Instead of the stepping into empty air or falling that she had imagined, Su Cheng stepped solidly onto the ground.
The surrounding darkness suddenly grew bright. Su Cheng immediately covered her eyes, taking a few seconds to adjust before looking around.
She was in the middle of a plaza.
The bustling plaza was filled with people coming and going. Since it was a summer evening, elderly people were leading children for after-dinner walks, couples were walking hand-in-hand planning where to eat, and teenagers were skateboarding and leaping ahead…
Safe and completely devoid of danger.
She was still wearing the same white T-shirt and jeans she had on before, which matched her current environment perfectly.
Su Cheng’s tightly wound heart relaxed slightly. Could she have gotten extremely lucky and entered a low-risk dungeon?
But very quickly, she frowned deeply. No, it couldn’t possibly be this simple…
As if to verify her guess, a mechanical voice rang out in her mind:
【Welcome to the ordinary dungeon: Tonghua City.】
【Basic Mission: Survive for 5 days. Completing the mission rewards 100 points and a return to the apartment.】
Surviving for 5 days was all it took to complete the mission—which meant that simply staying alive was a massive challenge for residents in this trial.
Su Cheng looked around, trying to obtain more information about the dungeon.
Across the street was a shopping mall with a neon billboard, which was currently broadcasting a news flash.
【The number of patients infected with the recent rabies virus continues to rise. Symptoms shown by patients include high fever, coughing, bloodshot eyes, and extreme aggressiveness… Citizens are advised to avoid contact with such patients as much as possible, minimize going out, and immediately call the police if such individuals are spotted!】
【Broadcasting the rabies infection update once again…】
Su Cheng’s heart skipped a beat, and her expression shifted drastically. A bad premonition arose, and she immediately ran toward a taxi parked by the road.
Where did news about this kind of rabies infection appear the most?
——In zombie movies!
And at this time of day, the plaza was one of the most densely populated places. Once the virus broke out here, there would be no escape.
Recalling the scenes of zombie sieges in movies, Su Cheng felt her scalp tingle. Driven by a desperate surge of survival instinct, she bolted straight toward the taxi parked on the side of the road.
The driver was scrolling through his phone waiting for customers, and Su Cheng suddenly diving into the back seat startled him so badly he nearly dropped his phone onto the floorboards. He muttered somewhat discontentedly, “Why is a young lady making such sudden moves? You scared me.”
Su Cheng didn’t have time to explain further. “Driver, take me to the nearest store by the road right now!”
Since cases of the zombie virus had already appeared, there wasn’t much time left for Su Cheng to stockpile supplies. Among the people walking about this city, any single one of them could be an infected person about to break out.
She had to be fast!
To save time, compared to the basement supermarket of a shopping mall, Su Cheng preferred roadside shops.
Basement supermarkets had plenty of items, but waiting for elevators took time, and their massive footprint meant wasting precious minutes searching through different product sections.
In comparison, roadside stores could satisfy her objectives much more swiftly.
The driver didn’t understand why Su Cheng was in such a panicked rush and was still bending down to pick up his phone.
Su Cheng couldn’t help urging him, “Hurry up, driver!”
“Alright, alright, don’t rush me. I’m starting the car right now.“
Helpless, the driver immediately started the vehicle. “There are tons of shops around here, there’s one right up ahead… We’re just going to a store, why are you in such a rush?“
Su Cheng had no time to explain everything to him. When the car stopped right in front of a store, she jumped out immediately, not forgetting to instruct: “Driver, wait for me for a second, I’ll be right out!”
“Fine, make it quick.”
Su Cheng dashed into the store. At this moment, the shop was relatively crowded, with customers leisurely picking out items.
Su Cheng snatched a plastic bag and dashed straight for the fast-food section, stuffing a bag each with bread and bottled water.
Hiding them behind her back, she bolted out of the store.
“Hey!”
“Stop thief!!—”
An angry shout rang out from behind the counter.
Having committed her first theft ever, Su Cheng had already scrambled back into the car. The driver was clueless, but upon seeing the store clerk chasing them out, a look of shock surfaced in his eyes. “You’re a thief?!”
Su Cheng had no time to explain. “Let’s go!”
The driver shook his head rapidly, about to offer persuasion, when Su Cheng whipped out the fish-cleaning knife she had snatched on the fly, her gaze fierce. “Drive!”
Su Cheng had swiped that fish-cleaning knife from the fresh produce section while the clerk wasn’t looking.
The driver shuddered, his just-opened mouth snapping shut instantly for fear that angering Su Cheng might lead to something terrible. The very next second, the vehicle shot away from the spot like an arrow released from a bow.
“Head toward the suburbs.”
“…Okay.”
Su Cheng looked back. Through the rear window, her gaze landed on a cluster of people gathered around. An old woman had collapsed on the ground, and several people were gathered nearby but didn’t dare help her up.
The surrounding crowd was buzzing with discussion: “What’s wrong with this old lady? Is she having an epileptic seizure? Can someone help call the police…”
Amidst everyone’s astonished gasps, the old woman’s body twitched and convulsed before suddenly springing to her feet. She lunged at the nearest man, viciously tearing off a chunk of flesh!
“Aahhhhh!”
Clutching his neck in agony, the man staggered back a few steps and collapsed to his knees.
After biting the man, the old woman fiercely lunged at another woman…
“Aaaaah—!”
“She bit someone! Help!!! Don’t bite me!”
“Quick, call the police!!”
Screaming in terror, the crowd scattered in all directions, though a few people still held up their phones to film for clout.
Su Cheng drew in a sharp breath. It’s already started…
She knew clearly that once the zombies broke out, urban traffic would face paralysis. If she couldn’t escape the city center before the outbreak spread, she would be trapped inside the city.
With the city’s dense population, the hazard coefficient was dozens of times higher than in the suburbs.
“Driver, you better call your family right now to hide or head toward the suburbs!”
Wary of Su Cheng’s earlier knife threat, the driver hadn’t fully processed the situation yet. “Huh?”
“Hurry up! Didn’t you just see that? That old woman bit someone—she’s turned into a zombie! The person she bit is going to turn into a zombie soon too!”
Seeing that Su Cheng’s expression was solemn, earnest, and faintly laced with anxious tension—carrying not an ounce of joking around—
He swallowed hard, pressed harder on the accelerator, and muttered, “N-No way, right… That’s just in movies…”
Su Cheng shook her head. “Make the call right now. Whether it’s true or not, you have nothing to lose.”
“And don’t bother thinking about calling the police; the police are busy dealing with the infected right now and have no time for anything else…”
In the rearview mirror, the driver had indeed seen the old woman convulsing and biting people, but given how many stories of rabies infections had hit the news over the past couple of days, he had simply assumed it was just a rabies outbreak.
However, Su Cheng’s absolute certainty made the driver wonder if she knew some kind of inside information.
As he pressed the gas pedal and honked the horn, he quickly dialed his wife’s phone. “Hello, don’t say anything yet. Hurry and have Xiao Jian drive—head down to the countryside together, I’m on my way too…”
After the driver hung up, silence filled the interior of the car. Perhaps infected by Su Cheng’s anxious state, fine beads of sweat popped up on his forehead.
“Driver, please drive as fast as you can!”
Tears welling in his eyes, the driver protested, “I’m already going as fast as possible. There are other cars on the main road…”
As a taxi driver, he dealt with city roads every day, making him essentially a living map of the city.
Yet, after driving for over half an hour, they still ran into a traffic jam. The driver wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“At this time of day, there usually aren’t many cars on this road…”
Right now, the virus hadn’t fully erupted and spread across Tonghua City yet, and vehicles on the road were still obeying traffic rules, turning and moving forward according to the traffic lights.
“Beep—beep—”
As soon as the light turned green, the driver couldn’t help honking the horn to urge the car ahead to move faster.
Su Cheng gripped her two plastic bags tightly. “How much farther are we from the suburbs?”
Once she found a place to hide, she planned to rely on the bread and water in her plastic bags to tide herself through the five days.
“We’ve already left the city center. Once we get on the highway ahead, it’ll still take another hour…”
An hour—that’s too long!
Pondering for a moment, Su Cheng made her decision: “Driver, we’re not taking the highway. Take the backstreets!”
The driver hesitated for a few seconds before turning the steering wheel. “Alright.”
The highway would take an hour, which was too long. If there were infected people along the way, getting stuck on the highway would leave them trapped with no way forward or backward—a severe problem.
Backroads would take longer to reach the outskirts, but they could avoid traffic jams to a certain degree and had fewer people.
Su Cheng didn’t know whether every decision she made was correct, but she could only do her best.
However, the moment Su Cheng recovered her focus and turned her head to the side, all the hair on her body stood on end, and she let out a shriek of horror: “Wait!!”
Her warning came too late. A runaway car plowed into their turning taxi at high speed!
Crash-bang—
Beep—
The taxi flipped onto its side from the impact and slid a distance before crashing into the car in front of it.
Su Cheng’s head slammed heavily against the driver’s seat in front of her. As the vehicle rolled, ringing filled her ears and dizziness washed over her. Liquid began to trickle down from her forehead…
She thought with bitter exasperation:
Why… is it another car crash…
Car crashes were the thing she hated most in this life, yet she kept stumbling over them back-to-back.
“How the hell are you driving?!”
“There are still people inside! Hurry up and call the police, call an ambulance!!”
“Hey, there’s someone in this car too… Aah! Why are you biting people—”
The sounds around her gradually blurred. Su Cheng tried hard to keep her eyes open, but her consciousness inevitably plunged back into darkness.
How much time passed, Su Cheng had no idea before she slowly opened her eyes.
It hurts so much…
Her body hurt, and her head hurt too.
“Crunch, crunch, crunch…”
What is that sound?
Su Cheng’s pupils gradually focused. When she clearly saw the scene before her, her scalp tingled and she held her breath instinctively.
A skinny “person” was crouched over the driver, frantically tearing and devouring the driver’s chest. A thick stench of blood filled the car interior.
The creature hadn’t noticed Su Cheng in the back seat; it was entirely absorbed in its “meal.”
Trapped inside the flipped car, Su Cheng was drained of all color, trembling slightly all over.
As an ordinary person who had lived twenty-five years in peacetime—with the sole misfortune of her parents passing away, and someone who had rarely even slaughtered chickens or ducks in daily life—she had almost never had the opportunity to confront bloodshed face-to-face.
This was her first time seeing “cannibalism.”
The rich smell of blood rushed straight into her nasal cavity. When blood scent reached the absolute extreme, it smelled like rot, making her want to vomit.
But she couldn’t.
Carefully and meticulously, Su Cheng unbuckled her seatbelt. The faint click didn’t attract the female zombie’s attention, but it nearly snapped Su Cheng’s tightly strung nerves.
Her heart hammered wildly against her ribs. Su Cheng was terrified that the sound would alert the zombie, so she repeated to herself over and over again to stay calm, to stay calm…
Slowly lowering her body, she inched forward to reach the fish-cleaning knife lying just half a meter away.
Rustle—
Thud!
She brushed against the plastic bag containing her food.
The chewing sound stopped abruptly.
Su Cheng jerked her head up, locking eyes directly with a pair of blood-red pupils. The lower half of the female zombie’s face was stained crimson with blood, and a chunk of viscera was still dangling from her mouth.
Droplets of blood dripped from the viscera.
This wasn’t a movie; this was real visual impact happening right before Su Cheng’s eyes. Her pupils constricted, and she felt as though her heart was about to leap straight out of her chest.
“Roar—!”
The female zombie moved with terrifying speed. Abandoning the driver’s corpse instantly, she lunged toward Su Cheng.
Panicking, Su Cheng threw herself toward the fish-cleaning knife and slashed backward the moment she grabbed it—
Facts proved that human beings really do unleash immense potential when gripped by fear.
Su Cheng’s blade struck with pinpoint accuracy and heavy force right against the zombie’s head. The fish-cleaning knife wedged half an inch into its skull before stopping, halting the female zombie’s movements for a single second.
Seizing the opportunity, Su Cheng kicked the female zombie far away. Ignoring her hand, which was numbed by the recoil of the knife, she hurriedly scrambled out through the shattered car window, not forgetting to drag along the plastic bag containing her water.
The plastic bag containing the bread had rolled off somewhere else, and several bottles of water were rolling loose inside the car cabin. Su Cheng had no time to search and collect them.
Scrambling out of the car in a rush, she found that the entire road had descended into chaos.
Vehicles were locked in multi-car pileups, black smoke billowed from hoods, and automated car alarms shrieked piercingly…
Zombies clung to windshields, smashing through glass windows with their heads and leaping inside to devour helpless, screaming living humans. Others were fleeing in terror with claws-out, snapping zombies in hot pursuit…
The overlapping cries of weeping and roaring were enough to strike terror into anyone’s heart.
“Ugh…”
Perhaps from hitting her head earlier, Su Cheng felt waves of ringing in her ears, along with dizziness and blurred vision.
Staggering a few steps, Su Cheng clutched her head. Once she felt slightly better, daring not to delay a single second longer, she grabbed her plastic bag and ran.
The female zombie in the car didn’t chase after her—whether it was too heavily injured to crawl out or had simply abandoned its “new prey”…
Unfortunately, however, Su Cheng hadn’t run far before she was targeted by a newly mutated zombie. It chased hot on her heels, its beast-like roar sounding like a death warrant in Su Cheng’s ears!
“Hah, hah, hah—”
Bursting into a sprint at maximum speed, Su Cheng could clearly hear her own heavy gasping. A taste of rust bloomed in her throat as she chanted endlessly in her mind: Run, run, run!
Can’t fall, can’t slow down… Stay calm, stay calm!
The roar behind her faded. Looking back over her shoulder, Su Cheng saw that the zombie had shifted its target, locking its sights onto someone else running closer…
Screams rose and fell in waves!
Su Cheng couldn’t stop the lingering terror. Fortunately, this wasn’t the city center; otherwise, she wouldn’t have had just a single zombie trailing behind her…
Being exposed out in the open made it far too easy to attract zombie attention. She needed to hide inside a building immediately.
Amidst the chaos, Su Cheng’s gaze locked onto a shop diagonally across the road. But as luck would have it, three zombies were currently sprawled on the ground there, feasting on a living person.
Su Cheng had no choice but to give up, ultimately selecting a pharmacy sitting no more than a hundred meters away from her.