Ch 74: Opening a Survival School Before the Zombie Outbreak

While the two girls were tugging at each other, the others reacted fast, cutting down two zombies that had crept over at the noise.

The zombies fell soundlessly.

Seeing they could handle things for the moment, Su Huaijin turned and asked, “What feels off?”

“There’s no mission,” Song Rushuang said, her expression grim. “In the usual simulation pod runs, the system always gives us objectives. But this time, the pre animation ended and it just threw us straight into action. We don’t even know what we’re supposed to do. That’s not how the simulation pod normally works.”

From the menu disappearing, to being forcibly dragged into a garbled-code instance, to the abnormal flow of the instance itself, everything was wrong.

Whether the pods had been infected by some kind of “virus” or simply malfunctioned, it meant they could not treat this as a normal run.

In other instances, dying meant you respawned in the lobby. Would that still happen here?

If someone died in this instance, would it affect their real body?

If they failed to clear it, would it end the way failures did in other instances, with “total party death”?

Su Huaijin had not been rushing to reach Fu Qing out of recklessness. She knew there was no time to waste.

The principal had suddenly been dropped into a body that was already badly wounded, facing an enemy in perfect condition. Translated on Hololo novels. If the fight aggravated the injury, or the wound worsened because it could not be treated in time…

Neither of them could bear to imagine the outcome.

Song Rushuang also knew they had to move quickly, but the factory interior was sealed and labyrinthine. Every corner, every fork, every half-closed door could hide zombies. They had no luxury to stand around talking.

No matter how frantic they felt, they still had to analyze the situation before acting, or they could cause even more casualties.

Song Rushuang silently recited the key points the principal had hammered into them during instance reviews, forcing down the panic in her chest.

Su Huaijin adjusted her breathing, shrinking deeper into the crater left by the explosive blast. Watching the swaying silhouettes in the distance, she spoke quickly.

“Fine. Let’s piece together what we each saw. What does this factory layout look like? Where are the zombies concentrated? Did anyone memorize the route the principal took? And which way gets us to that room fastest? We need answers before we move.”

A steady voice cut in. “I remember.”

Liang Yi instinctively pushed at the bridge of his nose, found nothing, and realized the role he’d been assigned did not wear glasses.

“I remember the route she took and the layout along the way. I can draw it.” He picked up a twig and scratched straight lines into the ground. “The room is over here. This corridor, by design, should connect to the side door on the west end. If we need to retreat later, we can run this way…”

Liang Yi knew he’d been selected for the elite group largely because of his performance in infrastructure class. These past weeks, outside of training, he’d been relentlessly sharpening that skill to compensate for his weaker fighting ability.

Now, in under a minute, he produced a detailed map by hand, almost perfectly reconstructing the floor plan they had seen spread across the table during the planning argument.

Even though the animation’s camera had focused mainly on the people arguing, and the map itself had occupied only a small corner of the frame, with many details blurry, Liang Yi had memorized it anyway.

No one else would have bothered.

So Song Rushuang and the others could not even verify the map against their own memory.

But months of fighting together in instances had forged a trust that made hesitation impossible. They chose to believe him without question.

Liang Yi immediately traced a route across the map. “She went in this way.”

With a route in hand, Su Huaijin began building a plan, others chiming in the moment they spotted gaps. In barely two minutes, the elite team had an efficient, workable rescue plan.

The diverted horde still had not returned. In the distance, faint horn blasts could still be heard.

Four years after the apocalypse, even cities showed almost no signs of human activity, much less the remote outskirts where this factory stood. Blasting a horn like that would draw every wandering zombie for miles.

In the animation, Lu Yan’s group had relied on superior driving to lure the horde away, then quickly gone silent and rotated through methods to eliminate special zombies.

But Qin Yufei and the others, whose driving was far rougher, moved with a kind of all-or-nothing madness.

They could not stop, and they could not let the zombies lose their target and turn back, so they kept the horn screaming without pause.

If zombies arrived from the sides, they ran them down.

If they were boxed in, they searched desperately for a gap to break through.

Every extra minute they bought eased pressure on the teammates inside the factory, raising the odds they could bring the principal out alive.

They could not contact each other, but the elite students had silently accepted their assignments and were carrying them out.

Knowing Qin Yufei’s group could be surrounded at any moment, the explosives team did not dare delay. Seeing the coast was clear, Song Rushuang signaled to move and was the first to vault out of the crater.

As she sprinted toward the factory, her mind drifted despite herself.

She remembered the look in Fu Qing’s eyes in the final moment of the animation, when “Fu Qing” lifted her gaze.

Most people, attacked and betrayed without warning, would show instinctive panic and disbelief.

But the principal’s reaction had felt… like she had expected the man to appear.

Song Rushuang’s thoughts tangled into confusion.

*

The sensation of something foreign lodged inside the body was strange, but not unfamiliar.

Fu Qing staggered two steps. The rapid blood loss made her dizzy, and standing only worsened it, so she braced a hand against the wall and sat down, exhaling slowly. Her mouth was full of hot, metallic blood.

Not only hers, either. There was also the blood that had sprayed onto her cheek when she killed her teammate. Translated on Hololo novels. The two mingled together, and the simulation pod dragged the buried scent back out of her memory with cruel clarity.

Fu Qing glanced at the friend lying nearby. The woman’s body lay on the cold floor, eyes gently closed, warmth not yet fully gone. If not for the hole in her temple, she might have looked almost peaceful.

Like the countless nights they had shared a tent, when Fu Qing could turn her head and see her like this.

The unhurried footsteps stopped in front of her.

In her lowered field of view appeared a familiar pair of military boots. The sole ground against the dagger on the floor, sending it spinning away.

Everything replayed exactly as it had in her previous life, and that was only natural.

This was her memory, after all.

She even remembered the first thing he said.

“Fu Qing, do you know what I hate most? That look you always have, like you’re above everyone.”

“Why is it that they all follow your orders so willingly? Why is it that the supplies we drag back with our own hands always get handed to you first so you can divide them up? Why is it that everyone has to take night watch, but they say you’re exhausted in the day, and they’d rather skip rest themselves just to cover your shift?”

“We haven’t met another living soul in almost two months. Maybe we’re all that’s left in the world, and I still have to listen to you. Why? Tell me why!”

In the memory, his eyes were bloodshot, thick with malice, almost impossible to connect to the quiet, low-profile teammate he had always been.

Then that shadowed stare turned into a brazen grin. He crouched beside her and murmured, “If the one on watch tonight had been you, maybe none of this would’ve happened.”

And what did she do next, again?

After that, the long period of unconsciousness left her memories fragmented. Only scattered impressions remained.

She remembered suddenly rising and slamming the man to the ground, a spare blade pressed to his throat. From beneath his chin she drove it upward, pinning his writhing tongue to the roof of his mouth.

He had never expected a severely wounded person to overpower him so completely. The ferocity in his eyes slowly turned into terror.

He tried to cry for help, screaming through the agony, words slurring together. “No, you…”

Fu Qing hated wasting words on the dead and had no strength left to listen to excuses. She finished him cleanly, kicked the body out of the room, then shoved the door shut behind her and barricaded it. Inside the sealed space, she sat quietly with the two fallen teammates, waiting for rescue.

Or rather, waiting to die.

In the final minutes before losing consciousness, she replayed his accusations, yet what surfaced instead were memories of her companions proudly carrying back hard-won supplies and showing them off to her.

“You’ve been busy clearing zombies, you didn’t see how many cans were hidden in that cellar, right? Here, take a look. We can finally have a decent meal tonight.”

And the way they forced her to rest, refusal written plainly in their eyes.

“You’re the one leading us during the day. If you’re exhausted, how are we supposed to stay safe? Boss, please just go to sleep already.”

—Dividing supplies?

—Fighting over night watch?

Fu Qing almost laughed.

If Lu Yan and the others heard their actions described that way, they would probably shudder and tell him to stop saying something so disgusting.

Even when only a handful of humans remained in the world, someone still chose jealousy and conflict.

And the least important person among them had caused the deaths of the friends she valued most.

Now, staring at the military boots halted before her, a spare blade slid quietly from her sleeve.

If the person standing there was that traitor, she would not mind killing him again.

If not…

“Fu Qing.”

The voice carried a smile, yet the words were nothing like those in her memory.

“I’ve finally met you.”

*

Fu Qing finally spent the effort to lift her head.

Leaning against the wall, she rested her head back lazily. There was no surprise in her expression, only calm confirmation of a long-held suspicion.

“The Zombie King?”

Her voice was hoarse with fatigue, but steady.

The being worshipped by countless followers, wearing the traitor’s body, nodded.

“You guessed.”

“I wasn’t certain at first,” Fu Qing adjusted her posture, accidentally tugging her wound and deciding not to move again, lying there like a corpse. “Until you opened with that disgusting line.”

From sabotaging Liu Yong’s plans, to killing Skull, to their long mutual investigation, to the red-clad woman’s failed recruitment attempt and the believers she brought dying at Lu Yan and Hao Zhenye’s hands, their back-and-forth had indeed earned the phrase “finally.”

The Zombie King asked curiously, “How did you figure it out?”

“Reasonable deduction.”

The system could foresee the future, conjure advanced technology out of nothing, and even create a “cognitive blind spot” large enough to hide a campus of over two thousand people in plain sight. Its abilities were far beyond modern humanity’s understanding.

The only entity capable of isolating the system’s signal and invading equipment under its control, like the simulation pods, had to be the Zombie King.

Now it seemed the two possessed comparable power, each constrained in different ways.

The system had little influence beyond campus grounds and could only operate through Fu Qing.

The Zombie King, meanwhile, could not enter the campus itself and paid a price whenever it evolved its followers.

They were like opposing halves, black and white forces struggling for control over the fate of the world.

When Fu Qing first suspected the Zombie King had invaded the simulation pods, she remembered how the system had purchased a suburban safehouse for her and bypassed surveillance cameras. Clearly, it could access the internet to some degree.

They had also long suspected that someone among the Believers possessed extraordinary hacking ability, enough to build a global cult network online.

The simulation pods relied on internal networks to connect and download instance data. If the system slipped even briefly, the Zombie King could have exploited that opening.

By then, Fu Qing had been seventy or eighty percent certain.

But she had no interest in explaining all that aloud, so she stopped after that single sentence.

After waiting a moment, the Zombie King sighed lightly and offered what sounded like a formal compliment.

“You’re very intelligent.”

Fu Qing replied without hesitation, “And you’re an idiot.”

Her injuries were severe. In the future she would remain unconscious for a week. Right now she was barely clinging to wakefulness, sprawled half-dead against the wall, her tone equally lifeless as she mocked him.

“I don’t understand why you let that scarred woman appear in front of me so early, or why you handed me so many free kills.”

From what she had observed, the Believers’ primary activity was instigating violent incidents around the world, stirring chaos and extreme emotions.

Fu Qing suspected this was one of the conditions required for the Zombie King’s evolution.

The evidence was clear. After Skull’s death, reports of violent incidents worldwide had surged, even exceeding those of her previous life.

By the time the hooded woman’s subordinates appeared, the infected had already undergone significant upgrades.

And after those followers died, entirely new disasters, ones that had never occurred in her previous life, began appearing in the news again.

The Zombie King had been recovering its strength.

Which was why Fu Qing could not understand why it had chosen to expose itself so soon.

It could have continued growing quietly in the shadows, making itself nearly impossible for her to find.

Even the system had never listed killing the Zombie King as part of the main quest, clearly holding little hope for it. Yet now it had come running to her on its own.

“You still haven’t given up on recruiting me?” Fu Qing sounded sarcastic even when speaking normally, and now she was openly mocking him.

She completely ignored the fact that he stood there unharmed while she had a gaping wound through her abdomen, an overwhelmingly disadvantageous situation.

The Zombie King remained calm, or perhaps its species simply differed from humans, incapable of showing emotion on its face.

“This was only an excuse to let Feng Huang approach you,” it said evenly. “I couldn’t expose my existence, nor that one’s. With it around, I couldn’t allow you to join my side anyway. Besides, you never would have.”

The “it” he referred to was clearly the system bound to Fu Qing.

That confirmed another of her suspicions: like the system, the Zombie King had also reincarnated from the previous world.

She had begun suspecting this when the infected appeared earlier than they should have. Otherwise, there was no explanation for the drastic changes in this timeline.

In a sense, the Zombie King had won in the previous life. Zombies had ultimately conquered Blue Star.

If such a struggle required energy, then the system must have spent more of it.

Which meant it was natural that, in this new life, the Zombie King awakened earlier than the system.

According to the hooded woman, she had contacted the Zombie King more than three months before Fu Qing bound the system.

Those three months created the initial disadvantage Fu Qing and the system faced. The Believers formed their secret organization, accelerating the Zombie King’s recovery, and intermediate zombies appeared on Blue Star nearly two years ahead of schedule.

The Zombie King held every advantage. There was no reason for it to rush to find her.

“Then why come to me?” Fu Qing waved dismissively. “Stopping by to greet your future opponent? Greeting done, you can leave now. Want to shake hands too?”

The man smiled, though the expression looked deeply unnatural, as if it did not truly understand human facial expressions, merely imitating them awkwardly. The movement of muscle carried an unmistakably inhuman quality.

“Don’t be like that. I deliberately chose this moment and turned it into a dungeon so we could talk properly,” it said softly. “Fu Qing, chances to see you at a disadvantage are rare. I searched through all your memories before finding one.”

Fu Qing replied coldly, “If you’ve seen my memories, then you should know how this person died.”

“Of course I do.”

The moment the man finished speaking, he moved.

His leg shot out, kicking her wrist with full force. The blade she had hidden fell to the ground with a clang. At the same instant Fu Qing sprang upward, moving with startling agility despite her injuries.

“You’re not human,” she murmured, “so you might not know that about half of humans share a very fragile weak point…”

If he had been an ordinary man, the knee strike driving toward him would have shattered his composure. But the Zombie King did not understand. It only felt a tearing agony, as if its organs had twisted together. It staggered, back bending sharply, before Fu Qing followed with a brutal kick that slammed it into the wall, stones crashing down around them.

“You probably don’t realize how weak this guy actually was,” she continued coldly. “When we killed zombies, he always hid at the back. Survived this long purely through luck and clinging to stronger people. And you thought borrowing his body was a good idea?”

She kept talking, though her consciousness was already fading. Taking advantage of his fall, she pinned him down, knees braced against his body, both hands clamping around his throat.

Through blurred vision, the Zombie King suddenly lifted its head and let out a roar.

Silence followed for a heartbeat.

Then thunderous footsteps erupted throughout the factory.

Fu Qing cursed inwardly. She tried to finish him quickly and shut the door, but her reaction lagged. Blood loss slowed her, and he seized the opening, flipping her beneath him and pinning her to the ground. Ironlike fingers closed around her throat in imitation of her own attack.

“You asked why I came,” he whispered as the footsteps drew closer, leaning toward her face. “Of course I came to kill you.”

“The simulation pod connects directly to the brain. If you die here, your system will be left with a host who cannot move, cannot speak, cannot respond. A living vegetable.”

“The apocalypse you speak of is coming soon. By then, you’ll just be an empty container.”

“Without you, without the system, humanity will have no defense. This time, they will fall even sooner.”

Watching her eyes gradually lose focus, the Zombie King felt unmistakable satisfaction. For the first time in their conflict, it held a clear advantage.

Beneath him, Fu Qing suddenly struggled again, lifting her knee—

But it would not fall for that twice.

The Zombie King pinned her legs down, blocking the motion. To keep balance, its grip loosened slightly. Fresh air rushed into her lungs, and Fu Qing broke into violent coughing.

She coughed and laughed at the same time.

“You miscalculated.”

“I may be injured,” she rasped, “but I’m not alone.”

Pressed against the ground, every vibration amplified beneath her body. Hearing something, the smile at her lips deepened slightly.

“You didn’t watch that memory to the end, did you?”

Before he could react, she grabbed his collar and yanked him downward, forcing him close enough that his shadow completely swallowed her.

The next instant, a deafening crash exploded overhead.

The factory ceiling, beams and all, collapsed violently downward.

₊˚.🎧📓✩