“Clang!”
A sudden sound of something toppling over came from the previously quiet street.
Almost instantly, all the zombies nearby were attracted by the noise and staggered toward its source.
Their footsteps stopped when they were only one or two meters away. If zombies could think, the expressions on their faces would definitely have read: speechless.
The one who had knocked over the trash can was not some fresh human, but a zombie just like them. So once they got close, they did not smell the scent of “food.”
Zombie Li Qiu climbed out of the trash can with her eyes wide open, still clutching a loaf of bread that remained fairly intact inside its packaging.
She awkwardly watched her zombie brethren leave and secretly let out a sigh of relief.
There was no doubt that Li Qiu really was a zombie. Speaking of it, the whole matter was truly absurd and filled with bitterness.
It all had to start from a month ago.
As a fresh university graduate, Li Qiu had been taking every civil service examination she could find, not even letting the surrounding provinces and cities escape her attention.
That day, she had gone to the neighboring province to take an entrance examination for a public institution, and things had started going wrong from the moment they entered the examination room.
First, a candidate had suddenly fainted before entering and had been sent to the emergency room. Then, halfway through the exam, the proctor had been called away because of an urgent matter and had not returned even after the exam ended.
The candidates could occasionally hear screams from outside, along with some inexplicable roaring sounds.
The entire group became restless, yet none of them dared leave, and could only sit in their seats and wait anxiously.
What they eventually waited for was a group of compatriots who had already turned into zombies. Their proctor was among them as well, roaring ferociously as he charged down the corridor.
Although the zombies moved slowly, their target was extremely clear.
One quick-witted candidate immediately shut the front and back doors and called for everyone to jump out of the windows that did not face the corridor.
Their examination room was on the third floor. As long as their luck was not too terrible, the fall definitely would not kill them. But if they waited until the zombies broke through the doors, they would definitely die.
Fortunately, everyone’s luck had exploded on that day. Only a very small number of people had injured an arm or a leg from the fall.
Everyone involuntarily cast sympathetic glances at those people.
Everyone knew what impaired mobility meant at a time like this. It meant nothing less than waiting for death.
The zombie horde quickly discovered the whereabouts of their group of survivors.
Ever since childhood, Li Qiu’s scores on the eight-hundred-meter run during physical education exams had always barely passed. At this moment, she deeply regretted being too much of a homebody and not exercising more.
As a result, at this life-or-death moment, even when she used the fastest speed of her life, she still could not put much distance between herself and the zombies.
Li Qiu ran forward like mad, her mind filled with nothing but don’t chase me, don’t chase me. Then she discovered that even the candidate who had injured his leg earlier was hopping and leaping faster than she could run?!
Weren’t we here to take a written exam? When did all of you train for sprinting?!
Li Qiu, whose throat felt like it was on fire from running, could only watch helplessly as she, the one who had fallen behind, was swallowed by the frenzied zombie horde.
Sharp, bloodstained teeth pierced her neck and tore open a long gash. Her memories of being human also stopped at that moment of agonizing pain.
As everyone knew, hunger and eating were the only two thoughts in a zombie’s brain.
After becoming a zombie, Li Qiu wandered around like a lost soul, following the zombie army as it ran everywhere.
The strong, long-legged zombie brothers ate their fill every day and constantly expanded the zombie population. Li Qiu, who still ran the slowest even after becoming a zombie, could not get anything at all and was hungry enough every day that her stomach seemed to stick to her back.
After being hungry for nearly a month without eating a single living person, the constantly accumulating hunger had become so intense that she felt like she was about to explode. Zombie Li Qiu finally could not endure it anymore and subconsciously took a bite out of the remains of a fellow zombie.
It was the corpse of a zombie that had been killed by a human esper. Its brain had been smashed to pieces, and its body had been cut into fragments by a blade-like weapon.
Delicious, so delicious.
Li Qiu thought this while chewing, and then some vague memories gradually appeared in her mind.
As she continued eating, those memories became increasingly clear.
By the time Li Qiu felt the hunger inside her body ease, all that remained beside her was a pile of tattered clothes.
Li Qiu subconsciously wiped her mouth as she stared at the grayish-white sky.
She remembered now, she had originally been a human.
Li Qiu subconsciously touched her neck. She remembered that this place should have been bitten open by a zombie, leaving an ugly wound. Sure enough, not only was there a large and lengthy wound on her neck, but there were also abnormally protruding veins that radiated scorching heat.
She was still wearing the same outfit she had worn when she went to take the written examination, jeans and an apricot-colored shirt.
After a month, both the pants and the shirt were now splattered with dried, black, foul-smelling bloodstains. Fortunately, becoming a zombie had one advantage, her sense of smell was only sensitive to living things. Otherwise, she would definitely have smelled the strong stench coming from her own body.
She was no longer human.
Although Li Qiu very much did not want to admit it, she had no choice but to accept this reality.
So what now? Was she supposed to continue following these zombies everywhere? She wanted to go home. But she did not know whether she still had a home, nor did she know whether her parents were still alive.
However, when Li Qiu’s thoughts returned to reality and her gaze shifted to the side, she was still so frightened by the zombie remains scattered across the ground that she screamed, “Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!”
On a street with almost no living people, this scream was especially conspicuous and immediately attracted the attention of the espers who had come to clean up the battlefield.
A man’s voice sounded out. “Captain Zhou, I think there’s someone over there?”
Another, slightly younger voice chimed in, “I think I heard it too! Maybe it’s a zombie?”
“What’s there to be afraid of about zombies? Any zombie that runs into our Captain Zhou is going straight to meet the heavens.” The man laughed.
“Stay alert. Xiaowu, hold your position. Zeyu, come with me and take a look,” Zhou Jinshi said in a low voice.
At his feet was a pile of crystal cores that had just been harvested from zombie brains, each one displaying his formidable strength.
Zhou Jinshi tightened his grip on the blade in his hand.
What he held was an ancient saber over three feet long, its blade pitch black and radiating a chilling aura.
This was the ancestral blade of the Zhou family, an ancient martial arts clan. Its name was Divine Art.
The blade contained the Zhou family’s secret martial techniques. Every hundred years, only one descendant of the Zhou bloodline could comprehend its mysteries and become the heir chosen by the ancient blade.
Twenty-five-year-old Zhou Jinshi was the strongest among the younger generation of the Zhou family.
As the saying went, experts appreciated the intricacies, while laymen only watched the excitement.
Before the calamity descended, Zhou Jinshi, who had hoped to carry forward the ancient martial arts of Hua Country, had merely been an uploader on F Station who was ridiculed across the internet.
His daily routine had been sharing videos of difficult martial techniques in which he personally appeared, including but not limited to throwing leaves and flowers like weapons, dazzling sword flourishes, staff techniques and fist winds, and arrows that never missed their targets.
The movements in the videos were stunning and fluid, every move seeming as though it had been tempered thousands of times and brimming with killing intent. Zhou Jinshi even broke the movements down step by step in an attempt to teach others.
Because Zhou Jinshi possessed top-tier looks and an excellent physique, not inferior in the slightest to the popular young stars of the entertainment industry, every video he posted would make it onto F Station’s trending homepage.
Although he was usually very busy, Zhou Jinshi always made time to read the comment section. Unfortunately, the feedback always left him extremely disappointed.
Either there was a group of inexplicable copy-and-paste commenters calling him husband, or a group of equally inexplicable people asking which company had done his special effects. There was also a group of self-important know-it-alls who mocked him relentlessly. There were thousands upon thousands of internet users in the world, yet not a single normal person ever praised his martial skills.
Nor was there anyone worthy of Zhou Jinshi drawing Divine Art to fight.
When the calamity arrived, the internet had already been cut off.
Most netizens no longer had the chance to know that the techniques taught by the uploader who had been ridiculed were all genuine skills. Of course, there was also a small number of people who disliked commenting and had actually learned the techniques Zhou Jinshi taught before the calamity. After the calamity, they unexpectedly relied on those methods to protect themselves and their families…
Using the ancient blade as his weapon, Zhou Jinshi drove himself forward with the blade, killing with a single strike.
Combined with the water-type ability he had awakened, water blades intertwined with the ancient saber, unleashing tremendous energy that surrounded him. Almost no zombie could withstand it.
The ancient blade and his ability complemented each other, allowing him to gather a survivor team within only a month. The team had a clear division of labor and was divided into several esper squads. Every day, he led one of those squads around to eliminate zombies and search for supplies in preparation for future migration.
Today, Zhou Jinshi had brought five people from his squad to clear this old street.
After about an hour of fierce fighting, more than a hundred zombie corpses were all that remained on the street.
The squad members had also spread out to remove the crystal cores from the zombies’ brains, and they were almost done with their work.
No one had expected that there would still be a fish that had slipped through the net on a battlefield that had already been cleared once.
Since the calamity, the world had completely changed. There had already been countless examples of people becoming bloody casualties because of carelessness. Even though Zhou Jinshi possessed martial skills and extensive experience, he would absolutely never underestimate his enemy.
He and Hu Zeyu, one carrying an ancient saber and the other holding an axe, flanked the source of the sound from opposite sides. Zhou Jinshi made a hand gesture, signaling them to act.
After letting out that scream, Zombie Li Qiu immediately realized that with her current appearance, it was not merely possible that human espers would kill her, it was absolutely certain.
Now that she had regained the ability to think, Li Qiu naturally would not stand there and wait to die. After noticing the movements of Zhou Jinshi’s group, she secretly hid herself.
The place where Li Qiu hid was a twenty-four-hour convenience store.
The convenience store had long since lost both water and electricity. Its shattered glass doors stood open, and almost everything on the shelves and the racks beside the cash register had already been looted.
Some useless packaging bags were scattered on the floor, covered with layers of overlapping footprints. One could vaguely imagine the panic of the people who had frantically fought over supplies back then.
Li Qiu was hiding in the empty space beneath the cashier’s counter.
The cashier, who had turned into a zombie, had died beside the counter, still holding a barcode scanner in its hand. The corpse had quite a long history and had probably been killed during the early days of the calamity. It had shriveled to the point that even flies would not spare it a second glance.
At the moment, this corpse was Li Qiu’s best guardian. With it there, it should interfere with those humans’ judgment to some extent.
Li Qiu still did not know what kind of formidable opponent she had encountered. She closed her eyes, held her breath, and desperately tried to lower her presence.
The scent of living humans continuously entered Li Qiu’s nose. It smelled wonderful and reminded her of the braised pork her mother used to make for her birthdays. This was a scent that zombie corpses did not possess, one that made people unable to suppress their appetite.
Li Qiu touched her flat stomach and felt the zombie instinct within her body, the craving to eat. She dug her fingernails viciously into her flesh. Although she could not feel much pain, it distracted her and allowed her to resist that instinct with all her might.
Only in this way could she control herself and keep from rushing out at this moment to take a bite out of the newcomers’ necks.
The footsteps of the two men drew closer and closer. Li Qiu could hear their breathing, the sound of fabric rubbing together as they walked, and an intimidating chill.
A wave of sorrow welled up in Li Qiu’s heart. There was probably no one in the world as unlucky as she was, dying once as a human and then dying again as a zombie.