Yang Yong's adrenaline surged wildly.
The stifled frustration brought on by that oppressive aura vanished.
In its place came a thoroughly exhilarating rush.
But...
Something even more unexpected happened.
Corpse Ancestor Jiang Chen.
The instant the axe's light split that enormous net.
In the moment before the tear could heal.
He moved.
Just a flash.
Faster than the eye could follow.
So fast...
It was as though time itself had stopped flowing in that instant.
Jiang Chen wedged himself right into the center of the tear in the great net.
The net could repair itself, and both sides of the tear were desperately closing toward the middle.
But Jiang Chen's body was lodged there, pinned firmly into the tear like a wedge.
His body began to glow.
A dark golden light.
The light burst from within him, spreading along his blood vessels and tracing intricate patterns across his skin.
Then...
He spread his arms.
"Return!"
A thunderous roar.
His voice shook all of Mechanical City.
The moment his words fell...
All the second-generation zombies around him began to change.
Their bodies began to turn insubstantial.
From solid flesh into translucent silhouettes of light.
Then...
Those silhouettes continued to collapse, contracting inward, until finally...
They all became beads of blood.
The blood beads hung in the air.
Each was the size of a human head, with thick, dark red blood flowing inside.
Countless tiny faces surfaced and vanished across the blood beads.
Those faces were the true forms of the second-generation zombies.
The blood bead Xiaoying became was the largest and the deepest in color.
When she turned into a blood bead, she was still holding that forty-meter-long blade.
The blade turned insubstantial along with her, becoming a mass of dark red light that merged into the blood bead.
"Come!"
All