Thousand-Year Zombie

Chu Xiaotian's heart skipped a beat. He knew that his greatest fear had come to pass. That massive tree he had passed earlier truly harbored something extraordinary. Not daring to hesitate for even a second, he hurried forward with the ten corpses in tow, desperate to put distance between himself and this place.

Yet, he could clearly sense a dense, frigid aura of yin approaching from behind. Simultaneously, blinding bolts of heavenly lightning were closing in, relentlessly pursuing that very same trail of yin.

Chu Xiaotian knew he was in trouble; he had undoubtedly stumbled upon something far from ordinary. Moreover, judging by the ferocity of the lightning, this entity was immensely powerful.

He shook the copper bell in his hand with increased urgency, and his pace quickened, dragging the ten corpses along as he tried to flee. However, the dead could never compare to the living. With the ten corpses in tow, his speed was clearly inferior to his pursuer's. He could feel that sinister, icy aura closing in with terrifying speed.

Chu Xiaotian was caught in a dilemma. He had two choices: abandon the ten corpses and flee alone. That might offer a sliver of hope for survival. The other option was to continue dragging them along, but that would make being overtaken by the horror behind him a certainty.

He did not make a decision immediately. He glanced back, wanting to see exactly what was chasing him. But after that one look, his scalp went numb and his face turned deathly pale.

"A thousand-year zombie!" Upon identifying the creature, Chu Xiaotian let out a cry of alarm and nearly bolted in a blind panic.

Under the illumination of the lightning, he saw it clearly: a zombie with a green face and fangs, covered in black hair, with blood-red eyes and pitch-black fingernails a full three inches long. The creature's speed was staggering; with a single leap, it covered over a hundred meters, soaring ten meters into the air. The massive trees in its path were reduced to clouds of wood chips in an instant. Though the lightning bolts were numerous, they seemed powerless, unable to strike the beast.

As a corpse-handler, Chu Xiaotian knew exactly how formidable a zombie could be. The creature he saw, capable of such leaps, possessed at least a millennium of cultivation. Zombies under a thousand years old generally lacked offensive capabilities and feared all living things. But once they had spent a millennium consuming yin energy and evolved into a thousand-year zombie, everything changed.

These zombies would attack any living creature they encountered, devouring their blood and essence to strengthen themselves. Such a creature was far beyond his ability to handle. If he could escape, he would be safe; if he couldn't, death was inevitable. Fortunately, such beings had no interest in the dead. Chu Xiaotian knew that if he could just get away, he would be fine. As for his ten uncles, he could return to retrieve them under the cover of daylight.

He brought the ten corpses to a halt and sprinted ahead. Since his uncles were wrapped in plastic sheets, he wasn't worried about the rain, which gave him some peace of mind. What he couldn't stop worrying about was himself, for he could never match the speed of such a zombie. He could feel it closing in on him with every passing moment.

As he fled, Chu Xiaotian couldn't help but curse the heavens. If the weather weren't like this, he could have drawn a few talismans to stall the creature, but in this thunderstorm, that was out of the question.

His only hope now was to outrun the zombie or for it to be distracted by something else in the forest. Yet, he didn't realize that the senses of other creatures in this mountain range were far keener than his own; within a radius of several hundred miles, there were no other living things left besides him.

The zombie pursued him relentlessly, the distance between them shrinking rapidly. Within a minute or two, he could already feel the waves of chilling, necrotic air radiating from it. In the next instant, he realized the zombie was within a meter of him. Its blood-red eyes locked onto him, and after a piercing shriek, it lunged. Chu Xiaotian was hit by a wave of such intense, putrid stench from the creature's maw that he nearly gagged. Before he could react, the zombie was upon him. With no way to defend himself, he felt it grab his shoulders, open its gaping, blood-stained mouth, and lunge for his throat.

Chu Xiaotian knew he was finished, but his survival instinct drove him to fight with everything he had. Before the zombie could bite, he thrust his peach-wood sword toward its throat. Like the space between the eyebrows, this was a zombie's fatal weak point. If he could pierce it, he might not kill the creature, but he could at least inflict a grievous wound and earn a chance to escape.

At such close range, the peach-wood sword struck the zombie's throat without fail. At that very moment, the seemingly unremarkable blade erupted with a layer of red light, glowing like a piece of iron heated in a forge. However, the outcome Chu Xiaotian hoped for did not occur. The sword failed to penetrate; the throat, which should have been fragile, was harder than steel on a thousand-year zombie. No matter how much strength he exerted, the blade didn't move an inch.

"Roar..." The zombie let out a low growl and continued to lunge for his neck with all its might, desperate to feast on his yang-filled blood. The peach-wood sword snapped in two with a sharp crack, and with no further obstacles, the zombie's two sharp fangs sank into the artery of Chu Xiaotian's neck.

The shadow of death instantly enveloped him. A searing pain radiated from his neck throughout his entire body, and his life force began to drain away.

The thousand-year zombie devoured his blood while simultaneously pumping necrotic poison into his veins. Chu Xiaotian knew that once the poison fully permeated his body, it wouldn't just be a matter of dying; he would become a monster that survived by consuming the blood of the living. This was a fate even harder to accept than death. He struggled desperately, but it was futile. His life force continued to ebb away as the poison took hold.

His consciousness began to blur, partly from the loss of vitality and partly from the encroaching poison, which began to cloud his mind. Finally, everything went black, and Chu Xiaotian lost consciousness entirely. In his final moment, he saw a massive web of lightning weaving together, enveloping both him and the zombie.

He didn't know how much time had passed, but Chu Xiaotian eventually regained his senses. He slowly opened his eyes and found himself lying in a dense forest.

He was certain this was not the same forest he had been in before. The trees here were far more massive than those in his previous location; each one stood at least thirty to forty meters tall and was thick enough that three or four men would struggle to wrap their arms around them. In the place where he had lived, such trees were rare, let alone an entire forest of them.

Where on earth was he? Was this where one went after death? Chu Xiaotian was filled with bewildered speculation. His memory still held the image of being bitten by the thousand-year zombie, followed by both of them being engulfed by the lightning. He touched his neck and could still clearly feel the two puncture wounds, proving that it hadn't been a hallucination.

Yet, he couldn't understand why he wasn't dead, nor had he become a blood-sucking zombie, and why he had appeared in such a bizarre place.

He struggled to sit up, curious to see his surroundings, when he suddenly felt something beneath him. He reached out to touch it—it was soft and cold. With his years of experience, he knew for certain that it was a corpse, and one that had been dead for quite some time.

Startled, Chu Xiaotian rolled away and looked back. Sure enough, there was a corpse lying on its back. However, the body was unrecognizable, as if it had been crushed by something heavy, leaving it a mangled mess of flesh and blood. Feeling the sticky, viscous sensation on his back, Chu Xiaotian realized with a jolt that the "heavy object" that had landed on the corpse was himself.

Without a moment's hesitation, he stripped off his clothes and found them soaked in dark red blood. He tossed the garments far away without a second thought, then quickly stripped off his pants and threw them aside as well.

Now dressed like a primitive man, Chu Xiaotian began to survey his surroundings. After a long while, he still couldn't tell where he was. Aside from the mangled body he had crushed and the endless expanse of giant trees, there was nothing else to be seen.

What he found strange, however, was that the clothes worn by the unrecognizable corpse were identical to those of the ancient people he had seen in the past, leading him to wonder if this poor soul had been some unlucky actor in a period drama.