It turns out

“Thump, thump.”

Her heart pounded fiercely. Song Ning clutched her chest, walking weakly along the winding mountain road.

Thankfully, there were almost no zombies nearby. She carried the claw hammer, swaying unsteadily, her eyes brimming with suppressed anger.

‘Damn Huang Zhong…’

After walking for half an hour, a small mountain village appeared before her eyes. The ground was particularly slick due to the recent rain. As Song Ning stepped onto the rural path, mud clung stubbornly to the soles of her feet, making walking arduous and her footsteps loud.

“Squish, squish.”

Every step tightened her nerves.

Before long, she reached a slightly larger rural wooden house. It was surrounded by a fenced yard, and in the backyard, there was an open root cellar.

Song Ning licked her bloodless lips. It seemed her luck wasn’t too bad.

Dragging her weakened body, she opened the decaying fence gate.

“Creak—”

It was very quiet; no zombie roars. Song Ning stood cautiously still.

“Roar, oof, oof—”

After about two seconds, she heard a zombie’s low growl from inside the house. A zombie was trapped in the house, furiously thrashing against the wooden door.

Song Ning breathed a sigh of relief.

She rummaged around the yard, picked up a urea sack, and approached the cellar entrance. It was pitch black inside; nothing could be seen.

Song Ning felt a bit nervous. If there were zombies down there, a fierce battle would be unavoidable.

She picked up a pebble from the ground and tossed it in.

“Plink,” a splashing sound. It seemed a lot of water had seeped in due to the heavy rain a few days prior.

“Roar!!!”

Song Ning’s face turned grim. A zombie, missing half its face, suddenly appeared directly below the cellar entrance. The not-so-bright sunlight illuminated its face.

Its eyes were pale, its body greyish-blue, and a mushroom had actually grown on its nose, twitching at Song Ning.

It glared at Song Ning menacingly, foul-smelling saliva dripping.

Facing a single zombie head-on was already difficult now, let alone in this situation… she needed to find a way…

Song Ning frowned, looking around. The claw hammer in her hand was her only self-defense weapon; she couldn’t carelessly use it to smash the zombie in the cellar. If it didn’t work, what then?

She searched the yard but found nothing useful, so her gaze fell on the house where a zombie was trapped.

The cold wind howled. She stood before the door, watching the zombie constantly roaring with its blood-filled maw. The door was about to fall apart from being rammed. It was secured by an iron lock, which had trapped the zombie inside.

Song Ning calmly stood before the door, gripping the claw hammer in her right hand, and swung it with all her might at the wooden frame connected to the iron lock.

“Clang!” The iron lock fell to the ground with a loud thud.

“Roar!” Freed from its confinement, the zombie lunged fiercely at Song Ning.

Song Ning agilely dodged backward, but a sharp pain shot through her chest, and blood welled up at the corner of her mouth.

She had no time to worry about it. Finding a precise angle, the claw hammer swung with a forceful gust of wind, embedding itself in the zombie’s forehead.

In just a moment, the zombie lost all signs of life.

Song Ning gasped for air, leaning against the wooden door, pressing on her chest repeatedly.

Pain! Pain!

A suffocating pain…

Resting for less than a minute, she immediately got up and searched the house.

After a long search, she opened the utility room and found a wood-cutting axe inside.

‘Might as well try it…’

Song Ning hesitated, holding the axe, then switched weapons. She aimed the claw hammer and threw it with all her might.

However, she had never been trained to use such a weapon as a long-range attack, and her aim was too poor to bear looking at.

Song Ning’s face was grim. The utility room hadn’t been fully searched yet; perhaps there were other weapons?

She returned to the utility room and continued searching. To her surprise, she found a blunderbuss in a corner. There was a box of rusted pellets and a small pouch of gunpowder.

It was enough. Although the blunderbuss could fire at most two shots a minute and had limited power, it was more than sufficient to take down a zombie with a headshot.

Joy lit up Song Ning’s eyes. She returned to the cellar entrance, cleared the blunderbuss barrel, and loaded it with gunpowder and pellets.

“Bang!—”

The zombie in the cellar fell heavily into the water.

Song Ning sighed in relief, then turned and placed one foot on the cellar ladder.

‘Will this suddenly break?’ She frowned.

But there was no other choice; she had to use this ladder. Although the cellar was less than three meters deep, in the past, she could have jumped down directly. But now she couldn’t; her chest ached terribly, and jumping down would only worsen her injuries.

What she feared came to pass.

Song Ning carefully held both sides of the ladder, descending rung by rung. Perhaps because it was filled with water, the bottom of the ladder suddenly slipped.

“Hiss…!”

In a desperate moment, Song Ning only managed to jump off the ladder, but her calf was badly scraped by something, tearing a hole in her black trousers, which now bled profusely.

There wasn’t much time to worry about too many things. Song Ning clutched the urea sack in her hand, fumbling in the darkness. There seemed to be many edible things.

In the dark, she touched something round and smooth, feeling like sweet potatoes. There were many more like them.

She stuffed them into the urea sack one after another, but fearing it would be too heavy to carry back, she only took thirty in the end.

Now they had enough food, but something more troubling occurred to Song Ning.

She couldn’t get back up… She pulled the ladder out of the ankle-deep water, only to see that one side of the ladder had broken apart when it fell earlier.

‘What now?’

She tried to repair it, but this ladder was an antique from who knew when; it seemed to have been broken beyond repair for a long time, and likely already broken when it leaned against the wall before. She now understood why there was a zombie trapped down here—it couldn’t get out at all!

‘What to do!?’

Thinking of Ping Chengcheng in the wooden cabin, she felt a surge of anxiety. She suddenly realized that binding Ping Chengcheng was a very foolish move. If she got trapped here and couldn’t get out, wouldn’t Ping Chengcheng be tied up and unable to move until she starved to death?

Song Ning tried to climb out of the cellar bare-handed, but because of the recent rain, the walls were wet and slippery, offering no purchase. Instead, she ended up covered in scrapes!

If this continued, the smell of blood would eventually attract zombies. Song Ning dared not move.

She suddenly remembered what the girl had said earlier when she was delirious with fever. Something about Song Ning dying if she ate the cracker…

She shook her head. ‘How could that be?’

She didn’t give up. ‘Was there a possibility that she could actually dig footholds in the cellar wall with her hands, since the wall seemed to be made of mud?’

No sooner said than done, she immediately started digging. Soon, her fingers burned with pain, but she didn’t slow down at all.

Within a few seconds, she felt a piercing pain in her fingernail. With a cry of agony, she pulled her hand back as if shocked.

Blood welled up from her fingertips; her fingernail had been ripped off!

She gasped for breath, tears of pain welling in her eyes, and looked at the direction she had been digging. Inside were grayish-blue stone bricks.

‘Damn it!’

Song Ning kicked the wall heavily, as if all strength had left her body, and collapsed powerlessly to the ground. The icy stagnant water spread, engulfing part of her body and slowly drawing away her body heat. Her head throbbed, and her breathing became labored…

She weakly propped herself against the nearby wall. A foul, metallic smell reached her nostrils.

She turned her head and, in the darkness, came face to face with a pair of dead, unseeing eyes, and next to it, a zombie claw with a trace of fresh flesh and black ragged cloth.

It wasn’t the zombie Song Ning had killed.

‘So that person turned into a zombie this way?’

Song Ning gave a bitter laugh.

The scrape on her calf began to clot, and dark blood vessels started to emerge.

‘This, then, was despair.’