Chapter 5: The Birth of the Fallen God
Li Ye felt not surprise but delight. He slightly raised his right arm, gazing at the strange creature before him as if it were a rare and precious treasure.
The atmosphere in the pharmacy room grew strange, the roles of hunter and prey switching in an instant.
Beside the zombie-like mutant swirled a cloud resembling a dark storm, but upon closer inspection, it was a swarm of red-eyed flies!
Perhaps sensing the change in the surrounding light, the buzzing of these giant flies grew louder and more frantic.
The mutant fixed its pitch-black eyes rigidly on Li Ye and let out two low growls before retreating two cautious steps.
Seeing that Li Ye made no further move, the creature quickly fled from the doorway, disappearing without a trace.
Li Ye lowered his arm and smiled.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t fight or catch it; now simply was not the right moment to slaughter the mutant.
“Covered in flesh scales, able at this stage to control some smaller creatures, with astonishing perception. It seems this beast will become the future corpse king of this land. If your talent is exceptional enough to condense into crystalline cerebral fluid, then life and death will no longer be in your hands.”
A chilling smile crept across Li Ye’s face once more, causing even the distant mutant to feel its legs weaken.
Leaning against the wall, a nurse who had witnessed the strange man scare off the horrific monster with just a lift of his hand showed a glimmer of hope, her lips trembling.
“Save… me.”
Li Ye glanced at her and shook his head, yet still spoke gently:
“This virus is triggered by the red mist. If you can endure it, you have a chance to become a ‘Chosen One.’ This is your fate. No one else can help you, including me.”
The woman looked at Li Ye helplessly, not understanding his words at all.
Without delay, Li Ye activated a plastic bucket nearby, which rose into the air and floated beside him. Some antibiotics from the medicine rack also flew over, hovering nearby.
Having done this, the man strode out of the pharmacy room and thoughtfully closed the door, which had already been torn open with a hole.
The nurse stared wide-eyed at everything, her mind echoing his last words.
“Chosen One…”
The pharmacy fell into complete silence. Overwhelmed by a wave of dizziness, the nurse’s eyelids, heavy as if weighed down by a thousand pounds, slowly closed.
Li Ye hurried out of the hospital, no longer paying attention to the rotting zombies wandering the streets.
His utmost priority was to return quickly to the food processing plant. Even a delay of one hour might mean encountering the terrifying Fallen God that had been lurking beneath Jiangning, starving for who knows how long.
Even a fledgling Fallen God, no matter how weak, was at least equivalent to a third-level Chosen One—far beyond what ordinary survivors of the apocalypse could resist.
***
Li Ye no longer held back his abilities. The dim light around his body bent and twisted, causing him to blend completely into the red mist.
A gust of wind swept by, prompting many zombies on the street to instinctively look in that direction. Yet, finding no sign of a person, they resumed their mindless scavenging.
Li Ye harbored no illusions. This tactic, treating zombies almost like automatons, was only feasible at this moment.
Once the red mist entered its late stage or vanished entirely, those zombies and mutants who had evolved perfect bodies would no longer be so easily deceived.
...
Li Ye raced through the university city, anxiety rising in his heart.
Xue Ning and the others were inside the processing plant. He didn’t know if they were obeying orders and feared someone might be curious about the red mist and venture outside.
There were still many survivors in the university district, quietly gathering together.
Some clever individuals had realized the zombies were all bark and no bite, trying to rally the people.
But faced with such a shattering upheaval, most remained engulfed in panic, their limited vision rendering them powerless.
“Where is the Xia Nation army? Why aren’t they coming to save us?”
“At this rate, we’re all going to die!”
“This is divine punishment. Humanity has angered the gods.”
“Don’t be afraid, those zombies are just paper tigers!”
“You’re talking nonsense! I saw a zombie devour a grown man with my own eyes!”
...
Continuously using his powers and feeling his strength thinning, Li Ye grew even more urgent.
The invisibility he wielded was not his own creation but developed by Qin Wu in a past life.
All of this was recorded in reports Li Ye had collected then, many small factions specialized in such intelligence gathering.
Among the rare Divine Miracle types, countless eyes were watching him.
Of course, it was only optical invisibility—he could still be heard and touched.
As only a first-level ability user, controlling every thread of light around him so precisely could not be sustained long.
Threading a needle and cleaving meat were two entirely different challenges.
***
“Please don’t let anything happen now.”
Just as he muttered this to himself, the very ground at the center of the university city began to tremble violently—unlike the initial apocalypse’s broad quakes, this was a localized upheaval of cataclysmic proportions!
The earth shook and mountains roared; massive buildings collapsed. The gathered survivors scattered in panic, human strength seeming so insignificant in the face of such disaster.
Li Ye’s face darkened as he looked behind him.
A sharp roar came from beneath everyone’s feet, followed by a thunderous crack as the solid ground split open into a chasm like an abyss.
A fetid stench of rotten sewage wafted forth.
Countless zombies swarmed toward the rift, their mass like a ghostly army crossing into the world of the living.
The survivors, blinded by the mist, could not see clearly and only kept their heads down, screaming and fleeing in the opposite direction, unaware that an equally terrifying tide of corpses awaited them ahead.
“No! Monsters are ahead!”
“Run the other way!”
“It seems we’re surrounded by those creatures...”
“Are we going to die? I don’t want to die here!”
Desperate cries were swallowed by the murmurs of the endless horde, dissipating into the chaotic red mist.
Li Ye climbed onto a building, his sharp gaze piercing through the wind-scattered fog to see nine enormous azure human heads emerging from the abyss.
Their faces were eerie, like stiff masks pasted on, with strange discolored ooze dripping from the corners of their mouths. Their serpentine bodies stretched over ten meters long, winding and twisting—a sight that chilled one to the bone.
This beast was the Fallen God from Eastern mythology.
A—009, Xiangliu!
The overwhelming tide of zombies that had surrounded the city now served only as fodder for this Fallen God. Its immense power was entirely different from that of the red mist.
If the red mist’s power was an evolution of life itself, then this godly force was bizarrely overwhelming—so powerful it bordered on brute force.
“A” was its danger rating.