Luo Xun lay prone behind a boulder, keeping his breathing as faint as the flutter of a mosquito’s wings.
He wore a “ghillie suit”—a makeshift cloak woven from moss and weeds.
Wrapped tightly around him, he looked no different from a mossy stone from a distance.
His right index finger rested on the release trigger of his compound bow, the bowstring pulled as taut as his nerves.
It was a custom-modded bow; its seventy-pound draw delivered the punch of a hundred and twenty.
Simply put: maximum impact on a budget.
Three hundred meters away, something was shuffling about.
That thing might have been human once—or at least some sort of humanoid creature.
Now…
tattered leather armor hung off its skeleton like rags on a clothes drying rack.
Blue eerie flames flickered in its eye sockets.
Its rotted lower jaw clattered up and down as if muttering endless last words, while it aimlessly dragged a rusted sword through the woods, bones clacking with every step.
Luo Xun stared at the thing, running the word through his head again: undead.
After spending over a month in this hellhole, he had drawn three conclusions: First, this world didn’t give a damn about science.
Second, science couldn’t explain shit here.
Third, he had better not die.
On the morning of his third day here, when he went down to the river to draw water, half a torso had burst out of the mud, reaching for his ankle with white, bony fingers.
That was when it hit him.
He was fucking nowhere near Earth…
Clack…
clack…
The skeleton pivoted and slowly ambled in his direction.
Luo Xun didn’t move.
He didn’t even change his breathing rhythm.
Thirty-some days of survival had taught him a lesson: these things had terrible eyesight and relied mainly on sound, with a secondary sense for the scent of the living.
Their movements were stiff, making them easy enough to handle one-on-one.
The real trouble was when they moved in swarms, like a mob of square-dancing aunties—once they showed up, they came all at once.
He shifted his eyes from the scope, closed them, and focused.
When he opened them again, the world had changed.
A glowing haze floated into his vision.
Blue, red, gray, gold—a spilled paint palette of colors slowly drifted through these cursed woods.
This was a “side effect” that had appeared after his transmigration.
At first, he thought it was concussion sequelae—after all, when that green light struck him, his vision had stayed blurry for three straight days.
Later, he realized this side effect was extraordinarily useful.
Where blue currents gathered densely, the air was crisp and clean, perfect for camping.
Where red mist ran thick, vegetation was dead and not even bugs survived.
As for the undead—especially the ones that threw ice shards or lightning—their bodies overflowed with a neon mix of colors like a nightclub dance floor.
Relying on these eyes, he could avoid danger in advance, spot relatively safe paths, and even predict the attacks of necromancers—before they cast anything, the colors on their bodies would start twitching like crazy.
Right now, about four hundred meters to the northeast, a thick, pitch-black mass of energy was creeping over like a spilled bottle of ink.
Definitely more than one.
Luo Xun narrowed his eyes and caught streaks of icy blue and dark purple tangled within the black mass.
He had seen the icy-blue ones before.
Those bastards would raise a hand and hurl frost shards, freezing his hiding bushes solid into an ice sculpture.
The dark purple abominations were even nastier—they spewed toxic mist that would leave a person coughing for half a day after just one breath.
“Trouble,” he grunted softly, the sound so quiet he barely heard it himself.
Over a month ago, he had still been tracking a rogue, man-injuring wild boar deep in the Daxing’anling Mountains.
As a hunter hired by the Forestry Bureau and an off-and-on wilderness survival instructor, he was basically a glorified guide whose main job was keeping tourists from wandering off and feeding the bears.
A blizzard had struck that day, tearing open a weird grayish-green rift across the sky.
Before Luo Xun could even curse, his vision went black.
When he opened his eyes again, he was lying in this damned forest.
His bow was still with him, with over twenty arrows left in the quiver and his hunting knife secured at his waist.
His pack held compressed biscuits, a first-aid kit, flint, pliers—he even had a roll of toilet paper.
This had to be the most luxurious loadout any transmigrator could ask for.
The only downside was that he hadn’t bumped into a single human being.
Oh, there were “people”—except they were all moving skeletons.
Luo Xun pulled his gaze back and locked onto the approaching undead creature once more.
Two hundred meters.
At this range, it might as well have been right in his face.
But he couldn’t shoot yet.
An arrow’s lethality was directly proportional to distance.
The skeleton soldier shuffled forward another few dozen meters.
Only a hundred and fifty paces left.
At this distance, he could clearly see the shredded meat hanging from its ribs, long since dried into black crumbles that swayed like a pair of ragged sacks with every step.
As the undead drew closer, Luo Xun placed his finger on the release trigger.
Right then, a sharp shriek shattered the air from the northeast—the sound of energy tearing through space, like nails scraping across a chalkboard, making his teeth ache.
Immediately after, an icy-blue light erupted above the canopy.
Boom!
It wasn’t loud—a muffled thud like rolling subterranean thunder.
Yet the chill swept right over with it.
Even from several hundred meters away, Luo Xun shuddered, goosebumps breaking out across the back of his neck.
Ignoring the now-halted skeleton soldier, he immediately narrowed his eyes and squinted toward the commotion.
The glowing haze in his vision fluctuated violently.
The black energy cluster exploded, sending out ripples, and at the very center of those ripples, a blinding golden radiance suddenly burst forth!
That gold was unlike any color he had seen before.
The icy blue was cold and sinister, the dark purple filthy, and the gray mist dead and lifeless.
But this gold…
was warm, pure, and almost felt…
polite and civilized.
That was the most accurate description Luo Xun could come up with.
Golden light collided with black mist.
A second explosion followed.
This one was closer and clearer, mixed with a high-pitched chant in an unknown language.
The cadence was elegant, like singing, though he couldn’t understand a single word.
“A living person?” Luo Xun’s heart leaped into his throat.
In over a month, this was the first time he had heard a sound made by a living human being.
Attracted by the explosion, the skeleton soldier turned toward the northeast.
The blue fire in its eye sockets flickered a few times, as if someone had lit a candle inside its skull.
Then it picked up its pace, limping toward the noise while its bones clattered with urgency.
Only then did Luo Xun ease his grip on the bowstring.
Whoosh…
The sound of the arrow leaving the string was as soft as a breath.
The custom hunting arrow hardly dipped, driving straight through the back of the skeleton’s skull.
The skeleton soldier froze in place, the flames in its eyes sputtering twice before dying out.
Bones clattered to the ground like someone had accidentally knocked over a drying rack, and the gray mist clinging to its body vanished entirely.
Luo Xun didn’t bother checking his work.
Grabbing his bow, he vaulted over the stone and darted into the adjacent bushes.
He moved as light as a cat, not dropping a single leaf from his ghillie cape.
In these thirty-plus days, if he hadn’t gained any other skill, he had certainly mastered stealth.
He crept toward the source of the explosion.
The energy aura in his vision served as the ultimate navigation system.
The black energy mass was shrinking toward a specific point, like a pack of beasts cornering prey.
The golden light resisted valiantly, but it was visibly thinning, like a flashlight running low on batteries.
Slinking to within two hundred meters, Luo Xun used his energy vision to take in the battlefield.
It was a tower.
A stone tower stood atop a small knoll.
He had never seen anything like it—tall and slender, spiraling upward toward the sky.
Its body was carved with intricate patterns, full of open cutouts like an ornate piece of filigree art.
Except now, this artwork had been smashed.
The lower half was scorched black, and huge cracks split the upper half; a strong breeze looked capable of knocking it down.
Black mist poured toward the tower’s summit from all directions like starving ghouls swarming a meal.
At the center of that impenetrable dark mass, a golden glow was fading.
No.
It wasn’t fading.
Luo Xun squinted.
The golden light was shrinking and condensing, like a small beast backed into a corner making a final stand.
And deep within that golden light, a humanoid outline knelt on the ground.
A pale hand reached out from the black mist, clawing toward the silhouette.
Luo Xun’s finger rested on the trigger.
Should he intervene?
It was the first time in over a month he had seen a living soul.
It might also be his last.
What if it was a trap?
What if the undead set it up?
What if that golden figure was just another monster?
The pale hand closed in on the golden silhouette.
Luo Xun inhaled deeply.
Nocked an arrow.
To hell with “what ifs.” He hadn’t spoken to a living person in over a month, and here was one right in front of him.
And they were about to die.