Chapter 6 (1/2)

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

Soft, gentle light shone through the cracks of the cabinet’s door, reaching Zhang Heng’s eyes.

He slowly opened his eyes and, looking through the cabinet door, he could confirm that everything in the guard room was the same as the previous day. He only opened the cabinet door slowly, after finding no signs of danger.

He stretched a little bit, body sore after staying curled up the whole night. He looked beneath his feet and saw that the dead zombie was still lying in a puddle of sticky blood from its head.

He hesitated for a bit before deciding to search the zombie a little. To his dismay, he didn’t find anything of value on the dead zombie, only a very decayed wallet and a rubber stick that didn’t seem like it could do much damage.

He walked to the window and flipped the shutter up a bit, seeing several more zombies out in the lobby. However, after finding nothing after searching the whole night, they decided to return to their slumber to conserve energy, which made them behave just like computers on standby.

Those zombies laid flat on the ground, looking like dead bodies that had been lying around for years. If Zhang Heng hadn’t seen them shambling about, looking for him, the night before, he probably wouldn’t have believed that those mummy-like bodies were actually flesh-eating undead desperate to eat people.

“Sh**.”

He cursed under his breath. He had no idea how else the zombies would be able to able to detect humans other than through sound and smell. But it was obvious that he needed to walk past those sleeping zombies if he were to get past the lobby. If he woke any one of them, he would most probably end up with all the zombies in the entire building coming after him.

Zhang Heng was deeply troubled by then. Truth be told, he was just a normal human being living in the 21st century. Strength-wise, he was just average for a person like himself. In terms of money and power, he was as average as he could be as well. He had no advantage to speak of, other than knowing more about the situation he was in than most people.

And, at that moment, he knew that that damned Dimensional Star was going to make him fight the zombies that were proven capable of wiping out human life.

“I’ll eventually end up dead if I just hole up in here. Better just do what I can then.” Given the situation, with no safe option, he gritted his teeth and went to wipe that sticky, gooey blood from the dead zombie all over him. While it was true that the T-Virus was inside the zombie’s body, the virus could only infect others through the exchange of blood and bodily fluids. That was to say, that so long as he wasn’t lathering the blood on his wounds, there wouldn’t be any risk of getting infected.

He took off his clothes and lathered that caked puddle of blood all over his body. It took him mere moments to turn himself into a bloodied man oozing a putrid stench.

He speculated that the zombies detect humans through three types of sensory perception: sight, smell, and hearing. If they could actually develop some kind of sixth sense, humans would have been rendered completely extinct a long time ago, instead of still having pockets of humans hanging around even 12 years later. Sight was the most difficult to speculate among the three senses. Zombies didn’t eat their own kind, so he wondered how were they able to tell their own kind apart from humans.

If his speculations were correct, when humans first became zombies, they emitted some kind of biological marker marking them as zombies. It was that biological marker that let zombies tell the difference between their own kind and those they saw as food.

That was why he lathered himself all over with zombie blood—he was trying to mask his own scent using the scent from that dead zombie’s blood.