Chapter 717: The Scent
She decided to trust this person.
Lun Heping, in the throes of his 'chuunibyou' phase, found it even easier to accept such novelties.
If zombies could appear, what was so strange about a treasure? The world had changed.
This was their shared sentiment.
...
"Sis, this is my treasure, the Moon-Drawing Bow!"
Lun Heping held a longbow intricately carved with countless mysterious runes, caressing its body with an almost obsessive fondness, showing it off as if to boast.
Having consumed a treasure seed, he finally understood what had happened to his sister. But he was even more curious: monsters had only appeared today for the first time, so how had Lun Qin managed to get a treasure seed in advance?
"I want to ask something." After gaining the enhancement of the Moon-Drawing Bow, Lun Heping silently appeared behind Lun Qin and whispered into her ear.
"Sister, what grade is your treasure?"
"Why ask that?"
"Mine is an A-grade treasure." Lun Heping was like a child who had unexpectedly scored high on an exam, impatiently showing off by asking others about their grades.
"..."
"Mine is S-grade."
"..."
His attempt at showing off fell flat, and the atmosphere grew awkward.
...
"These zombies aren't fast; their top speed is just a normal jog. As long as you don't get surrounded, most people can take them down one-on-one.
The only thing to watch out for is not to get injured by them. Once you're scratched or bitten, you'll quickly turn into a zombie too."
Lun Qin continued to earnestly record her "zombie notes."
...
"Ding-dong, ding-dong..." The clock struck midnight.
Thus ended a day of bloodshed.
From afternoon into evening, Lun Qin, relying on her superior martial arts, scurried everywhere to observe the zombies.
The apocalypse had arrived too suddenly. Butterfly-shaped monsters appeared without warning, and countless people, before they could even react, were killed by the monsters and transformed into true walking dead.
Lun Qin incidentally rescued some people along the way, but she had no intention of taking them along to survive. She simply found a supermarket and settled them there.
As strangers, she felt this was already the utmost benevolence.
...
"I've grown stronger again." Under the tainted moonlight, Lun Qin sat beside the coffin, speaking softly, not caring if Bai Mo was listening anymore.
"My power has increased by about a tenth."
"Does this mean that, of the eight billion people on Water Blue Star, nearly one billion died today alone?"
There was no response from the coffin.
"One billion people! Not one billion pigs!"
The more she knew, the more horrified she felt.
Due to the peculiar ability of the 'Zero-Hour Mystery Seeker,' Lun Qin could, through simple mathematical statistical inference, roughly deduce the current number of surviving people on Water Blue Star.
"How did they even appear..."
In the pitch-black room, she lay awake all night.
On just the first day, countless monsters appearing randomly across the world had already destroyed the water and electricity supply in most cities.
Lun Qin's city was no exception. Several monsters appeared right at the water treatment plant, transforming all the unsuspecting plant employees into zombies.
...
"It's time to go."
Without water or electricity, and with the food at home insufficient for two big eaters to last another two days, the Lun Qin siblings had no choice but to leave.
The number of zombies in the city was increasing every moment. Survivors from the first day of the apocalypse were constantly getting infected. If they didn't leave soon, even if she possessed strength to uproot mountains and cover the world, she might still be buried alive by a sea of zombies.
New York City, where they lived, had a resident population of over seven million, and counting outsiders, it approached ten million. Even if only half of them turned into zombies, five million corpses would be a sea from which Lun Qin had no confidence in escaping before she collapsed from exhaustion.
She wanted to flee to the countryside.
In such a zombie apocalypse, places with higher population density would also have higher zombie density. Only sparsely populated villages would be relatively easier to handle.
"Can't we stay two more days? Just two days." Lun Heping was reluctant to leave the apartment that still offered temporary security.
"Zombies are climbing up the apartment building, floor by floor. At most two days, they'll reach here."
"But you're really amazing, sis... you can definitely kill them all."
"These things only multiply the more you kill them. There are at least a million zombies in New York City now. How many can I kill?"
"Alright..." Lun Heping regretfully locked the door. "I swear, one day I'll come back here and kill them all!"
He said the latter part very softly, but it didn't escape Lun Qin's ears.
"You carry the luggage, I'll take this." Lun Qin pointed to the coffin that had also been brought outside the door.
"Is that your treasure? But aren't treasures supposed to be able to be stored inside your body?"
"No."
"Then what is it?"
"Don't ask."
Lun Heping noticed that the patterns on the surface of the coffin his sister was carrying seemed somewhat similar to the markings on his Moon-Drawing Bow...
...
"Once you step out that door, you'll have to learn to face the new world independently."
The two stood at the ground-floor exit of the apartment building, surrounded by over a dozen heaps of blood and flesh so mangled they were unrecognizable as human.
The zombies' vitality was simply too tenacious. Even a headshot couldn't instantly kill them. Headless zombies could still instinctively fight for over half an hour using their torsos.
"Brute..." Lun Heping habitually muttered, having just witnessed the spectacle of hand-making meat-mush, bones and all. A girl, wielding a stick thicker than her leg, furiously clubbing the encroaching zombies. One blow would break bones and sever tendons; ten blows would obliterate any human form.
"You must survive." Lun Qin didn't dwell on the appellation, instead earnestly admonishing him.
She knew she wasn't invincible. The 'Zero-Hour Mystery Seeker's' ability told Lun Qin that she would always be just an average, and one day she wouldn't be able to protect her brother.
"Bai, if you truly are a god, why would you arrange such a cruel trial for us mortals..."
...
"Miscalculated. I didn't expect that after activating my superhuman powers, my body's need for food would be so immense."
Meanwhile, in another corner of New York City, Yu Nan, still in his safe house, was astonished by his dramatically increased appetite.
Ten times the average person's food intake!
Of course, food was plentiful. He had prepared enough reserves for ten years of consumption, so even with ten times the appetite, it would last at least a year.
But the problem was, the water and electricity supply were completely cut off. The more he ate, the more he excreted, and he couldn't possibly use precious drinking water to flush the toilet. Soon, certain foul things would fill the commode.
With the lid currently down, there wouldn't be any smell in the safe house for now, but if he stayed for another week or two, the entire place would likely reek of that stuff...
And the weather was quite warm, precisely when microbial decomposition was active, making the smell even more intense.
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