Xue Ming cautiously approached the source of the sound and hid behind a large tree. He poked his head out and stealthily looked in the direction it had come from.
Then his eyes widened, and his pupils contracted sharply. A stiff-looking figure was hopping toward him. But it was dark, and he couldn't make out what it looked like.
At first, Xue Ming didn't think it was a zombie. He assumed one of his fans had heard he was coming here to livestream and had gone out of their way to play a prank on him.
After all, it wasn't as if this sort of thing had never happened before.
He steadied himself and looked at his phone, then chuckled. "Which viewer came all this way to scare me? If you're going to dress up, at least make it convincing. You should've waited until I poked my head out, then suddenly appeared right in front of me. That would've been thrilling."
Xue Ming didn't see the viewers teasing him. Instead, the comments were all the same: "Streamer, run! That's the real deal!"
"Hey, cut it out. What do you mean, the real deal? It's probably some viewer..." Xue Ming glanced up at the figure, now just a dozen or so meters away, then looked at his phone—and finally realized something was wrong.
He couldn't make out the figure's appearance with his own eyes. It was simply too dark.
But his livestream equipment could. It had night vision. When he looked up, the camera mounted on his head clearly transmitted the figure's appearance to his phone screen in real time.
At last, he could see its face. It had rotted so badly that it was unrecognizable. Its eyes were dull and lifeless, and two slender fangs protruded from its open mouth.
If that had been all, Xue Ming might still have thought one of his viewers was good at makeup. After all, makeup could achieve all of that. But the putrid stench drifting into his nostrils told him that the hopping thing before him wasn't a viewer trying to scare him. It was a real zombie, here to suck his blood.
In an instant, Xue Ming's scalp prickled, and a bone-chilling cold shot straight from his tailbone to the crown of his head.
In the livestream, the viewers watched the zombie draw closer, its features growing clearer by the second. They were all dumbstruck with terror, flooding the screen with "Holy shit!" and "Bullet comments, protect me!"
With the zombie getting closer and closer, Xue Ming didn't dare think any further. He immediately spun around and took off at full speed!
"Holy shit! How can there really be zombies in this world?!" Xue Ming shouted, sprinting with astonishing agility.
His long career as an outdoor streamer had taken him all over the place, sometimes deep into the mountains and forests, so he was in excellent shape.
Now, with his life on the line, he gave it everything he had, running as if Usain Bolt had possessed him. He even had enough energy to glance back every now and then to see whether the zombie was catching up.
But soon, he didn't need to look back anymore. Another hopping figure had appeared in front of him.
Xue Ming nearly broke down. What the hell, are these zombies traveling in packs? Why are there so many?!
Without thinking, he changed direction and kept running.
He hadn't gone much farther when he saw several staggering figures walking toward him. His heart leaped with joy. Seeing people at a time like this was like seeing a lifeline.
"Help! There are zombies!"
Xue Ming didn't stop to wonder why the figures were staggering. All he could think about was facing the zombies together with them. Even having more people around to bolster his courage would help.
But when he reached them, he realized something was wrong. They were all people he knew—the ones who had previously come to the place where he was livestreaming to scare him by pretending to be ghosts.
Every one of them had a deathly pale face, vacant eyes, and stiff limbs that dragged them forward. There were two obvious puncture wounds on each of their necks.
When Xue Ming came close, it was as if they'd finally found their target. They charged straight at him.
Xue Ming's scalp went numb. He spun around and dodged one person's lunge, but failed to notice someone lying on the ground. He tripped over them and fell, and the others pounced on him.
All he could do was scream as they bit him again and again.
Because the scene was too gruesome, the livestream was immediately shut down. Before it cut off, the viewers heard a roar—and a blinding clap of thunder.
"Wretched beast, you dare!"
"Take this, Five Thunders Orthodox Method!"
"Goddess of Lightning and Duke of Thunder, descend at once with your divine powers and help me purge this affliction! Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! By the command of Grand Supreme Elder Lao, obey at once! Begone!"
Everyone watching the livestream was stunned. Zombies were one thing, but now someone could use the Five Thunders Orthodox Method, too? Did real Taoist magic actually exist in this world?
Most of the viewers were too shocked to react. Some called the police, while others reposted their screen recordings. In short, the story spread at astonishing speed.
The incident soon caught the authorities' attention. They immediately deleted all the videos being circulated online, then dispatched troops to the mountain village and sealed off the surrounding forest.
By the time the troops found the place where Xue Ming had met with disaster, corpses were already scattered across the ground. Besides Xue Ming and the viewers who had tried to scare him, there were several bodies that had clearly been dead for some time.
Those were probably the zombies.
Luo Xuan, who was leading the team, frowned as he looked at the bodies. They were all charred black, especially Xue Ming and the viewers, whose corpses were badly carbonized.
The zombies, on the other hand, were barely carbonized. Only their clothes had been completely burned away. They looked so badly decomposed that they might fall apart at any moment, but Luo Xuan had a feeling they were no ordinary corpses.
He drew a dagger and crouched beside one of the zombies, then thrust the blade at it. The sharp dagger felt as if it had struck an extremely hard surface. It couldn't pierce the body at all.
It felt like stabbing wood, except the zombie's body was far more resilient and even harder to pierce.
"This..." Luo Xuan was astonished. The zombie really was just like the legends said—impervious to blades and spears.
"Take these bodies back," Luo Xuan ordered. Then he looked toward the mountains. "Seal off the entire forest. Tomorrow, search it systematically and make sure nothing gets away."
"Yes, sir." A soldier acknowledged the order and left.
Luo Xuan surveyed the forest, then turned to a soldier beside him with a frown. "Get all the surveillance footage from this area. Also, tomorrow, invite every Taoist priest in Cloud City to the Cloud City Public Security Bureau."
"Yes, sir." The soldier nodded.
Once the matter was settled, Liu Bing quietly left the scene, keeping his contribution to himself.
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