Evolution

The air suddenly fell silent, and all their hearts lurched.

It wasn't that the claim was too sensational. It was too sensitive.

Bang!

Perhaps out of unease, He Zheng unconsciously crushed the iron cup the assistant had handed him.

"How could people eat other people? Even if they did, it'd have to be under special circumstances, right? Like a famine or something..."

He Zheng stiffened his neck. Ever since finishing his statement, the assistant had been staring at them, making his skin crawl.

"They all did, just to varying degrees. We all have antibodies in our bodies."

An Ke explained softly, an odd look flashing through her eyes.

The assistant nodded and gave An Ke a surprised look.

"It seems you know a little about this."

"Prion antibodies."

"When the professor studied human genes, he found them in every racial group."

"Antibodies exist to fight pathogens. That also means every racial group, in every region, consumed large quantities of human flesh throughout history. Otherwise, those antibodies would never have developed."

"Take the Tungus and the Guinean Fore, for example. Their antibody rates exceed seventy percent."

"Sixty percent in Western Europe, fifty percent in the Americas. Even Asia, with the lowest rates, comes in at five to seven percent."

"After the professor raised this point, many people 'challenged' him. Speaking of which, you mentioned that zombies attack humans. That actually means they eat people, doesn't it?"

An odd look flashed through the assistant's eyes, and a sneer curled his lips. He seemed to be mocking those sanctimonious fools from back then, who refused to admit it for the sake of their race's reputation.

"Yes, zombies do eat people. In a certain sense, the two are indeed very similar."

"It's an interesting study, but that alone shouldn't have been enough to get you ostracized, let alone treated with hostility."

"You hate those people?"

Ye Lin suddenly raised his head and met his gaze.

The assistant froze. As though memories had been stirred up, his expression suddenly twisted.

"Yes! No matter how those idiots argued, they couldn't explain any of it. We didn't care what those morons thought, either!"

"But they actually dared to oppose the professor's research! They drove us out, called us lunatics, and destroyed our life's work!"

"It was the greatest theory in the world! A theory capable of making history and changing the entire world!"

He seemed possessed. At the height of his agitation, the assistant even began to roar.

The sight startled the others, and they instinctively reached for their weapons.

This was wrong. Something was very wrong...

Things had veered completely off their expected course. Judging by the assistant's reaction, he really did seem insane...

"What theory?"

Ye Lin took a deep breath and simply asked in a cold voice. This time, however, the professor spoke of his own accord.

"A theory about the evolution of species..."

"Technological progress is actually a trap."

The professor propped himself up. His back hunched and his eyes vacant, he muttered to himself.

"Technological progress seemingly gave us the means to withstand disasters."

"But all of it... is an illusion."

"In ancient times, a plague... could infect one village at most... a few cities. But with technological progress, influenza can spread across the entire world on trains and ships."

"Antibiotics, hormones, vaccines-they seem to help us resist disease, but the immune systems we truly depend on for survival are already riddled with holes."

"Our ancestors chased wild beasts across the continents and hunted mammoths during the Ice Age. Yet now, our bodies are weaker than at any other time."

"Relying on external things is ultimately a trap."

"We haven't evolved in too long. Humanity hasn't evolved in too long. If this continues, sooner or later we'll be eliminated. Like the dodos of the Indian Ocean, we've become too addicted to the comfort technology brings, and forgotten how to survive with our own bodies."

"Evolution. We need... evolution...!"

The professor finished in one breath, his face flushed an unhealthy red.

Amid his violent coughing, Hu Jia couldn't help offering a quiet objection.

"B-but... Professor, isn't technology also a kind of evolution...? That's our own ability, too... Our lives are much better than before... And in the future..."

"Better? The future?"

Without giving Hu Jia a chance to finish, the assistant whipped his head around.

"We have no future!"

"Because of technological progress, survival of the fittest can no longer take place within humanity. Those ignorant, ugly, filthy politicians will never 'die' again under the protection of modern technology!"

"Without evolution, flesh can no longer stand against technology, and people can no longer resist them as they once did! Our genes keep getting worse. Humanity as a whole is like a corpse incapable of renewal, rotting little by little."

"So your theory is cannibalism? Eating people lets you evolve? And once you've evolved, you can replace the 'blood'?"

Ye Lin questioned him coldly, but the assistant seemed not to notice at all. Instead, he grew even more fanatical.

"Yes!"

"Only by eating people can we evolve! Only by eating people can we restructure our genes! Only by eating people can we strengthen our bodies! True evolution means evolving the way they did!"

"Just like our ancestors! A hundred thousand years ago, they ate all the Homo erectus and evolved the ability to use fire!"

"Sixty thousand years ago, they ate all the Flores Man and evolved short-term memory!"

"Forty thousand years ago, they ate all the Neanderthals and evolved language!"

"The Sowa people! Rhodesian Man! Luzon Man...! We ate everyone, and that's how we got where we are today!"

The assistant spread his arms, his expression crazed, as though proclaiming the truth. At that moment, he no longer seemed like a scholar, but a fanatical cultist.

They?

Ye Lin's mind raced.

This theory was insane to the extreme.

He didn't care whether it was right or wrong. He only cared what Riley and the professor had seen that could have given rise to such an idea.

"Riley, did you see something?"

"See something?"

The assistant lowered his hands, his gaze strange.

"That's right. We did see something. We saw traces of evolution. We saw that thousands of years ago, some people had already begun to evolve."

"It's just that their evolution was interrupted. Before they could eat many people, they were trapped in the pharaoh's tomb and died there. Oh, right, some of them succeeded, too. You seem to call them... gods, or zombies?"

Clang!

The piercing crash of falling metal suddenly came from the kitchen.

Inside the kitchen, Zhang Tie's face was deathly pale, his arms trembling. At his feet, soup from an overturned iron pot had spilled across the floor, and a ghastly white sphere rolled out, steaming.

Everyone instinctively looked over. It was a cooked human head.

Silence fell over the room, and all their expressions changed.

The next second, the professor's hoarse voice suddenly rang out.

"I thought... perhaps I really had gone mad... I tried eating people, but I didn't evolve... But after seeing you, I knew the things on the Stone Tablet... perhaps..."

"Perhaps what?"

He Zheng asked instinctively. The next second, before he could react-

The professor suddenly lunged forward, his withered hands seizing He Zheng like a madman's. He hauled him closer, opened his mouth, and tried to bite him!

"Fuck!!!"

He Zheng was terrified out of his wits!

He kicked out on instinct!

Bang!

With the sound of shattering glass, the professor's scrawny body smashed straight through the window and plummeted to the ground below.

Thud!

Looking at the professor lying on his back, half his skull caved in, He Zheng's mind went blank. Shock and fury surged through him!

Everything had happened too suddenly!

Damn it! Had he accidentally killed him!?

"Professor!!"

Riley cried out and rushed toward the window, screaming, but Ye Lin grabbed him.

"What did you find!?"

"What was written on the Stone Tablet...?"

Leslie swallowed dryly and instinctively tried to answer, but a system notification rang out at that very moment.

Beep. The Virus meme has activated ahead of schedule. Eliminate all carriers immediately!

A meme? What meme? What carriers!?

Before anyone could react, An Ke's expression changed drastically, and she shouted urgently!

"Ye Lin! Kill it! Kill him now!!"

"A meme! There's a meme inside him!!!"

Ye Lin's pupils suddenly contracted. He needed no further warning from An Ke. Outside the building, the professor, who should have died from the fall, staggered to his feet and charged toward the nearest student at tremendous speed.

No biting. No eating!

The student merely saw what he looked like and was instantly infected, becoming another zombie!

As spreaders of the meme, both had blood-red eyes. Without the slightest hesitation, as though their only purpose was to infect more people, they turned and raced toward the next person!

One infected two, two infected four, four infected eight. The number of infected kept multiplying.

The students along the entire street fell like dominoes. In less than a few seconds, they were all infected! Then they charged madly toward the next group!

"He Zheng! Huang Liang!!"

With no time to ask anything else, Ye Lin roared and shot out of the building like an arrow loosed from a bow.

Draw his sword. Fire!

His sword gave a violent shriek, splitting the nearest infected in half from the head down. The blood-burning effect activated, reducing the body to charcoal! Ye Lin drew his gun with his other hand and, within a breath, landed consecutive headshots on the infected farther away.

Coming to his senses, He Zheng hurriedly jumped down after him, seized his twin axes, and desperately attacked the infected students!

Bang! Like smashing a watermelon, the blow burst a skull open, splattering his face with blood and thick sprays of brain matter.

His expression was horrified!

Seeing the infected scrambling madly on all fours around the street corner, He Zheng roared at Huang Liang.

"Buzz Cut! Shoot them! Kill them!!"

Huang Liang was the best shot. At that distance, He Zheng couldn't catch them in time! A delay of even a few seconds could let them infect hundreds, perhaps thousands!

He didn't know why Huang Liang was still hesitating. The infected weren't primarily trying to attack them, but to spread the meme.

But at this rate, the entire city would be assimilated within ten minutes at most! Then it would be hell!

Bang! Bang!!

The gunshots were muffled, like pneumatic pistons.

Realizing the severity of the situation, Huang Liang no longer dared hesitate. The psionic sniper rifle in his hands seemed to fire continuously as he rapidly picked off the most distant infected.

Unlike a conventional sniper rifle, every shot produced a burst of white light at the muzzle. Empowered by that light, the bullets struck like shells from a large-caliber howitzer, blasting their targets into chunks of flesh!

"Kill them! Everyone, attack!"

Corpses littered the ground, spreading outward in a radial pattern.

Three minutes later, He Zheng's arms trembled as he panted heavily, bits of flesh clinging to his entire body.

Watching Ye Lin pull his sword from a corpse, he forced a smile uglier than tears.

"Fuck... finally... we finally killed them all!"

Exhausted, He Zheng collapsed onto the ground.

It wasn't that his stamina was poor. He had been too tense to spare even a fraction of his strength. And as the infected grew in number, their speed had kept increasing.

Fortunately, by giving it everything they had, they had finally killed the last infected just before it could charge into the teaching building.

Too fast. The infection had spread far too fast.

To stop it from spreading, they had been forced to kill an unknown number of people who hadn't even been infected yet.

"Did you finish questioning him? Wait, that guy turned into a zombie, too?"

Before he could catch more than a few breaths, He Zheng blurted out the question upon seeing An Ke and Hu Jia come downstairs.

A few drops of blood had splashed onto An Ke's face, evidently the assistant's.

"Yes. He turned into a zombie too quickly. We didn't get much out of him."

An Ke smiled bitterly, then turned and saw Ye Lin approaching.

"What exactly is a meme? Why did that professor turn into a zombie?"

Sheathing his sword, Ye Lin asked in a low voice.

An Ke hadn't had time to explain earlier, but her reaction alone had been enough to show how terrifying it was.

"A meme is something similar to a gene."

"But genes replicate themselves through biological reproduction, while memes replicate themselves through thoughts, behavior, word of mouth, and other such activities."

"Like a viral internet joke. People always find themselves spreading it to others."

"In short, once you're infected with the meme, all it takes is knowing what a zombie is, and you'll become one!"

"The professor probably encountered the meme before, but he didn't know what the meme he'd encountered was."

"Just as a bomb is safe before it's detonated. Once he heard about the zombie virus, saw He Zheng's strength, and even sensed that you were also a 'zombie,' he was instantly infected."

After that convoluted explanation, An Ke wore a bitter expression.

"I'm sorry, Ye Lin. I can't explain it very clearly, either. I don't know much about it myself."

"All I know is, if you think of a meme as a monster, the only way to destroy that monster is to kill everyone who knows about it. Otherwise, as long as even one person knows, the meme can be reborn endlessly."

Looking at the corpses covering the ground, a trace of lingering fear flashed through An Ke's eyes.

"Really, we were lucky. At least we dealt with it before it could spread."

"If we'd found this place any later-even just ten minutes-it would've been enough for him to infect millions!"

The professor turning into a meme ahead of time was a good thing, in a way. Although their arrival had triggered his early transformation, the system would have set it off automatically once the time was up anyway.

Memes spread exponentially. Unlike zombies, which had to attack humans to transmit a virus, a meme could infect someone merely through knowledge, sight, or even hearing the word "zombie."

They had been wondering how the virus would break out. Now, at least, they had their answer.

"Then does that mean we're infected too? Fuck, we know about zombies too!"

Knowing far less than An Ke, He Zheng swallowed and began frantically feeling himself all over.

"Why do I feel like I'm fine?"

He had only heard of memes before. This was his first encounter with one.

"Maybe we aren't? Maybe we are. I don't know. Perhaps the speed of infection depends on our constitution?"

"But that assistant was infected too. He learned about zombies, and since he'd come into contact with the meme, he transformed early."

After listening, Ye Lin said nothing, as though he were thinking something over.

An Ke sighed. She had no idea how they had run into a meme so early.

Still, as she saw it, they had been lucky:

"Ye Lin, it's a good thing we took the second option. With that team's strength, they never would have killed these carriers in time."

"And luckily, nobody in this world knows what zombies are... Of course, we've killed the meme now. As long as they don't come into contact with it, knowing about zombies won't hurt them."

"Now we have a problem: are we infected? If we are, will we have enough medicine? And where's the Stone Tablet? That thing might be the source."

Ye Lin's brow furrowed as he listened. Far from looking relieved, he seemed to have confirmed something and quickly asked:

"An Ke, are you sure the Antidote we exchanged for works on a memetic virus too?"

"And as long as someone hasn't come into contact with the meme like that assistant did, knowing about zombies won't hurt them?"

An Ke paused in surprise:

"Yes. Although it's a meme this time, at its core, it still turns people into zombies."

"As for the second question... that should be right too. On Earth, for instance, lots of people know about zombies and ghosts. But to infect someone, the meme first has to be inside their body, and then information triggers it. But now, the source of the meme has already..."

An Ke suddenly froze halfway through her sentence.

Earth... here...?

Wait, if...

An Ke's head buzzed as a terrifying possibility flashed through her mind.

"You can't be sure, can you?"

"What if the professor didn't become like this because he came into contact with the meme? What if he-no, they-what if everyone here already has the meme inside them?"

"Once they learn the information, it'll trigger as soon as the system's countdown ends..."

(They had succeeded, they had failed, they had been stopped...)

(Carlton found evidence that a memetic outbreak had happened in this world before. That was why he was imitating it, why he longed to evolve! This wasn't Earth. The meme already existed inside their bodies!)

Damn it.

Ye Lin's heart jolted. He thought he knew what the other team's real challenge was!

And where the difficulty of this exam truly lay, and why it was in free mode!

It was a trap!

Choosing either answer on its own was a trap!

"Move!!"

Without hesitation, Ye Lin roared at everyone, then tossed the Communicator to An Ke:

"Stay here and contact them! I'll go find them. We have to stop them, no matter what!"

Catching the Communicator Ye Lin threw her, An Ke jolted in shock.

But a moment later, her face turned deathly pale, her pupils shrinking to pinpoints!

She knew what Ye Lin meant!!

To gain the Military's trust, the other team must have told them about zombies.

And without knowing where the virus would appear, they had only one way to reduce infections: tell the entire world!

What...

zombies were!