Chapter 175: Zombie Siege Practice
After hearing Tang Xinjue’s answer, Yu Wei: …I don’t understand it, but it feels very reasonable.
And so she followed along in a daze for the whole day. It was not until she finished dinner at dusk that she suddenly realized: “Wait, if we’ve enclosed the entire sixth floor as our territory, then what about the other dormitories on this floor?”
She remembered that yesterday, 606 had brutally swept through 12 rooms, while the 12 dormitories on the other side had remained completely untouched.
Looking at the expressions of the four people from 606, Yu Wei’s heart trembled: “Could it be that… we also have to…”
Guo Guo patted her shoulder sympathetically, her tone carrying the seasoned maturity of someone who had been through the vicissitudes of life: “From the moment we visited the first dormitory, there was already no turning back.”
Either they completely holed up in 606 and paid no attention to the outside world; or, since they had explored the outside world, they might as well go all the way and visit every single one. There was no reason to stop halfway.
“It’s a pity we don’t have enough time today. It would be better to continue tomorrow.” Zhang You glanced at the sky, cautious as always.
After dusk came nightfall, and the zombies crowded in certain places would pour out of their nests once again. They needed to use the corridor arrangements this night to determine the strength level of the zombies after mutation.
Tang Xinjue put two pieces of dried beef into Zhang You’s bowl, then picked her moment and said: “Perhaps I can, before twelve…”
Zhang You: “Too dangerous, no.”
Tang Xinjue: “…All right.”
Her roommate’s attitude was firm, so she could only resignedly shrug, then quickly snatched the dried beef back from the other person’s bowl.
Zhang You: “……”
Guo Guo, meanwhile, took advantage of the moment Tang Xinjue and Zhang You were confronting each other, quietly picked a boneless chicken foot from Tang Xinjue’s bowl, then stole several dates from Zhang You’s bowl, stuffing them into her mouth as she mumbled:
“Jue shen, you need to restrain your urge to escape from prison. If you leave, and You jie gets tricked into going out to fight again, then there’ll only be me and Wanqing left in the dormitory, clutching our heads and crying…”
Zheng Wanqing woke up halfway through eating. Her metal arm slapped down on the table as she looked around: “Who’s crying? Why are you crying?”
Guo Guo: “…Then there’ll only be me crying alone, hugging myself and weeping. I’d be too pitiful.”
After finishing her meal, she leaned back in her chair and let out a burp: “Scientific research says that sufficient sleep is the secret to lush human hair, but in these two days I’ve slept less than 10 hours altogether. Could it affect the hair-growth potion and make it stop working?”
Guo Guo worriedly touched the top of her head, and out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the last trace of sunset sinking into the horizon.
Suddenly, her pupils contracted. She widened her eyes as if she had seen something, but her neck abruptly jerked backward, and her head, carrying her entire body with it, flipped backward off the chair!
“Guo Guo!”
Tang Xinjue immediately caught her. The body in her arms was stretched completely rigid, large patches of white showing in her eyes, her lips moving as though she were speaking, yet not making a single sound.
Yu Wei’s hands were sweating from nervousness: “She, what happened to her?”
Mutation? Epilepsy? A stroke?
Countless terrifying thoughts flashed through Yu Wei’s mind. She held her breath and had not yet had time to exhale when Guo Guo suddenly took a deep breath, and her eyes returned to normal.
Tang Xinjue asked: “What did you see?”
Guo Guo pressed her pale lips together: “On the sports field, so many, so many student corpses, forming huge circles one after another. In the middle was a glass box, and the thing inside seemed to be, seemed to be…”
She suddenly became speechless, unable to describe the exact appearance of the object inside the box. She could only slowly recall: “It had no shape, and no fixed appearance. Sometimes it looked like gas, sometimes like water, sand, or a mass of red threads—in short, it was extremely strange, extremely dangerous! And I could sense that the zombie virus should have come from inside it.”
Tang Xinjue handed her a bottle of water to calm her down. After pondering for a moment, she asked: “Were there any living people in the scene? Or were they all corpses?”
Guo Guo thought for a moment: “There were living people.”
At the very outer edge of the enormous circle, there were several male and female students dressed uniformly. They were even holding paper and pens in their hands, seemingly recording something.
The scene in the hallucination had only flashed by, and she had not been able to see their appearances clearly. She only remembered that there were several red stripes on their clothes, which looked like some kind of sportswear.
Only after finishing everything she had seen did Guo Guo begin to feel her hands and feet slowly warm up, gradually breaking free from the influence of the hallucinated scene.
Zhang You recreated the scene Guo Guo had described on paper. When the finished drawing appeared, everyone felt an indescribable disgust rise from their stomachs.
The densely packed black dots in the “disc” represented student corpses, circling and contracting inward ring by ring, finally converging at a single point in the center. But viewed in reverse, it also looked like a sunflower without petals, spreading out eerily across the sports field.
Although Yu Wei’s cheeks were twitching this time, unexpectedly she did not go throw up. Instead, she carefully looked several times before exclaiming: “Isn’t this your school’s First Track and Field?”
When she came, she had not found the right route. She had gone around from the teaching campus, then accidentally taken a wrong turn into the track and field in the middle, and had only managed to get out through sheer indomitable willpower.
Looking at this drawing, she could not say exactly what part looked similar, only that it felt inexplicably familiar and certain.
“And,” Yu Wei scratched her head, “don’t you think this picture looks a little like…”
The four people from 606 looked at each other and blurted out together: “Like a sacrificial ritual?”
From the time [Heavenly Eye] had been activated until now, they still had not found a pattern in the several hallucinations Guo Guo had experienced. Sometimes they were precognition, while other times they seemed to be simply “observation”, and the object being observed could occur in the present, the future, or the past—or even be something that could never be verified.
“First, we have to determine whether this scene has already appeared in the school, or whether it has yet to happen.”
Tang Xinjue’s gaze slowly swept across the drawing. After Guo Guo’s efforts to reconstruct and refine it, the scene suspected to be a “sacrificial ritual” had once again become considerably clearer.
The corpses were bloody, and should be students who had already become zombies. The number was at least several thousand, ruling out the initial stage of the mutation.
The lighting was clear. It was daytime, ruling out the present.
“—It’s very likely a scene from the later stages of the zombie outbreak, perhaps even the final day.”
“So the conclusion of this mutation is that it ends in an evil-cult-like ritual resembling a sacrifice?”
Zhang You’s brows furrowed tightly.
But what did this ritual have to do with the examinees?
The few of them simultaneously thought of the clue from the piece of paper Tang Xinjue had obtained earlier.
“Experiment No. 091… experimental recovery…”
Guo Guo murmured twice, then suddenly realized: “Right, this was an experiment to begin with!”
If they set aside those terms they could not understand and only looked at the parts they could understand, then the information contained in this section was very simple:
The virus was an experiment, and the virus outbreak was also an experiment.
If the entire dungeon was regarded as an experimental procedure, then everything was a predetermined stage—including having zombies dry human bodies under the sun on the sports field to perform a sacrificial ritual.
Yu Wei took a long time to finally sort out the core point in her mind. She immediately said in horror:
“So the laboratory accident and all that leaking stuff was fake—we really were sacrificed by an evil cult?!!!”
Save her, she really had just guessed that offhand back then!!
As if echoing her horror, the only small desk lamp maintaining the light inside the dormitory suddenly went out with a snap, and darkness instantly enveloped both inside and outside the window.
Yu Wei: Heart stopped.
After taking several deep breaths, Yu Wei slightly calmed down. By the faint moonlight, she cautiously glanced toward the four people—and then saw nothing.
The places that had originally belonged to the four of them were now completely empty.
“……”
Just as Yu Wei desperately tried to suppress the first scream of the day, a small face suddenly emerged from beside her. The eyes on that face looked like two large black grapes under the reflection of the moonlight.
Yu Wei: “Ah!!!”
Guo Guo: “Ah!!!”
Zheng Wanqing: “What happened! Where are the zombies?”
The lights came back on. The two people who had frightened each other stared blankly at each other, while the three people in the distance holding the light looked completely bewildered.
Yu Wei looked from one side to the other, still shaken: “I, I thought you had disappeared just now.”
Zhang You: “We were changing the batteries in the desk lamp.”
Guo Guo said in a low, wistful voice: “I saw you sitting completely still, so I originally wanted to comfort you.”
But instead of comforting her, she nearly sent herself to an early grave.
……
With the lights restored, Yu Wei finally felt like she had come back to life. She then became especially nervous about looking outside, afraid that her scream just now would attract all the zombies.
Tang Xinjue smiled: “It’s fine. Whether we make noise or not, the zombies will come eventually.”
Or in other words, as long as the four people from 606 were still here, even if they sealed the dormitory into the center of the earth, the zombies could still stubbornly follow the smell and burrow their way in.
Yu Wei responded as if she understood and yet did not. Soon, she warily pricked up her ears, her attention drawn by the sounds outside.
—The zombies really had come!
But before long, the people inside the room realized another problem:
…Had the defenses outside the corridor been a little too good this time?
After waiting for more than half the day, the zombies’ roars and scrambling sounds were still far away at the entrance of the corridor. They had not even managed to reach their workplace—let alone clock in at 606’s door.
As she waited, perhaps because she had been too tired during the day, Yu Wei actually began to feel a little sleepy.
When the first zombie finally won the obstacle-course championship and was blown apart by the iron spikes at the finish line, that originally bone-chilling roar and struggle sounded incredibly distant to Yu Wei.
Even the faint commotion and screams coming from outside the window turned into the intermittent noise beside her ears as sleepiness surged over her. She did not even have time to say another word before completely losing consciousness.
When she woke again, it was already the dimly bright hours before dawn.
Yu Wei rubbed her sleepy eyes and hair. Her first reaction was to look for the four people from 606, only to find no one under the beds… no one on the beds… the balcony…
Wait, why did it seem like nobody was here?
Yu Wei thought the misunderstanding from last night had happened again. She blinked her eyes and stared for a long while before suddenly sitting bolt upright as if on her deathbed:
Fuck, this time they’re really gone!!
The author has something to say: ------
Yu Wei: Woke up from a sleep and lost all my besties
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