Ch 99: Opening a Survival School Before the Zombie Outbreak

Fu Qing’s video of killing a zombie triggered fierce debate inside the department.

It had been nearly an hour since unexplained violent attacks broke out across the country. Everyone in every unit was already anxious to the point of frenzy. Ordinary people were terrified for themselves and their loved ones, but these staff members carried the responsibility of protecting the entire population. And no one understood better than they did what was happening nationwide at that very moment.

In the half hour from 2:30 to 3:00 alone, the death toll reported from various regions had surged past ten thousand, and that was only the portion that had been filed and preliminarily verified. Translated on Hololo novels. It was the number of “abnormal deaths” confirmed by frontline institutions like hospitals, local police stations, and neighborhood committees, then escalated level by level and finally consolidated.

Many more had died in the streets with no one to collect their bodies, or had turned into similar attackers and started roaming. There was no time to wait for professionals to arrive and conduct formal death certifications.

The figure lagged badly, with a huge margin of error.

What was the real death toll? Double? Triple?

Or ten times that…?

They did not dare imagine it.

After 3:00, the number of reported deaths actually began to drop further, but that only meant the situation had become even more chaotic. Police capacity was consumed, hospitals were overflowing, and many frontline workers themselves had been attacked and transformed into those monsters.

They were utterly unprepared for an incident like this. The number of outbreaks and the scale of them were unprecedented.

At first, they thought it was a terror operation by some extremist organization. But any group capable of causing chaos on this scale could not possibly have grown secretly on China soil without anyone knowing. Later, after they captured a living “attacker,” they judged from the person’s physiological abnormalities that this was likely an infectious disease.

But what kind of infectious disease could appear simultaneously, without warning, across multiple regions around the world? It completely upended epidemiological understanding.

Even if someone had poisoned something, no organization on earth could pull off synchronized poisoning on this scale, in so many places at once.

Everyone felt despair.

When science cannot explain something, people cannot help but turn their hope elsewhere, longing, even begging for someone to step forward and give them answers.

What kind of virus was it? How did it spread? How high was the fatality rate? Could the mutated, infected people ever return to normal?

The mutants were ordinary citizens. If they could not be killed outright, it took more time to subdue and detain them. Yet in that time, more and more mutants would appear without end.

There were too many unknowns, severely hindering the creation of countermeasures. Lives were at stake. They could not make conclusions lightly, and yet time did not wait.

Every second, someone was dying.

The later they found answers, the more would die.

How could anyone not be frantic?

Higher authorities had temporarily issued a notice urging everyone to stay home and avoid crowded places. At the same time, police, special forces, and armed units began operations to control infected individuals on the streets. To avoid igniting public panic, the focus was on suppression, and unless absolutely necessary, they were not to harm lives.

But everyone could see this was not a long-term solution. Medical experts convened emergency meetings. Other departments mobilized as well. It was at this moment that Fu Qing’s video surfaced in the public-opinion monitoring system.

She was the first person they had found who clearly identified a weak point in the mutants.

Of course, nearly an hour in, the military and many netizens across the country had already discovered through survival attempts that attacking the head could kill these “zombies” quickly. But few stated it as clearly and decisively as she did.

After all, in ordinary common sense, destroying the head causes death, so it did not automatically connect to the mutants’ special traits.

That made people suspect the young woman in the video might know more.

A one-minute clip was replayed again and again in the conference room. Some, like the netizens, worried they were reading too much into it, that Fu Qing was merely teaching a useful self-defense method, and that in a crisis they should not waste time on an ordinary civilian. Others insisted there was more hidden in her words and argued they had to find her immediately.

They argued without end, until the person at the head of the table finally raised a hand and made the call. “Report the video’s content up the chain. Immediately locate the original uploader’s IP, and contact local police to conduct an in-person verification.”

Even if it turned out to be a dead end, they had to try to seize that one-in-ten-thousand chance.

*

The meeting broke quickly as everyone moved to carry out orders. But the system protected Fu Qing’s and the Fangzhou students’ online traces extremely well. Just as the police had once tried to investigate the mysterious group connected to Liu Yong and found nothing, it was difficult to find them on the internet.

In the face of two higher-dimensional constructs, the system and the Zombie King, human power was simply too weak and too small.

When they searched the web and still could not locate Fu Qing, Fu Qing, instead, delivered herself right to their doorstep.

At 3:30 p.m., Fu Qing appeared at the entrance of a police station with Zhao Yunxiao and Xue Ran.

She had called Officer Chen in advance, saying there was something important she needed to discuss, then set the meeting location at his station without room for argument. The car had not even reached the entrance yet when the three of them saw Officer Chen standing outside from a distance.

He wore a ballistic vest and was fully armed, frowning as he kept scanning outward. Once he confirmed it was Fu Qing in the vehicle, he quickly waved for the guard to open the electric gate.

Fu Qing drove straight into a parking spot. After she stopped, the three of them jumped out. Officer Chen was already waiting in front of the car and launched into them. “Didn’t you see what’s online? It’s this dangerous out there right now. What could possibly be so important it can’t be said on the phone!”

He caught sight of Xue Ran behind her and jolted again. “You even brought students out?!”

Just looking at them made Officer Chen feel chilled with fear. Thank goodness nothing had happened on the way.

He guessed Fu Qing didn’t yet understand what was going on and was about to pull her inside to explain properly, but Fu Qing moved first, striding toward the entrance.

She had come here once before to give a statement, so she knew the place well. Fu Qing walked straight inside with familiarity, Zhao Yunxiao and Xue Ran following closely behind her. Instead, Officer Chen ended up trailing at the rear.

Officer Chen: “……”

Fu Qing stepped onto the stairs, then turned back slightly and tilted her head politely, signaling for him to follow. “What I’m about to say is very important. I assume you wouldn’t want to waste time lecturing me.”

With the outside world already in chaos, what could possibly be more important than the bodies lying everywhere?

Officer Chen muttered inwardly. Honestly, if the caller hadn’t been Fu Qing, he would never have come out personally to meet her.

Nearly eighty percent of the station’s manpower was already deployed outside. Thinking about the many people still waiting for help made every second spent inside feel unbearable to him.

He shook his head and hurried after her.

He wanted to hear exactly what Fu Qing had come to say.

*

Inside the station, staffing had dropped by more than half compared to normal. Officers moving through the halls were all armed, their expressions tense. When the chaos began outside, many civilians handling paperwork and suspects brought in for questioning had been trapped inside the station. Some officers stayed behind to guard and protect them, while the rest had all been dispatched.

Fu Qing glanced at Officer Chen’s gear. Although he wore a ballistic vest, it was summer, and the protection wasn’t thorough. Underneath, he was still wearing short sleeves.

That offered no protection against zombies.

“You can contact the officers outside, right? Tell them to cover all exposed skin,” Fu Qing suddenly said, gesturing toward her own forearm. His was completely exposed. “Wear gloves that don’t leave fingers uncovered. Cover the head, face, and neck as much as possible. As long as zombies create even a small wound, contact with saliva or blood can cause infection. Protecting only vital organs is useless.”

Officer Chen stopped mid-step and turned back in surprise. “What?”

He hadn’t processed it yet.

Fu Qing glanced ahead. An empty meeting room stood before them, clearly their destination. She walked in first and took out a tablet, pulling up a video. “Watch this first.”

The footage was none other than the livestream replay from earlier.

She hadn’t bothered searching for the original and simply saved the clip uploaded by a netizen.

Fortunately, she had downloaded it quickly. Not long afterward, the post disappeared and the trending topic was removed.

Fu Qing had expected the takedown. So far, every official response matched exactly what had happened in her previous life.

Coming to find Officer Chen had always been part of her plan. She never intended to face the apocalypse alone with only Fangzhou’s two thousand residents. Translated on Hololo novels. The system’s rule forbidding disclosure of apocalypse-related information expired at 2:30 p.m., the moment the disaster began.

She was always going to come, and the sooner she did, the more people could be saved.

But she hadn’t come immediately at 2:30 because she still had concerns.

First, once she revealed information about zombies, she would inevitably face intense scrutiny and possibly movement restrictions. She might not be able to return to the school for some time. Before that, she had needed to settle matters at Fangzhou.

Second, she needed time to observe.

Strictly speaking, this world was only a parallel version of her previous one. In this timeline, there was no Fu Qing of the past, no teachers who had died before, and because the Zombie King had also been reborn and organized the believers ahead of time, even zombie evolution had changed drastically.

Her knowledge was no longer perfectly accurate.

If she intended to trade intelligence for official trust, inaccuracies could be fatal.

For example, the news anchor who died at the beginning of the apocalypse had changed from a female host in her previous life to a male host here. That detail alone had put her on guard. This “second-round world” clearly differed in many small ways.

She had needed confirmation that no larger deviations existed. So she forced herself to wait and observe until the trending topics were removed and the stay-at-home notice issued.

She could not wait any longer.

If she delayed further, authorities would repeat earlier strategic missteps. Strictly speaking, they weren’t mistakes but caution.

Unfortunately, caution was the worst mindset when racing against zombies. Infection spread too fast. One slow step would become many.

Until everything became irreversible.

Fu Qing sat calmly across from Officer Chen, watching his expression change repeatedly as he watched the video, as if she could hear his brain spinning faster and faster before finally crashing with a silent boom.

When the video ended, he remained silent for several seconds. His lips moved as if searching for words. When he finally spoke, his voice was strained with shock.

“You… why are you showing me this video?”

That being his first question surprised Zhao Yunxiao slightly.

But Fu Qing was satisfied. Officer Chen was shocked, yet he had followed her reasoning.

She herself was sitting right here. She could have simply explained everything verbally. Showing the video meant two things: first, she needed visual evidence to help him confirm something. Second, the video served another purpose.

The first reason was obvious, to let him observe the zombies’ reactions.

Fu Qing opened another clip from her gallery. “I downloaded this online. A passerby filmed someone fighting back with a kitchen cleaver during an attack. The person struck the zombie more than a dozen times. Two blows landed on the neck, and one was extremely deep.”

She dragged the timeline frame by frame, paused, and zoomed in.

The footage was blurry, but through the pixels one could still see that more than half the cleaver blade had sunk into the attacker’s neck.

A normal person would have collapsed instantly. Translated on Hololo novels. But when the video resumed, the attacker barely reacted, didn’t even clutch their neck, and continued walking forward.

The person wielding the cleaver screamed and cried for help in mental collapse, swinging wildly. Some strikes hit the face but weren’t deep enough to stop movement.

While being hacked into a bloody mess, the zombie finally bit the attacker.

The victim convulsed briefly and went still.

After some time, he slowly rose back to his feet.

The video ended there.

“Notice anything?” Fu Qing asked.

Officer Chen stared blankly. “Even with their neck nearly severed, they can still move… Is something like that even human?”

His thoughts immediately jumped to the officers already deployed outside.

Their orders were to suppress and arrest attackers. If this were terrorism, those people would face trial later. If it were disease, they would be treated once a cure was found.

But if these things were no longer human, did those actions still make sense?

A chill ran through him as realization struck. “When you said in the video that the attackers, no, the zombies, have a weakness in the brain… do you mean only attacking the brain can kill them?”

He stressed the word “only.”

A nearly severed neck still wasn’t fatal. As he grasped the monsters’ resilience, he also realized how explosive the information Fu Qing brought truly was.

“How did you know that?!” he blurted.

“I’ll explain everything,” Fu Qing said, glancing at her watch. “But before that, to avoid wasting time, could you help report this upward?”

“This video has already been deleted. If we’re lucky, it might still be flagged by the monitoring system as sensitive information. But too many zombie videos were uploaded at the same time. I’m not sure it’ll receive enough attention, so I need your help.”

She watched his pupils contract.

“You can tell them that I, and the person beside me, possess over ninety-five percent of the available intelligence about these creatures. This video is proof. Less than half an hour after the outbreak began, I already knew their weakness and how to kill them.”

“Every second from now on, tens of thousands of people will die. The sooner they come to me, the more lives can be saved.”

₊˚.🎧📓✩