Zombie Sparring Partners Were No Longer Enough

Zombie sparring partners were no longer enough.

These rats were huge and fat, and none of them feared humans anymore.

Even after discovering that someone had entered, they continued gnawing on things as if nothing had happened.

The buzzing of green-headed flies swarming through the air made people's scalps crawl.

Recently, Jiang You had discovered that some zombies had begun devouring their own kind.

This was a sign that the zombies were evolving.

Tier 1 zombies had no awareness of devouring their own kind.

But over the past few days, she had often seen zombies gnawing on the corpses of their own kind by the roadside.

With so many corpses in the stadium, it naturally attracted quite a few zombies.

Jiang You swiftly dealt with the few zombies approaching her nearby, then dumped the zombie corpses out of her space.

She quickly retreated afterward.

This place stank horribly, but she truly had no way to deal with all these zombie corpses.

If she dumped them all near the training warehouse, that place would be unusable in less than two days.

The moment the fresh zombie corpses appeared, the first creatures nearby to react were the rats. They squeaked wildly in swarms, quickly covering the pile of corpses.

Then they began feasting.

Some rats even gnawed through the flesh and burrowed inside the zombies' bodies to eat.

They would even kill one another over the food.

The weaker side would be bitten until severely injured, then eaten by the other rats.

Jiang You frowned as she looked at several zombies in the distance that were concentrating on their meal.

She noticed that these zombies first devoured their kind's heads. Only after the heads had been eaten and there was nothing left did they settle for other parts of the body.

It was the same with the rats. They ate the heads first.

Jiang You couldn't help associating this with Da Zhuang's habit of eating mutated rats' and zombies' heads.

Although these mutated animals lacked much intelligence, their instincts drove them to consume the food most beneficial to them first.

After dumping the trash, Jiang You went home and ate lunch.

With such intense training, she naturally ate a lot. She finished three large bowls of rice in that one meal.

She didn't waste a drop of the sauce from the Chinjao shredded pork or the tomato-and-egg stir-fry, mixing it directly with the rice and eating it all clean.

She even drank a large cup of grass jelly afterward before taking her afternoon nap.

In the afternoon.

Jiang You arrived at Hangar Two.

If Hangar One was for combat training, Hangar Two was for agility training.

Six Tier 2 zombies were locked inside this underground warehouse. All of them were either speed-type or strength-type zombies.

They were specially used for combat practice. Since the zombie virus couldn't infect her, she had no reason to hold back.

Tier 2 zombies were already hard to find, let alone ones that met her special requirements.

She needed strength-type and speed-type zombies that could help with close-combat training.

Every zombie in here had been carefully selected by her.

Da Zhuang scouted locations every day. Whenever he found a Tier 2 zombie, he would return and tell her.

She would go capture it and bring it back as a sparring partner.

At first, there had been only one Tier 2 zombie in the warehouse. After she handled one-on-one training with ease, she captured a second and began one-against-two training.

She gradually increased the number, and Jiang You could now fight six at once.

Of the six Tier 2 zombies before her, the one with the longest tenure as a sparring partner was a one-eyed zombie. She had captured it a week ago.

The remaining five were all new hires that had arrived over the past few days.

Zombie sparring partners were consumables, after all. Losing limbs during training was unavoidable.

Once a Tier 2 zombie's damage began affecting normal training, it was time for it to retire.

After being fired from sparring duty, the only value these zombies had left was having their crystal nuclei dug out.

This kind of one-against-many training, available without paying membership fees, was practically essential for staying home or traveling.

Hangar Two was underground. Aside from the reinforced square steel plate at the entrance, everything below was made of thick layers of concrete and soil.

That was why the zombies couldn't escape.

Jiang You opened the steel plate at the entrance, quickly locked it behind her, and walked down the stairs into the warehouse.

The instant she opened the steel plate, she heard the distinctive low growls of zombies rising from below.

There was also the squeaking of fingernails scraping against the walls.

Sparring Partner Number One was a one-eyed zombie, the oldest employee. Jiang You had pierced one of its eyes, and the dagger was still lodged in its eye socket.

Sparring Partner Number Two was a speed-type zombie. It was as small and thin as a monkey, but extremely agile.

Sparring Partner Number Three was a strength-type zombie. It stood around two meters tall, its entire body covered in bulging muscles, its blue-gray skin seeming ready to burst at any moment.

Sparring Partner Number Four had long, thin limbs and excelled at climbing. It moved across the walls as freely as it did on the ground.

Sparring Partner Number Five had claws instead of hands and feet. Its sharp hooks were extremely keen. When Jiang You captured it, she had personally watched it tear another Tier 2 zombie in half. It was vicious as hell.

As for Sparring Partner Number Six, it was a zombie captured only yesterday.

It obviously hadn't fully adapted to the working environment yet and had gotten into a conflict with the veteran employees.

The five veteran employees had already gnawed it down to little more than bone fragments.

The moment Jiang You entered the underground warehouse, a sweep of her eyes revealed that one of her employees was missing.

The welcome offered by the five Tier 2 zombies was to bare their sharp claws and fangs before charging at Jiang You in unison.

This damn human had been the one to capture them and lock them up here!

The instant they saw her, all five Tier 2 zombies flew into a rage.

"You ate the new employee?"

"Roar roar roar!!!!"

A new round of slaughter began...

More than an hour later, Jiang You emerged covered in blood. She tilted her head, and blood dripped from her hair onto the ground.

Although she inevitably had a few wounds on her body, the feeling of such a thorough, exhilarating fight was wonderful.

Da Zhuang immediately walked in front of her and gestured.

"Meow!!!"

Boss, I found another Tier 2 zombie!

Fo-le-mi!

Jiang You immediately followed him to replenish the staff of Hangar Two.

By evening.

Just as before, Jiang You carried a speaker on her shoulder to lure the zombie horde into chasing her as she practiced her speed. Her twenty-kilometer run began.

She ran, they chased, and the flies flew behind them.

When she couldn't sleep at night, Jiang You would also go to the twenty-second floor for mental-strength training.

Look at her—so positive and motivated.

Sometimes even she admired herself. She was so disciplined!

The twenty-second floor was the mental-strength training room.

The training-room employee was a psychic zombie. She had searched the entire city and found only one psychic zombie.

How rare was that!

To prevent the zombie from escaping, she had tied it up like a rice dumpling.

The method of practicing mental strength was much simpler: just go head-to-head with the psychic zombie.

It was like taming a falcon!

Whoever held out until the end won.

When this zombie had first arrived, it had been quite rebellious, constantly trying to ambush Jiang You with its mental strength.

Jiang You had indeed fallen for it several times at first, but as she gradually adapted, she began fighting back.

By now, Jiang You felt that this psychic zombie seemed to have become a little unhinged.

Whenever it saw Jiang You, it would squeeze its eyes into a cross-eyed stare. Wherever she went, those crossed eyes would follow her.

When Jiang You looked at it, it tilted its head and looked at her too, even tossing its head back and forth.

Saliva flew everywhere, making it look completely neurotic.

Jiang You sighed.

"As the only employee in the mental department, you're supporting the entire department by yourself. I know things have been hard for you.

"But you have to take care of yourself. Hold on for a few more days, and maybe you'll have a coworker soon."

"How did you, a zombie, end up making yourself look depressed?"

"Can't you show a little backbone? Stand up. Shall we continue practicing?"

The zombie stared at itself cross-eyed, its hair already standing on end like a bird's nest.

"Grr!"

It growled lowly, looking rather dazed.

"Forget it, forget it. Maybe I've given you too much work lately. How about this? Take a few days off. I'm not a heartless boss. Get some proper rest, and I'll come check on you in a couple of days."

After all, the other training programs had plenty of zombies working together.

But in the area of mental strength, this was currently the only one supporting the entire department alone.

It was inevitable that the pressure would be greater.

A few days of rest should do the trick.

Jiang You fed it a crystal nucleus, patted its head, and left.

As long as nothing else came up, she arranged her morning, noon, and evening training sessions to the brim every day and never slacked off.

Did you think that hoarding supplies in the apocalypse meant you could lie around doing nothing?

No. She was going to outwork everyone else!!

While others hoarded supplies and then loafed around, she would quietly work hard and then crush all the other survivors!

Her many years on Forbidden Island had made one thing deeply clear to her: if your fists weren't strong enough, you could be captured, locked in a cage, and used for experiments.

A person who wasn't strong enough could never live freely, no matter where they were.

Jiang You was completely immersed in her training. Before she became strong enough, she would never take the initiative to enter a human settlement.

Especially a place like a base—the more people there were, the more dangerous it was.

Under her high-intensity training regimen, zombies were consumed at an astonishing rate.

She often spent a great deal of time capturing sparring partners. Sometimes Jiang You even felt that there weren't enough zombies.

She didn't know whether she had worn those zombies out by running them around.

As things developed, Jiang You discovered that even when she carried a square-dance speaker through the streets, or rode the motorcycle and made an earth-shaking racket,

many zombies, upon hearing the familiar songs and engine noise, would merely glance faintly in her direction before going about their own business.

Only a small portion of the zombies would chase her.

They weren't enthusiastic at all anymore.

Sure enough, love could disappear.

Back then, these little zombies had been so enthusiastic. Now that the new faces had become old acquaintances, they had lost their passion.

By then, however, her training plan was nearly complete, so Jiang You stopped bothering with them.

Not long afterward, a group of survivors came to City A to search for supplies, only to discover that the zombies here were very strange.

In other places, zombies would pounce on living humans impatiently the moment they saw them.

But the zombies here seemed a little stupid.

When they saw humans appear, they didn't instinctively rush forward. Instead, they would run a few tentative steps before beginning their pursuit.

But during that tentative hesitation, the survivors had already run far away.

Once the news spread, rumors circulated in many places that the zombies in City A were low-level for unknown reasons and that no evolved zombies had appeared there.

The zombies of City A were trash. That practically became accepted fact.

Yet years later, when an outsider entered City A hoping to see the stupidest zombies around, they discovered that it had all been nothing but rumors!

Which goddamn bastard had said the zombies here were stupid?!!

Although these zombies were slower than normal zombies to confirm their targets, once they did, they would bite down and never let go. They absolutely refused to give up!

And these zombies ran incredibly damn fast!

They were so fast that their legs spun into afterimages, just like Wind Fire Wheels!

They were a whole horde of monstrous zombies!!