Super Regeneration

Fan Ding shook his head blankly.

We had all been teleported into this Deathmatch Arena at the same time. If you didn't know what was happening, how the hell would I know?

But Fan Ding quickly realized this was his chance and probed cautiously.

"Give me my sword back, and I'll go take a look outside?"

"In your impression, am I someone easy to bully and mentally... uh... immature?"

Lu Bai tilted his head slightly, looking puzzled.

As he spoke, he glanced at the Long Sword in his hand, and a string of information appeared before his eyes.

[Weapon: Eight-Sided Han Sword]

[Traits:

(Lightweight: You will not feel the weight of the blade while swinging it.)

(Durable: Sharpness will not decrease with use.)]

[Evaluation: Randomly obtained from [Armory II (Silver)]. An exceptionally fine standard-issue weapon.]

When Lu Bai noticed the "Silver" suffix, his pupils contracted slightly.

Was everyone's Ability Pool level random, or...

Did I hit the jackpot?

Without showing it, he asked Fan Ding, "Why did you pick such a trash thing?"

"How amazing do you think you can get from a Silver Ability Pool?"

Provoked by that, Fan Ding blurted out angrily.

Yet beneath the endless wails drifting over from afar, the indignation rising in Fan Ding's heart quickly cooled.

He looked around, trying his best to appear calm, but he clearly lacked confidence. "...Should we find somewhere to hide first?"

Though they still did not know exactly what had happened on campus, the increasingly frequent screams and shrieks were enough to make anyone's skin crawl.

Even the air carried a faint, nauseating Bloody Smell.

No matter how he thought about it, this was not something that should have been happening on a school campus.

"Help... help!"

A cry for help came from nearby.

A boy with a mangled, bloody neck staggered out from around the corner.

Lu Bai could barely make out that he was one of the Delinquent Youth who had left earlier.

The moment that Delinquent Youth saw Lu Bai, he was like a drowning man desperately trying to grab his last straw.

He threw himself to the ground and clutched Lu Bai's calf tightly.

"Help me... everyone's gone crazy... they bite anyone they see!"

He spoke in broken fragments. At least for the moment, Fan Ding could not piece together a complete account from his words.

"Calm down first. What happened? How did you get that wound?" Fan Ding stepped forward, grabbed the Delinquent Youth by the shoulders, and shook him.

Thanks to his absurdly extensive movie-watching habits before transmigrating, Lu Bai came up with a bold guess.

Zombies?

Looking at the obvious bite wound torn across the Delinquent Youth's neck, Lu Bai silently pulled his leg free from the youth's embrace, his grip tightening unconsciously around the Long Sword.

"Ughhh~"

Several figures emerged from behind the old banyan tree. Their groaning made the skin crawl, as if a hand were scraping harshly against the depths of their throats.

He could barely recognize them as the Delinquent Youth from before. Their school uniform shirts were practically unbuttoned to their navels.

Of course, Lu Bai had no mood to play hall monitor right now.

Their pairs of grayish-white eyes, the bulging blood vessels across their flushed faces, the disgusting mucus dripping from their mouths...

Every detail screamed one thing—

Fuck, zombies!

Fan Ding's face darkened. "What the fuck are those things?!"

Lu Bai was given no time to think.

The instant their gazes met, the Zombies lunged at him.

In that instant, Lu Bai confirmed one thing.

These really were Zombies,

But not the slow-moving, stiff-bodied kind he remembered.

Put simply,

From his perspective, they were like several Hundred Meter Sprinters charging at him at once.

These Zombies seemed to be frantically squeezing every bit of power from their muscle tissue in some way he could not comprehend, erupting with unbelievable speed.

They were ridiculously fast.

The distance between them had been less than ten meters to begin with. With that explosive sprint, it vanished in the blink of an eye.

In that brief span, Lu Bai only had time to raise his sword in an upward slash.

Pfft—

The blade sank into flesh.

The fastest Zombie was pierced straight through the throat.

No, rather than saying it had been pierced, it would be more accurate to say the Zombie had actively rammed its neck into the sword tip.

But piercing it did not mean it was over.

Driven by powerful momentum, the Zombie still crashed down toward Lu Bai.

In that incredibly brief moment, Lu Bai strangely found that he was not panicking at all. Instead, he made the correct judgment with astonishing speed.

He turned the sword sideways, using the Zombie's throat as a pivot. As he severed its head, he smoothly shifted his whole body aside.

Thud!

The headless corpse continued forward and slammed heavily into the ground, where it stopped moving.

Catching that from the corner of his eye, Lu Bai relaxed slightly.

Yeah, cutting off the head works.

Unfortunately, there was more than one Zombie present.

Before Lu Bai could adjust his footing, the Zombies crashing into him one after another knocked him to the ground.

It felt as though he had been hit head-on by a speeding car, nearly stunning him senseless.

And as far as Zombies were concerned, fresh food required no preparation.

Without even the slightest hesitation, the two Zombies bit down.

His neck. His thigh.

Blood welled from both bite wounds.

It had to be said that the pain of being torn apart by teeth was far more intense than any wound from a blade.

Especially when he had to watch himself being eaten alive, sending his adrenaline surging uncontrollably.

Driven by the pain, Lu Bai quickly snapped out of his daze and regained control of his body.

He had no time to wonder whether being bitten would turn him into a Zombie, nor did he know why he had transmigrated here.

He only knew that he was going to slaughter them all!

At that moment, Lu Bai's mind became incomparably clear.

There were four Zombies in total. He had taken one out with a single sword strike, leaving three.

Two were pinning him down, while the last had gone after Fan Ding.

Lu Bai did not think Fan Ding could handle Zombies this absurdly powerful, nor could the Delinquent Youth who had already been bitten...

If he delayed too long, he might have to prepare to face five Zombies.

But,

As long as he dealt with the two Zombies in front of him before Fan Ding and that Delinquent Youth turned into Zombies, the advantage would be mine!

Fan Ding's wails were already ringing in his ears. Neither his condition nor the current situation allowed Lu Bai even a moment of hesitation.

He took a deep breath.

He bent his knees, then exploded upward.

His hard knee drove fiercely into the space diagonally above him.

The clever direction of the force sent the Zombie biting his neck flipping straight over his head.

At the same time, his tightly gripped Long Sword slashed upward from below at the Zombie gnawing on his thigh.

It was, after all, a weapon drawn from a Silver Ability Pool. The Eight-Sided Han Sword did not disappoint Lu Bai with its sharpness.

The flesh around the Zombie's neck, along with its stark white Bones, were severed in one stroke.

Lu Bai rolled to his feet and, before the Zombie he had flipped over could rise, beheaded it with one slash.

Even after all that, the Zombie's head was still clamped onto Lu Bai's thigh. Blood ran down his pant leg into the dirt, carrying a savage, bloody wildness.

He unconsciously grinned, tore the head hanging from his thigh free, and casually tossed it aside like trash.

Lu Bai did not stop. Limping, he made his way toward the last Zombie.

The Zombie pinning Fan Ding beneath it and feasting greedily had no awareness at all that danger was approaching.

It did not offer any resistance even as a sword pierced through the back of its head.

Lu Bai first looked at Fan Ding, whose flesh had been bitten into a bloody mess, then turned toward the Delinquent Youth nearby, whose eyes had gone white as his body began convulsing without pause.

Out of humanitarian concern, he raised his sword and brought it down.

Ending the possibility of either of them becoming Zombies.

[Ding!]

[Points +1. Current Rank: 27/423]

Lu Bai ignored the mechanical notification in his mind. He took two steps, then turned and leaned his back against the trunk of the old banyan tree.

He held the blood-dripping Long Sword in his hand. Apart from his ragged breathing, his expression was remarkably calm.

Thinking back, he found it strange that he seemed not to have felt any major emotional fluctuations throughout the entire ordeal.

By all rights, in his previous life he had been a poor Taoist priest from a rundown temple. Even killing a chicken would make his heart race nervously. At the very least, he should not have been able to kill several "people" in a row and remain as calm as if he had done something completely ordinary.

Is there really something wrong with this body?

His back scraping against the tree trunk, Lu Bai slid down to sit.

Even that simple motion made him suck in a sharp breath from the pain.

There was no helping it. The human body often felt pain only after relaxing, when it came flooding in like a tide.

Gritting his teeth, Lu Bai shifted into a more comfortable position and relaxed.

He glanced toward the athletic field, as though that vibrant realm where all things flourished was still right before his eyes.

Half lamenting, half mocking himself, he muttered,

"Am I already about to die just minutes after the start?"

However,

Nearly ten minutes passed.

The transformation into a Zombie that Lu Bai had expected never came. Instead, the screams reaching his ears only grew more frequent.

Beyond the school walls, car horns, the roar of collisions, Zombie howls, and the shrill screams of humans blended into a symphony of chaotic elements.

That meant the school was not the only place where the Zombie outbreak had occurred.

Even without seeing it firsthand, he could imagine how terrible the outside world had become.

Having personally cut down several, Lu Bai knew just how terrifying these Zombies were.

After all, most people in modern society could not even fully use their own strength.

Even elite athletes, after years of training, could only barely unleash the power of certain muscle groups in their bodies.

As for pushing one's physical potential past its limits in a burst of intense emotion and exceeding the boundaries of the human body, that was rarer still.

After all, such eruptions were uncontrollable and impossible for ordinary people to sustain.

They also caused irreversible damage to the body.

But after his brief encounter with several Zombies, Lu Bai could conclude that these Zombies possessed strength and speed so formidable they were almost absurd.

They seemed to have turned that kind of overexertion into their normal state.

The reasonable explanation was that after infection turned them into Zombies, their brains no longer retained the self-protective restraint that limited their bodies. All that remained was the animalistic urge to devour prey.

If that was the case, ordinary people could probably only fight Zombies like these with firearms.

As he pondered such random thoughts, Lu Bai did not notice that the two places where he had been bitten were like a documentary put on fast-forward.

Fresh flesh was slowly sprouting there, healing at a speed beyond ordinary human understanding... rapidly regenerating!