The group reacted quickly.
Su Ya and Nie Fei were the first to run toward the back, with Xiao Jingcheng immediately following them.
Jiang Ran grabbed Lin Buyu’s hand and sprinted at full speed.
Huh?
Running?
Why wasn’t he flying anymore?
Wasn’t he able to use his ability to lift his body and shoot away like a beam of light?
Behind them, the speed-type zombies leaped and darted around like fleas, pouncing toward them.
Lin Buyu took a quick look and was stunned by their sheer numbers. There had to be hundreds of mutated zombies.
“Jiang Ran, why aren’t you using your ability?” she asked, sensing that something was wrong.
Jiang Ran wrapped one arm around her waist and carried her as he ran. He kicked off a wall, using it to propel himself sideways before calmly answering, “I’ll tell you a secret.”
“What secret?”
“Your wish is about to come true.”
Lin Buyu was just about to ask what wish he meant when Jiang Ran continued, “You might get to die with me. Happy?”
Happy my ass!
Did he even hear himself? Was that something a normal person would say?
Lin Buyu stared at him with wide eyes.
“Your ability isn’t about to run out, is it?”
Jiang Ran smiled at her. With his bare fist, he smashed the head of a zombie charging straight at them. Its skull exploded instantly.
“Worse than that. My body will probably be completely paralyzed for about an hour, and I won’t be able to use my ability.”
After awakening his ability, a flaw had appeared in his body.
No one knew this secret.
At an unpredictable moment, he would suddenly lose his ability, and his entire body would become completely immobile.
It was a serious problem.
Lin Buyu glanced rapidly at the zombies behind them.
Oh, shit.
There were so many of them, like a swarm of locusts.
Xiao Jingcheng, Su Ya, and Nie Fei had already jumped directly from the second floor.
They quickly opened the car doors, jumped inside, and started the engines.
Su Ya shouted from below, “Brother Ran, hurry up!”
Her voice was more urgent than ever before.
Because this was the worst situation they had ever encountered.
Each of them could easily deal with more than a dozen mutated zombies alone.
Mutated zombies rarely gathered in groups because they were territorial.
Yet somehow, this time they had encountered an absolutely terrifying number of them.
Jiang Ran was still moving quickly, but no matter how fast he was, he couldn’t outrun the mutated zombies.
The two of them had already reached the second-floor window.
The zombies came rushing toward them.
Lin Buyu’s zombie body possessed terrifying strength. If she went all out, even Su Ya, who had a strength-type ability, couldn’t match half of her strength.
Lin Buyu knew better than anyone that the main villain, Jiang Ran, wasn’t going to die.
But when he was pushed into an extremely dangerous situation, he would awaken the terrifying power hidden deep within his body.
The system had warned her that if he lost control, he might accidentally destroy this entire world.
So, there was absolutely no way she could let him reach that point.
Without a second thought, Lin Buyu grabbed Jiang Ran’s arm with one hand and violently hurled him out of the window.
“Su Ya, catch Jiang Ran!”
The moment Jiang Ran was forcefully pulled by Lin Buyu, his pitch-black eyes suddenly erupted with intense disgust toward the world.
He thought Lin Buyu had finally stopped pretending.
He thought she was going to throw him into the horde of zombies, just like all his family members had been thrown away before.
But the truth was completely different.
After throwing him out of the window, she reached up and pulled the hairpin from her hair.
Then she viciously slashed her own palm, drawing blood, and ran toward the opposite end of the corridor.
She was going to lure the zombies away?
Jiang Ran’s pupils suddenly widened.
This was an outcome he had never expected.
He wanted to move.
But his body was already completely paralyzed.
Su Ya quickly caught Jiang Ran and pulled him into the car with one hand.
Nie Fei turned the steering wheel and was about to drive away when Jiang Ran shouted, “Wait for her.”
Nie Fei and Su Ya had both seen Lin Buyu lure the zombies away. Xiao Jingcheng had seen it too.
None of them had expected Lin Buyu to be so reckless.
Even less had they expected her to really be a lovesick fool.
She was actually willing to sacrifice her own life for Jiang Ran.
She was truly willing to give him her life.
Unfortunately, no matter how much they admired her courage, they couldn’t stop and wait for her.
There was no time.
There were simply too many mutated zombies.
If they stayed there any longer, they would all die.
Xiao Jingcheng quickly spun the steering wheel, honking repeatedly as he stuck his head out and shouted at Nie Fei.
“What are you waiting for? Go!”
Nie Fei slammed his foot on the accelerator.
Jiang Ran sat in the back seat, his voice frighteningly cold.
“I said wait for her!”
Su Ya looked toward the hospital anxiously.
“Brother Ran, it’s not that we don’t want to wait. It’s just that Lin Buyu might already—”
“Before she comes back, if any of you dare leave, I’ll kill you first.”
He uttered the threat coldly.
No one knew that he was currently unable to move and couldn’t use his ability.
Fortunately, Jiang Ran had always had a reputation for being someone nobody should provoke—someone reckless and willful.
Otherwise, he really wouldn’t have been able to intimidate them.
Nie Fei knew that Jiang Ran always kept his word, so he had no choice but to step on the brakes.
This was the apocalypse.
After surviving for a year, the rule Nie Fei had learned was that the fact he wasn’t the kind of person who would push someone else out to take the hit for him already meant he still had some conscience.
But he couldn’t bring himself to wait for Lin Buyu when there was practically no hope of her surviving.
They had no feelings for her.
And there was no hope.
They had even thought Jiang Ran would be even more cold-hearted.
Time passed second by second.
From inside the hospital came the zombies’ hoarse, guttural growls, making everyone’s hearts tremble with fear.
Jiang Ran couldn’t move. He struggled to keep his eyes fixed in the direction of the hospital.
A complicated emotion that no one could understand flashed through his dark eyes.
Meanwhile, Lin Buyu.
She knew that her blood was extremely tempting to zombies.
As long as her blood was exposed to the air, the zombies would go insane trying to drink it.
If she still had her crystal core, she could easily control these zombies.
But now, her mental strength wasn’t strong enough, and her zombie crystal core was gone. She couldn’t control so many mutated zombies at once.
Although ordinary zombies didn’t eat other zombies, mutated zombies would absorb the crystal cores of ordinary zombies.
So Lin Buyu wasn’t exactly in a safe position either.
But she did have one advantage.
She could control any zombie that drank her blood.
Therefore, as she ran, Lin Buyu kept glancing back.
With a sweep of her eyes, she selected several of the strongest zombies.
Without hesitation, she flicked the blood from her fingers behind her.
The droplets flew through the air and landed directly in the mouths of the zombies she had chosen.
Thankfully, because of the system’s disguise, her blood was still red.
The instant those blood droplets entered their mouths, the zombies’ bodies began twisting and swelling violently.
The eyes of the lowest-level zombies were grayish-white.
As for mutated zombies, their eye colors ranked from lowest to highest:
Red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and purple.
The weakest among the mutated zombies chasing her were already red-eyed zombies.
Her blood could instantly evolve a white-eyed zombie into a high-level green-eyed zombie.
The zombies she had chosen were already green-eyed.
After drinking her blood, they instantly advanced to the blue-eyed level.
Ultra-high-level zombies.
There were five of them.
Lin Buyu had already reached a corner. She pressed her back against the wall and issued an order to the zombies.
“Kill them.”
Almost the instant her command was given, those high-level zombies moved.
Their speed was terrifying.
They began slaughtering the endless horde of zombies behind her.
Lin Buyu felt an intense pain explode inside her head.
The high-level zombies that had drunk her blood were obeying her commands while simultaneously resisting her control.
Her mental strength wasn’t strong enough to suppress them completely.
They were fighting back.
Zombies were like wild beasts.
Their leader had to be the strongest among them.
Now that Lin Buyu’s crystal core was gone, her own strength wasn’t great enough.
Yet her bloodline happened to possess the power to suppress them.
As a result, their mental strength was desperately fighting against her control.
With those few zombies protecting her, Lin Buyu was temporarily safe.
She quickly picked up the zombie heads scattered across the ground.
Then she dug into them with her bare hands.
She didn’t have time to care whether it was disgusting.
She hurriedly dug out the zombie crystal cores and stuffed them into her mouth.
She had to eat the crystal cores.
She had to become stronger.
In this world, as long as she didn’t bleed, the zombies wouldn’t actively attack her.
But what if something went wrong?
What if she encountered the new Zombie King who had killed her?
What if that bastard discovered that she was still alive and summoned every zombie in existence to hunt her down?
What would she do then?
Lin Buyu ate so many zombie crystal cores that she was practically sick of them.
She didn’t have time to digest them.
When she sensed that the zombies she was controlling were about to break free of her mental restraints, she immediately took off running.
She had to get away before they completely escaped her control.
She ran back the way she had come.
Placing one hand on the edge of the window, she leaped straight out.
But just as she was about to land, she discovered that Jiang Ran and the others were still waiting for her.
Holy crap.
There really is still love in this world.
When Nie Fei and the others saw that she was still alive and well, they were equally incredulous.
She had actually managed to escape from so many mutated zombies.
Su Ya and Nie Fei exchanged glances, both of them seeing the astonishment in each other’s eyes.
Even Xiao Jingcheng, who was usually the calmest of them all, couldn’t help blurting out,
“Fuck. She really is a man-eating flower.”
No one could possibly still think she was some delicate little flower after seeing her escape from such a massive horde of zombies.
Only Jiang Ran reacted differently.
The instant he saw her land safely, he tightly shut his eyes.
Lin Buyu opened the car door, quickly jumped inside, and sat down beside Jiang Ran.
“Go! What are you waiting for? We’re going to die if we don’t leave!”
Nie Fei snapped back to reality.
Realizing that the zombies would soon catch up, he practically spun the steering wheel hard enough to send sparks flying.
Xiao Jingcheng had already shifted into full-on escape mode, speeding away as if his life depended on it.
The several zombies Lin Buyu had controlled soon caught up.
They had successfully broken free of her control.
Besides them, several dozen mutated zombies that hadn’t been killed were also chasing after them.
They looked like grotesque alien creatures, their bodies twisted into bizarre shapes, and their speed was astonishing.
Nie Fei and Xiao Jingcheng practically wanted to shove their feet straight through the gas pedals.
Yet within just a few minutes, the zombies caught up with them.
And worse, they blocked the road ahead.
Xiao Jingcheng stared at the blue-eyed zombies standing ten meters away and muttered incredulously,
“What the hell kind of rotten luck is this?”
They were caught between a rock and a hard place.
Nie Fei drove alongside Xiao Jingcheng’s car and also saw the several ultra-high-level zombies ahead.
Good grief.
Blue-eyed zombies! And there was more than one!
“Brother Ran, have you ever fought a blue-eyed zombie before?”
The atmosphere was unbearably tense.
No one had the slightest mood to joke around.
Everyone felt that today might very well be the day they died.
Lin Buyu heard the system urgently sounding an alarm inside her head.
It said that Jiang Ran was accumulating energy.
He was about to unleash the terrifying power hidden within his body.
Lin Buyu immediately sprang up like a carp, nearly launching herself out of the window.
She hurriedly tried to calm the big boss beside her.
“Jiang Ran, don’t be afraid. I’ll protect you. Really, don’t worry. Trust me. I can handle this.”
She was practically on the verge of kneeling on the ground and begging him not to explode.