watched.