Ch 110: Opening a Survival School Before the Zombie Outbreak

Upon entering the lobby, Bai Xianglei quickly spotted both his squad and the Fangzhou group.

The students were clearly already familiar with everything here, while the special operations soldiers looked around with curiosity, stretching their limbs and testing how the data-simulated bodies differed from their real ones.

The conclusion came naturally. If they had not been told beforehand, they would never have realized they were now nothing more than streams of data. They would have believed everything to be real.

This was practically the fully immersive holographic gaming pod people had always dreamed about.

Everyone was astonished.

Fu Qing stood nearby watching them warm up. After about a minute, once she confirmed they were ready, she activated her permissions and pulled everyone into the same instance.

She disabled the system mission, using only the background map as the battlefield.

This had been common practice during the later stages of elite class training. By then, the students had already cleared the simulation instances countless times. Repeating identical missions no longer had much value, so Fu Qing repurposed the environments themselves, discarding system objectives and designing daily training scenarios on her own.

This particular setting was a hell-difficulty instance set five years after the virus outbreak, a place Song Rushuang and the others had visited many times before.

Yet every time they entered, it still felt suffocating and painful.

Especially now, when the virus had only just erupted and everyone’s nerves were stretched tight.

As the surroundings shifted, Song Rushuang instinctively took a deep breath, her expression turning solemn.

For Bai Xianglei, Zhou Lingxi, and the others, this was their first time inside. They had not expected the map to load so quickly. In the blink of an eye, the world around them changed completely.

They now stood atop an abandoned high-rise.

It had once been an office building. Cubicles stretched out in neat rows. With a quick glance, Zhou Lingxi could tell many young people had once worked here. Some desks were crowded with figurines. Felt boards on the walls were covered in instant photos. Others held potted plants long since withered, their dry pots cracked, soil scattered across the desks.

One office chair sat pulled out at an angle, a cartoon blanket draped casually over the back, as if its owner had only gone home for the weekend and would soon return.

The bright decorations had faded and yellowed with time, like an abandoned amusement park, surreal and disjointed.

The dusty smell filling their lungs reminded them that everything here had been frozen at the exact moment the apocalypse arrived.

Zhou Lingxi slowly surveyed the room before turning toward the floor-to-ceiling window covering the entire western wall.

One pane had shattered long ago, likely during a storm years earlier. Carefully stepping over the scattered glass, she approached the edge and looked outside.

Several teammates followed, equally curious.

From more than thirty stories up, the entire landscape lay exposed beneath them.

What they saw stole their breath.

It was nothing like the apocalypse they had imagined.

Before them was simply a forgotten city.

As time stretched onward, all chaos and bloodshed had faded away. Just as a human body decays after death, this city resembled a skeleton stripped clean of flesh.

One day, it too would weather into dust like the countless human remains scattered across the land, vanishing without a trace in the wind.

Zhou Lingxi glanced at the sun’s position and realized it was still afternoon, normally the busiest time of day.

Yet without human activity, the city was so quiet it felt as though one could hear plants growing.

Warm sunlight fell gently across her face. Birds fluttered through the sky. Vines crept over roadside signs. Countless zombies wandered aimlessly through the streets. With no targets to attack, even their expressions seemed strangely peaceful.

Zhou Lingxi instinctively stepped back.

When she thought of the apocalypse, she had imagined corpses piled high and rivers of blood.

She had never imagined this.

A city that had endured the apocalypse was not wholly dead. On the contrary, it was vibrantly alive.

Only humanity was gone.

Even the air drifting through the window smelled clean, free of rot or decay.

Human beings had vanished, and soon even the traces they left behind would disappear.

Perhaps this was the instinctive terror of extinction buried deep within every species’ soul, more despairing than any scene of blood or death.

They were soldiers sworn to defend their homeland. Care for their country and its people was etched into their bones, dissolved into their blood.

The storefront signs, the familiar street layout, made it obvious. This was Huaxia.

Zhou Lingxi began to tremble uncontrollably.

She clenched her teeth and tried to steady herself with slow breaths, but her emotions felt like stagnant water, incapable of stirring even a trace of hope.

She was not alone. Every team member visiting this instance for the first time felt the same.

One soldier, unable to resist, stepped closer to the window for a better look. As he did, his hand rested instinctively against the frame. The moment his fingertips touched it, the remaining pane suddenly detached and plunged downward.

Falling more than thirty stories, it smashed into the ground below with a thunderous crash, shattering into countless fragments.

The soldier froze. “H… how did that happen?”

He looked utterly lost, like someone who had made a terrible mistake. Su Huaijin immediately reassured him.

“It’s fine. That wasn’t your fault.”

Just by looking at the already shattered pane nearby, it was obvious the window had long been unstable. Nearly every time they came here, it broke one way or another. Sometimes from a light touch, sometimes from a stray gust of wind.

Eventually they had grown used to it, treating it like a mandatory trigger in a video game boss fight, something inevitable that simply could not be avoided.

After finishing her explanation, Su Huaijin hesitated slightly. “But…”

She fell silent, and the words she left unsaid were spoken instead by the sounds that followed.

The deafening crash of the falling glass spread outward in waves. Everywhere the sound passed, inside buildings and through alleyways, furious roars erupted almost instantly, rising and falling like a tidal surge.

It was the scream of a city that no longer belonged to humanity, a shriek unleashed at intruders.

In nearly an instant, countless zombies poured out from hollow windows, plant-choked underground passages, streets, and hidden corners both imaginable and unimaginable.

Some were slow-moving ordinary zombies. Translated on Hololo novels. Others ran on all fours, racing toward the source of the noise with terrifying speed.

Regardless of how fast they moved, their numbers quickly formed a tightening encirclement. Looking out, there was no visible end to them.

Even if a fully armed military unit were present, without helicopters their chances of breaking through would be almost nonexistent. And they were only a dozen people armed with cold weapons.

Zhou Lingxi could not yet identify which city they were in, but judging by the scale of the buildings, it must once have been prosperous.

A city like this could easily have held millions of residents. In an apocalypse where half the population died and the other half turned into zombies…

How many zombies were they facing?

Even if only a fraction had arrived so far, the disturbance was massive. Before long, the entire city’s undead would converge here.

A chill crept through Zhou Lingxi.

She remembered Song Rushuang mentioning earlier that this instance was set to “hell difficulty.”

It truly was hell difficulty.

Being surrounded by millions of zombies, even hell itself might not be this terrifying.

The zombies’ poor eyesight prevented them from spotting the group standing more than thirty floors up, but the soldiers’ keen vision allowed them to see everything clearly.

The longer they watched, the colder their hearts grew.

More than thirty stories high. Glass walls with almost no footholds. Taking the stairs would mean running directly into the first wave of approaching zombies.

How could they escape?

How could they possibly escape?

Faced with extreme danger, they did not panic like ordinary people. But that did not mean despair failed to creep in when no solution presented itself.

“Captain! We—”

Chu Hai instinctively turned to seek orders, only to stop halfway, his urgent words catching in his throat.

He opened his mouth, realizing a beat too late what was happening.

Bai Xianglei was looking at Fu Qing. She simply spread her hands calmly.

“I warned you,” she said, “stay here long enough, and it becomes easy to confuse this with reality.”

The more urgent the situation and the less time there was to think, the faster immersion took hold.

Just moments ago they had known this was only a simulation, casually observing their surroundings. But when faced with genuine life-and-death tension, human instinct still demanded escape.

Like standing inside a tilted funhouse, even knowing the illusion’s mechanism could not stop dizziness or the body’s involuntary attempts to rebalance.

The senses deceived the brain, and the brain deceived the body in return. These physiological reactions could not simply be resisted.

Unless one adapted to the sensation of being surrounded and hunted by a zombie horde, calmness was nearly impossible, even when one knew the environment was virtual.

Bai Xianglei remained silent for a moment before asking, “This is part of your regular training too?”

When they first agreed to the competition, Fu Qing had said every challenge reflected the students’ daily training.

That was precisely why he had accepted.

Winning or losing meant nothing to him. What truly mattered was understanding Fangzhou’s training methods.

He had fully accepted that each match favored the students and had never considered it unfair.

But now his voice carried unmistakable astonishment.

Because he could not believe that a situation like this could be considered a “favorable condition,” or that it could be routine training at all.

An ordinary person might require psychological counseling after experiencing this instance even once.

Were Fangzhou’s students really training in environments like this?

“No,” Fu Qing shook her head. “Only thirteen elite-class students were selected to endure long-term training in this instance. For ordinary students, training here is far less effective than in other scenarios.”

“And even for the elite class, they rarely come here.”

This instance was uniquely extreme. The entire city contained no humans at all. The moment a single human appeared, made a sound, or was detected by even one zombie with an unusually sharp sense of smell, the entire city would immediately converge in a full-scale siege.

This kind of environment was simply too extreme. When a scenario’s difficulty became excessively high, the training effect was actually worse than that of slightly easier advanced or even intermediate instances.

Because the students died too quickly.

What this instance emphasized was not combat ability, but psychological oppression and fear.

So Fu Qing only brought the elite-class students here occasionally, allowing them to stay for short periods so they could adapt gradually. Both the frequency and duration were carefully controlled to avoid leaving lasting trauma.

Psychological training was different from physical training. Growth was difficult to quantify, yet damage could occur in an instant.

Fu Qing had seen countless people who survived the apocalypse long enough to reach safe places like shelters, only to suddenly take their own lives.

She had also seen survivors who endured battle after battle, living for months or even years, suddenly lose their sanity one day and become no different from walking corpses.

Even the strongest warriors could not resist invisible emotional strain. Cases of soldiers developing PTSD after retirement were far from rare.

So no matter how harsh the training became, she was always careful to prevent her students from carrying lasting wounds. In matters like this, Fu Qing exercised particular caution.

Hearing this, Bai Xianglei let out a breath of relief.

If the students truly trained in environments like this every day, that would have been terrifyingly extreme.

“So…”

So the reason she brought them here was merely to witness this scene?

Then what about the match that followed…

He was interrupted by Fu Qing.

“Captain Bai, we don’t have much time.”

She drew a military knife, flicked it lightly in her hand, and calmly assumed a fighting stance.

“If we’re going to fight, it’s best to start soon. The first zombie should reach this floor in about fifty seconds.”

Her expression remained unchanged, her tone almost playful.

“Otherwise, once the horde arrives, the conditions you face will become much more unfavorable.”

More unfavorable?

Bai Xianglei paused.

The way she said it sounded as though he was already at a disadvantage, yet before the zombies arrived, their conditions seemed identical.

Unable to make sense of it, he stopped thinking about it. Translated on Hololo novels. In the distance, the approaching horde’s footsteps merged into a continuous rustling sound that set one’s nerves on edge.

He forced himself to ignore it, pushing aside any attempt to decipher the hidden meaning in her words, focusing entirely on the battle before him.

When the first sharp clash of blades rang out, Zhou Lingxi heard something else crack.

The military knives were specially made. The sound clearly had not come from them.

While everyone else watched the duel without blinking, Zhou Lingxi reacted first, rushing to the window and looking down.

At the base of the building, the first zombie leapt high into the air. Just as it seemed about to slide down the smooth glass exterior, it suddenly thrust out a hand. Its claws, sharp as blades, pierced deeply into the glass beneath it, which instantly fractured.

Crack.

She found the source of the sound.

Witnessing yet another evolutionary direction of the zombies, Zhou Lingxi’s eyelid twitched. She could easily imagine how effortlessly those claws would slice through a human throat.

Each leap carried the zombie two or three meters upward, its claws leaving holes in the glass like bullet impacts.

Step by step, it climbed toward them.

Using the stairs, it would never have arrived this fast. Zhou Lingxi finally understood what Fu Qing meant by “the first zombie will arrive in fifty seconds.”

She calculated the climbing speed and couldn’t help admiring the precision of Fu Qing’s estimate.

Only fifty seconds of combat.

The ringing clash of blades continued nonstop, so fast that multiple arcs of shining steel seemed to carve through the air at once.

Blocking another strike, Bai Xianglei gritted his teeth and held firm, inwardly shaken.

Not only because of Fu Qing’s astonishing strength, which made direct confrontation difficult even for him, but because he realized something else.

His hand was trembling.

The tremor was extremely slight, almost imperceptible.

But against an opponent this powerful, when victory could not be secured quickly, even such a tiny weakness became fatal.

First he had witnessed the ruins of a world where humanity was nearly extinct. Then he found himself surrounded by an endless zombie tide, constantly facing the threat of being torn apart at any moment.

The immense psychological pressure had manifested physically before he even noticed it himself, and Fu Qing had immediately sensed it.

Only now did Bai Xianglei understand what she meant by unfavorable conditions.