Chapter 74 I finally saw you

While the two girls were pulling at each other, the others swiftly slashed down two zombies that approached after hearing the noise.

The zombie fell silently, without making a sound.

Seeing that they could manage for the time being, Su Huaijin turned to ask, "What's strange?"

“There is no mission.” Song Rushuang’s expression was grim. “In the past, the simulation pods would give us system missions, but this time, after the pre-show animation, we were immediately put into action. We have no idea what to do—this is not the usual mode of the simulation pod.”

From the menu page disappearing to being forcibly pulled into a garbled copy, and then to the abnormal copy process, everything was very strange.

Whether the simulator was infected with a virus or damaged accidentally, it means they cannot apply ordinary scenarios to this replica.

In other dungeons, you resurrect in the lobby after dying. Will this also happen in this dungeon?

If I die in this instance, will it affect my physical body in reality?

If we fail to clear the dungeon, will it result in the same "all players die" outcome as when we fail other dungeons?

...The reason Su Huaijin was in such a hurry to find Fu Qing was not because she was reckless, but because she knew that time could not be wasted.

The principal suddenly finds himself in this severely injured body, and now he has to face an unharmed enemy. What if his injuries worsen during the fight, or if his wounds become malignant due to lack of timely treatment...?

None of them dared to imagine the consequences.

Song Rushuang understood that they had to hurry, but the factory's interior was a confined space with a complex maze of roads. Zombies might be lurking behind every corner, every fork in the road, and every half-open door. They no longer had time to talk like this.

Even if you are extremely anxious, you must analyze the situation clearly before taking action to avoid causing more casualties.

Song Rushuang silently recited the key points that the principal had repeatedly emphasized during the review of the previous episodes, suppressing the anxiety in her heart.

Su Huaijin adjusted his breathing, shrank further into the crater created by the gunpowder, and observed the swaying corpses not far away. He quickly said, "Alright, let's organize what we just saw. What exactly is the map of this factory like? Where are the zombies mainly located? Does anyone remember the map of the principal's route? Also, which side we can sneak in from to get to her room the fastest? These are all questions we need to consider..."

Someone nearby interjected in a deep voice: "I remember."

Liang Yi subconsciously pushed up his glasses, only to find nothing, realizing that the character he was impersonating wasn't wearing glasses.

“I remember the route the principal took and the map along the way; I can draw it.” He picked up a twig and drew straight lines. “That room is over here… This corridor, by design, should connect to the side door on the west side of the factory. If we need to escape later, we can go this way…”

Knowing that he was selected for the elite class thanks to his excellent performance in the infrastructure class, Liang Yi has been working hard to improve this skill in order to make up for his poor fighting level, in addition to training.

In a matter of seconds, he created a detailed map by hand, almost perfectly replicating the factory layout that Fu Qing and the others had laid out on the table when they were discussing their plans.

The animation's perspective was focused on the arguing group, with the map occupying only a small corner of the screen and many details being blurry.

Apart from Liang Yi, no one would bother to remember it.

Therefore, at this moment, Song Rushuang and the others were unable to verify the accuracy of the map from their memories.

However, the tacit understanding they had developed through sharing life and death in the dungeon over the past few months made them choose to trust Liang Yi without hesitation.

Liang Yi then drew a route on the map: "The principal went in this way."

With the route in place, Su Huaijin made the plan, and the others promptly filled in any gaps they found. This elite team efficiently produced the rescue plan in just two minutes.

The zombies that were lured away showed no signs of returning, and the faint sound of horns could be heard in the distance.

Four years after the apocalypse, there were almost no signs of human activity even in the cities, let alone in the sparsely populated suburbs where this factory was located. Such blatant honking would only attract all the scattered zombies wandering around.

If Lu Yan and his group in the animation planned to rely on their superior driving skills to lure away the horde of zombies surrounding the factory and then quickly shut up to deal with the special zombies one by one.

So Qin Yufei and his group, who had only recently obtained their driver's licenses and whose driving skills were far from up to par, acted with a completely reckless madness.

They couldn't stop, nor could they let the zombies lose their target and return, so they had no choice but to keep blaring their horns.

When zombies came from all directions, they just ran straight into them.

Once trapped in an encirclement, one must try every means to find a way to break through.

Every minute of delay reduces the pressure on the factory workers and increases the chances of getting the principal out safely.

Although they cannot contact each other, the members of the elite class have silently taken on their respective tasks.

Knowing that Qin Yufei and the others might be surrounded by zombies at any moment, the gunpowder team dared not delay. Seeing that no one was around, Song Rushuang made a gesture to act and jumped out of the pit first.

As she walked toward the factory, she couldn't help but drift off into a daze.

Song Rushuang recalled the last scene of the animation, the look in Fu Qing's eyes when he looked up.

When suddenly attacked or betrayed, a normal person would instinctively feel panic and confusion.

But the principal's behavior gave the impression that... she seemed to have anticipated the man's appearance.

Song Rushuang was a little confused.

*

The feeling of a foreign object entering the body is strange, but not entirely unfamiliar.

Fu Qing staggered two steps, feeling dizzy from rapid blood loss. Standing would only worsen the feeling, so she simply sat down against the wall, letting out a soft breath, her lips still tasting the hot, metallic taste of blood.

Not only hers, but also the blood splattered on the side of his face when he killed his teammate. The two bloods mixed together, and the taste buried deep in his memory was clearly retrieved by the simulation pod.

Fu Qing glanced at her friend lying on the ground beside her. The woman's body lay on the cold floor, her eyes gently closed, still warm. If one ignored the bloody hole in her temple, her expression could even be described as peaceful.

Just like the scene that Fu Qing could see when she turned around during countless nights when the two of them lay in the same tent.

The unhurried footsteps stopped in front of her, and a pair of familiar military boots appeared in her lowered vision. The soles of the boots rolled over the dagger lying on the ground, kicking it away in a spinning motion.

Everything is repeating itself just like in the previous life, but that's only natural.

After all, these are her memories.

Fu Qing even remembered the first words the other person uttered.

"Fu Qing, do you know how much I hate your arrogant attitude?"

"Why should they all willingly obey your orders? Why should the supplies we painstakingly brought back be handed over to you for distribution immediately? Why should everyone have to keep watch at night, but they say you're tired from working during the day and would rather not rest themselves than not take your shift?"

“We haven’t met any other living people for almost two months. Maybe there are only a few of us left in this world. And yet I still have to listen to you? Why? Tell me why?!” The man in my memory had bloodshot eyes filled with gloom, making it hard to connect him with the low-key and silent teammate in the group.

Suddenly, his gloomy gaze turned into a smug smile. He crouched down beside Fu Qing and whispered, "If you were the one keeping watch tonight, perhaps none of this would have happened."

And then what did she do?

The prolonged coma afterwards left Fu Qing with only a few fragmented impressions.

She suddenly stood up and slammed the man to the ground, pressing the spare blade in her palm against his throat, piercing straight through his chin and pinning his constantly moving tongue to his palate.

The other party had not expected that he would be powerless against a seriously wounded person, and the ferocity in his eyes gradually turned into fear.

He uttered a mumbled cry for help, then screamed in agony, "No, you..."

Fu Qing hated arguing with a dead man and had no energy to listen to his arguments anymore, so he simply dealt with him, kicked the body out of the room, and blocked the door behind him. He then stayed in the closed room with his two dead teammates, quietly waiting for help.

Or perhaps, they are waiting to die.

In the last few minutes she remained conscious, she pondered the man's words, but what appeared before her eyes was her companions proudly showing off the supplies they had painstakingly found.

"You've been clearing out zombies, didn't you see how many cans of food were hidden in that cellar? Here, let me show you, we can have a good meal tonight."

And when they urged her to rest, the unyielding look in their eyes said, "We still need you to travel during the day. How can we ensure our safety if you're not in good spirits? Boss, please go to sleep."

—Distributing supplies?

—Are they vying to keep watch at night?

Fu Qing almost laughed.

If Lu Yan and the others knew that their actions were interpreted this way, they would probably jump up and down, rubbing the goosebumps on their arms, and tell him not to say such disgusting things.

Even when only a few humans remain in the world, some still blindly incite conflict out of jealousy.

She let the most insignificant person kill her most important friend.

At this moment, Fu Qing looked at the military boots that had stopped in front of him, and the spare blade quietly slid out from his sleeve.

If the traitor were to appear before her, she wouldn't hesitate to kill him again.

If not...

"Fu Qing." The voice that rang out was smiling, but the words it spoke were completely different from what she remembered: "I've finally met you."

*

Fu Qing finally decided to waste a little effort to lift his head.

She sat with her back against the wall, lazily resting her head against it. Upon hearing this, her expression showed no surprise, but rather an understanding that her guess had been confirmed.

"Zombie King?"

Her voice was a little hoarse from exhaustion, but her tone was calm.

The "He" worshipped by countless people, bearing the guise of a traitor, nodded: "You guessed it."

“I wasn’t sure at first…” Fu Qing adjusted his posture, accidentally aggravating his wound. Afraid of killing himself, he simply continued to lie there like a dead man, “until you uttered that disgusting opening line.”

From her interference with Liu Yong's plans to killing the skeleton, the two sides investigated each other for a long time, and then the red-clothed woman's failed recruitment attempt, with the believers she brought dying at the hands of Lu Yan and Hao Zhenye.

After several tugs of struggle, it could indeed be described as "finally".

The Zombie King asked curiously, "How did you guess that?"

"Some reasonable associations."

The system's ability to predict the future, conjure up numerous high-tech gadgets out of thin air, and create a "blind spot" for over two thousand people right under our noses demonstrates that its capabilities are far beyond what humans can currently imagine.

Able to isolate system signals and infiltrate the simulation pods under its control—besides the Zombie King, Fu Qing couldn't think of anyone else who could do that.

It now appears that its capabilities are comparable to those of the system, and each has its own limitations.

For example, the system has almost no room to function outside of the campus, as it cannot detect the presence of students and can only rely on the youth support program.

For example, the zombie king cannot enter the school, and certain sacrifices are required when helping believers evolve.

The system and the zombie king are like two sides of the same coin, representing two opposing forces of good and evil in this worldview, vying for control over the fate of the world.

When the suspicion arose that "the zombie king had infiltrated the simulation pod," Fu Qing remembered the suburban cabin the system had previously bought for her and the cameras it had bypassed.

The system clearly has some ability to use the internet.

They had previously suspected that some of the believers possessed exceptional hacking skills, enabling them to establish a secret cult with a global reach through the internet.

Both online play and downloading duplicate data in the simulator require the use of the internal network. If the system malfunctions, it's not impossible for the Zombie King to take advantage of the situation.

With this in mind, she was about 70-80% confident.

But Fu Qing was too lazy to explain this long-winded explanation to the zombie king, so after uttering that sentence, she stopped there.

After waiting for a while, the Zombie King, somewhat exasperated, gave a very official compliment, seemingly in a good-natured manner: "You are very smart."

Fu Qing retorted bluntly, "But you're like an idiot."

She was indeed seriously injured and would be in a coma for a week. She was barely managing to stay conscious, so she maintained that half-dead posture and said sarcastically in a half-dead tone: "I don't understand why you let that scarred woman appear in front of me so early and give me so many free kills."

Currently, the main activities of the devout organizations are, like Liu Yong's, to incite various heinous incidents, stir up riots around the world, and arouse extreme emotions among people.

Fu Qing guessed that this was one of the necessary conditions for the zombie king to upgrade its strength.

The evidence is that after the skeleton died, news reports from around the world showed a significant increase in heinous incidents, even more so than in the previous life.

When the hooded woman's henchmen appeared, the infected's abilities had been greatly upgraded.

After the deaths of these henchmen, news reports surfaced of a series of heinous incidents that had never occurred in the previous life.

This must be the zombie king recovering its strength.

That's why Fu Qing didn't understand why the Zombie King was in such a hurry to expose himself.

It can develop stealthily in the shadows, making it very difficult for Fuqing to find it.

Even the system didn't include killing the zombie king in the main quest, clearly indicating that it had no hope for it, but now it has actually come knocking on the door.

"You haven't given up on trying to recruit me?" Fu Qing's normal speech always carried a hint of sarcasm, let alone her genuinely sarcastic tone.

They completely ignored the extremely unfavorable situation where the other party was unharmed, while they themselves had a large hole in their stomach.

Fortunately, the zombie king was able to remain calm, or perhaps it is simply that such creatures are different from humans and do not show their emotions.

It said calmly, "This is just an excuse for the phoenix to contact you. I can't reveal my existence or that guy's. With it around, I can't let you join my camp. Besides, you wouldn't join anyway."

—The "it" it refers to should be the system that Fuqing is bound to.

Fu Qing's theory was confirmed once again: the Zombie King, like the system, was a reincarnation from a previous life.

This suspicion arose as soon as the infected individuals were discovered to have appeared earlier than expected; otherwise, there would be no way to explain why there were so many changes in this lifetime.

In a sense, the Zombie King won in the previous life, and the zombies eventually took over the planet.

If such a "struggle" requires energy, the system must be the one that consumes more energy.

So it's normal that in this reincarnated life, the zombie king awakens earlier than the system.

According to the hooded woman, she came into contact with the zombie king more than three months before Fu Qing was bound to the system.

It was this three-month gap that put Fu Qing and the system at a disadvantage from the very beginning. The secret organization of the believers was established, which led to the recovery of the zombie king's abilities, and intermediate zombies appeared on Blue Star two years ahead of schedule.

The Zombie King was in a completely advantageous position, so there was absolutely no need for it to rush to find Fu Qing.

"Then what did you come to see me for? To say hello to your future rival?" Fu Qing waved his hand. "You've said your hello, you can leave now—would you like to shake hands?"

The man in front of me smiled, but the smile was very strange. It seemed that he did not really understand the mechanism of human facial expressions. It was just a clumsy imitation, moving his muscles and exuding a strong sense of being unhuman.

"Don't be like that. I deliberately chose this node to make a copy so that I could have a proper chat with you." It said softly, "Fu Qing, it's hard to find a chance for you to suffer a setback. I searched through all your memories to find this one."

Fu Qing said coldly, "You've seen my memories, so you should know how this person died in the end."

"Of course I know," the man said with a smile, then suddenly moved.

He raised his foot and kicked at Fu Qing's wrist, where the blade was hidden. The kick was delivered with full force; the blade clattered to the ground, and Fu Qing leaped into the air. Her movements were so agile, as if her wounds had vanished. She murmured, "You're not human, so you probably don't know that half of humans have a very fragile weakness..."

If it had been an ordinary man instead of a zombie king, the knee strike would have probably made its pupils dilate in shock. But it didn't understand. It only felt a tearing pain, as if its intestines were all twisted together. It staggered and its back hunched over. Fu Qing followed up with a flying kick that slammed it heavily against the wall, scattering rubble everywhere.

“You probably don’t know how weak this guy is. He always hides at the back and does nothing when killing zombies. He’s only survived this long because of good luck and clinging to powerful figures. He’s using his body…” Fu Qing retorted, “How dare you?”

She kept talking, but her consciousness was already starting to fade. Taking advantage of the man lying on the ground, she bent her knees against him and grabbed his throat with both hands.

In the hazy light, the zombie king suddenly raised his head and let out a roar.

After a moment of silence, the entire factory was suddenly filled with the sound of rumbling footsteps.

Fu Qing knew something was wrong and tried to strangle the man to close the door, but she was a beat too slow. Her strength was waning, and the other man seized the opportunity to turn her around in a flash, pinning her to the ground. His iron-like fingers mimicked her actions and grabbed her throat.

"You just asked me why I came?" The footsteps grew closer, and the man bent down to touch Qing's cheek, whispering, "Of course I'm here to kill you."

"The simulator is connected to the human brain. If I kill you here, your system will be given a host that is motionless, speechless, and unresponsive, like a vegetable for a short period of time."

"The doomsday you speak of is coming, and then you will be nothing more than a useless vessel."

"Without you, without the system, humanity will be utterly defenseless. This time, they will perish even sooner."

It looked at Fu Qing's gradually unfocused eyes, and felt a clear sense of pleasure because it had gained such a clear advantage in its first confrontation with her.

The person beneath him struggled again to lift his knees—

But it won't fall for it again.

The zombie king braced Fu Qing with his legs, stopping her movements. To maintain his balance, he temporarily loosened his grip, allowing fresh air to flow into his lungs. Fu Qing suddenly coughed violently.

She coughed and laughed, "You've miscalculated."

"I am injured, but I am not alone." Lying on the ground, every sound was amplified by the earth beneath her. As if hearing something, Fu Qing's smile widened slightly. "That memory...you didn't see the end, did you?"

Before she could finish speaking, she forcefully pulled on the man's collar, forcing him to bend down and get closer to her, his shadow completely covering Fu Qing.

The next second, a loud bang was heard overhead, and the factory ceiling and beams collapsed together!