The pounding on the door grew urgent and panicked, mixed with the stammering sobs of a nurse: “Doctor Ji! Please! There are monsters outside! They’re biting anyone they see!”
Ji Qingyan snapped out of her daze.
Monsters, healing abilities, mesospace—all these extraordinary events, like pieces of a puzzle, came together to form a truth that was difficult to believe: the once-peaceful world had completely collapsed.
She drew a deep breath and forced herself to calm down.
Don’t panic.
First, she needed to go home. Her family had supplies and medicine she had stored over the years, enough to keep them safely alive for at least three months.
It had become her habit over the years to prepare for sudden disasters. Now it seemed that the people who planned ahead were the ones who lived longer.
Ji Qingyan quickly composed herself, her gaze sweeping across the entire office. A box of antibiotics, a complete set of precision surgical instruments, and several rare, out-of-print medical books—with barely a thought, she stored everything in her spatial storage.
It all happened in the blink of an eye.
She calmly opened the door, and the sight in the hallway nearly froze her blood.
The young nurse was curled up beside a trash can, trembling. Her eyes were fixed on the dark corridor, her lips quivering, her voice barely audible. “They... they all... they’ve all turned into monsters...”
In the middle of the corridor, several monsters wearing hospital gowns were pouncing on someone who was still alive, brutally tearing them apart.
Piercing screams echoed throughout the space. Blood and flesh were splattered everywhere, and severed limbs lay scattered across the floor. The pungent smell of blood mixed with a foul, sickly-sweet odor that made people’s stomachs churn.
This was hell on earth.
Ji Qingyan’s pupils trembled, and her Adam’s apple bobbed. She pulled up the limp nurse, placed her index finger against her lips, and gestured for her to stay quiet.
The back door was at the end of the corridor, standing wide open, and there were no monsters wandering around for the moment.
“Walk.”
She lowered her voice and crept silently along the wall.
The young nurse clutched the hem of her shirt tightly. Her whole body trembled, and her teeth chattered softly, the sound especially grating in the eerily silent corridor.
Ji Qingyan glanced back at her but did not brush her hand away.
Two mutilated corpses lay in the way, their abdominal cavities torn open, their internal organs dragged across the floor, dark-red blood flowing like rivers.
They held their breath and carefully maneuvered around them. The nauseating stench in the air nearly overwhelmed their senses.
The back door was right there.
A sluggish figure suddenly appeared from around the corner.
It was the same middle-aged woman who had rampaged through the emergency room earlier.
No, she could no longer be called a woman—
Her eyes were shrouded in a grayish-white light, her pupils completely gone. Most of her scalp had been ripped open, exposing a dark-red membrane underneath. Her mouth had been torn all the way to the base of her ears, and thick, blackish-blue saliva mixed with blood kept dripping from it, making people’s scalps crawl.
Raaagh—!
The monsters spotted them.
Without the slightest hesitation, it roared and lunged forward, moving so fast that only a blurry afterimage remained.
“Ah—!” The nurse was so terrified that she fell to the ground and screamed.
Ji Qingyan reacted incredibly quickly, shoving her backward. With barely a thought, the cold scalpel dropped straight into her palm.
In the dim light, the blade glimmered with a sinister sheen, reflecting the determined expression on her handsome face.
There was no way to retreat.
Her only choice was to fight to the death.
She lowered her center of gravity, gripped the knife handle tightly, and just as the monster lunged—
Bang!
A gunshot rang out.
The monster crashed to the floor with a thud, skidding several meters from inertia before stopping right at Ji Qingyan’s feet, where it lay completely motionless.
Fragments of its shattered skull were scattered nearby, accompanied by a pungent stench. Thick, blackish-blue blood gushed from the bullet hole, spreading across the white floor tiles in a disgusting mess.
The intense visual and olfactory assault instantly overwhelmed her, triggering a wave of nausea.
Ji Qingyan frowned and unconsciously took a step back, her usually cold face growing even paler.
The nurse behind her could no longer hold it in. She leaned against the wall and vomited violently, even bringing up bile, her entire body trembling uncontrollably.
Ji Qingyan raised her head and stared intently at the doorway.
In the rain, a tall, powerfully built man in a black combat uniform was holstering his weapon. Rainwater streamed down his hard, cold face. His deep-set eyes were fixed on the hand holding Ji Qingyan’s knife, with a faintly observant, probing look buried in their depths.
Ji Qingyan instinctively hid her hand behind her back, her heart pounding wildly out of control.
She had a feeling that this man had somehow seen through her.
The aura of ruthlessness radiating from him alone was enough to make someone’s blood boil and send a strange chill down their spine. Her instincts screamed an alarm—this man was dangerous!
The man ignored the nurse sprawled on the floor and walked straight toward Ji Qingyan.
The rain soaked through his combat uniform, perfectly revealing the contours of his powerful muscles. His shoulders and back were as broad as a wall, and every step was steady and forceful, as if it were stomping on Ji Qingyan’s heart.
“Who are you?” the man asked in a deep voice.
Ji Qingyan forced herself to remain calm and looked up into his eyes. “Ji Qingyan, a doctor.”
At the same time, she quickly observed the man in front of her—he was tall, a head taller than her, with deep, three-dimensional features, a high, straight nose, and thin lips pressed tightly together. A fierce, merciless aura born from years of experience radiated from him, giving him a powerful presence that kept strangers at a distance.
He was fully equipped from head to toe, with a pistol at his waist and a tactical knife strapped to his calf. He did not look like a police officer; he looked more like... a special-forces soldier.
The man glanced at the chaos inside the hospital, his brows drawing together slightly. “This hospital is a disaster zone. You need to leave immediately.”
After saying that, he gave Ji Qingyan a deep look, then turned and walked away.
That look held a complicated meaning: observation, wariness, and something else difficult to define or understand.
“Wait!” Ji Qingyan called after him. “What’s happening outside? Is this... really zombies?”
The man paused and turned to look at her. Rain blurred his face, but his deep eyes remained remarkably clear.
“Yes.”
The answer was brief, decisive, and efficient.
“If you want to live, find somewhere to hide.”
After saying that, he did not linger and disappeared into the vast curtain of rain.
At the same time, the heavy, dragging sound of footsteps mixed with the monsters’ groans and suddenly approached from behind. The terrified nurse panicked, screamed, and rushed out the door. Ji Qingyan did not even have time to stop her before she disappeared.
She looked toward the end of the corridor.
A swarm of monsters charged toward her, their gray eyes and horrifying faces filling her entire field of vision. Though she tried to stay calm, she could not suppress the fear overtaking her, and a chill ran down her spine.
There was no time to hesitate.
She gritted her teeth, gripped the scalpel tightly in her palm, held back the trembling throughout her body, and without another moment’s hesitation, turned and plunged straight into the cold downpour.
Yun City was completely battered by heavy rain.
The streets and alleys were packed with fleeing crowds. Screams, sobs, and the roars of monsters blended together, carried by the rain and echoing throughout the city.
Cars had been abandoned haphazardly along the roadside, blocking intersections. Their doors stood wide open, and their bodies were covered in horrifying scratches and dark-red bloodstains. Their owners were nowhere to be found.
Ji Qingyan ran wildly through the rain, her thoughts in turmoil.
Suddenly, she remembered something—at the antique shop Paviliun Harta Karun in the old town, there was a family-heirloom jade pendant passed down to her by her maternal grandfather.
Before he died, her grandfather had repeatedly warned her to keep it safe, saying it might prove extremely useful in a crisis.
She had once thought it was merely an old man’s fantasy, but now that she had mysteriously obtained spatial exploration and healing abilities, and all these unusual changes were far too strange, she had a vague suspicion that the jade pendant’s “great usefulness” might be connected to these changes.
Temporarily transferred to Dao.
Ji Qingyan changed direction and headed toward the old town.
The heavy rain continued to pour, leaving the streets in disarray.
The monsters dragged their twisted bodies through the streets, frantically attacking and biting any living creature they caught. From time to time, piercing screams rang out nearby or in the distance, cutting through the torrential rain and adding another layer of dread to this collapsing apocalypse.
With her familiarity with the terrain and the faint mental perception she had just gained from Awakening, Ji Qingyan silently slipped through the wandering zombie hordes, narrowly escaping danger several times.
She gradually understood their pattern—these monsters were almost completely blind, relying primarily on their hearing and sense of smell to locate prey. As long as people remained completely hidden and made no unusual movements, they could minimize the danger and pass through smoothly.
After several turns, she finally arrived at the entrance to Paviliun Harta Karun.
The closed roll-up door was covered in dents of varying depths, its edges slightly warped, showing that it had been attacked by zombies.
Ji Qingyan did not enter through the main gate. Instead, she skillfully circled around to a secluded back alley, pulled out a thin piece of wire, and easily picked the old lock cylinder on the back door within moments.
I slipped inside and found the shop in complete disarray.
All the wooden display shelves had been overturned, and the floor was covered with scattered fragments of antiques. Stepping on them produced sharp cracking sounds, and each one tightened the knot in her heart.
Ignoring the chaos around her, Ji Qingyan walked straight toward the antique display shelf in the inner hall without stopping.
My grandfather had once said that the family-heirloom jade pendant was hidden in a secret compartment on the third level of the antique shelf, with a mechanism concealed in the eye of the dragon carved into its dragon pattern.
She raised her hand to touch the shelf.
Suddenly, her ears caught an extremely faint sound.
Above.
There was someone up there!