Training Makes Me Stronger Every Day: I'm the Ultimate Grinder in the Apocalypse

[Strong female lead, no romance + apocalypse + evolution + supernatural powers + a touch of fantasy + coming-of-age + a touch of ensemble cast]

[The heroine grows stronger step by step. She doesn’t start out as the most powerful character.]

(Also known as: How I Accidentally Found the Apocalypse’s Most Powerful Support Item and Made It Big in the End Times.)

Bai Siran, who longs for freedom, leaves her family, only to be drawn unwillingly into one troublesome incident after another.

The underground organization she belongs to takes a job from a client. While stealing something from an underground research facility, Bai Siran happens upon a dusty jade pendant. Figuring she might as well take whatever she can, she casually pockets it.

It isn’t until… her blood drips onto the jade pendant that she discovers its true power.

From then on, while others cultivate, she cultivates too. When everyone else is begging high and low and fighting over a bite to eat, she has plenty of food, drink, and clothes, and keeps cultivating. When others are locked in bitter power struggles to seize the top positions, Bai Siran, bearing the title of the strongest ability user alive today…

Is still cultivating!!!

…

Go ahead and cultivate, then. Who could possibly outdo your work ethic?

-

Zombies, natural disasters, global evolution… Earth is no longer as stable or as suitable for survival as humanity once believed.

The fittest survive.

More important than freedom is staying alive.

(PS: This is a standalone world. Please don’t conflate it with reality.)