Ch 7: Opening a Survival School Before the Zombie Outbreak

Expelled?

Expelled!!

Students who would panic over even a single demerit, terrified it might go on their record and affect their future, felt like a bolt of lightning had struck them out of a clear sky. They were stunned into stupidity.

They truly could not understand how Fu Qing could say the words “expelled” so lightly.

It was only the first day of registration. They had not even warmed their quilts before being told to roll up their bedding and leave. How were they supposed to explain that to their families…

The twenty-one people standing went pale in an instant.

Some of them had managed to stay barely calm even when they saw zombies, but the moment they heard they were being expelled, their legs went weak.

“I, I…”

The 1111 trio exchanged an eerie look. Zhang Han wiggled her eyebrows furtively, practically unable to hide her excitement, and only reined it in after Song Rushuang pinched her. All three of them focused on Shi Guangyao’s reaction.

To his credit, he still managed to keep his composure, his face full of urgent indignation, like someone falsely accused.

“There must be some mistake!”

“I didn’t do anything. Why would you expel me!”

“Damn, shameless.” Zhang Han muttered. “Should I stand up and report him?”

Shen Qingqing stayed cautious. “Wait a bit.”

Prompted by Shi Guangyao, the others also raised their voices to protest.

“Exactly, what did we even do?”

“You just expel people like that, where’s the justice?”

“You have to have evidence for things like this…”

Twenty-one people pleading their case together was not quiet. The students who did not know the truth began to stir as well, whispering while looking toward the stage, doubt rising in their eyes.

They had already recognized from Fu Qing’s voice that she was the “upperclassman” from the broadcast. She was the one who had summoned the zombie tide. In these circumstances, they naturally could not trust her much.

Song Rushuang felt a little worried, afraid the person on stage might back down from the punishment just to quiet things down.

But when she looked again at Fu Qing’s expression, it seemed Fu Qing did not care at all about the uproar below.

Fu Qing truly did not care.

She listened for a moment, then fixed on the first person who had spoken. “You want to know what you did?”

Shi Guangyao froze. For some reason, it felt like her face said, “People actually make requests like that?” He forced himself to say, “Yes. I didn’t do anything. You can’t expel me.”

Before coming to the auditorium, he had even checked. There were no cameras in that corridor. And in that chaos, even if those three girls complained, he could still, just like earlier, claim they had seen wrong.

As long as he refused to admit it, she had no evidence.

Thinking that, Shi Guangyao felt a bit more confident, his back straightening.

Fu Qing flipped the booklet open again, as if reluctantly. “Since you asked, fine.”

Shi Guangyao: “?”

His heart lurched.

“Fan Hua, male. In the third minute after the exercise began, in order to buy himself time to escape, he shoved a classmate beside him into the zombie tide, causing that classmate to be surrounded and killed by three zombies.”

“Liu Jun, male. In the sixth minute after the exercise began, in order to escape a zombie pursuit, he shut seven classmates who were running behind him in a corridor together with eleven zombies, and locked the emergency passage door, causing all seven to be infected.”

“Zhao Xinyu, male. In the fourteenth minute after the exercise began, he groped a female student who had fled with him into a toilet stall and provoked her with words.”

“Luo Jiao, female. In the seventeenth minute after the exercise began, after a dispute with a companion inside a shelter, she forcibly shoved her companion out of the room and refused to open the door, causing infection…”

……

“Shi Guangyao, male. In the twenty-fourth minute after the exercise began, in order to monopolize supplies inside the shelter, he shut three female students outside the door, forcing them to face a zombie attack. Fortunately, the three worked together to deal with the zombie and no one died, but that does not erase the malicious intent of the act.”

Fu Qing lifted her eyes. The notebook that clearly recorded the time, location, and involved parties of each violation sat by her hand like a slap in the face.

“Any other questions?”

Zhang Han clenched her thigh so hard she nearly screamed from excitement.

She really knew!

There had been no one else on the scene. How could she know? Did she have some kind of all-seeing eye?

Whatever the zombie tide was about, the fact that Fu Qing had taken revenge for her so thoroughly was enough to change Zhang Han’s view. Fu Qing now looked towering and formidable in her eyes.

A girl suddenly stood up, pointing at the boy named Zhao Xinyu, her face full of disgust. “It was him! He thought there were zombies outside so I wouldn’t dare run, and he reached out and touched me…”

“So it was you who locked us in the corridor. The zombies were still some distance away then. Everyone could have escaped.”

“It’s you. You killed my—”

That last sentence sounded like a vengeful ghost demanding a life. The crowd froze, then felt something odd.

…A ghost who was still alive, who could slam tables, who could shout and spray spittle.

The students finally understood why those twenty-one looked so fearful when their names were called. It had not been fear. It had been guilt.

The victims stood up one after another to identify them, and that was the best evidence possible.

Shi Guangyao felt prickles up his back. His face turned ashen, fear rising.

Like Zhang Han, he could not understand how she knew, but thinking of his education, he still gritted his teeth. “Even so, you can’t expel me. First, I didn’t cause serious consequences. Second, which school rule says you’re not allowed to lock classmates outside a door?”

Fu Qing was already getting impatient. She leaned against the lectern and tapped the tabletop twice with her notebook. “Thanks for the reminder. Let me introduce myself.”

“I am your future principal, Fu Qing. Starting today, your food, clothing, housing, daily life, teaching, training… everything you do on campus will be handled by me, and managed by me,” she said flatly, then shifted her tone. “In other words.”

“If I say you’re not allowed to grope girls, then you’re not allowed. If I say you’re not allowed to use unlucky classmates as shields, then you’re not allowed. If I say I’m expelling you, then tomorrow morning at eight o’clock you get out on time. Understood?”

Everyone: “……”

The unlucky one used as a shield: “……”

The auditorium fell silent as a grave. The twenty-one people looked like they were about to cry.

This is the principal? This is an unreasonable thug!

After all that, the twenty-one who had been expelled knew there was no hope left for them. They lingered and dragged their feet, unwilling to leave, still clinging to the idea that some last-minute reversal might appear.

Fu Qing did not bother urging them.

Her earlier, utterly unreasonable speech had completely cowed this group of greenhouse-raised flowers. They had never seen such a shameless “teacher” before. On one hand, they felt grateful that she had stood up for the innocent victims; on the other, they were seized by a terrible sense of having wandered straight into a tiger’s den. Their emotions churned into an indescribable mix.

What they did not know was that an even bigger “surprise” was still waiting.

The curtain behind the stage had never been raised. At Fu Qing’s signal, the lights all around suddenly dimmed, plunging the entire auditorium into darkness. Immediately after, a beam of projection light snapped on, illuminating fine gray dust drifting lazily through the air.

On the curtain appeared the words:

【363 days 19 hours 52 minutes 20 seconds】

At the same time, every student wearing a Fangzhou University tactical watch felt it vibrate in unison, synchronizing with the same information.

The massive countdown was glaringly conspicuous in the darkness, nearly monopolizing everyone’s field of vision. It ticked away relentlessly, second by second, the soft ticking sound tugging at their hearts until their pulses seemed to beat in sync with it.

“When the countdown on this screen reaches zero, the zombies you saw today will appear on the streets and alleys of the world.”

The figure on stage was blurred by the darkness.

Her tone was almost flat, yet her very first sentence was like a pebble dropped into still water, sending ripples outward.

Fu Qing remembered it clearly. It had originally been nothing more than a calm summer afternoon.

Their university started early. By late August the weather was damp and stifling, enough to sap anyone’s energy. That afternoon she happened to have no classes and was lying on her bed scrolling on her phone, while another roommate did the same on hers.

Suddenly, all the group chats exploded with notifications, pushing out a livestream link.

On screen, the camera shook violently. A female anchor who often appeared on the news was speaking rapidly. She had clearly rushed out, appearing barefaced on camera, her long hair tied back into a neat bundle, her expression anxious and panicked.

Fu Qing could not hear clearly. All her attention was fixed on what was happening behind the anchor. People were tearing into each other like wild beasts, the scene too horrific to bear. Even riot police who rushed in to stop it were dragged into the vortex, letting out one blood-chilling scream after another.

No one noticed a person quietly approaching—until he suddenly sprang forward and pinned the anchor beneath him.

The livestream was cut off. Before the screen went black, Fu Qing saw the anchor lying on the ground, blood spilling from the corner of her mouth and streaking down the side of her face, painting a vivid red slash across her pale, makeup-free skin.

After that, public opinion exploded—then abruptly fell silent.

The trending lists stayed quiet for two full days, until a senior official fell from a high building during a live broadcast, smashing into a bloody mess before the cameras. Only then did the situation spiral completely out of control.

“No one knows how this virus appeared. All that is known is that it is highly lethal and highly contagious. Contact between human blood and an infected person’s saliva is enough to transmit it. The infected lose their sanity, develop a craving for human flesh, and display intense aggression, becoming the ‘living dead’ you see in films.”

“The incubation period ranges from seconds to days. The only certainty is that once bitten by a zombie, you will become one of them. No exceptions.”

She enunciated every word heavily.

“In the first week after the outbreak, nearly half the population died. Many people did not even survive the first wave of attacks. More, however, failed to notice that they themselves had been infected. After fleeing into shelters, they mutated one after another, directly or indirectly causing multiple densely populated primary shelters—shopping malls, schools, air-raid bunkers—to be completely wiped out.”

Fu Qing’s words made the students who had hidden in the cafeteria shiver. In their minds rose countless scenes of shelters falling one after another.

Many of them had been bitten in exactly that way. They knew all too well how terrifying it was for a zombie to appear inside a crowded, enclosed space.

Fu Qing did not give them time to process this. She continued almost harshly:

“One month after the outbreak, the global population had dropped by 90%. Of those, about ninety percent became zombies. The remaining ten percent died on the spot due to the extent of their bodily injuries.”

“Transportation collapsed. Industry ground to a halt. Medical systems failed. Basic utilities such as water and electricity ceased entirely. People hiding in buildings began migrating everywhere in search of food and water, which in turn led to even more deaths.”

“The authorities established shelters. However, because the virus’s incubation period was unpredictable and its virulence extreme, many shelters ultimately failed.”

People on the run inevitably suffered scrapes and wounds. No one knew whether any of them had come into contact with zombie saliva. Even if isolation was attempted, no one knew how long it should last.

With long incubation periods, many people gambled on luck, believing they were uninfected. They concealed the truth and slipped into crowds… no one knew how many shelters were ultimately destroyed by such selfishness.

This did not even count those who broke down emotionally and took their own lives.

Rotting corpses fermented in the stagnant air. Blood clogged the sewers. During that time, the stench of death was everywhere, and cities became purgatory.

Later, many people fled to remote places—mountains, outskirts, wilderness—completely distancing themselves from population centers, and only then managed to survive by sheer luck.

One year after the outbreak, only a tiny fraction of the global population remained. Conflicts began to erupt over the last remnants of civilized society’s resources. At the same time, as time went on, zombies continued to mutate, and the remaining humans were gradually wiped out.”

Anyone who survived to that stage was ruthless. The conflicts then were smaller in scale, but far more brutal.

Song Rushuang bit her lip. “Trouble from without and within.”

Zhang Han muttered under her breath, “Fighting among themselves at a time like this… how stupid. Shouldn’t they be uniting to fight the zombies?”

Shen Qingqing said nothing, a faint glimmer flickering in her eyes.

According to the “principal,” ninety percent of the dead had mutated—that meant billions of zombies. At that point, aside from running for their lives, there really was nothing else to do.

Which also meant that the lifespan of humanity as a species had entered its final countdown.

And sure enough—

“Five years after the outbreak, the last human died.”

From then on, no one remembered anything that had ever happened on this planet.

“2035 became the final year in humanity’s long history.”

“All of the above is what will occur within the next six years.”

After finishing, Fu Qing paused slightly. In the silence, the speakers throughout the auditorium suddenly erupted with a sharp hum. Quite a few people merely flinched instinctively, then continued sitting there blankly, staring in disbelief at the woman in front of them who had just prophesied humanity’s extinction.

“This is the greatest crisis in human history. But you have a chance to change it, to extend human civilization.”

“Perhaps for decades. Perhaps only for a few years. Or perhaps for countless new millennia.”

Noticing the fear and confusion on the students’ faces, Fu Qing’s lips curved into a very slight smile, breaking the stiff, broadcast-like cadence of her speech.

“That said, when Australopithecus in southern Africa struggled to evolve in response to drought two and a half million years ago, they probably never imagined they were shouldering the responsibility for humanity’s survival. So let’s put it another way.”

“In the one-hour simulation just now, of 2,397 freshmen, only 1,347 survived to the end. 1,050 died. A mortality rate close to 44%. In terms of physical fitness and luck, that does not even match the former human average.”

“Based on these numbers, more than half of you here will die within one year and one week. Ninety-nine percent will die within one year and one month. And the longest-lived among you has, at most, a little over a thousand days left.”

“Six years from today, not a single person here will remain.”

As Fu Qing spoke, it was as if she could see the packed seats before her emptying one by one, until finally the stage lights came up and she stood alone on the stage.

For an instant, the audience was filled with familiar faces, those who had left wearing smiles. In the next second, the smiles dissolved into the students’ taut expressions.

Her expression did not change.

“Now I need you to make a choice. Tomorrow morning at eight, leave with those twenty-one people and spend the final year of your life with your family and friends. Or stay, follow me, and learn how to survive.”

“The principal’s office is in Administrative Building 301. It will be open until nine p.m. This is your final opportunity to submit a withdrawal application.”

Fu Qing glanced at her watch. The timing was about right.

“Once again, welcome, freshmen, to Fangzhou University. I hope every day you spend here will be beautiful and unforgettable. The opening ceremony is now concluded. Dismissed.”

₊˚.🎧📓✩