Doubts

(Forget Worries)

After hesitating for a moment, Chu Xiaotian finally decided to bury the man he had smashed until he was nearly a meat pie, then leave the dense forest and see what kind of place this was.

"Old brother, I'm really sorry. I couldn't even leave you with a whole corpse before you died. If you go down to hell, please don't come back to find me." As he buried the bloodied, mangled corpse, Chu Xiaotian bowed slightly to the man twice and spoke softly.

From his experience, Chu Xiaotian could tell the man had been dead for some time, and had already died before Chu Xiaotian landed on him. He hadn't killed him. Otherwise, Chu Xiaotian wouldn't have been so calm—he would have fled long ago. As for why there was a corpse here, Chu Xiaotian already felt he could barely keep himself alive, so he had no interest in investigating.

After settling the disfigured corpse, Chu Xiaotian began searching the dense forest for grass to weave into clothes. He had done this plenty of times as a boy, when he went out to herd cattle, so he was quite adept at it now. In just half an hour, he had a set of clothes woven from grass on his body. At that moment, Chu Xiaotian looked every bit like a man from a primitive society.

After straightening his unusual outfit, Chu Xiaotian headed for the edge of the forest. Why he hadn't died was now a secondary concern. What mattered most was finding someone alive and asking where he was. The unfamiliar always made people feel uneasy. Of course, once he found someone, he also planned to get something to eat.

It had to be said that this forest was enormous. Chu Xiaotian had no idea which way led out and which way went deeper in. Fortunately, in one direction, some of the weeds had been trampled down, suggesting there might be a way out.

Without hesitation, he followed the trampled weeds. Everywhere he looked, towering trees rose into the sky, making Chu Xiaotian marvel at how well the environment here had been protected. As he walked, he proceeded with great caution, afraid that a thousand-year-old zombie might suddenly come hopping out.

But what he feared never came to pass. No powerful thousand-year-old zombies appeared. He didn't even see a single wild beast; all around him was silent. After half an hour, he had covered a distance of fifty li, yet the trees still stretched endlessly before him. There was nothing else in sight. He began to wonder if he had gone the wrong way, and if this wasn't an exit at all, but a dead end leading farther into the forest.

He stopped and pondered whether he should keep going. In the end, he decided to press on. There was no other reason: in a place like this, he couldn't tell which way was in or out, so it was better to pick a direction and stick to it. Otherwise, he might end up somewhere even more unknown.

By midday, Chu Xiaotian had traveled more than a hundred li. Along the way, he finally spotted a small beast. It looked like a mouse, but Chu Xiaotian was certain it wasn't one. There was no way a mouse in this world could grow so large. This little mouse-like beast was a full meter long. If it really had been a mouse, it would have been terrifying.

The moment it saw Chu Xiaotian, the creature darted into the grass without hesitation and vanished in the blink of an eye. Chu Xiaotian smiled wryly and shook his head, then continued onward without giving it another thought. But what he saw next left him deep in thought. He came across many unbelievable creatures: birds with four claws, foxes with two tails.

Chu Xiaotian was certain that none of these things could possibly exist in the world he had lived in before. A thread of panic had already crept into his heart. He had no idea where he was, but he could now be almost certain that this wasn't the world he had known. Anyone would have struggled to bear leaving a familiar world for a place where they couldn't even tell east from west.

Chu Xiaotian could only console himself that he hadn't left his old world, but had merely entered a forest no one had ever discovered. Even he didn't really believe that explanation.

When night first fell, Chu Xiaotian underwent a sudden transformation. His body, which had shown no abnormalities until then, abruptly turned ice-cold just before dusk. The chill wasn't caused by the temperature dropping. It came from within him: a wave of frigid energy had erupted inside his body. Chu Xiaotian hadn't even had time to do anything before that terrifying cold energy spread through him.

In that instant, he felt as if his body had completely changed. Something seemed to break through the tips of his fingers, and his vision blurred in the blink of an eye. Everything before him changed utterly. His world was reduced to black and crimson; no other colors remained.

He felt nothing toward the black things, but his body had an instinctive urge to devour the red ones. The baleful energy within him surged, and instinct told him that swallowing those things would make him feel much better. But another instinct told him that the red things were the blood and qi of living creatures, and must not be devoured. Under the repeated assaults of the baleful energy within him, however, that thought couldn't hold out for long. It was on the verge of collapsing completely. His body was about to slip beyond his control and rush toward the living creatures whose blood and qi he saw as red, to devour them, when the Jade Talisman around his neck suddenly released a warm current that surged into his mind. He immediately regained some clarity—and got a glimpse of his own appearance.

His grass clothes had vanished, replaced by a thick coat of blackish-purple fur. Three-inch-long black nails protruded from his fingertips, gleaming with a ghostly chill. His hands were mottled blue and purple, making him look like a corpse buried in the ground for decades. He could also clearly feel two sharp fangs in his mouth. And the crimson glow he had seen before now revealed itself to be the blood and qi inside a two-tailed fox.

"Zombie! I've become a zombie!" Chu Xiaotian cried out, nearly fainting. His current appearance was that of a zombie. Earlier, he had wondered why he hadn't turned into one. Now he realized it wasn't that he wouldn't change; it simply wasn't time yet.

He didn't think too hard about why it had happened. He only wanted to return to normal as soon as possible. This wasn't the form he wanted. But just as he was about to change direction and avoid devouring the two-tailed fox, the cold energy inside him surged wildly. In the blink of an eye, his earlier awareness disappeared again, and the world before him turned black and crimson once more. This time, no matter how much warm energy the Jade Pendant around his neck sent into his body, it couldn't stop the cold energy.

Deep down, Chu Xiaotian was utterly unwilling, but his body had already shot toward the crimson glow in his eyes like the wind...

When the sun rose the next day, Chu Xiaotian found himself standing beneath a gigantic ancient tree. Beside him lay a red giant wolf, a full zhang long. It was completely lifeless. Two bloody holes marked its neck, but not a drop of blood had flowed from them.

"Ah..." The events of the previous night flashed through Chu Xiaotian's mind, nearly driving him mad. He really had become a monster that needed to suck blood to survive. Chu Xiaotian found it incredibly hard to accept.

After howling for a long while, Chu Xiaotian sat down on the ground, despondent. What had happened had happened; there was nothing he could do to change it. But after a moment, his eyes brightened. He saw a glimmer of hope: the Jade Pendant around his neck. He grasped it and examined it carefully. His grandfather had given it to him. According to his grandfather, it was an antique their ancestors had found in an ancient tomb, kept as a family heirloom and handed down from generation to generation.

It was a ring-shaped jade pendant, smooth and cold to the touch. It looked quite ordinary and had nothing special about it. But after the previous night, he knew it wasn't ordinary at all.

As someone who dealt with corpses, he knew very well that people became zombies when Corpse Poison entered their bodies. The cold energy from the previous night had been Corpse Poison. He clearly remembered that the Jade Pendant around his neck had released a warm current the night before, suppressing the poison and keeping him lucid for a while, long enough to see what he looked like.

Although the Corpse Poison had ultimately won and he was still a zombie, he now understood why he hadn't turned into one during the day, only to become one at night. It must have been because the Jade Pendant around his neck suppressed the Corpse Poison in his body while the yang energy was strong during the day. Only at night, as yang waned and yin waxed and the yin energy between heaven and earth grew heavier, could the pendant no longer suppress the Corpse Poison in his body. That was when he became a zombie.

He was human by day and a zombie by night, a half-human, half-corpse being. It was a fact he didn't want to accept, but compared with becoming a zombie forever, this outcome was still bearable.(Forget Worries)