Huaisi didn’t even have time to react before Xie Shouchan’s kick landed squarely on his chest. With tremendous force, he was sent flying backward and knocked flat onto the ground without any warning. Stunned, he raised his head to look at Xie Shouchan in disbelief; the Xie Shouchan who had acted this way felt entirely unreal, plunging him into a hallucinatory, dream-like state.
Yet it was no dream. The person before him was undeniably Xie Shouchan the one he had carried back on his back himself. It was the same face, the same person, except that his dual pupils had turned crimson and were now scanning everything with cold detachment.
“Shouchan…” Huaisi picked himself up, stumbled over to Xie Shouchan, and couldn’t help asking, “What’s wrong with you…”
Before he could finish, Xie Shouchan didn’t even spare him a sideways glance as he reached out and shoved him away. The force was so great that Huaisi was sent sprawling to the side. Striding straight ahead, Xie Shouchan looked at the zombies crowding around them, annoyance flashing across his face while an aura of violent temper smoldered faintly around him.
His crimson eyes swept over the surrounding zombies, his chin lifting slightly as an impatient tone slipped out: “Stop crowding around me. I hate zombies, they stink.” Then, his gaze landed on the dazed Huaisi off to the side, but this time, it carried a distinctly sharp emotional charge completely different from the detachment he had just directed at the zombies. His emotions grew much more defined as he stared right at Huaisi, pronouncing each word with deliberate hostility: “Especially you.”
Huaisi sat slumped on the ground, staring at Xie Shouchan. Although Xie Shouchan’s push had been completely merciless, he was currently in a zombie body and hadn’t sustained any real injury; instead, he was simply baffled by Xie Shouchan’s behavior.
The Xie Shouchan he knew was nothing like this. He would never make such an expression, nor would he treat him like this. In short, this wasn’t the Xie Shouchan he was familiar with. Had something gone wrong somewhere?
He searched frantically through the contents of the original novel, trying to find a clue. Yet the plot of the original book had long since been branded into his mind, and he knew clearly that it had never depicted a Xie Shouchan like this. So why on earth was this happening?
He even began to doubt whether the plot of the original novel was real at all.
Those crimson eyes lingered on him for a moment longer, the red gradually filling with a violent, murderous intent. The person in front of me is indeed Xie Shouchan, Huaisi confirmed once more as he opened his mouth to question: “Shouchan, are you, Ahhhhhh!!!”
Abruptly, Huaisi clutched his head and collapsed onto the ground, screaming in agony and rolling around as a wave of pain suddenly exploded inside his brain!
It hurts, hurts, hurts!
It was a violent surge of pain, arriving unannounced and out of nowhere, like an electric chainsaw violently cleaving open his skull. His small cranial capacity was forcibly stuffed with a massive volume of data, akin to some invisible, giant hand grabbing a handful of external objects and stuffing them forcefully into his brain cells. Streams of information poured in endlessly unlike physical pain, this was a searing torment that reached deep into the depths of his soul.
It was as if a computer with a modest storage capacity was being forced to reconfigure its programming to accommodate an overwhelming flood of massive data, causing the system to crash completely in an instant.
Huaisi lay motionless on the ground, clutching his head with his eyes closed, his slender body curled into a ball. His clothes were mottled and stained with patches of blood everywhere, while his handsome face only served to make him look all the more fragile and vulnerable.
He passed out cold in an instant.
Yet upon seeing this, Xie Shouchan’s expression did not show a single ripple of emotion. Staring down at the unconscious Huaisi crumpled on the ground, a violent temper continued to churn within his crimson eyes. Slowly, he raised his left hand toward Huaisi the preparatory motion for activating an ability.
Suddenly, Xie Shouchan’s right hand jerked upward, clamping violently around his own throat. He tightened his grip bit by bit, a flicker of astonishment flashing through his crimson eyes, while the corners of his lips pulled back into an increasingly wide arc until he burst into uninhibited laughter. He laughed up toward the sky as if witnessing something immensely hilarious, his laughter sounding chillingly mocking.
Yet his right hand refused to let go of his neck. Because he was cutting off his own carotid artery, his face above the neck turned a dark, swollen purple, as if he were about to suffocate to death the very next moment. Meanwhile, his left hand still aimed its ability directly at Huaisi’s head, attempting to crush the other person into pulp!
With a muffled bang, a tiny spatial distortion occurred, followed by an explosive sound. A mist of blood clouded the air, scattering a mess of flesh and white cerebral matter all over the ground.
When Huaisi woke up, the first thing he saw was the hazy gray sky framed by towering square buildings. For a fleeting second, he suffered the illusion of being trapped at the bottom of a well thousands of meters deep. Staring blankly at the sky for a while, he slowly sat up. Even though that soul-piercing agony had already vanished, a phantom sensation of pain seemed to linger persistently in his mind. Yet his expression remained remarkably calm.
Because he already knew everything.
The information that had flooded into his mind told him precisely what had happened.
Including the changes in Xie Shouchan.
Just moments ago, a flood of information had poured into his head. He figured it must be the author supplementing settings or rewriting the plot yet again. In any case, those pieces of data had appeared in his mind without warning, and the process had been far more painful than last time.
He sat up and looked around, only to discover that the surrounding area was a complete mess a thoroughly blood-soaked, mangled scene.
Scattered all around him were dismembered chunks and broken fragments of zombie corpses. Bits of flesh lay strewn across the vicinity, and he even felt a sticky weight pressing down on his body. Raising his left arm, he discovered a large, gaping hole pierced right through his forearm, exposing the shredded muscle underneath so that he could peer straight through to the other side, with blood still dripping down from the wound.
His clothes, head, and face were heavily speckled with tiny splatters of flesh and blood stains like sesame seeds, covering almost his entire pale, handsome face. The sparse patches of white skin peeking through the dense red dots, contrasted against the bewilderment in his narrow vertical pupils, created an intensely bizarre and incongruous picture like a pale white flower stained with bloody grime, blooming amidst a massacre.
Only then did he realize that several mangled zombie corpses were actually sprawled across his body; a few of them were reduced to tattered torsos with their heads completely missing, while various zombie crystal cores lay scattered across the ground. Particularly eye-catching was a single head belonging to a blond zombie, its strands of hair matted together with dried blood. Its original mutilated eye was gone, and half of its skull had been blown away by something, leaving the remaining half intact with a wide-open sapphire-blue eye. The crystal core, teetering precariously as though about to fall out, was exposed inside the half-shattered cranium.
This was.
What happened? Where is Xie Shouchan?
[Wuwu…]
Huaisi actually heard soft sobbing the infantile, high-pitched vocal tones of zombie speech. Looking closely, the little zombie had appeared from somewhere, staring fixedly at a spot with large eyes while whimpering. Occasionally, it would wipe its eyes with its hands, its big eyes filled with a pitiful, grievance-stricken look, though the tear ducts were simply brimming with terrifying dark liquid leaking out of its hollow, gnawed-away eye sockets.
Following its line of sight, Huaisi looked over and saw the half-intact blond head matted with bloody hair.
[Wuwu…]
The little zombie continued crying and wailing toward the blond head, though it kept a distance of several steps away, still harboring a fearful dread of Huaisi. Huaisi finally noticed this anomaly.
“Why are you crying?” Huaisi asked. Naturally, the little zombie couldn’t understand him and gave no reply, maintaining its weeping, aggrieved posture.
Huaisi fell silent. He didn’t even know how to communicate; did he know how to speak zombie language now? Subconsciously, he felt that he clearly shouldn’t.
[Save him…]
Huaisi looked at the little zombie in astonishment. The little zombie had already dropped flat onto the ground in a posture of complete submission, its hands outstretched and its body trembling slightly as it conveyed a single, desperate message.
It was begging Huaisi to save this blond zombie.
Why? What happened?
Huaisi froze. He realized that he had actually uttered zombie speech just now, yet he had no mastery over it whatsoever; the sounds had escaped him entirely by accident.
The little zombie immediately conveyed its meaning using zombie language: [They protected you. The person from just now wanted to kill you. It was too terrifying. That person.]
At this mention, the little zombie’s body actually trembled violently, as if truly frightened out of its wits.
[That person was too terrifying… Everyone ran away… But… he wanted to kill you… So everyone… came back anyway…]
Perhaps due to a child’s simplistic mentality compounded by a zombie’s stiff articulation, the delivery was disjointed and lacking in fluency. Yet, piecing it together with the present circumstances, Huaisi managed to vaguely glean the course of events from this fragmented account.
After Huaisi passed out, based on Xie Shouchan’s attitude toward him prior to fainting and the supplemental plot points in his head, Xie Shouchan should logically have killed all the zombies especially him, since he had turned into a zombie himself. Xie Shouchan possessed formidable combat prowess, and the zombies could all sense his terrifying deterrent aura, prompting them to flee in all directions. Seeing no intention on Xie Shouchan’s pursuit, the zombies fled even further, while Xie Shouchan casually slaughtered any stragglers who failed to run fast enough, naturally including the motionless, unconscious Huaisi.
Yet this group of fleeing zombies had actually turned around and rushed back, throwing themselves in the way and even engaging him in combat. Waking up now, he was met with this very spectacle.
Looking at the scattered zombie fragments around him and the crystal cores that had fallen out of them, Huaisi felt a complex mix of emotions.
He had always assumed zombies were devoid of emotion, operating purely on instinct. Yet this group of zombies had actually rushed back and flung themselves over his body to protect him from being killed. He figured the little zombie had no reason to lie, but this reality took him a long time to digest.
[Save him…] The little zombie repeated its plea cautiously, its small child-like body pressed tightly against the ground, palms turned upward in a completely defenseless state awaiting its fate.
Gazing down at the remaining half of the blond head, Huaisi’s expression grew complex. The blond zombie was not entirely dead; he could sense a tiny thread of life lingering within it, likely because its crystal core hadn’t completely fallen out. However, the blond zombie could no longer regenerate spontaneously as before, lying motionless on the ground with only a single breath left in it, resembling a dying human.
A thousand thoughts churned through Huaisi’s mind. Accustomed to viewing things from a human perspective, he still naturally placed himself on the side of humanity, deciding deep down that it would be best if all zombies simply died off entirely. It would be a net zero loss for mankind; furthermore, observing that these zombies were starting to awaken consciousness made their eventual extinction seem all the more beneficial.
Save him? No! Isn’t the complete disappearance of zombies a good thing? It poses no disadvantage to humans whatsoever. Besides, judging by how these zombies are starting to develop awareness, letting them vanish is the right path.
If I don’t save him, I’ll just let him slowly die out. But he turned out this way because he was trying to protect me! Where is your conscience?! If a person loses their heart, can they still be called human?
Two conflicting lines of thought battled fiercely inside Huaisi’s head. Closing his eyes, he covered his face with one hand while instinctively reaching out with the other.
Stop arguing. Huaisi felt that dull ache beginning to flare up deep within his brain again.
Suddenly, Huaisi snapped his head upward. He noticed that the blond zombie, which had been lying on the ground with half its skull shattered just a moment before, had crawled right in front of him and was now licking at the blood dripping down from his wound with its tongue. Miraculously, the wound on the side of its head was actually beginning to regenerate!
Huaisi was stunned into inaction, watching as the blond zombie’s crystal core was re-encased by the newly regrown skull. However, the blond zombie’s damaged eye failed to grow back; the empty, blackened socket stood out sharply against its other, perfectly intact sapphire-blue eye, lending it a striking clarity.
Seeing the blond zombie recover, the little zombie whimpered as it huddled beside it, while the blond youth zombie prostrated itself before Huaisi in an attitude characterized by reverence and a strange, trembling awe, conveying:
[Your flesh and blood have granted me rebirth! I’m so glad you’re all right!]
Studying the two zombies before him, Huaisi felt that some of his fundamental perceptions were being overturned by the scene unfolding before his eyes. He looked down at the hand he had unconsciously stretched out just a moment ago.
Did I save this zombie unconsciously just now? But I had no awareness of activating a healing ability with my hand at all.
Moreover, looking at the gaping hole in his left forearm which was still bleeding drop by drop, Huaisi couldn’t resist sticking out his tongue to lick it a few times. It didn’t taste special, and it certainly wasn’t pleasant at least, it couldn’t compare to human blood. He couldn’t comprehend why these zombies were so fixated on his flesh and blood; they were always drawn to it, repeatedly expressing total submission and even utilizing his blood to rapidly regenerate their zombie bodies.
His flesh and blood seemed to possess healing properties for zombies.
What is going on? Why on earth is this happening? The supplemental plot points in his mind made no mention of this aspect of him. Was this an emergent situation, or was it deemed irrelevant to the plot and thus unworthy of elaboration?
Lost in thought, Huaisi pondered the implications, but his mind gradually grew hazy again as a dull, nagging ache set in deep within his brain not a sudden sharp agony, but an exhausting, grinding ache like fine sandpaper wearing down stone. Such a foggy state severely hampered his thinking; only when his mind was completely blank did he feel truly comfortable.
He figured this must be a side effect of turning into a zombie, much like how his thought processes had been agonizingly sluggish when he first transformed. Henceforth, whenever he pondered things too deeply, his brain easily slipped into a muddled state accompanied by that fine, grinding ache.
Clutching his head, he raised his gaze to see the blond zombie and the little zombie staring directly at him, wearing an expression that practically screamed they were awaiting his commands.
The two zombies stopped communicating and simply sprawled blankly on the ground, staring at him. Huaisi stared back at them, his mind drifting into emptiness as they shared a blank, vacant gaze for a long time. Finally, Huaisi snapped out of it first, striking his head twice with his fist in an attempt to drive away the nagging ache. Deciding to drop any further contemplation of his bodily changes and suppressing the rising tide of hunger, he got to his feet and prepared to leave this place.
Seeing him stand up, the blond zombie immediately asked in respectful zombie speech: [What shall we do?]
Huaisi felt a strange sentiment toward these two zombies; when it came to killing them, he found himself unable to bring himself to do it for the time being, especially now that they possessed self-awareness. Yet, focusing too much attention on them felt wrong as well as if crossing a delicate red line hidden in his heart.
“Do whatever you want,” he uttered aloud, regardless of whether they understood or not. Refusing to look back at them anymore, he paced slowly toward the exit of the abandoned chemical plant, staring blankly out the doorway.
In any case, he couldn’t stay here any longer. Looking at the scattered zombie fragments covering the ground and the lingering stench of rot in the air, he felt zero desire to remain. Following this incident of being captured at the refuge, he realized he could no longer return there rashly at least not right now, given that the bespectacled man resembling Xie Shouchan might still want to hunt him down.
So, during the time before he could return to the refuge, he needed to carefully plan his next steps. Coupled with the incident involving Xie Shouchan, he felt an even greater urgency to reassess his plans going forward.
Where should I go, then?
A rare trace of bewilderment washed over him.
After the ordeal at the refuge, he realized he could no longer easily reintegrate into human society. So where did he truly belong?
His head started throbbing again sure enough, thinking too much always triggered it. Frown lines creaking across his handsome face, he decided to find something else to occupy his mind and divert his attention. Hearing a rustling sound behind him, accompanied by faint chewing and swallowing noises, he turned around and froze.
The blond zombie was holding a severed piece of zombie thigh meat, tearing off chunks of muscle with its sharp fangs like cotton batting before gulping them down into its stomach. Dark, pitch-black blood and scraps of flesh flew about as it chewed, dripping from the corners of its mouth and smearing a grotesque, blood-soaked ring around its jaw. During the tearing motion, a stray scrap of flesh even splattered straight into its hollow eye socket; mixing with the dark fluid, it trickled down the blackened eye pit like a trail of dark, bloody tears.
The little zombie beside it shook its shoulders at the exact same rhythm. Despite having the innocent face of a child, it was likewise frantically tearing into and devouring chunks from some unknown zombie corpse. Flesh and juices flew in all directions, its large eyes reflecting nothing but total submission to instinct, while its dead-gray, round face was smeared with flowing blood.
They knew only that they were ravenous to the extreme, and with plenty of zombie fragments lying around to eat, they simply snatched them up without hesitation to tear into them and appease the innate hunger of a zombie.
At this sight, Huaisi’s narrow vertical pupils violently constricted.
[STOP!!!]
Abruptly, the two zombies halted their chewing in unison as if obeying an order, turning their heads to look at Huaisi. Their eyes held no special emotions bordering indeed on vacuity yet they perceived Huaisi’s change and instinctively complied with his command. To demonstrate obedience and submission, the blond zombie even offered the half-eaten piece of zombie thigh meat it held in both hands, presenting it to Huaisi like a subject tributing an offering to a king.
Huaisi reached out and violently slapped the filthy zombie meat away, glaring in anger at the two zombies. Yet both creatures remained completely blank; naturally, they had no way of understanding why the variant zombie before them was suddenly so upset.
From Huaisi’s perspective, these two zombies were devouring the corpses of their own kind an occurrence that would normally be commonplace among ordinary zombies acting on blind instinct. But now that he recognized they possessed self-awareness, witnessing them commit such an act filled him with disgust and wrath.
“Do you even know what you’re doing?!”
However, the two zombies merely looked at him with cautious apprehension, immediately dropping flat onto the ground to tremble in fear, still utterly clueless about what he meant.
Only then did it dawn on him that these zombies had never received a human education. They had merely awakened consciousness while still operating under zombie survival instincts; no one had ever taught them about the taboos of cannibalizing their own kind, and they simply didn’t possess the capacity to understand such concepts.
Awakening awareness was the critical turning point for a beast to transform into a human, but independent consciousness was the true hallmark of an individual person. Consciousness might serve as the boundary distinguishing men from beasts, but it was by no means the sole standard for human civilization.
Instantly, Huaisi realized his anger was entirely unjustified, yet a stifled wrath continued to burn within his chest, threatening to tear him apart from the inside out at any second.
Especially when the little zombie raised its head to look at him, its large eyes set within its dead-gray face devoid of any inner substance possessing only absolute submission to superior power. The round child’s face had lost all innocence and everything else the moment it became a zombie; existing now solely to survive under a brand-new identity, it was currently equivalent to a blank sheet of paper.
Looking at the half-eaten zombie thigh meat swept aside on the ground, he fell into a momentary trance, suddenly overlapping the image with the terrified, half-face of the woman he had held in his hands that day.
In truth, what difference is there?
He had consumed his own kind as well, driven by that same gnawing hunger for his peers. Yet, he suffered because he understood that such actions were wrong. But the two zombies before him remained perpetually bewildered what standing did he have to feel angry and point fingers at them?
Yet the fury burning in his heart persisted. In truth, he was merely enraged by his own inability to control his actions.
Huaisi closed his eyes, striving to steady his emotions, and said, “Bury them all.”
However, the two zombies lacked the capacity to comprehend his instructions; they simply remained pressed against the ground, assuming he was waiting to issue another command.
Huaisi fell silent, realizing this was proving rather troublesome. He sensed that he was theoretically capable of producing zombie speech, but whenever he tried earnestly to articulate something, he failed to form the correct sounds accurately, forcing him to resort to human speech instead to direct them.
Yet these two zombies had no concept of such matters. While they had managed to follow his commands earlier, it was likely due to instinctual resonance among zombies; complex human behavioral concepts naturally eluded their understanding, and they couldn’t even grasp his words.
Staring at the scattered zombie fragments blankly littering the ground, Huaisi began attempting to piece the zombie pieces back together into human shapes one by one. He soon realized this was completely unfeasible, as there were simply too many shattered chunks scattered about. Sometimes it was impossible to tell whether a fragment belonged to the abdomen or the chest; on one occasion, after painstakingly piecing one together, he discovered it had one terrifyingly long leg and one terribly short leg, resulting in a grotesque asymmetry. Moreover, heads were largely impossible to reconstruct since they were far too shattered. Resorting to symbolically placing a crystal core where the head ought to be made it look exceptionally comical.
It resembled an abstract art painting where no one could tell what it was supposed to represent.
Not to mention whether the crystal cores actually belonged to the patchwork bodies they were slapped onto. Huaisi had simply grabbed whatever was closest at hand and jammed them together.
After staring at his handiwork for a long time, Huaisi decided his behavior was rather ridiculous, and simply swept all the zombie fragments into a single pile, abandoning any further effort at sorting or piecing them together.
As Huaisi busied himself, the two zombies watched his labor intently with their three combined eyes staring blankly. Huaisi suddenly developed the profound sensation of being an exhausted, overworked elder with zero helpful youngsters around to lend a hand; what left him even more speechless was the absurdity of having such a train of thought in the first place.
“Follow me,” Huaisi told the two zombies, punctuating his words by pointing at them and then gesturing toward the doorway, signaling them to tag along.
The two zombies finally scrambled up, trailing behind Huaisi as he stepped outside. Outside the abandoned chemical plant lay a stretch of barren mud flats where sparse weeds managed to eke out an existence, though the soil clearly lacked moisture, cracking into spiderweb-like fissures across the terrain.
Huaisi scanned the surroundings; not even a single tree branch was in sight, let alone any tools to use.
Finally, gazing down at his own hands as if sensing his thoughts, his slender fingers instantly sprouted long, razor-sharp claws.
Thus, he drove his claws straight into the dry earth and began digging.
A zombie’s claws were exceptionally sharp and sturdy, making short work of excavating soil; digging a pit was child’s play, though even with his ten fingers flying furiously, he could only manage a single hole at a time.
He looked over at the large and small zombies standing blankly beside him, and snapped in obvious irritation, “Come over and dig.” Only after finishing did he realize these two zombies might not necessarily understand, forcing him to resort to frantic gesturing until he finally managed to make them grasp his intent, successfully drafting them into the excavation crew.
Before long, a large pit was duly excavated.
Huaisi hurried back inside the abandoned chemical plant, hauling an armful of zombie fragments out to toss them into the pit. After a couple of round trips, the two zombies finally caught on, learning to copy him by hauling fragments and tossing them into the large pit as well.
Watching various shattered limbs pile up inside the pit, Huaisi solemnly used his hands and claws once more to shovel earth over the pit to bury them. Though the two zombies failed to grasp the significance of this act, they obediently squatted down beside him to help shovel dirt into the hole.
As the fragments inside the pit gradually vanished beneath layers of soil, the residual anger in his chest finally dissipated somewhat.
Three mud-and-blood-smeared zombies squatted along the edge of the large pit, the large and small ones flanking Huaisi on either side as they watched him with cautious curiosity.
“Even if you are zombies, you cannot eat your own kind,” Huaisi paused to think, then added, “And you cannot eat humans either.”
“Even if they are just corpse fragments, you must bury your own kind.” He pointed toward the filled pit. “This is what we call burial. It is a sign of respect for your own kind.”
Huaisi wore a deadpan expression of utmost seriousness, his vertical pupils devoid of their previous golden hue as he stared fixedly at the two zombies. After observing them for a long time without seeing any reaction, he once more concluded that his own behavior was utterly absurd.
I’ve truly picked up Uncle Liao’s old bad habits even worse than Uncle Liao, actually. I’ve actually started trying to educate zombies.
He let out a self-deprecating chuckle and shook his head.
At that moment, the little zombie’s large eyes twitched as emotions gradually surfaced within them. Because a child’s eyes were exceptionally large, pure black, and devoid of impurities, any tiny flicker of emotion showed through with absolute clarity. It nodded with a look of half-comprehension.
Huaisi froze, followed immediately by the crisp, childish sound of zombie speech:
[I feel a bit… hard…] A trace of sorrow welled up within the little zombie’s large eyes.
Huaisi’s previously dim vertical pupils lit up.
If zombies can never be completely eliminated or wiped out, is it possible to take a different path? If there is a zombie that learns to control its desires and masters humanity, won’t more zombies learn human emotions? If so, will the boundary between zombies and humans still remain so distinct?
By then, even I probably won’t be ostracized by humans anymore.
“Come, construct a sentence using even if… even though…” Huaisi traced a few words onto the muddy earth with his finger.
“Even if… even though we are… zombies… we cannot eat… humans…” His speech was halting and clumsy, the pitch sounding like indistinct human language, akin to a toddler just learning how to babble.
Huaisi patted the little zombie’s head and praised, “Well done.”
“Construct a sentence using because… therefore…”
“Because… we are… zombies… therefore… we cannot… casually eat people…”
Huaisi frowned, turning his gaze toward the blond zombie. The sapphire-blue eye looked back at Huaisi with a slightly bewildered expression. Huaisi said sternly, “Not casually eat. We cannot eat them at all.”
Does that mean eating them casually is fine, then?
That kind of mindset simply wouldn’t do.
The blond zombie leader nodded with a look of half-comprehension, raising its head to look at Huaisi. The face framed beneath the white cloth strip alongside that sapphire-blue eye looked rather refined and handsome; previously, Huaisi had found the blackened, hollow eye socket horribly asymmetrical against the sapphire eye, so he had simply torn a strip of fabric from his clothing to bandage the empty socket. Ignoring the overly pale skin, it now looked indistinguishable from a normal human.
At that moment, a tattered zombie stumbled inside, instinctively dropping into a crawling posture before Huaisi. Midway down, it remembered that Huaisi disliked this behavior and awkwardly stood back up.
“Lea… leader…” It struggled to vocalize, finding the task far more difficult than the blond zombie did. After managing those two words, it could no longer articulate any further human speech.
Huaisi immediately corrected it: “Don’t call me leader.”
Yet this correction only flustered the messenger zombie so badly that it completely failed to utter any other human words.
[Leader, while we were out catching chickens outside earlier, our group of zombies got beaten to pieces by another faction of zombies.] To demonstrate, it had other zombies carry forward an obviously battered zombie whose body lacked a single intact patch of flesh.
Huaisi froze, looking at the tattered zombie. Since zombies couldn’t die unless their heads were destroyed, this particular creature was merely beaten to a pulp.
Ever since Huaisi resolved not to return to the refuge for the time being, he had taken the large and small zombies to establish a temporary stronghold in what used to be a garage, which appeared relatively safe. Huaisi brought the two zombies inside to begin teaching them human speech, imparting human knowledge, and instilling a sense of morality.
However, zombies required sustenance, and their hunger was far more intense than that of humans.
Even though Huaisi could use deterrence and teach them to control their instincts, they couldn’t go without flesh and blood for extended periods, as doing so only led to greater loss of control. Consequently, he would take the pair out to hunt animals to barely appease their hunger. Animal flesh possessed virtually zero appeal compared to humans, but it sufficed to stave off starvation. Later on, realizing that living hand-to-mouth like this was unfeasible, Huaisi simply enclosed some animals to achieve self-sufficiency.
Curiously, though he had initially only brought the large and small zombies along, their numbers had steadily grown over time. Upon closer inspection, these new arrivals had all been brought back by the blond zombie whenever it ventured outside. Perhaps the blond zombie possessed natural leadership qualities even in life, retaining its role as the minor chieftain among this pack of zombies. Without exception, all the zombies brought back by the blond zombie exhibited total submission to him, save for the occasional unruly individual that the blond zombie would simply beat into submission.
Seeing that the zombie couldn’t explain itself clearly, Huaisi turned toward the blond zombie, opening his mouth to call out, only to stall instantly he realized he didn’t actually know its name.
Only then did he realize that neither the minor chieftain nor the little zombie had a name.
“Leader… earlier we… discovered… a group of… zombies…” The minor chieftain took the initiative to speak up, its spoken human language proving somewhat smoother than the others, with a distinctly better grasp of expression.
“They… always… fight… and they eat people too…” The minor chieftain seemed afraid that Huaisi might get angry, and hurriedly added, “We didn’t… we didn’t…”
In short, apart from the group of zombies Huaisi had brought into the garage, there was another faction of zombies roaming outside. It was a small gang boasting its own chieftain who apparently also possessed self-awareness. Having banded together into a small zombie squad, they acted extremely arrogantly outside, repeatedly provoking them before, though they had always restrained themselves due to Huaisi’s teachings. Who would have thought that this time, the rival faction’s zombies had devoured the chickens they worked so hard to raise? Naturally furious, these zombies had retaliated, resulting in their current battered state.
Word had it that this rival zombie gang had even run over to an enclosure fenced off on all four sides to hunt and eat humans.
There were no Espers inside that place, making it a regular hunting ground for that small gang of zombies to capture and feed on humans.
Hearing this description from the minor chieftain, the surrounding zombies nearly drooled.
Enclosed humans how delicious must that be?
Yet, with Huaisi present, none of them dared to show it.
Huaisi, however, turned solemn upon hearing the account. His narrow vertical pupils snapped toward the minor chieftain, making the creature tremble slightly. The shudder was extremely faint not quite fear, but rather a reaction akin to some form of excitement as it looked back at Huaisi with those sapphire-blue eyes.
[Where is that place?]
Eager to find out, he directly communicated using zombie language to prevent the minor chieftain and the others from failing to understand and messing up the location.
Over these past days, Huaisi had finally mastered the art of expressing his thoughts via zombie speech.
The minor chieftain immediately described the general location: high walls on all four sides, with many humans inside who seemed just like the chickens they raised. The minor chieftain watched Huaisi’s reaction cautiously, and added, [I’ve been inside that place myself. It was right there that I met the Leader.]
That was precisely the moment when he licked the fresh blood that had dripped onto the ground from Huaisi, gaining consciousness in that very instant.
Huaisi’s focus, however, lay elsewhere. Naturally, he couldn’t recall which specific zombies had breached the refuge during the initial incident, but in his heart, he could virtually confirm it.
Because the only place nearby that matched this description was District 8 Refuge.
Judging by this description, could the inspection team have already left?
Nearly a month had passed, and he couldn’t be certain whether the inspection team had departed or not, but a lingering anxiety refused to let go of him. In the end, he rose to his feet, determined to go check the place out for himself. Even if it turned out not to be the refuge, it would at least offer some peace of mind.
No matter what Liao Muqing had said that day, Huaisi found himself utterly incapable of severing this deep-seated attachment in his heart.
Stepping outside, he turned back to call for the minor chieftain to lead the way. Opening his mouth, he watched the minor chieftain stand up as well to follow closely behind him. The creature clearly understood Huaisi’s intent better than the ordinary zombies did, carrying a stronger human touch. Even the little zombie carefully trotted over to his side, assuming a posture that was both respectful and affectionate.
After pondering for a moment, Huaisi decided to speak: “I’ll give you a name.”
“Adam.”
The wielder of desires who attained consciousness.
A look of astonishment flickered through the minor chieftain’s sapphire-blue eyes. Huaisi smiled, his pale, lean face brightening up considerably as he said, “Your name is Adam. How does that sound?”