A Thousand-Year-Old Zombie

Chu Xiaotian's heart jolted. He knew his worst fear had come true. There really had been something extraordinary beneath that huge tree. Not daring to hesitate for even a moment, he hurried onward with the ten corpses behind him, eager to get away from this place.

Behind him, he could clearly feel a dense mass of yin energy drawing near. At the same time, those blinding bolts of heavenly lightning were closing in too. They were chasing that mass of yin energy.

Chu Xiaotian knew he was in trouble. He had definitely run into something out of the ordinary. And judging by the lightning behind him, whatever it was, it was extraordinarily powerful.

He shook the copper bell even faster, and his pace immediately quickened. He hurried on with the ten corpses, trying to escape. But the dead could never keep up with the living. With the ten corpses of the deceased trailing behind him, he was obviously much slower than his pursuer. He could clearly feel that sinister mass of energy rapidly closing in.

Chu Xiaotian was caught between a rock and a hard place. He had two choices: abandon the ten corpses and flee alone. That might give him a chance to escape. Or keep going with the corpses, in which case it was all but certain that the terrifying thing behind him would catch up.

Chu Xiaotian didn't decide right away. He looked back, wanting to see what was behind him. But the moment he did, his scalp prickled and his face turned white.

"A thousand-year-old zombie!" Seeing the thing behind him, Chu Xiaotian cried out. He nearly bolted in panic.

The lightning illuminated the thing behind him: a zombie with a blue-green face, bared fangs, a body covered in black hair, blood-red eyes, and pitch-black nails a full three inches long. It was astonishingly fast. Each leap carried it over a hundred meters and more than ten meters into the air. The enormous trees in its path were smashed into a shower of splinters in an instant. Though bolts of lightning rained down in great numbers, they seemed powerless to strike it.

As a corpse herder, Chu Xiaotian knew all too well how powerful zombies could be. The leaping zombie before him had cultivated for at least a thousand years. Zombies younger than a thousand years old could barely attack at all; they feared every living thing. But after a thousand years of devouring sinister energy and growing stronger, they became entirely different creatures.

These zombies attacked any living thing they saw, devouring its vital essence to strengthen themselves. A zombie like this was far beyond anything Chu Xiaotian could handle. If it caught him, he either escaped or died. Fortunately, such creatures had no interest in the dead. So Chu Xiaotian knew that as long as he could get away, he would be fine. He could sneak back for his ten uncles during the day.

He made the ten corpses stop, then fled ahead alone. Plastic sheeting covered his ten uncles, so he wasn't worried about the rain soaking them. What worried him now was himself. There was no way he could match a zombie like that for speed. He could feel it steadily closing in.

As he ran, Chu Xiaotian couldn't help cursing the heavens. If the weather weren't like this, he could draw a couple of talismans to slow the zombie down a little. But there was no point even thinking about drawing talismans in a thunderstorm.

His only hope was to outrun the zombie or have it distracted by something else in the forest. But he had no idea that the other things in these woods had far stronger senses than he did. By now, there wasn't a single other living creature left for hundreds of miles around—only him.

The zombie pursued him relentlessly, and the distance between them kept shrinking. In barely a minute or two, he could already feel the waves of icy yin energy emanating from it. The next instant, the zombie appeared just a meter ahead of him. Its pair of crimson eyes fixed on him as it let out a shrill howl and pounced.

A thick stench of rotting corpses poured from its mouth. Chu Xiaotian nearly vomited. Before he could react, the zombie was upon him, gripping both his shoulders. It opened its bloody maw and lunged for his neck.

Chu Xiaotian knew he was done for, but the instinct to survive drove him to fight with everything he had. Before the zombie could bite him, he thrust the peachwood sword in his hand toward its throat. Like the space between its brows, the throat was one of a zombie's vital points. If he could pierce it, he might not kill the creature, but he could at least wound it badly enough to escape.

At such close range, the peachwood sword struck the zombie's throat without fail. At that very moment, the unremarkable sword suddenly blazed with a layer of red light, like iron fresh from the forge. But the scene Chu Xiaotian hoped for never came. The sword didn't pierce the zombie's throat. On a thousand-year-old zombie, that supposedly vulnerable spot was harder than steel. No matter how hard Chu Xiaotian pushed, the blade wouldn't go in even a fraction.

"Roar..." The zombie let out a low growl and kept lunging for Chu Xiaotian's neck, desperate to drink his blood, rich with yang energy. With a sharp crack, the peachwood sword broke in two. The zombie met no further resistance. Its two sharp fangs sank into the artery in Chu Xiaotian's neck.

The shadow of death instantly engulfed Chu Xiaotian. Pain shot from his neck throughout his body, and his life force began pouring away.

As the thousand-year-old zombie devoured his vital essence, it also poured Corpse Poison into his body. Chu Xiaotian knew that once the poison had fully invaded him, the question wouldn't be whether he would die. He would become a monster just like it, surviving by devouring the vital essence of living beings. That was even harder to accept than death. He struggled desperately, but to no avail. His life force continued to drain away as the poison spread through him.

His consciousness began to blur, both because his life force was fading and because the poison was invading him, already robbing him of his reason. At last, Chu Xiaotian's vision went black, and he lost consciousness completely. In that final instant, he saw a vast web of lightning weave across the sky, trapping him and the zombie within it.

He didn't know how much time passed before Chu Xiaotian became aware of anything again. He slowly opened his eyes and realized he was lying in a dense forest.

He was certain this wasn't the forest he'd been in before. The trees here were far larger than those in the place he'd come from. Every one of them stood at least thirty or forty meters tall and was thick enough for three or four people to wrap their arms around. Trees like these had been rare where he used to live; a whole forest of them had been unthinkable.

Where had he ended up? Was this where people went after they died? Chu Xiaotian wondered in confusion. He remembered being bitten to death by the thousand-year-old zombie, then both of them being swallowed by the lightning. He touched his neck. He could still clearly feel the two bite marks, proof that none of it had been an illusion.

But he didn't understand. He had clearly been bitten to death by the zombie. Why wasn't he dead now? Why hadn't he turned into another blood-drinking zombie? And why had he appeared in this strange place?

Puzzled, he struggled to sit up and look around. Just then, he suddenly felt that he was lying on top of something. He reached out and touched it. It was soft and cold. From years of experience, he could tell for certain that it was a corpse—one that had been dead for quite some time.

Startled, Chu Xiaotian immediately rolled away, then looked back. Sure enough, a corpse lay on its back on the ground. But it was already unrecognizable, as if some heavy object had smashed it, leaving it a bloody mess. Feeling the sticky mess on his back, Chu Xiaotian was almost certain that he was the heavy object that had landed on it.

Without hesitation, he took off his clothes. Sure enough, they were stained dark red. Without a word, he flung them far away, then quickly stripped off his trousers and tossed them aside too.

Nearly reduced to wearing nothing at all, Chu Xiaotian began looking around. But after a long while, he still couldn't tell where he was. All he could see was the man he had nearly crushed into a heap of flesh and an endless expanse of giant trees. There was nothing else in sight.

What puzzled him, though, was that the dead man's clothes looked just like those worn by people in ancient times. Chu Xiaotian figured the man must have been some poor soul filming a costume drama.