“If being bitten by a zombie turns you into one, then what if we bite a zombie?”
The apocalypse had arrived, and the zombies had come. Four female high school students had been trapped inside the school for half a month. Their food had long since run out, and they were exhausted to the point of collapse. They hid in an underground storage room, stealing a moment to catch their breath.
An old wooden door was their final barrier. As the last survivors of Jiangcheng No. 1 High School, they were about to become dessert for more than seven thousand zombies inside the school.
Bang! Bang! The zombies were slamming into the door.
The rusted, broken door bolt was already on the verge of giving way. Death was only moments away. At this critical juncture, Luo Jiu proposed a bold idea: bite the zombies back.
The martial arts specialist Feng Qi forcefully kicked the door, trying to use all her strength to hold back the violent impacts from outside. “If we bite the zombies, won’t we avoid getting infected?”
Luo Jiu shook her head, a trace of sorrow appearing in her eyes. This was the ultimate battle between all of humanity and the zombies. It couldn’t possibly be as simple as whoever bit first winning.
Bang! Bang! More and more zombies gathered outside the door.
Zhong Jialing clenched her back teeth and pressed her body against the door as well. “Then why should we bite the zombies? Are we going to eat something disgusting before we die?”
Luo Jiu forced out a smile. “If the zombies break in, we’ll have to watch each other get torn apart and bitten one by one. The first person to be infected might even go on to tear into her own companions. Rather than suffer like that in the end, we might as well take a chance. The worst outcome is that we all turn into zombies at the same time. Perhaps… there’s another possibility.”
She had thought about it before. When a dog bit a person, the person could contract rabies. But when a person bit a dog, nothing happened.
Bang!
The zombies smashed a bowl-sized hole in the wooden door. A bloodied, shriveled arm instantly reached through. A chunk of flesh was missing from it, exposing a ghastly length of white bone.
Luo Jiu quickly seized the zombie’s wrist. Cheng Yaoyao hurried over and joined her in restraining the flailing arm.
Cheng Yaoyao had always been small and thin, and she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for several days. The moment she exerted all her strength, cold sweat broke out over her entire body. Her arm trembled uncontrollably, and her vision repeatedly darkened.
“I’m so hungry. Maybe zombies taste pretty good raw. Listen to Jiuer—bite it.”
There was no time left to hesitate. Zhong Jialing also grabbed hold of the arm, nervously swallowing. “Come on. Let’s bite him.”
Judging by its clothes, this fat zombie in a security guard’s uniform was probably the old security guard who loved catching students picking up takeout in the security office. Now, he was about to become takeout for the four of them.
Luo Jiu drew a deep breath. “I’ll count to three. We bite at the same time.”
“Okay!” the other three answered in unison, throwing caution to the wind.
“Three, two…”
Feng Qi was so nervous that her heart nearly leaped out of her chest. “Hey, hey! Why are you counting backward…”
“One!”
“Graaah…”
A flash of white light appeared, and the four of them instantly lost consciousness.
*
“Look at question four. Given that the left and right foci of the ellipse are F1 and F2 respectively, and the line y = x + m intersects C at points A and B, if the area of F1AB is twice the area of F2AB, what is the value of m…”
The deep male voice was so hypnotic that Luo Jiu opened her eyes and discovered that she was still in class.
The mathematics teacher stood two meters away, holding a piece of chalk as he drew auxiliary lines on the blackboard. That fat, burly back was incredibly familiar.
The window was half open, and the gentle spring breeze stirred the white curtains. The memories of the apocalypse seemed like a nightmare.
The blackboard displayed Wednesday, April 17. Beside it hung a sign showing that there were still fifty days left until the college entrance examination.
She remembered that the zombie outbreak at the school had occurred when there were forty days left until the examination. In other words, she had been reborn—ten days before the apocalypse.
Luo Jiu was sitting in the first row. She suppressed the excitement surging inside her and calmly stared at the blackboard, while her hands searched all over her body. At last, she discovered an extra earring in her right ear.
Jiangcheng No. 1 High School was a century-old prestigious school, renowned for its strict school policies. The school absolutely did not allow students to wear makeup or jewelry. She hadn’t even had her ears pierced before. This earring that had appeared out of nowhere had to serve some special purpose.
Luo Jiu quickly removed it and found that it was an utterly ordinary round stud. A transparent crystal was set into its top, its post was gold, and its pointed end was as sharp as a needle.
She had no time to think about it carefully. She quietly pricked her finger beneath the desk and let a drop of bright red blood fall onto the crystal, waiting nervously for a miracle to happen.
Bang!
A sudden loud noise came from the back of the classroom, and everyone turned around in unison.
The last row was occupied by several “geniuses” who ranked at the bottom of the class. The mathematics teacher frowned and adjusted his glasses. “What happened?”
Someone laughingly reported, “Feng Qi was sleeping so deeply that she fell onto the floor.”
The class burst into laughter, and the mathematics teacher’s face darkened further.
Feng Qi was strong and healthy. She was 176 centimeters tall and weighed 150 pounds, with solid muscles all over her body. She was as sturdy as a bull. She had attended a martial arts school since elementary school, and she had won so many medals by the time she graduated middle school that they could have been sold by the pound.
Thanks to her absolute strength—she had won first prize in the National Martial Arts Competition three years in a row—Feng Qi had been specially recruited by Jiangcheng No. 1 High School. They had even placed her in the top class, attempting to create a legend who excelled in both academics and martial arts.
Afterward, however, all the teachers and students in the school came to understand one thing very clearly: people with well-developed limbs really did tend to have simpler minds.
The total score was 750, yet Feng Qi’s most outrageous result had been 98 points. Luo Jiu’s score in any single subject was higher than Feng Qi’s total score.
The mathematics teacher got a headache whenever he saw Feng Qi. He snapped harshly, “If you don’t want to listen to my class, then get out!”
Feng Qi crawled out from under the desk and awkwardly wiped the sweat from her head. Still shaken and panting heavily, she said, “Teacher, the zombies are coming! The end of the world is about to begin!”
Another round of laughter erupted from the class. The mathematics teacher slammed his book down and pointed toward the back door. “Get out! Don’t make me say it a third time!”
“It’s true! We were chased by zombies for half a month. Besides me, there’s also Luo Jiu…”
Feng Qi suddenly realized something. She looked toward Luo Jiu’s seat and saw that Luo Jiu was pressing her lips tightly together while giving her a slight shake of the head.
As her roommate, Feng Qi could understand that hint. She did not continue, instead walking out of the classroom with practiced ease to stand facing the wall as punishment.
It seemed that everyone had been reborn.
Zhong Jialing was Luo Jiu’s deskmate, but the seat beside Luo Jiu was empty. Then Luo Jiu remembered that before the zombie outbreak, Zhong Jialing had taken a leave of absence to go out and get the nine-valent vaccine. She didn’t know what condition Zhong Jialing was in now.
And then there was Cheng Yaoyao.
Luo Jiu looked toward the diagonally opposite seat. Cheng Yaoyao had been staring at her the entire time, her expression tense and her eyes filled with ten thousand things she wanted to say. A note soon made its way over.
As luck would have it, the moment Luo Jiu took the note, the teacher caught her red-handed.
Luo Jiu was a super academic prodigy, a legendary figure who had achieved a perfect score on the middle school entrance examination. When recruiting her, the principal had personally promised to waive all her tuition and miscellaneous fees for three years and provide her with a monthly subsidy of one thousand yuan. Throughout those three years, Luo Jiu had come first in every examination. She had sat firmly at the top of the entire city in every major test. No matter how outstanding her opponents were, they could only look up at her and work hard for second place.
Teachers were gentler toward top students. He reached out for the note and said teasingly, “Let me see what’s so urgent that it can’t wait until after class. You had to pass a note?”
Luo Jiu rose involuntarily because she herself had no idea what Cheng Yaoyao had written.
She leaned over for a glance and nearly burst out laughing. Cheng Yaoyao had been extremely concise. There were only two words on it:
What do we do?
The mathematics teacher was completely baffled. Luo Jiu improvised smoothly, “She was in a hurry to ask me for the answer to this question.”
The teacher snorted. “I haven’t even explained it yet, and you already know the answer?”
Luo Jiu glanced at the blackboard and answered calmly, “The answer is B, negative root two over three.”
No one could calculate such a complicated expression mentally.
Suspicion written across his face, the teacher hurried back to the podium and pulled out the answer key. After checking, he was left awkward and speechless. He waved his hand, telling her to sit down quickly. A prodigy like this was certain to become the top scorer in the college entrance examination two months from now. He couldn’t have her overexerting herself.
What he did not know was that in ten days, the apocalypse would descend upon the entire world. It would be humanity’s destruction, with zombies running rampant and natural disasters arriving one after another.
This was a survival examination aimed at all of humanity. Those who failed would die.
Luo Jiu was not afraid. Although she was only a sixteen-year-old high school student, she possessed extraordinary intelligence, courage, and perseverance.
In her previous life, despite having no preparation whatsoever and being trapped in a school with an extremely high concentration of zombies, she had still survived for half a month. This time, she had ten days to prepare. She would stay alive for as long as possible. Together with her sisters from Room 301, she would live until they were seventy or eighty and died of old age.
She had to find a way for everyone to eat well and live comfortably during the apocalypse instead of gnawing on zombie flesh!
That taste was like maggots wrapped in tree bark—dry, gritty, and oozing foul-smelling pus. It was disgusting.
Whenever Luo Jiu remembered it, she would frown, her stomach churning as she fought the urge to retch.
She hurriedly took a sip of water. The taste of purified water was so nostalgic, as sweet as heavenly nectar. In her previous life, in order to survive, they had even drunk rainwater running off the eaves. This time, she absolutely had to stockpile a great deal of drinking water.
She quickly took out a blank sheet of scratch paper and wrote one word:
Money.
Soon, she wrote two even larger words:
Space.
This was an existence more important than money.
Without money, they could still take things for free. Without space, there was no way to store large quantities of food.
She bent down and searched for something inside the desk compartment. When she straightened up, her face was glowing with delight.
As soon as the bell rang, Luo Jiu took Cheng Yaoyao and called to Feng Qi, who was still standing outside the classroom as punishment. “Come on. Let’s go to the homeroom teacher and get a leave slip.”