The man glanced briefly at the group of refugees, his gaze cold and even impatient. However, the light gleaming off his lenses kept his emotions shielded from view.
Huaisi looked back over his shoulder. In the distance, he could vaguely make out that amidst a massive swarm of zombies, the man seemed to be with the refugees, which brought him a slight sense of relief. Although the man looked similar to Xie Shouhan, he was clearly not Xie Shouhan; both his temperament and combat skills marked him as an experienced esper. A person like that ought to protect this group of humans, right?
Although Huaisi had grasped the usage of the “Blood Spike” ability in a split second just moments ago, he had no desire to become entangled in a fight with the man. For one thing, he was no match for him right now, and for another, he simply didn’t want to fight him. He clearly understood that his current zombie body possessed some kind of mechanism that wouldn’t let him die easily. Even if he intentionally sought death, just as before, a zombie’s instinct for danger would react faster than his brain, evading the threat instantly, or else causing any self-inflicted wounds to heal at a terrifying speed.
If he kept fighting the man, he would only lose more and more blood, and his craving for human flesh and blood would only intensify. His sanity was barely hanging on; if he lost any more blood, he couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t lose his mind again and attack that group of humans.
He even felt a trace of gratitude toward the man for appearing, even though the man had launched an attack against him and shaved off half his face at least it had stopped his desire to devour those people.
As long as he fled to a place devoid of humans, suppressing the craving for flesh and blood would be much easier while he was still not entirely consumed by hunger.
Huaisi had no idea how long he had walked. Relying purely on his last shred of sanity, he stumbled past one dilapidated ruin after another, steering himself as close to the city’s edge as possible. As time ticked away and the blood in his body drained, his mind grew increasingly hazy. Occasionally, when passing a street corner, he could still catch the scent of human life drifting on the breeze.
Humans!! Eat him!! Eating him will restore everything…
No, no! I’m a human! I’m human, ahhhhh!!!
But you have to eat human meat to survive! You’ve already turned into this monster anyway, and the people at the shelter already treat you like a zombie. Since you’re a zombie, why not eat human meat…
No! Don’t go over there!! I’m not one!!
Just one bite is enough. Just take a sip, it won’t do any harm, just a single bite, and that person won’t die…
Right… just one bite. As long as you pull back in time, you won’t endanger that person’s life, so why can’t you…
…
“Ahhhhhh!!!! Shut up!!”
Clutching his head in agony, his eyes split wide with terror, the intact half of his face twisted in pain while his teeth in the half-face where flesh and blood had been shaved away bit down desperately on his own tongue. Blood gushed from his mouth, staining his white teeth crimson and making that half-mangled face look even more gruesome. Yet the pain managed to jolt him back to a sliver of sanity. He hurried away in the opposite direction of the drifting human scent, stumbling blindly until he reached a place devoid of any human presence presumably an old, abandoned construction site. Only then did he dare to completely let go, collapsing limply onto the ground as he waged a painful battle against his internal self-awareness and his zombie instincts.
Although there was no human scent, the area reeked entirely of the foul, rotting odor of zombies. The moment he slumped down, more and more zombies began to converge around him, making him wonder if he had accidentally stumbled straight into a zombie den. However, these zombies slowly drew closer, and as he watched them with bloodshot eyes, wondering what they were up to, he saw some of them realize he wasn’t moving and instead lowered themselves to crawl flat on the ground, licking the blood that dripped from his body.
Some even licked their way all the way from the outer perimeter straight to his front, pressing themselves flat against the ground in a posture of total submission. Others, finding the blood dripping onto the pavement insufficient, became so intoxicated by the taste that they tried to crawl up onto his body to lick his wounds directly.
Though dominated by hunger, Huaisi was still thoroughly startled and sickened by the zombies’ bizarre behavior. Without hesitation, he threw a punch that sent the nearest zombie flying, followed by several more wild punches that batted away the uninvited creatures crowding too close, his slit pupils fixed on them with a menacing glare.
Fortunately, once those zombies were batted away, they no longer dared to move recklessly, prostrating themselves beside his flanks. At that moment, Huaisi felt something was amiss; the reactions of these zombies were far too strange, especially the way they licked his blood, while an increasing number of zombies ringed around him.
The zombie lying flat on the ground closest to him occasionally raised its head to stare at Huaisi’s movements with its shattered eye sockets, carefully spreading its hands flat on the ground to show complete submission. This particular zombie had plenty of damage on its body, including a pitch-black, flesh-piercing hole clear through its right foot, and one of its eyes was completely ruined, yet it still looked relatively presentable compared to the others here.
Seeing that Huaisi made no move for the moment, the zombie actually lowered its head again to lap up the blood dripping from him. At this point, Huaisi was being tortured to the limits of his patience by hunger; losing all tolerance and wishing nothing more than to beat all these zombies away, he let out a savage roar: “Get lost!!!”
Immediately afterward, he grit his teeth with all his might. At that moment, his golden-red slit pupils stood rigidly vertical as reason was completely stripped from his body. He curled himself up into a tight ball, desperately attempting to suppress his actions once he lost control.
Afterward, he vaguely felt himself mumbling his lips in the pitch-black void, as if some warm, delicious, surging current of heat was pouring into his body. To his parched, dry zombie frame, this was like a long-awaited dew after a drought; he subconsciously sucked frantically at this wave of warmth, and unable to resist this feeding method, he simply began chewing voraciously, mouthful after mouthful. Gradually, he felt a surge of strength fill his entire body, as if a withered husk was being soaked by dew and swelling back to life.
In the darkness, he saw life glowing with fluorescent green light breaking through the soil, rapidly shooting out branches and sprouting leaves with a teeth-setting creak sound. Next, the roots grew rapidly, wrapped in membranes as they pushed out branches and vines, until suddenly a beam of light pierced through the end of the pitch-black void.
Like a green plant yearning for sunlight, he instinctively followed the light, running for his life. Feeling entirely unburdened and filled with strength, he sprinted toward the sunlight with every ounce of his being, attempting to seize that streak of brightness. As if catching sight of an opening in a cave, the harder he ran, the more light came into view. Overjoyed, the brightness ahead grew increasingly blinding until he could vaguely make out distinct details right in front of him.
The grey-white, shattered half-face of a woman.
One eyeball was nearly dislodged from its socket, blood vessels wrapping around the sphere like a spiderweb. Her expression remained frozen in a split second of sheer terror, her wide-open mouth seemingly crying out for help, while the other half of her face was a mangled, bloody ruin marked by what looked like the chewing of a beast.
This is…
He felt a sticky sensation in the palm of his hand, noticing trails of blood winding down his pale arm. Following the trails, fresh blood overflowed from between his fingers, and his hands were cupping the severed half-head of this woman. The bloody taste in his mouth and the grey, terrified expression of the woman overlapped with the terrified expression of the frail woman whose neck he had choked back in the alley…
“Ugh…”
As if scorched by fire, he flung the woman’s head away, flipped over, and began to retch violently. Yet the bloody taste in his mouth couldn’t trigger any actual stomach upset, so he shoved his hand down his throat. He had no idea how deep his hand went; he only felt as though he had completely lost any human sensation. Pushing his hand all the way through his narrow esophagus, touching the cramped stenosis of his sternal food pipe, his entire palm and even his forearm were jammed straight down into his throat. Yet a sense of reassurance bloomed in his chest he could finally vomit! But nothing came up at all; the moment any human flesh and blood entered his body, it instantly melted into his own flesh and blood.
Retching, desperately dry heaving.
He felt as though he were a corpse stripped of normal functions yet somehow still capable of movement. Opening his wide, helpless eyes, he watched the woman’s head roll to the side and come to a stop, that face staring fixedly at him.
Huaisi froze. Blood-tears flooded his eye sockets, spilling over continuously and leaving wet, winding trails of blood across his face. The skin and flesh of his cheek that had previously been shaved away had actually regenerated by the time he woke up, restoring his appearance to how it looked before the injury only the old scar on his neck remained.
“It wasn’t me… It wasn’t me… I didn’t do it…” His voice, intermittently wheezing out of his severed throat like glass scraping across a chalkboard, sounded gratingly harsh. Shaking his head as blood-tears flew off like snapped pearls, his words grew increasingly weak and powerless. He felt a conviction being forcibly ripped out of his body, anchored by a thread tied directly to that woman’s head, slowly being pulled away. He had to do something he had to do something!
He lunged forward to scoop up the woman’s head, cradling the severed half-skull in his hands as he murmured crazily and stubbornly: “Giving it back to you… I’m giving it all back to you… I’m giving it all back…” He repeated the phrase in a frenzied, obsessive loop, his pupils mixed with blood-tears flashing with golden light. He felt a portion of his own blood cells fall upon the woman’s face, while also sensing a portion of the woman’s essence integrating into his own body. These cells were like seeds; just like the green plants he had witnessed rapidly sprouting and growing earlier, he threw every ounce of his strength into making those cellular “seeds” spread and multiply.
In an instant, the missing half of the woman’s face regenerated like something out of a movie. Bones, neural pathways, and blood vessels grew and intertwined to weave through the nerves; muscles wove across the frame, covered by a membrane and skin, rapidly growing and completing the entirety of the woman’s skull!
Gazing at the woman’s complete skull, the light slowly returned to Huaisi’s eyes, yet the woman was already dead, lying silently and motionlessly in his hands.
“How could this be… How could it end up like this…” Huaisi muttered, blankness flooding his features until a familiar face burst into his view, pulling him fiercely into an embrace.
“Huaisi!”
With the cherishing tone of someone reclaiming something lost, Xie Shouhan pulled Huaisi into his arms and finally let out a breath of relief. A circle of zombies surrounded them on all sides, and numerous zombie corpses littered the ground. Xie Shouhan had carved his way in through a heavily stacked, surrounding horde of zombies, and right now, this pack of zombies didn’t even dare to step forward.
Noticing something was amiss, Xie Shouhan carefully scrutinized Huaisi. The Huaisi in his arms was trembling, covered entirely in bloody filth, his face streaked with trails of blood. Even the shirt he had meticulously buttoned up earlier was now unrecognizable in color, dyed a deep, blood-soaked red. Huaisi looked as though he had just been fished out of a sea of blood, covered head to toe in gory grime.
Yet Huaisi seemed completely oblivious to his surroundings, only muttering to himself: “I ate a person… I’m already a zombie… I’m going to eat everyone… No matter who it is… I’m going to eat them… No matter who… No matter who…”
And yet, he felt a tight embrace filled with human warmth, searingly hot enough to melt him as warm kisses fell one after another onto his forehead, accompanied by a voice that continuously echoed in his ear: “Huaisi isn’t like that… You would never hurt anyone else… Trust yourself, just trust yourself, Huaisi…”