Ch 50: Opening a Survival School Before the Zombie Outbreak

After receiving their assigned simulated zombies, the students once again had no idea what to do.

Qi Zhengfei stared at the hole that pierced straight through the zombie’s eye socket. He had never examined the wounds left behind after killing zombies so carefully before, whether his own kills or those of others. Yet the first aid class demanded exactly that, not only looking, but looking closely, distinguishing different types of injuries and recording them.

It felt profoundly inhuman.

Suppressing his nausea, Qi Zhengfei bent down to examine it.

Fragments of red-and-white, cloudy, unrecognizable tissue had been dragged out when Zhao Zhou pulled out his pen. They were splattered everywhere, limp and soft, so vivid that merely looking at them made one imagine the sticky texture.

Ugh…

Qi Zhengfei snapped a photo quickly and turned his head away at once.

Unfortunately, after two months of killing zombies, the students had developed muscle memory. Against these low-level zombies, their attacks were clean and efficient.

Like Zhao Zhou. Even without a weapon, adjusting his angle and force allowed him to kill a zombie with nothing more than a ballpoint pen.

As a result, their group’s zombie had only a broken neck and a single fatal wound.

They were nowhere near the required twenty injury types.

“What do we do now?” a girl in their group asked worriedly, squatting beside the corpse and casually poking at its wound with her finger.

Qi Zhengfei thought for a moment and said uncertainly, “Didn’t Teacher Lu just say… ‘any method is fine’?”

He detached a small knife from his keychain, bent down, and sliced open the zombie’s arm. “What about this?”

The girl’s eyes lit up.

“You’re a genius.” She eagerly snapped a photo and said, lowering her wrist display, “If there aren’t wounds, we can just create them ourselves.”

“But cuts made by a knife probably count as only one type unless they damage different organs…” Qi Zhengfei muttered, gesturing across different parts of the zombie’s abdomen. “This is the heart. This is the stomach. Here… should be the large intestine.”

Feeling he had discovered a reliable way to rack up numbers, he enthusiastically stabbed several more times, muttering organ names under his breath. He failed to notice that everyone else in the group had gradually gone quiet, watching him with complicated expressions.

Zhao Zhou: “…”

Something about this scene felt deeply wrong.

Why did his roommate suddenly look like a deranged serial killer?

Beating a corpse while whispering ominously, counting organs one by one, and gradually developing an excited expression… if this scene got out, who would believe they were attending a first aid class?

Numbly, Zhao Zhou looked toward the other groups and realized they were doing roughly the same thing.

One student stabbed downward; blood splashed across his face. He casually wiped it away, smiling with blissful satisfaction beneath the smear. “Hehe, that’s another one.”

Another pair worked together sawing off arms and legs with great effort. Someone else straddled a zombie and slapped it repeatedly, then paused to observe.

“Is it swollen enough yet? Can we photograph this?…”

The chaos was almost unbearable to witness.

“Holy—!”

A shout came from the distance.

Zhao Zhou looked toward the sound and realized it came from the boys’ dormitory building.

One side of Building Two faced the dorm balconies directly. Since the dorm was taller, students on higher floors had a clear view of the rooftop.

At that moment, a boy stood on a balcony around the tenth floor, holding a freshly dried pair of underwear, frozen in shock as he stared at the scene of collective madness below.

When his eyes met Zhao Zhou’s, he shouted another stunned expletive, dropped what he was holding, and fled back inside clutching his head.

Zhao Zhou: “…”

Too late to stop him, Zhao Zhou’s outstretched hand hung helplessly in the air, aimed at the boy’s retreating back.

—Wait! Let me explain! This isn’t what it looks like!

He could already predict the forum posts that would appear after class:

[First aid students apparently driven insane by coursework, collectively mutilating corpses on the rooftop. I made eye contact with one of them. Am I going to be silenced???]

[Is this a first aid class or “108 Creative Ways to Kill Someone”?]

Zhao Zhou covered his face.

For now, the only consolation was that first aid was a required course. The misunderstanding could last at most a week.

“This won’t work. The efficiency is way too low,” Qi Zhengfei said in frustration, wiping sweat from his forehead as Zhao Zhou continued ranting internally.

Zhao Zhou snapped back to attention, realizing he had been slacking off. “Isn’t there a better way? Something that could create multiple injuries at once?”

“All at once?”

Qi Zhengfei froze, suddenly recalling what Teacher Lu had said about “throwing little people.”

He had deliberately brought them to the rooftop. It clearly wasn’t just because there was more space. The real reason must be…

“Yes! Falling from a height,” Qi Zhengfei decided immediately, bending down to lift the zombie. “Quick, give me a hand.”

“A high fall can cause fractures all over the body, soft-tissue injuries, abrasions, lacerations, internal organ damage, head trauma, chest trauma…” he recited from the lecture earlier. “We can collect a lot of injury types in one go.”

Zhao Zhou and the others immediately understood and helped carry the zombie.

Other groups noticed what they were doing and had the same realization. Soon, several teams began dragging their zombies toward the rooftop edge.

Helplessly, Qi Zhengfei’s group paused to mark theirs first. One girl donated her hair tie and fastened it around the zombie’s wrist so it wouldn’t get mixed up with others.

Only after marking it did they push the zombie off the roof.

Two seconds that felt both long and fleeting later, a heavy, heart-stopping thud sounded from below.

All ten members of the group leaned over the railing to look down.

From the zombie’s perspective, it would probably see ten round heads lined up neatly above, each seemingly sweating nervously, wearing guilty expressions.

After a moment of silence, Zhao Zhou clutched his chest. “I suddenly feel like we just murdered someone and dumped the body.”

“What if one day these zombie robots gain self-awareness like AI in cyberpunk stories and come back for revenge?”

“Before that, maybe worry about their real counterparts coming for revenge in a year.”

After their muttering, the group resigned themselves to going downstairs to retrieve their important experimental subject, now sprawled in an awkward heap.

When throwing the zombies, the students had carefully avoided the stairwell exits in case someone appeared suddenly. Translated on Hololo novels. Whenever another group arrived below to retrieve theirs, they also waited to avoid accidentally hitting anyone.

After hauling the fallen zombie back upstairs and examining it thoroughly, Qi Zhengfei relaxed.

As expected, the variety of injuries was far richer this time.

And since all injuries came from a single accident, writing the emergency treatment plan for homework would be much easier.

So this had been Teacher Lu’s intention all along.

The successful groups eagerly began photographing their results. Halfway through, someone complained that the clothing covering the zombie was getting in the way, so they set aside their wrist devices and started removing its clothes.

One person was too slow, so several people joined in together.

Although the zombies had no gender characteristics and were essentially 180-centimeter human mannequins, the scene still felt… strange.

Fortunately, everyone present understood the context, and no one gave them odd looks. Zhao Zhou reassured himself while quickly stripping off the last layer covering the zombie’s body, exposing its skin.

At that exact moment, he heard a familiar shout from afar again:

“Holy—!”

Zhao Zhou: “…”

He looked up in disbelief and once again saw the same shocked face on a dormitory balcony.

He nearly broke down.

Brother, why is your timing always this perfect?!

He could practically imagine the boy’s thought process. The guy must have assumed he’d misseen things earlier, spent ages mentally debating indoors, then finally worked up the courage to come back out to confirm, only to witness an even more morally questionable scene.

Not only corpse mutilation, but now they were stripping it too!

Their eyes met for the second time. The boy yelped and fled indoors again.

Zhao Zhou silently memorized the dorm room’s location and vowed never to walk past that floor again.

After finally finishing their photos and collecting twenty types of injuries, they still had time before class ended, so they gathered to discuss how to write the assignment.

Qi Zhengfei’s group had worked efficiently, but not every group was so lucky.

Some zombies landed on thick grass and suffered only minor injuries. One group’s zombie had the misfortune of getting stuck in a tree, resulting in little more than scratches. Those groups had to repeat the process, throwing them again until they achieved satisfactory results.

As a result, loud crashing sounds like dumplings being tossed into boiling water echoed nonstop around Building Two until class ended.

That day, forum discussions exploded. Among the top three trending posts, aside from the unlucky dorm witness’s thread titled:

[A Strange Scene on the Rooftop: Is This the Distortion of Humanity or…?]

the other two were:

[The world is still beautiful (even if the apocalypse is coming). We must live with hope! Also, how many actually jumped??]

and a post from a first aid student after class:

[Does anyone else feel like our school is getting increasingly… criminal?]

Who could explain how something that began with the goal of saving the world had somehow veered so wildly off course?

…

Of course, the commotion caused by the first aid class did not escape Fu Qing’s notice.

Although Lu Yan had sent her the course outline beforehand, she never imagined he would teach this way. When the system alerted her and she opened the surveillance feed, she immediately sucked in a sharp breath.

Not long after class ended, Teacher Lu received an internal message from the principal, highlighted in red, bolded, enlarged, and dripping with warning intent:

[If you smash my flowers again, I’ll throw you down with them.]

— the fury of a simulation-management player.

Lu Yan: “…”

That’s the part you’re focusing on?

₊˚.🎧📓✩

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