Chapter Fourteen: Livening Up the Atmosphere

Yan Luo gazed down at the ground beneath his feet. His left foot was pressed against a human face; with a slight force, there was a crackling sound of bones shattering and skin splitting. Yet no blood or brain matter spilled forth—there was nothing but a skull wrapped in human skin.

First, they had become zombies, then lost all flesh.

The massive sphere, formed by countless bodies, had eight men standing atop it.

Aside from Li Changxin and the eccentric young girl, Yali Takanashi, all seven male newcomers, including Xu Han, Wang Dongwei, and Zhu Xiaoyong, stood upon this corpse ball. The guide, Mu Bai, let out a small sigh of relief; transporting the seven from the ground to the boss's summit had been arduous.

The piled corpses formed the footing for everyone. When the wind blew, the heavy stench of rot and decay threatened to overwhelm, and all the newcomers except Yan Luo looked pale—standing atop dried, sun-baked zombies was hardly pleasant for anyone.

“Why don’t we try something—maybe use gasoline and fire to burn this boss?” Xu Han suggested. As an undertaker, he was familiar with crematoriums, and such a massive ball of corpses should burn.

“Naive.”

Mu Bai, the African guide, smiled. “Didn’t you notice? This corpse ball, over twenty meters in diameter, is floating in midair.”

“Life magnetic field! Every creature has an invisible magnetic field, a type of energy. This boss—the Horde—uses its life magnetic field to gather all the zombies together. And as a single entity, its magnetic field is strong enough to counteract the earth’s gravity and float. If you ignite it, the flames will simply be dispersed by the field.”

“Unless you have something like a rocket car, missile, or thermobaric bomb—large-scale weapons—you’ll have to enter and destroy the core.”

Li Zangai, the flamboyant punk, was bold enough. He picked up a corpse—a girl of about seventeen or eighteen, now a zombie, her skin mottled with dark purple patches from the infection.

But now, all flesh and fat beneath her skin was gone, even her chest was sunken. He shook the corpse, and with a rattling noise, a heap of bones—ribs, thigh bones, arm bones, even an intact skull—fell out from a tear in her back.

In the end, only a tattered human skin remained in Li Zangai’s hand.

“Damn it.”

He tossed the skin aside in disgust.

Xu Han, nearby, seemed to notice something. He picked up another corpse, found a fist-sized hole near the neck on the spine, and with a shake, the decayed skin tore open, the opening widened, and a jumble of bones spilled out.

The undertaker examined several bodies, his face grave. “Every corpse has a hole near the neck.”

“That’s because the boss’s core absorbs flesh and fat from the zombies as nutrients, using a tube,” Mu Bai explained.

The explanation nearly sent Zhu Xiaoyong, the chubby homebody, into another panic.

“I want to go back!”

“You’ve come this far; you want to leave now?” Mu Bai teased the fat man. “With your build, you’d make a perfect meat shield down below. So much fat—boss would have a feast… If the tank leaves, how will the rest of us start the fight?”

“Come on, don’t scare him,” Chu Qingfeng interjected. “Let’s hurry up—end this and go home.”

Tang Tianjie, his expression icy, took a sphere the size of an apple from his waist.

An M67 grenade.

The bullets from his Colt M1911 were useless against a corpse ball over twenty meters across. Only grenades might help—delayed detonation, four to five seconds, effective radius fifteen meters.

“Yan Luo, please dig a pit in the corpse ball,” Tang Tianjie said. Though still resentful after being slapped, he knew the boss’s core would be a tough battle. Breaking through the corpse ball wouldn’t be easy, and he hoped to wear Yan Luo down.

Mu Bai had crafted a plan: dig a hole from the top, all the way to the core.

The zombie sphere—the Horde—had a diameter over twenty meters, with a central cavity less than five meters across. That meant breaking through about ten meters from the outer wall would suffice.

The grenade couldn’t be used after entry; in such a confined space, its blast would kill everyone. Moreover, it was a fragmentation grenade, relying on shrapnel for damage—its only use was to blast a passage.

Tang Tianjie had five grenades.

Yan Luo glanced at the “boundary-breaking lucky man,” then silently picked up a shovel, bent down, and began digging into the surface of the corpse ball.

“I’ll help.” Wang Dongwei joined him, shovel in hand. Chu Qingfeng, now seeing Yan Luo as a teammate and eager to earn his favor, forced himself over despite the nausea.

The three of them together started digging a pit for the grenade.

This was not earth, but corpses. These bodies had first become zombies, their bones brittle, then had all flesh drained, left to decay in the sun and wind.

It didn’t require much effort.

One shovel struck, severing a thigh hung with bone and skin, which Yan Luo tossed aside. Another shovel—this time a skull, its empty eye sockets staring at him.

Wang Dongwei and Chu Qingfeng wore grim faces. Even with two days of fighting zombies, these dried corpses were less disgusting than zombies, but shoveling bones and skin, piling them up, was unbearable.

Zhu Xiaoyong’s teeth chattered.

His earlier courage was already fading.

Even Li Zangai, fearless as ever, looked deeply unsettled.

Tang Tianjie, for all his disgust, felt a secret satisfaction. The boss’s core would be hard to defeat, and every bit of stamina was precious.

Suddenly, joyful humming echoed through the air.

Mu Bai’s mouth hung open, his cigarette dropping to the ground. Yan Luo, who was digging with vigor atop the corpse ball, was humming? It was incongruous—the mood here was of nausea and dread, yet amidst the digging of a grave in corpses, he could hum a song?

Chu Qingfeng stared at Yan Luo in disbelief.

He saw a suspicious flush on Yan Luo’s cheeks, his eyes curved like crescent moons.

This… was a face of pure enjoyment!

Was it genuine happiness, or a facade? Chu Qingfeng, as a boundary-breaking psychologist, could tell clearly. Yan Luo was in a remarkably good mood—so good it was obvious! Digging up corpses with a shovel, he wore the face of someone at a peak of pleasure.

“Is this guy a pervert?” Chu Qingfeng was completely perplexed, unable to comprehend.

At that moment, Yan Luo truly was in a state of “joy.”

Emotional release.

To craft a level-one persona mask required a hundred points of emotion. Aside from the stored disgust, madness, and fear, his emotionless puppet still held ten points of anger and fourteen points of joy, occupying storage space. They had to be released; otherwise, fear and madness could not be absorbed—the capacity was full.

Yan Luo released fourteen points of joy.

Humming a song, he raised his shovel high, splitting corpses in two, dried skulls rolling to his feet, which he crushed underfoot.

“So this is what it’s like to work with a good mood—really not tiring at all!” The cheerful humming filled Yan Luo with strength; his arms moved swiftly, shoveling again and again… In no time, a pit deeper than a person had been dug into the corpse ball.

He leapt from the hole and saw everyone staring at him.

Wang Dongwei’s mouth hung open, his face blank, unmoving like a wax statue. Zhu Xiaoyong, the overweight homebody, had stopped trembling, frozen into a mound of fat. Chu Qingfeng, elegant as ever, and Tang Tianjie, full of confidence—every expression was petrified.

All were staring at him in stunned silence.

Yan Luo, having released his fourteen points of joy, felt a bit awkward at the scene. He bowed his head in thought for a few seconds, then looked up and explained, “I just thought it was too oppressive here, so I sang a song to lighten the atmosphere for everyone. No need to thank me.”

Mu Bai, the guide, tilted his head, mouth slightly agape, staring at Yan Luo. If there were a single phrase to describe his expression, it would be: “Black man with a question mark.”