Chapter 9: The First Signs of the Truth
Besides Zhang Qiang, several other survivors had turned up dead. All of them lived in Zhang Qiang’s immediate vicinity, with no obvious connections among them.
On the surface, it truly resembled the work of a rogue zombie, but Su Han found it hard to believe Wang Jiafu wasn’t pulling the strings.
In the wake of Zhang Qiang’s murder, terror gripped the entire base; everyone feared for their own necks. No one dared bring up the half-warehouse of provisions Wang Jiafu had promised to produce today.
Seemingly to placate the public, Wang Jiafu ordered Zhang Qiang’s mangled corpse displayed in a public square near the mission hall, leaving its gruesome state out in the open for all to see.
By the time Su Han arrived, five or six ability users were already gathered around the perimeter, their brows tightly knit and their faces grim.
Glancing down at the bloody, mangled remains, Su Han felt his stomach drop.
This looks so familiar…
It was practically identical to the state Shen Chengyin had been in when tossed off the fortress walls—gutted from chest to abdomen, flesh torn apart in unnatural, shredded patterns.
No, wait. Something was different.
Su Han’s gaze locked onto the opened cavity of the chest.
Zhang Qiang’s heart was gone.
Yet compared to the overall butchery of the corpse, this specific missing piece didn’t seem out of place. Aside from him, not a single person appeared to have noticed.
[Ability users and zombies are fundamentally both mutational variants spawned by infection from the same virus. If zombies produce crystal cores, ability users naturally develop them as well,] System 111’s frigid voice sounded inside his mind.
[The only difference is that a zombie’s core forms in its skull, whereas an ability user’s core condenses inside the heart.]
“Are you saying Wang Jiafu carved out Zhang Qiang’s core?”
[Supplies were still abundant early in the apocalypse; humanity hadn’t devolved to the point of butchering their own kind yet, so precious few people know this secret.] System 111 huffed lightly. [The energy condensed within an ability user’s crystal core vastly surpasses that of a zombie core… All of this was laid out in the original text.]
Curious. If Wang Jiafu had known about this from the start, why hadn’t he ripped out Shen Chengyin’s heart back then?
Could it be that he hadn’t yet discovered the existence of ability cores at that time?
Before he could ponder it further, the perimeter guard arrived carrying Wang Jiafu’s latest decree.
Barking orders, the guards began dispersing the gathering crowd of survivors and ability users.
“By order of the Leader, all squads are forbidden from leaving the base today! A full-scale security sweep of the compound will be conducted—that intermediate zombie must be hunted down and eliminated!”
With the entire base locked down, Su Han was forced to remain cooped up at home, sharing a bed once more with Shen Chengyin.
When he stepped inside, the man was reading a book—a nature magazine he had scavenged from who knew where, its pages covered in English text.
Separated from them by just a single wall, their newly arrived roommate was loudly unpacking luggage.
“To save his own skin and preserve his precious reputation, Leader Wang really will stoop to anything. Striking down a top-tier ability user like Zhang Qiang just like that.”
Su Han felt a twinge of regret—not merely over the loss of a human life, but because he had lost a valuable pawn to leverage against Wang Jiafu.
If this dragged on, the base would soon revert to bowing subserviently at Wang Jiafu’s feet again.
Shen Chengyin offered no reply, continuing to act as if he were stone-deaf.
Cross-legged on the mattress, Su Han glanced at the man, then cautiously shifted his weight, scooching an inch closer in Shen Chengyin’s direction.
“It’s bizarre, you know? I’ve been asking around every single day lately. It seems not a single soul in this entire base ever had close contact with the former leader. No one actually knows what kind of person he was.”
Shen Chengyin didn’t even lift his head. Taking an inch and wanting a yard, Su Han slid over a little more.
The bed wasn’t particularly large to begin with; after a couple of discreet scooches, he was practically pressing against the man’s hip.
“Could it be that every single friend the former leader had is dead?”
Thinking about it, pulling off such a massacre wouldn’t have been hard. Amidst the chaos of the zombie siege, it would have been effortless to stage their deaths as heroic sacrifices and feed their bodies to the horde. Forget evidence—not even their bones would ever be recovered.
Shen Chengyin finally deigned to cast a sidelong glance down at him.
“You seem very invested in this former leader.”
“Of course I am. It’s just a shame I arrived too late to meet him in person. Anyone capable of drafting so many policies to protect ordinary survivors had to be a noble, compassionate figure.”
The man let out a derisive scoff dripping with contempt.
Snapping the magazine shut, he leaned forward, closing the distance between them.
Caught off guard, Su Han looked up straight into the man’s pitch-black pupils.
They were like bottomless abysses, brimming with turbulent, indecipherable emotions that threatened to swallow anyone whole.
“Everyone who knew him is dead. Even he himself is dead,” Shen Chengyin challenged in a raspy murmur. “Don’t you find it laughable to play the hero-worshipper now?”
Aren’t you sitting right here, breathing just fine?
Su Han grumbled inwardly. Naturally, he kept the thought firmly locked behind his teeth, terrified that an ill-advised quip might provoke the male lead into snapping his neck.
Shifting back toward the foot of the bed, Su Han put a sliver of distance between them again.
“How is it pointless? Would it kill you to let me burn a couple sticks of incense for the guy…?”
The man’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. Shrinking back in fright, Su Han braced himself, terrified the male lead was about to end him.
Just then, two sharp knocks rattled the bedroom door, followed by an unfamiliar voice:
“The crap you left sitting out in the hallway is in my way. Move it.”
It was the new roommate, speaking with an aggressively rude edge.
Compared to this nuisance outside, Su Han feared the ticking time bomb beside him far more. Scrambling off the mattress, he blurted out, “Right away, right away! Coming!”
Without lingering to see Shen Chengyin’s reaction, he bolted out the door like a startled rabbit.
That very afternoon, the guard corps captured the so-called “intermediate zombie.”
The guards hoisted the creature’s carcass and its crystal core onto a display frame, parading it through the streets for every resident of the base to see.
Standing among the spectators, Su Han saw it with crystal clarity. The core was slightly larger than an ordinary zombie core, pulsating with a faint reddish glow that instantly evoked memories of the blazing flames on Zhang Qiang’s fists.
“An intermediate zombie… and they hunted it down so fast!”
“Leader Wang really is something else. What incredible luck I must have had in my past life to find shelter in a base this secure.”
The crowd buzzed with endless murmurs of praise and relief.
Elbowing his way through the press of bodies, Su Han slipped to the front row. Locking his eyes onto the floating core, he chimed in with theatrical awe:
“Whoa, so this is an intermediate core… it’s gorgeous!”
Most of the guards and ability users recognized Su Han by now.
This kid was an absolute zombie-slaying lunatic; he hadn’t even been in the base for two weeks, yet the tally of crystal cores he turned in ranked among the highest in the compound.
One of the guards who had crossed paths with him before chuckled. “Well? How does it look compared to the regular zombie cores you usually drag back?”
Su Han slipped a hand into his pocket, pulled out a primary-tier zombie core, and tossed it up in the air twice, catching it cleanly against his palm.
The surrounding crowd tracked the rise and fall of the crystal with hungry eyes.
That was a primary-tier mutated core… worth a hefty pile of rations, yet this kid was casually flipping it around like a cheap coin!
“It definitely looks different from a primary-tier core… but what about compared to this one?”
Su Han reached back into his pocket, retrieved another crystal core, and tossed it straight into the guard’s hands.
Holding it up to the sunlight, the guard revealed its shape for everyone nearby to see.
“This core is round too!”
“It’s a tiny bit smaller, but it looks identical to the intermediate core!”
Gasps of astonishment broke out across the crowd.
Up until now, every zombie core discovered by humanity had been an irregular, jagged polyhedron. Yet the so-called “intermediate core” Wang Jiafu presented was a smooth, polished oval sphere.
Because no one had ever laid eyes on an intermediate zombie core before, they had naturally assumed that higher-tier cores simply took on an oval shape.
Hearing the commotion, several ability users stationed nearby hurried over, passing the spherical core around for inspection.
“A-Han, where the hell did you find this?”
“Did you take down an intermediate zombie yourself?”
Su Han waved his hands dismissively. “As if! I just scavenged it off a corpse.”
“Strange thing was, while I was out hunting supplies yesterday, I spotted a rotting body glowing faintly in the weeds. When I went over to check it out, I found this core sitting right inside the corpse’s chest cavity.”
With that, he pulled yet another spherical core from his pocket and tossed it over to the cluster of ability users. “There was another body lying right next to it, not rotted at all. I carved open the chest, and sure enough, there was another one nestled right in the heart.”
Hearing his words, one of the ability users stiffened violently from head to toe.
A sudden realization struck him—he finally remembered who this boy was.
The sole reason Zhang Qiang had led the four of them out beyond the gates in the dead of night was that they had overheard this very kid bragging about tons of coal buried in the south.
Because of a single line from this boy’s mouth, they had lost two brothers, and now Zhang Qiang was dead too.
“Where exactly did you find these cores?”
Su Han’s smile broadened, looking utterly guileless.
“South of the base! I found a cellar in a village out that way packed with several tons of coal. Stumbled across the bodies on the road yesterday.”
The questioning ability user’s hands began to tremble violently.
Fumbling frantically through his pockets, he pulled out a crumpled photograph.
It was a keepsake left behind by one of the ability users who had died that night.
“Did either of the bodies you saw look like the man in this photo?”
Su Han leaned in, pretending to study the print closely for a moment before nodding firmly.
“That’s him! He was wearing black cargo pants and a black tactical vest… Wait, why do you have a picture of a zombie corpse? Was he a friend of yours?”
Having the exact clothing described down to the finest detail erased any lingering doubt in the man’s mind.
His eyes went wide, his fists clenching until the veins bulged across his temples and forearms. Fighting back a volcanic wave of fury and hatred, he choked out each word through gritted teeth:
“Because that wasn’t a zombie corpse at all. That was an ability user from our base. We went out on a mission together last week, and Zhan Jiang and Xiao Liang never made it back… They died.”
The man’s eyes turned bloodshot as he bit down on his lip.
“There were too many mutated zombies… we didn’t even have time to recover their remains.”
Ability users possessed complete immunity to the zombie virus; even in death, their corpses would never turn.
The chatter around them slowly died down, plunging the square into a suffocating, dead silence.
What had they just heard? Ability users produced crystal cores too?
Which meant that smooth, spherical core hoisted high on the display frame wasn’t from some intermediate zombie.
It had been carved out of an ability user.
