Doubt

After a moment of hesitation, Chu Xiaotian finally decided to bury the man he had flattened into a meat patty, then walk out of this dense forest to see exactly what kind of place this was.

"Old brother, I'm truly sorry. I couldn't even keep your body intact after your death. If you end up in hell, please, you must not come looking for me," Chu Xiaotian murmured while bowing slightly toward the mangled corpse as he buried it.

Based on his experience, he could tell the man had been dead for some time—he had died long before Chu Xiaotian had landed on him, not because of the impact. Otherwise, he wouldn't be so calm; he would have fled long ago. As for why a dead man appeared in this place, Chu Xiaotian, feeling like he could barely look after himself, had no heart to care.

After laying the unrecognizable corpse to rest, Chu Xiaotian began searching the dense forest for wild grass to weave himself some clothes. He had done this plenty of times back when he herded cattle as a child, so the task was familiar. Within half an hour, a suit of clothes woven from green grass covered his body. At this moment, Chu Xiaotian looked no different from a true primitive human.

After adjusting his peculiar outfit, Chu Xiaotian headed out of the dense forest. At this point, why he hadn't died was secondary; the most important thing was to find a living person and ask where he had ended up. The unknown always breeds panic. Of course, another thing to do once he found someone was to scrounge up some food.

It had to be said that this dense forest was incredibly vast, and Chu Xiaotian had no idea which way led out and which way led deeper inside. Fortunately, in the area where he stood, there was a direction where the grass had been trampled, suggesting that this should be a way out.

Without hesitation, he followed the trampled grass forward. Along the way, his eyes were met only with towering trees, forcing Chu Xiaotian to marvel at how well the environmental protection was handled here. At the same time, he moved with extreme caution, terrified that a thousand-year-old zombie might pop out at any moment.

However, the thing he feared did not happen; no powerful thousand-year-old zombie appeared. He didn't even see a single wild beast; the surroundings were deathly quiet. After half an hour, he had traveled a full fifty miles, but ahead lay only endless trees, with nothing else in sight. He began to suspect that he had taken the wrong path and that this wasn't an exit, but a dead end leading into the heart of the forest.

He pondered in place, considering whether he should keep going. Ultimately, he decided to press on. There was no other reason than the fact that he couldn't distinguish the way in or out in this place, so it was better to commit to one direction rather than wandering aimlessly and ending up somewhere even worse.

Half a day later, Chu Xiaotian had traveled over a hundred miles. During this stretch, he finally spotted a small beast—it looked like a rat, though Chu Xiaotian was certain it was no rat. There was no way a rat of this size could exist in the world; the creature before him had a body a meter long. If that were truly a rat, it would be far too terrifying.

The moment the creature saw Chu Xiaotian, it didn't hesitate at all, diving into the grass and vanishing in a flash. Chu Xiaotian shook his head with a bitter smile and, without further thought, continued forward. But what he saw next plunged him into deep contemplation, for he witnessed many incredible things: birds with four claws and foxes with two tails.

Chu Xiaotian was certain these things could not possibly exist in the world he had lived in before. A sliver of panic took root in his heart. He didn't know where he had arrived, but it was basically certain that this was no longer his original world. Having left a familiar world for a place where he couldn't even tell north from south—anyone would find that hard to bear.

Chu Xiaotian could only secretly comfort himself, telling himself he hadn't left his world, but had merely entered a forest that had never been discovered by anyone else. Yet, even he didn't really believe this explanation.

When night fell for the first time, Chu Xiaotian underwent a massive transformation. His body, which had shown no abnormalities until now, suddenly turned ice-cold just before the sky darkened. This cold didn't come from a drop in temperature, but from within his own body; a surge of baleful, icy energy was erupting from inside him. Before Chu Xiaotian could do anything, the terrifying, frigid energy eroded his entire being.

In that moment, he felt his body change completely. Something seemed to be breaking through his fingertips, and his vision blurred in an instant. Everything before him changed entirely; his world was reduced to only black and red, with no other colors remaining.

He felt nothing toward the black objects, but toward the red ones, his body possessed an instinct to devour them completely. The baleful energy churned within him, and his instincts told him that consuming those things would make him feel much better. Yet, another instinct told him that those red things were the lifeblood of living beings and must not be consumed. But this thought, under the constant assault of the baleful energy within him, could not hold out for long. Just as he was about to collapse completely and his body was on the verge of losing control, rushing toward the red lifeblood he saw to devour it, a Jade Talisman around his neck suddenly surged with a warm current that rushed into his brain, instantly clearing his mind and allowing him to see his own reflection.

The grass clothes on his body had vanished, replaced by a layer of thick, black-purple fur. Three-inch-long black claws extended from his fingertips, glinting with a ghostly, cold light. The mottled, purple-and-blue skin on the back of his hands made him look like a corpse that had been buried in the ground for decades, and he could clearly feel two sharp fangs in his mouth. The red glow he had seen earlier was now confirmed to be the lifeblood within a two-tailed fox, manifested in his eyes.

"A zombie! I've become a zombie!" Chu Xiaotian shrieked, nearly fainting. The appearance he had now was that of a zombie. Before, he had wondered why he hadn't turned into one; now it seemed it wasn't that he wouldn't, but that the time hadn't come yet.

He didn't dwell on the reasons, wanting only to recover quickly; this was not a form he wanted to see. However, just as he prepared to change direction and avoid devouring the two-tailed fox, the baleful, icy energy within him surged madly. In the blink of an eye, his sanity vanished once more, and his vision returned to a world of black and red. This time, no matter how much the Jade Talisman around his neck poured warmth into his body, it could no longer stop the baleful energy.

Deep in his heart, he was incredibly unwilling, but Chu Xiaotian's body was already lunging like the wind toward the red glow in his sight...

When the sun rose the next day, Chu Xiaotian found himself standing beneath a massive ancient tree. Beside him lay a giant red wolf, a full ten feet long. The giant wolf had no life left in it; there were two bloody holes in its neck, yet not a drop of blood flowed out.

"Ah..." Scenes from last night flashed through Chu Xiaotian's mind, nearly driving him mad. He had truly become a monster that had to rely on drinking blood to survive. Chu Xiaotian found this extremely difficult to accept.

After howling for a long time, Chu Xiaotian sat on the ground, dejected. Things had come to this, and he was powerless to change anything. But after a while, his eyes brightened; he saw a glimmer of hope—the Jade Talisman around his neck. He grasped the pendant and examined it closely. This piece of jade had been given to him by his grandfather. According to his grandfather, it was an antique his ancestors had obtained from an ancient tomb, passed down through generations as a family heirloom.

It was a ring-shaped pendant, smooth and cold to the touch, looking quite ordinary with nothing special about it. But after last night, he knew this object was far from ordinary.

As a corpse-guiding practitioner, he knew very well that people turned into zombies because zombie venom entered their bodies. Last night, that baleful, icy energy was the zombie venom. He clearly remembered that it was the warm current from this pendant around his neck that had suppressed the venom, allowing him to maintain his sanity for a moment and see his own appearance.

Although the venom had ultimately won and he remained a zombie, he now understood why he didn't turn into one during the day but became one at night. It must be that the pendant suppressed the venom in his body when the Yang energy was strong during the day. Only at night, when the Yang faded and the Yin grew, and the Yin energy in the world became heavy, could the pendant no longer suppress the venom, causing him to take on a zombie form.

He was a human by day and a zombie by night—a half-human, half-zombie existence. It was a fact he didn't want to accept, but compared to becoming a zombie forever, this result was at least tolerable.