Chapter Twelve: The Zombie Ball

"Hoo..."
The sound of the wind echoed through the small town, its chill seeping everywhere like a lingering mist, shrouding the sunlight so that even midday was cloaked in gloom.

When the guide, Mu Bai, led them to the so-called "Garden Box Boss," Yan Luo instantly gained seven points of fear. The Heartless Doll continued to absorb the rising tide of fearful emotions.

Zhu Xiaoyong, the overweight recluse, collapsed onto the ground with a heavy thud.

Even Xu Han, the mortician who'd prepared countless corpses for burial, felt a chill surge up his spine and sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth.

Psychologist Chu Qingfeng, overwhelmed by the shocking sight before him, remained silent.

The sky above was dominated by something unbelievable.

Suspended over the distant square was a sphere.

Yes—a sphere!

A massive ball over twenty meters in diameter, larger than the neighboring buildings, hovering in midair above the ground.

It was a "corpse ball."

A ball composed of countless zombies packed together. If the corpse ball were a human body, then each zombie was a cell; countless cells joined to form a person, and here, thousands upon thousands of zombies clustered to form this monstrous sphere.

Why didn’t the mass of zombies collapse? How could such a gigantic ball float in the air?

It was utterly illogical.

Zombies, though corpses, were essentially a kind of biochemical monster, highly sensitive to sound; even the slightest noise could draw their attention. Yet, these zombies covering the meaty sphere lay motionless, as if truly dead.

Yan Luo also noticed that the surface zombies were withered and grayish-white, their flesh and fat seemingly sucked dry.

The zombies on the surface were little more than skin stretched over bone, their skulls pressing against the papery flesh to create faces that resembled grinning skulls—men, women, old, young—each with empty black sockets where eyes once were.

It was a sight beyond anyone’s wildest imagination!

"You... this is the boss you want us to handle?" Tang Tianjie, blessed with a luck that defied human limits and always eager for a boss fight, felt his scalp tingle and his face turn ashen at the sight of the floating corpse ball.

Mu Bai, the guide, took a slow, satisfied drag from his cigarette.

"That's right. This boss is the singularity of this zombie garden world."

"Guide, are you trying to scare us? That ball must be made of countless zombies. Even if it fell apart, just being buried under them would kill us, never mind the boss itself," Wang Dongwei, the failure, stammered, his voice trembling though he hadn't collapsed like Zhu Xiaoyong.

"Don’t be so timid."
Mu Bai dismissed their fears. "With courage like yours, how will you survive? Once you enter the supernatural worlds of the East—witchcraft, curses, ghosts, and hopping corpses—you’ll start to miss the warmth of biochemical horror worlds."

"It’s just a ball of zombies. Think of it as a giant meatball—what’s there to fear? Once, in a parallel Thailand, I was cursed, and fat maggots crawled up my throat one by one... Ah, that was a special kind of agony."

"I am never going into those supernatural worlds!" Wang Dongwei declared through gritted teeth, his face pale.

"That’s not up to you. You can choose whether to enter the worlds you find by program search, but Dreamspace will also forcibly conscript people into certain parallel worlds—mandatory missions you can’t avoid."

Mu Bai laughed heartily, his dark face gleaming. "Don’t be too afraid. Let me introduce the boss."

"I found this boss and scouted it out myself." Mu Bai’s destiny talent had gone through two upgrades, now allowing him to transform his body into energy—immune to physical attacks and able to pass through matter.

"This zombie sphere, more than twenty meters across, has a cavity at its center less than five meters in diameter. That’s the boss’s core. The outermost layer is made up of zombies whose blood and flesh seem to have been drained away—skin stretched over bone, forming a shell of skeletal, skin-clad zombies."

"So, breaking through the outer layer of skin and bone won’t be too dangerous. The middle layer consists of zombies that still have flesh, but most of them are dead and unmoving."

"Once you break through the shell and the meat layer, you’ll reach the central cavity."

"Destroy the core inside, and the boss will collapse and disintegrate."

Mu Bai’s explanation was simple, but the implication was clear: the newcomers were to crawl into that enormous ball of corpses.

Everyone was aghast.

Yan Luo was very pleased—or so it could be said. Having lost his emotions, he felt only the prompts relayed by the Heartless Doll.

You feel intense emotions:
Madness +1, +1, +1, +1...
Disgust had already maxed out at 20 points, and though fear had been at 30, the sight of the corpse sphere had pushed it higher. Madness, which had been at 2 points, finally began to rise as well, radiating especially from the overweight recluse.

"No, I’m not going! Zombies, bosses, none of it has anything to do with me—I want to go home! I want to go home!" Zhu Xiaoyong wailed, his fat neck pulsing with bulging veins, his eyes bloodshot to the point of bleeding.

"Calm down—what’s wrong with you?" Wang Dongwei tried to comfort his teammate, only to see Zhu Xiaoyong thrash his pudgy arms wildly, as if gripped by madness.

"Alas..."

Psychologist Chu Qingfeng glanced at the fat man, shook his head, and sighed. "It seems he’s developed extreme fear syndrome."

"Extreme fear syndrome?" Xu Han, the mortician, was puzzled.

"It’s the same as being scared out of your wits, or to the point of insanity."

No longer interested in the recluse, Chu Qingfeng recalled the material collected at the research institute yesterday.

"Do you remember the page from the Gospel of Mark in yesterday’s diary? The passage said:
'My name is Legion, for we are many.'
'The demons came out and went into the pigs. The herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and drowned—there were about two thousand pigs.'

"The boss’s corpse ball probably symbolizes the two thousand pigs, and the core the demon. All we need to do is pass through the pigs and destroy the demon. The diary’s researcher, Dr. Smith, muttered about concentrating the nutrients of everyone into one person..."

He swept his gaze across the group, reading their expressions. "Most likely, the core of the corpse ball is Dr. Smith himself, using the gathered zombies as nutrients for viral evolution... Just think of our enemy as a mad scientist."

At that moment, Mu Bai interrupted, "Enough talk. Let’s not waste time. Prepare for action. If you break through this parallel world, Dreamspace’s rewards will be generous. If you’re lucky, you might even get a Dream Gene Point! And defeating a boss of this caliber will yield rare items."

Noticing Zhu Xiaoyong still raving and the others pale-faced, Mu Bai considered for a few seconds before saying, "As your guide, I’m not authorized to force you to fight any boss. Besides, I gain no benefit from its defeat."

"I can’t help you fight the boss, but I can at least rescue you if you’re in mortal danger. Inside the corpse ball, no matter what you encounter, no matter if you can destroy the boss or not, I promise—no one will die."

"Those willing to go, go. Those unwilling, stay behind."

"I won’t go! I won’t!" Zhu Xiaoyong croaked, his voice raw.

The Heartless Doll’s madness value had now reached twelve.

"I..."

From afar, the corpse sphere, like a massive brain or walnut made of zombies, sent a chill through Wang Dongwei, making his skin crawl. He said weakly, "I don’t want to go either."

"As a mortician, I simply cannot enter a sphere made of so many corpses... It would be a desecration," Xu Han murmured, slowly shaking his head.