“Help! Help!!”
The shrill female voice was especially chilling in the empty surroundings.
The three no longer hesitated and ran toward the source of the sound.
From a distance, Bai Zhuo saw a woman pinned to the ground, unable to move, her clothes torn to shreds.
Noticing that people had come, the man impatiently raised his head, and when he saw that the newcomers were three girls, a flash of delight shot through his eyes.
No one missed the shift in his expression. Chongming leveled her sniper rifle at him, her face cold. “Stand up.”
Before the delight could fade from his face, it froze there.
Bai Zhuo reached out to pull the woman on the ground up, and the woman gripped her hand, trembling as if utterly terrified.
“Hands behind your head. Get over there.”
The man swiftly traded a glance with the woman Bai Zhuo had just pulled up. Xue Yanhen, who caught the exchange, felt her heart clench and instinctively moved to call out to Bai Zhuo.
Bai Zhuo, turned partly away from them, hadn’t noticed anything off. Having pulled the woman up, she was just about to take off her jacket to give to her, when a sliver of cold pressed against her neck.
The woman, dropping her fear and her pitiful, fragile act, coldly ordered Chongming to lower her gun.
Bai Zhuo raised her hands, a cold glint flashing in her eyes.
The man on the other side looked at Chongming smugly and drew a dagger from his sleeve. “Didn’t you hear? Put the gun down.”
Chongming pressed her lips tight, the fingers clutching her sniper rifle whitening from the force, clearly furious to the extreme.
Xue Yanhen had already laid a hand on her blade’s hilt, but she immediately saw the woman across from her grip Bai Zhuo’s shoulder tighter, too.
“You’d better not get any lucky ideas! No funny business, or I’ll kill her on the spot!”
Bai Zhuo, taken hostage, showed no change in expression at all. If her heart rate could have been measured, one would be astonished to find her utterly calm inside.
She felt no tension, let alone despair, at having her life threatened.
Chongming slowly lowered the sniper rifle in her hands. Seeing how sensibly she read the situation, the man grew even more smug and reached out to touch her face.
At that sight, Bai Zhuo suddenly smiled.
Her laughter drew the man’s attention. “Death’s at your doorstep and you can still laugh?”
Bai Zhuo raised her hand and, before their shocked eyes, gripped the dagger laid across her throat outright. Blood instantly welled out from between her fingers.
“Damn you, it’s you people.”
The quickest to react was Chongming. She rolled into a flip, hoisted the sniper rifle again, and put a shot straight into the man’s thigh.
A scream rang out at once. And Bai Zhuo, having wrenched the dagger away, turned to look at the one who’d held her hostage.
The woman stared at her in disbelief. “Lunatic…”
Bai Zhuo still wore a smile. “I’m glad you’d describe me that way, but I’m not actually a lunatic, you know.”
Xue Yanhen had already strode forward and knocked the woman out cold, then gripped Bai Zhuo’s wrist tight.
“Clang—”
The dagger clattered to the ground. The wound in Bai Zhuo’s palm was deep enough to show bone, dripping with blood.
Xue Yanhen decided at once to leave things here to Chongming and pull Bai Zhuo back to the car to treat the wound.
“I—” Bai Zhuo had barely started when a gunshot rang out again over there, and the two of them turned their heads at the same time.
The man lying on the ground was already showing signs of turning into a zombie!
Bai Zhuo shook off Xue Yanhen’s hand and hurried to Chongming’s side, brow furrowed.
Chongming’s expression was grave. She said in a low voice, “It’s strange, these signs of zombification came on all of a sudden.”
“Wake that woman up and ask her what’s going on.”
Xue Yanhen shot Bai Zhuo a look, the meaning plain: You, go treat your wound.
Bai Zhuo threw up her hands in surrender. “Fine, fine, fine, I’ll go.”
“Leave this to me, be quick there and back.”
The two had gathered a fair amount at the hospital earlier, besides all the useful and useless medicines, there were also supplies like gauze.
Expressionless, Xue Yanhen picked up the hydrogen peroxide and poured it on. Bai Zhuo’s hand couldn’t help twitching, and she let out a low cry of pain.
“Gentler, this is a human hand I’ve got here…”
Xue Yanhen sneered. “Oh, so you do know it’s a human hand?”
Bai Zhuo guiltily looked away and admitted her mistake, swiftly and sincerely. “My bad.”
Xue Yanhen picked up the gauze and wrapped Bai Zhuo’s hand, saying flatly, “Let me guess, right now you’re thinking, ‘Would I dare do it again? Absolutely.'”
“I’m not.” Bai Zhuo retorted with a perfectly straight face. Even if she was, right now she’d better not be.
“Heh.”
Hearing Xue Yanhen’s mocking little laugh, Bai Zhuo’s expression didn’t change in the slightest, her hide was plenty thick anyway.
When the two returned with the wound treated, they saw that the man, now with two gunshot wounds, had fully taken on the appearance of a zombie.
Xue Yanhen bound the still-unconscious woman good and tight with rope before waking her.
The woman opened her eyes, saw the zombified man right in front of her, and immediately shrieked.
“Shut up!”
Xue Yanhen picked up the dagger and pressed it straight to the woman’s throat, her face cold. “One more scream and your life is forfeit.”
The woman trembled and struggled, her voice full of shaking and terror.
“I’m begging you, I don’t know anything, let me go, I…”
Bai Zhuo cut her off with a soft laugh. “You put on this whole act with him to lure kind-hearted people over, and now you’re claiming you don’t know anything? Who’d believe that?”
The woman was still shaking, looking on the verge of a mental breakdown. “I don’t know… I really don’t…”
Chongming’s head snapped up. “Listen!”
A melodious flute began to play, sounding especially eerie across the open fields.
The instant it started, a change came over the woman too. She let out a sudden snarl, signs of zombification surfacing on her face, her nails beginning to shoot out.
Xue Yanhen made her decision at once and slit the woman’s throat.
Bai Zhuo took two steps forward. This stretch of field was completely open, with nothing to obstruct the view, almost nothing hidden. Where was the flute coming from? Did it come with its own loudspeaker?
The flute soon faded away. A light breeze stirred the three women’s hair, as if nothing had happened at all just now.
Chongming clutched her sniper rifle tight, swept a glance over the two on the ground, and quickly came to a decision. “Bring their bodies back to Linzhou.”
Bai Zhuo and Xue Yanhen had no objection. They found a tarp in the car, wrapped up the two bodies, and stuffed them into the trunk.
Without another pause, Chongming stamped down on the gas. The engine let out a roar, and the car sped off toward Linzhou.
With her uninjured hand, Bai Zhuo lightly tapped her thigh and called out to the system.
【Congratulations, host. Mission complete. The reward has been delivered to your system inventory.】
A cold glint flashed through Bai Zhuo’s eyes. Her mission had been to obtain information related to zombie evolution. The flute that had suddenly sounded, and those two people who’d zombified without any warning, all pointed to one thing.
Behind this, there was very likely a human hand at work.