In Lu Hao’s office, what Ji Ling reported to him was this:

The triad group competing with the SG for F City had been infiltrated by an unknown third party. This third party was using the triad to conduct dangerous research on harnessing the power of zombies. Ji Ling suspected they tried to make obedient super-zombies as weapons, but failed. Ji Ling went to meet one of the suspected members of the unknown third party at the underground base. She had plans to investigate the area, but upon meeting Hong Sheng and Yu Qiu, changed her plans to retreat and find Lu Hao.

Through talking with her, Lu Hao confirmed that the strange zombie he’d seen was related to this group. He might not have been a full zombie. He could have been an experiment, or even the researcher.

“So this is the reason behind the rise in the zombie population? These experiments?”

“Yes. I believe so. My contact said there was data he could use in the underground base… if we can recover the information there, we’ll be able to figure out a little more. But…”

Leaning against the office window, Lu Hao asked, “How did you explain to him SG members coming to you for help?”

“It’s as you think.”

Being an undercover agent was a lot of risk. And when you were caught, there was only one way to convince everyone you were still loyal to their side. “So,” he said slowly. “You’re a triple agent now?”

Ji Ling nodded at Lu Hao. There wasn’t a single trace of apprehension in her eyes. The light from the window spilled over her with an angelic halo, and in her gaze was complete and utter faith in Lu Hao and in the SG.

Lu Hao closed his eyes.

Ji Ling had been with the SG for years. She’d never given him reason to doubt her before.

In this tumultuous world, the difference between survival and death lay in whether you could trust the people around you or not.

So Lu Hao quirked the side of his mouth, burying the conflict he felt to a place Ji Ling wouldn’t see, and opened his eyes again. He looked at her calmly and said, “We need to return to that underground base. Get ready in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

The SG base buzzed with activity.

A solemn and serious air filled the base. Everyone now knew that other factions were teaming up and conducting dangerous experiments that lead to the creation of deadlier zombies. The SG prepared for war, and readied to accept more refugees.

The records in the underground base had all been destroyed by the time Lu Hao had gotten there. Luckily—or perhaps, ‘coincidentally’—Ji Ling had managed to find clues of the existence of other secret bases.

To Lu Hao, these deadly experiments had to be stopped by any means: humanity couldn’t afford to create new zombies. It was only the creation of a vaccine that could help humanity survive.

Specialized SG teams comprised of powerful humans and ability users returned to the base. Lu Hao informed them of the new mission priority: find out where these experiments were being conducted, and who was behind them.

Lu Hao left with them.

Thus, he didn’t know that while he was away, Hong Sheng faced off against Ji Ling’s influence.

Water splashed on Hong Sheng’s face. The survivors had shoved him to the ground, and his entire body was covered in mud. His bruises and wounds stung as the dirt rubbed against them.

“This bastard keeps trying to sabotage the base!”

“He was poisoning the water—we all saw it! He can’t live, or he’ll kill us all!”

The ones who ganged up on him were the ordinary members of the base, the survivors that Lu Hao’s team had taken in. They were like a raging horde around him. The SG guards sent to check on the situation were nearly pushed back, and they scowled.

One of them roughly grabbed Hong Sheng by the back of his shirt and hauled him up. “You’re lucky the leader spoke for you,” he murmured lowly. He then shouted loudly to the crowd, “We’ll be bringing him in. Everyone, make way.”

“He’s going to get away with it again!”

“What a conniving bastard…”

Face lowered and out of sight, Hong Sheng’s eyes were dark, without a trace of light.

The people around him spit at him, hit him, cursed him. He was a piece of garbage that they itched to throw out. They had ‘seen’ him tampering with the base’s power source, and had just now ‘witnessed’ him altering the water purifier.

They didn’t know that it was Hong Sheng who had seen Ji Ling’s people do these things first, and that he was just trying to fix the problems she tried to cause while Lu Hao was away.

But of course, no one would know these things. They just thought he was the culprit, and they did everything they could to grind him under their boots. They did everything short of killing him.

But even if they did kill him, it would be fine, Hong Sheng thought.

Because all of this was instigated by that woman, and that woman had slowly grown her power until she had the SG in the palm of her hand.

She suspected that he knew her secret. So she couldn’t let Hong Sheng go.

Even though Hong Sheng wouldn’t say a word.

Because only Lu Hao mattered to him, and whether the people in this base, or even everyone else in the world lived or died, all that mattered was Lu Hao being alright.

But Lu Hao was on her side.

And Lu Hao wouldn’t care what happened to Hong Sheng, if that woman was the one standing at the other end.

So Hong Sheng wouldn’t say anything. Because he wasn’t as important to Lu Hao as she was. Even if he did say something… Lu Hao wouldn’t believe him. Why would he?

The guards dragged Hong Sheng away into the base. Normally, instigators would be expelled, or punished with labor, but instead they threw him into a room in the base and kept him under watch.

Sitting on the ground in this empty room, separated from his tools and belongings, Hong Sheng’s eyes dimmed. He knew that woman was going to search through all his belongings now. Looking for the things Hong Sheng stole.

But she wouldn’t find them.

He had hidden them in a secret compartment, somewhere only Hong Sheng knew.

Hong Sheng thought for a long time. He wondered about the point of him being here. Why did he even survive this long. What was humanity going to do after that woman succeeded. If Lu Hao was really going to be happy if she did whatever she wanted.

After half a day, Hong Sheng raised his head.

 

 

Lisa Xi’s laboratory was deep in the SG base, under so many layers of protection that no one except those specifically authorized could enter. Yet even then, rats kept scurrying in because of that damned woman.

“Get out! I said, get out!”

Lisa Xi, with all the force of an expert bar brawler, hauled the worthless ‘assistants’ out of her lab. Her gorgeous face was twisted in a snarl, and she nearly spit on the spies Ji Ling sent as they scampered away.

“Goddamn useless idiots,” she cursed in English. “Fuck that bitch.”

For the past few years, that woman Ji Ling kept making small moves beneath the surface to disturb Lisa’s research. Lisa Xi suspected that the woman even wanted to steal her findings. So she guarded her lab like a hawk, rooting out every possible suspect, until eventually she didn’t have even a single assistant to accompany her personal research. There was nothing Lisa could do to protect the general laboratory—the base’s research was extensive in its amount of fields—but for her own personal findings, no one was allowed to look, except for Lu Hao.

As she cursed and turned around, she suddenly heard a scuffle at the end of the hallway. One of the spies she’d just thrown out had tripped and knocked someone onto the floor, and the spy sputtered, face purpling in anger, “What, you don’t even watch where you’re going? Asshole!”

The guards looked at the spy sharply, making him tremble. Then he picked himself up and ran round the corner, leaving the victim on the ground.

Lisa Xi squinted. That person was covered in bruises and scrapes; evidently he’d just got beaten up. He had a gloomy aura, antisocial, like he rejected everyone and everything within ten feet of himself. If that wasn’t… Her eyes suddenly lit up. She walked over as the boy, Lu Hao’s childhood sweetheart—ah no, little genius, sullenly picked himself up. “You!” she said. She grabbed him by the wrist, ignoring the angry, protesting eyes beneath the long bangs. “You’re coming with me!”

Hong Sheng wrenched his wrist trying to escape from her grasp, but Lisa Xi tenaciously held on. She once politely respected his wishes to not be touched in the past, and look where that got her—the boy got snatched by Lu Hao and separated from her to the point where she couldn’t even say hi, let alone pick his brain.

Fully embracing the bandit lifestyle, Lisa Xi whisked Hong Sheng into her lab and slammed the door shut. Hong Sheng writhed his way free and immediately distanced himself, staring balefully at Lisa from thirty feet away. Lisa Xi snorted. She put her hands in her coat and said to him, “My hospitality fee is the theory behind your zombie-lure. Why it works, how you came up with it.”

The responding silence was deafening.

Lisa Xi’s lip curled. She looked at Hong Sheng sharply. “Otherwise, I can tell you to get out, and won’t listen to whatever you wanted to ask me.”

The man bristled like a little porcupine. Hong Sheng pursed his lips with a strong sense of not wanting to talk. Lisa Xi didn’t care about formalities; she threw a notebook and pen to him.

“Write it down.”

It didn’t matter if Hong Sheng wasn’t willing to talk. As long as there was mutual beneficial cooperation and communication, they could work together.

Once Hong Sheng pushed the filled-out notebook back to her, Lisa Xi skimmed over it in satisfaction. The thought behind his invention satisfied her curiosity, and might give her some new ideas when she looked through it more carefully. She put it down then asked, “And what you came here for?”

Hong Sheng took off his backpack. He opened the zipper and pulled out a stack of papers, slightly rumpled, painstakingly straightened out.

When Lisa Xi read through the first few papers, her body stiffened.

The anguish, fury, and disgust grew as she flipped through the stack and saw more and more puzzle pieces revealed in these few logs of research. She threw the papers down on the table, her breaths heavy with anger. “Human experimentation! These fucking bastards!”

The company associated with this research was a military affiliate. The papers were only partial records of experiments, some of the data so vague and purposefully obscured that it would be difficult to understand what exactly it described. But Lisa Xi knew that this research was about taking normal humans and attempting to convert them into ability users.

If such a thing could be possible, it would have been a major breakthrough. Yet evidently it hadn’t succeeded. No wonder so many zombies appeared here! No wonder zombie populations were surging on the rise even after all these years! Those sick bastards were capturing survivors and forcibly experimenting on them!

How many people had fallen victim? If the military was involved, then no one could say a word if entire cities and bases were turned into experiment pens. This behavior was absolutely inhuman—so inhuman, in fact, that it nearly seemed like whoever had planned it wasn’t a human at all.

Humanity was desperately in need of ability users, and with the rising power of the zombies, it would soon reach the point where humans would no longer be able to fight back. She shouldn’t have been surprised that experiments like these came into play, yet she was sickened all the same.

Lisa Xi took some deep breaths. It was hard to calm down. She tried to distract herself, and asked Hong Sheng, “What do you make of this?”

Hong Sheng looked at her dully.

Lisa Xi knew that this man had problems socializing, but it annoyed her when he pretended to be a piece of wood. Especially knowing just how soft and pliable he could be in the right hands. “Shall I tell Lu Hao that his little Hong Sheng specially came to see me in private? That we spent such a nice time together intimately chatting…”

Hong Sheng’s brow furrowed beneath his bangs at her words, but otherwise seemed unperturbed at the idea of Lu Hao hearing this. Evidently, he didn’t think it would matter; did he not think he had any weight in Lu Hao’s heart?

Lisa Xi switched tacks, “Or how about I tell you—Lu Hao loves to visit me late in the night. He comes to me saying, Lisa, there’s something on my mind…”

That got a reaction. Hong Sheng shook, his pale face going a little paler, and he bitterly pulled the notebook to himself as if trying to shut off his ears by burying into writing. Lisa Xi coldly laughed. She and Lu Hao didn’t have that relationship, but she felt better for bullying this sullen porcupine.

Hong Sheng’s writing was dull and small, and Lisa needed to squint to read it. What he wrote made her somber.

Hong Sheng had drawn two evolutionary paths. It started with the mark, 人 , for human. Then it branched up into “Ability User” and “Zombie”. The further an ability user advanced, the more powerful they became, but the more a zombie advanced, it not only grew more powerful, it also became more intelligent, and recovered to become more human-like.

In this way—the highest peak of both ability users and zombies were not much different at all. The highest rank zombies became sentient, intelligent people again. The difference was ability users could procreate with normal humans. Zombies were altered and infertile, and becoming a zombie was the end of the line.

…Or at least, that was what had been assumed.

According to Ji Ling’s information, the military base had been experimenting with creating advanced and obedient zombies. Yet the data Hong Sheng brought contradicted this. The base had been trying to turn normal humans into ability users.

It couldn’t be ruled out that both experiments could have happened, but with Lisa Xi’s distrust of Ji Ling, she suddenly thought of something—

If Ji Ling was lying to purposefully obscure the experiment, it would be because she didn’t want Lu Hao to know the true cause of the rise of zombies.

Lisa Xi’s mind sparked with a theory she had made when she realized zombies were not necessarily dead creatures, but rather, genetically altered humans—

Theoretically, when zombies advanced far enough, a high-ranking zombie might even be able to have children.

If the highest-rank zombies could heal their wounds and look functionally human, they might even be able to restore their bodily functions, thus being able to procreate and have children. Then, horrifically—they would become the dominant species of the world.

Previously it was thought that when everyone became a zombie, human life would be functionally extinct with no new lifeforms. But if zombies could evolve, recover their humanity, and breed, then functionally, zombies would simply be the ‘new human.’

After all, zombies were not completely dead. They were beings made when the human body was broken down and irreversibly altered by the zombie virus. Their genes changed, and their forms mutated. But the further a zombie’s power advanced, the more and more ‘human’ they became.

Normal humans could not become ability users. But everyone could become a zombie, and zombies could be more powerful than ability users. Zombies could ignore pain, heal themselves, and could go years without caloric intake. Ability users were still held down by human limitations. By that comparison, zombies were truly inhuman, or rather, superhuman. The road to all humans becoming zombies was much more likely than humans resisting zombies, and when that happened, it would simply become the world of zombies.

And then, with the knowledge from this experiment, knowing that bringing ability user DNA into a normal human could also trigger the transformation into a zombie, it brought another chilling realization—

Perhaps it was the ability users who were the anomalies. They resisted zombification at the outset, thus their bodies were not broken down and outwardly altered by the virus, but the virus exists within them and is able to spread zombification through their DNA. Although Lisa Xi knew that ability users’ saliva, blood, etc., had not caused anyone to turn into a zombie in in the same way zombie fluids would…

But perhaps the effects were just more gradual, like radiation.

Seeing the bleak future of humanity ahead, Lisa Xi felt cold to the bone.

If trying to turn humans into ability users would turn them into zombies, it was because ability users and zombies came from the same source.

And if someone knew this fact and purposefully instigated research based on it, then humanity had fallen into a massive trap. The hope of creating new ability users was actually the despair of creating new zombies. As for who would benefit, it would obviously be zombies, ones who were intelligent enough to fool humanity into destroying themselves.

Zombies who were so powerful they were indistinguishable from humans… was there really only the one?