One year into the apocalypse, the world looked like a sprawling wasteland of crumbling ruins.
Lin Buyu made her way into the city, casually passing hordes of zombies along the streets.
Her biggest advantage was that the undead took no notice of her—she was, after all, one of them.
Leisurely strolling past them, whenever she spotted a zombie moving with notable speed and agility, she would pop open its skull to check for a crystal core.
As for the sluggish, slow-moving ones, she didn’t bother wasting her time; they were useless low-lifes with completely empty brains.
She made sure not to wander too close to the zone where the ability users were operating, knowing full well she had no core power to back herself up yet.
Still, the sheer volume of zombies proved useful—among a sea of duds, there were bound to be a few standouts.
The ones that moved with swift, fluid precision actually carried something inside their heads, though they were merely translucent white crystal cores—the lowest tier available.
Inside an abandoned hospital, after cracking open several dozen skulls and devouring their white cores back-to-back, she finally felt a tangible shift in her body.
The dark cyan scar marking where her neck had been severed faded away entirely, and the hole in her skull fully healed.
With her current clothes tattered beyond repair, Lin Buyu headed straight for a nearby shopping mall.
Back when she was a special forces commander, dresses had never been part of her wardrobe. Now that she had a chance to live a completely different life, she decided it was time to tap into her inner girliness.
Pink, blue, green… tossed aside.
She wanted pure white. She was going to be an innocent, fragile little white lotus of a zombie.
Heaven rewarded her efforts: after digging through piles of clothes, she finally unearthed a solid white slip dress.
Being a woman who appreciated cleanliness, Miss Lin Buyu even took the time to hunt down a usable water source to give herself a thorough scrub down.
She wasn’t worried about waterborne viruses anyway—she was already the grandest zombie king of them all, so what was there to fear?
After bathing, she checked her reflection in the mirror and noticed her skin had undergone a complete transformation.
The deathly, corpse-like pallor was gone.
Though still fair, it was now a vibrant, healthy porcelain tone, smooth and glowing with a delicate blush on her cheeks.
Looking at her face in the mirror—identical to her face in her original world—Lin Buyu rested her chin on her hand and smiled softly. Perfect.
At least she hadn’t ended up with someone else’s face.
She gave her eye sockets a tentative push, paranoid that an eyeball might pop out. They didn’t feel terribly secure.
Dressed in her pretty white dress and a pair of flip-flops, she hummed a tune and trotted down the stairs with a casual flip-flop, flip-flop, looking entirely relaxed.
Stepping out of the mall, Lin Buyu was greeted by the sight of several hundred zombies gathered in the plaza ahead.
They reached their hands up into the air wildly, letting out low, guttural roars.
Lin Buyu paused. What’s going on here?
She slowly raised her head toward the sky.
High above, a helicopter was gradually descending, its spinning rotors producing a deafening roar.
Standing on the rope ladder dangling from the open cabin door was a young man clad in a sleek black tactical windbreaker and cargo pants.
Her enhanced eyesight allowed her to clearly discern his features even from a distance: it was the guy who had summoned lightning from the rooftop earlier.
His eyes were as dark as midnight—sharp, cold, and harboring a faint, lethal glimmer.
What truly caught Lin Buyu off guard, however, was his astonishingly refined face.
So someone like this actually existed in real life—a handsome man who looked like he had walked straight out of another dimension.
He carried an air of icy detachment, completely removed from the world around him.
A headset was clipped to his ear, the microphone positioned near his finely shaped lips.
Looking down at the snarling mass of ordinary undead below, Jiang Ran spoke into the mic: “A minor zombie surge has been spotted at Lieri Shopping Mall. Permission to eliminate all targets?”
A voice responded through his earpiece: “The area surrounding the mall is open terrain with no high-tier zombie clusters detected. You are cleared to engage.”
“Copy that.”
The moment the words left his lips, a crackle of violet lightning burst forth in his open palm.
Standing down in the plaza, Lin Buyu felt a surge of terrifying energy ripple through the air. Phew, now that is some serious firepower.
She was just about to slip away unnoticed into the crowd of zombies when the system in her head suddenly exploded into screaming chicken mode.
“AAAAHHHHH! Jiang Ran! Jiang Ran! The guy up there is Jiang Ran—the main villain of the entire book! Host, quick, find a way to get close to him!”
Lin Buyu had just crawled to the entrance of the mall, intending to duck inside for shelter, when she let out a startled sound: “Wait, that’s Jiang Ran?”
Holy crap, talk about a golden opportunity falling right into my lap.
She spun around instantly.
BOOM! RUMBLE!
Cascades of lightning crashed into the pavement, sending swarms of zombies flying into the air and scattering severed limbs in all directions.
Sparks ignited across the shattered ground as billowing, acrid smoke enveloped the entire plaza.
Lin Buyu threw her hands up to cover her face.
God, I really hate this miserable world.
She couldn’t help but let out a violent cough.
Directly above, the young man watched the dark smoke churning below, a ruthless smile curling at the corner of his lips.
His deep, magnetic voice vibrated through the comms: “All zombies at Lieri Plaza have been eliminated.”
With that, his long, slender fingers reached up to his earpiece, clicking the unit off.
From the pilot’s seat of the helicopter, a cheerful laugh rang out: “Ran-ge, even if there weren’t any mutated variants down there, you cleared them out absurdly fast! Aren’t you gonna have a little fun with ’em?”
Jiang Ran sneered softly. “I don’t have a fetish for playing with corpses.”
It was at that exact moment that Lin Buyu’s soft coughing reached both of their ears.
Jiang Ran’s fingers hovering near his earpiece gave an almost imperceptible pause. A faint, razor-thin smile brushed across his vibrant red lips as he let out a low chuckle. “Well, looks like one slipped through the net.”
To be capable of coughing, it had to be at least a mutated zombie.
Nie Fei grinned. “A zombie managed to survive a hit from you, Ran-ge? Now that’s a collector’s item.”
Jiang Ran reminded him coolly, “Three days ago, we were the ones running for our lives from a super-high-tier zombie.”
Nie Fei’s face fell into an awkward grimace. “Hey, that was only because our elemental energy was totally drained!”
Jiang Ran didn’t bother arguing the point. “Land the chopper.”
“Roger that!” Nie Fei replied.
He immediately brought the helicopter down, using the pile of charred corpses in the plaza as a improvised landing pad.
By the time they stepped out, the thick smoke had just begun to disperse.
Hearing the heavy thud of footsteps, Lin Buyu raised her head.
A pair of tactical black boots came into view first, followed by long legs and an impossibly handsome face.
He walked toward her, step by step.
As their eyes locked, Lin Buyu frantically bombarded the system in her head.
“System! System! What do I do?! My sitting here makes zero sense—Jiang Ran is definitely going to mark me as a zombie and chop my head off!”
The system panicked slightly too; after all, this was the ultimate world-ending antagonist.
“Don’t panic, Host! The plot hasn’t reached the world-destruction phase yet, so the big villain still possesses a sliver of humanity. He won’t kill humans indiscriminately right now!”
Lin Buyu felt even more frantic. “Did you forget that I’m literally a zombie?!”
Sure, she was wearing lovely human skin, but underneath it all, she was a deposed Zombie King with a hollowed-out crystal core!
The system attempted to soothe her: “Stay calm! I will help mask your aura from Jiang Ran’s detection. Great Host, all you need to do is find a way to stick with him!”
And with that, it promptly plunged back into hibernation.
Lin Buyu called out to it several times, but received nothing but radio silence.
Fuck, what a useless piece of trash system.
Sitting on the asphalt, Lin Buyu tilted her head slightly upward, meeting the gaze of the man who now stood directly over her.
Word on the street was that men were softies when it came to weak, helpless, pitiable girls.
Luckily, Lin Buyu was adaptable—she could play fierce, or she could play delicate.
In a fraction of a second, tears pooled dramatically in her eyes.
“D—Don’t kill me… I’m human.”
Jiang Ran looked down at the woman collapsed on the ground.
A spotless white dress, snow-white skin, lustrous dark hair, a delicate face, brimming tears threatening to spill, and a pitiful posture that practically begged for protection.
She looked so clean she seemed untouched by the filth of the world—a naive, sheltered little princess.
Except—this was one year into the apocalypse.
A helpless, pristine little princess didn’t just appear out of nowhere and remain spotless in a wasteland like this.
And if his memory served him right, just one minute ago, this entire plaza had been crawling with flesh-eating zombies.
A dark, dangerous gleam glinted in Jiang Ran’s pitch-black eyes. His eyes held a subtle smile, yet his lips didn’t curve upward in the slightest.
“You say… you’re human?”
He crouched down, reaching out a single hand to pinch her chin firmly, the laughter in his eyes mixing seamlessly with a cold, intent to kill.