Surviving the Game as a Zombie - Chapter 24

Y-City was a large city with rows upon rows of tall buildings, so many shops and pharmacies had survived.

Tang Yu found an abandoned security booth and settled Jin Ye inside, while she and Xiao Li went to a nearby pharmacy to scavenge for medicine.

They couldn’t take Jin Ye with them, as pharmacies were places players frequently visited. In contrast, a small space like a security booth, which had few supplies, was unlikely to attract any players.

Unfortunately, everything useful in the pharmacy had already been looted. Tang Yu and Xiao Li rummaged through everything, eventually finding some Sanqi powder, medicine to improve circulation and treat bruises, and some painkillers that may or may not have expired.

They had no medical knowledge, so they grabbed whatever they could. They took everything that looked remotely useful.

These medicines could treat humans, but they didn’t know if they would work on zombies.

When Tang Yu and Xiao Li returned to the security booth, they found Jin Ye had regained consciousness. Jin Ye smiled helplessly. “A zombie’s body has its advantages. At least, as long as it’s not a fatal wound, I can still move.”

Seeing that Jin Ye could still manage a smile, the corners of Xiao Li’s mouth turned down, and she looked like she was about to burst into tears.

Jin Ye frantically waved her hands, trying to coax Xiao Li not to cry, but Xiao Li only cried harder, whether out of guilt or some other emotion, it was hard to say.

Holding the medicine, Tang Yu didn’t know whether to advance or retreat. She felt completely superfluous…

She glanced around. It was already midnight. Without the Zombie King’s control, the zombies in Y-City had reverted to their usual scattered and chaotic state.

As a result, the threat was much smaller.

However, there were still many players in Y-City who hadn’t evacuated, and running into them would be a problem.

After weighing the situation, Tang Yu picked up Jin Ye again and prepared to head out of the city.

“Given the circumstances, we won’t be able to take on any other missions for a while. Let’s just go back to the village to recuperate. Y-City isn’t safe. We’ll travel through the night to leave. Jin Ye, please relay this to Xiao Li.”

Jin Ye coughed, then briefly conveyed the message to Xiao Li with gestures.

Jin Ye noticed that Tang Yu’s stamina seemed to have improved slightly. Plus, the mission to kill the Zombie King had vanished from her own panel, which meant someone had completed it.

She thought for a moment and understood the connection.

“You killed the Zombie King?” Jin Ye asked Tang Yu.

“I guess… so? I acquired his ability, but my points didn’t increase.”

Jin Ye’s face lit up. “An ability? You have an ability now?”

“Yes.” Tang Yu then told Jin Ye about the ability she had acquired and how it all happened.

“You need to be more on your guard. Don’t just casually tell people about your ability and its drawbacks,” Jin Ye said earnestly, like an elder giving advice.

“It’s fine. You and Xiao Li aren’t ‘other people,'” Tang Yu said frankly. “We’ve been through life and death together twice now. I have a clear sense of your character.”

Jin Ye sighed inwardly, unable to tell if she was gratified that Tang Yu truly considered her a friend or worried about Tang Yu’s future.

Before Jin Ye could finish her sigh, she heard Tang Yu add, “So in the future, if we run into trouble, you two can coordinate with me using these two abilities. For instance, you could send enemies with abilities over to me.”

Jin Ye: “…You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you.”

“Of course!” Tang Yu said, quite proudly.

The three of them slipped out of Y-City under the cover of darkness, walking until they couldn’t go on before finally stopping for a rest.

After leaving the city, they slowed their pace and followed the mountain path back toward the previous village.

With Jin Ye injured, the trio’s progress was slow. They walked and rested intermittently in the mountain forest. A journey that had previously taken three days now took them a full six to get back to the village.

By this time, Jin Ye’s gunshot wounds had stopped bleeding and were even showing faint signs of healing. However, since they had no way to remove the bullets, the two slugs simply remained inside her body.

External wounds were easy to heal, but internal injuries were another matter. Jin Ye couldn’t stop coughing the entire way and had trouble walking. The injury would likely require a long period of recuperation.

When the three of them returned to the village, they were startled.

The dilapidated house near the bamboo forest was, for some unknown reason, neat and tidy. The withered leaves and weeds in the courtyard had vanished, replaced by level, yellow earth. The half-collapsed kitchen had been cleared of mud and wood fragments, and the pieces of wood were now stacked neatly against a wall. It was all very suspicious.

The three of them looked at each other in confusion. Had they taken the wrong path?

Lu Lu peeked her head out from the side of the courtyard wall. When she saw it was Tang Yu and the others, she quickly lowered her gun, her face breaking into a wide smile.

“You scared me to death! I thought you were zombies,” Lu Lu said, very happy.

“But I am a zombie. And so are you,” Tang Yu reminded her.

“That’s true. I’m still not quite used to this identity.”

Only then did Lu Lu notice the injured Jin Ye. Startled, she quickly led the three of them into the courtyard. “I found a relatively clean yard and tidied it up,” she said as they walked. “There’s a big bed inside the house where Jin Ye can rest, though there aren’t any blankets or anything.”

“That’s more than enough,” Jin Ye responded.

Tang Yu settled Jin Ye onto the wooden bed, then took a turn about the courtyard.

The village house, which had a small courtyard, consisted of two earthen living quarters standing side by side, both in relatively good condition. The wooden bed in the other house had collapsed and was unusable, but the room contained a large wooden cabinet, as well as two tables and some chairs.

Additionally, there was a mud-brick kitchen in the courtyard, though it too had collapsed.

The small courtyard had a fence that just managed to enclose the three buildings. Behind it lay a dense bamboo forest.

Tang Yu and the others had cut bamboo here before, and it wasn’t far from the village well.

The courtyard was now tidy. Although the yellow earth ground wasn’t perfectly clean, the place looked completely different from when they had last been there.

Tang Yu looked at Lu Lu. “Are you planning to make a home here?”

Lu Lu tilted her head. “Huh? Isn’t this your camp? I thought… Ah! No wonder this place was so overgrown.”

Lu Lu’s words served as a reminder to Tang Yu.

That’s right, they were a small team now. They needed a camp!

A light sparked in Tang Yu’s eyes as she began to seriously consider the idea.

The place had a water source, a bamboo forest, and some abandoned farmland. With the mountain forest at their back, there were plenty of wild animals, so they wouldn’t have to worry about food and water.

Although Shen Xu’s camp was just over the mountain—a little too close for comfort—Shen Xu was now dead, and his most capable subordinates had perished in Y-City. There was likely no one with high combat power left in his camp.

Besides, even though it was just one mountain over, crossing it would still require a full night’s hike.

Tang Yu clapped her hands together. “Alright, this is the place!”

With this idea in mind, Tang Yu gathered everyone by Jin Ye’s bed and explained her plan.

Lying on her side, Jin Ye was a little speechless. Who ever heard of zombies needing to build a camp?

But Lu Lu and Xiao Li were both enthusiastic and eager to get started.

Since Xiao Li couldn’t understand the language and couldn’t participate in the discussion, she asked Jin Ye to relay the outcome to her later. In the meantime, she went to prepare some food.

Tang Yu’s idea was simple, but implementing it would be complicated. She wanted to establish a third faction within the game.

A faction composed of zombie players.

To Tang Yu, mindless zombie NPCs were not allies. They couldn’t communicate and offered almost no help to her survival. In fact, they would attack her group because of Xiao Li’s human status.

Therefore, to survive here, they had to convert some human players into zombies.

This goal was extremely difficult. Finding such teammates would require frequent interaction with humans, which was a very risky business.

Furthermore, good teammates were hard to find. Most people who had been in the game for a long time had complex motives.

The biggest obstacle, however, was that players would be unwilling to stay. Staying meant their points and skills would be wiped, and their bodies would revert to their initial state, forcing them to start over from scratch.

Veteran players with rich survival experience would never make such a choice. The points they had accumulated could be converted into a considerable fortune in the real world—not something they could give up lightly.

That left novice players like Lu Lu. But Jin Ye informed them that new players in the game had become extremely rare.

The reality Jin Ye described brought Tang Yu’s soaring ambitions back down to earth. However, none of them were discouraged. After some thought, Tang Yu decided to treat it as a long-term goal and take things one step at a time.

The immediate priority was to get the camp organized. Half the houses in the village were dilapidated, and the few that were habitable were in a state of chaos. They would need to spend some time cleaning them up.

Beyond that, they needed to scout the surrounding terrain and resources. The camp’s external defenses, its water and power supply, food stores, and weapon caches would all require a great deal of time and manpower to prepare.

Right now, they had only three zombies, one human, a single pot, a military knife, and three guns.

They didn’t even have a hammer for nails.

No sooner said than done. Tang Yu rolled up her sleeves and darted out of the room with Lu Lu.

Jin Ye chuckled and lay back down. Two years older than Tang Yu, she was more level-headed and knew more about the game than the others. She didn’t think establishing a camp would be easy, but her teammates’ enthusiasm made her feel an undeniable sense of anticipation.

This might just be feasible.

First, Tang Yu went into the courtyard and helped Xiao Li chop firewood. The wood fragments Lu Lu had gathered from the house earlier now came in handy.

The rabbit and wild vegetables they had caught before had been mostly eaten on their journey back. So, Tang Yu dragged Lu Lu out of the courtyard and up the mountain behind the house to find ingredients, leaving Xiao Li behind to look after Jin Ye.

As they walked, Tang Yu asked Lu Lu, “What did you eat before we returned?”

“I picked some wild fruit on my way here. All told, I haven’t really eaten anything, and I haven’t seen a single person,” Lu Lu, who looked to be about seventeen or eighteen, answered earnestly.

“What? You were hoping to eat people?”

“Don’t zombies eat people? I wanted to give it a try.”

Tang Yu let out a sound of disgust. “Don’t you get any ideas about Xiao Li,” she warned. “Jin Ye would kill you.”

“What’s their relationship? Sisters? They don’t really seem like it,” Lu Lu said, her curiosity piqued.

“A secret relationship,” Tang Yu whispered with a laugh. Jin Ye’s affection for Xiao Li was so obvious that even Tang Yu could see it plainly, but it seemed the two had yet to confess their feelings to each other.

Passing the bamboo forest behind the house, Tang Yu casually cut down some more bamboo stalks to make utensils. As she was cutting, she noticed a small bulge in the earth on the ground, with a crack running through it.

“Huh?” Tang Yu crouched down and scraped away the dirt with her knife. In no time, she uncovered a bamboo shoot buried in the ground.

“Ha! We’re in for a treat.” Tang Yu carefully loosened the surrounding earth and dug out the shoot.

The temperature wasn’t very high, and Tang Yu hadn’t paid much attention to the season since arriving. But holding the bamboo shoot, she came to a realization. Spring offered the most abundant ingredients; they wouldn’t have to worry about food.

Full of enthusiasm, she led Lu Lu up the mountain behind the house.

In less than an hour, Tang Yu returned with a considerable haul, which even included a wild pheasant.

Plucking, gutting, and cleaning out the innards, Xiao Li deftly prepared the pheasant, putting it in a pot with the bamboo shoots and wild vegetables to simmer over a low flame.

Once it was ready, the four of them happily enjoyed a hot meal, the fatigue of the past several days finally melting away.

This was pure bliss. She wanted to feel this happy every day. The idea of building a camp became deeply ingrained in Tang Yu’s mind.

Before dusk, Tang Yu circled the village. It wasn’t large, with only about ten earthen houses in total. She sorted through the intact and collapsed houses, scavenging any useful items and bringing them back to the house they were staying in.

Hoes, dustpans, wooden buckets, a large iron pot, plus some saws and iron nails—all piled together, they amounted to quite a lot.

They even found two intact bamboo beds.

During this time, Lu Lu cleaned out the small house next door and moved the two bamboo beds inside. The four of them took a look and beamed with delight.

They could finally get a good night’s rest.

But that wasn’t enough. After a moment’s thought, Tang Yu and Lu Lu set the large iron pot over a fire, drew fresh water from the well, and boiled it, managing to prepare some bathwater for everyone.

“Even as zombies, we have to stay clean,” Tang Yu declared righteously. “We girls need to be neat and hygienic.”

They cleaned out the kitchen, which had one collapsed wall. After hanging a tattered bedsheet they’d found over the opening, the kitchen was transformed into a makeshift bathroom.

The four of them took turns, happily washing themselves clean before returning to their little house under the cover of darkness.

Tang Yu left the large wooden bed to Jin Ye and Xiao Li, while she and Lu Lu went to the other room. Each claimed a corner, lay down on a bamboo bed, and slept soundly.

Meat to eat, a bed to sleep in, and water for bathing—if other zombies saw this, they’d probably get sick with envy.

What a heavenly life this was.

This life continued for half a month. Every day, Tang Yu, Xiao Li, and Lu Lu took turns going out to either search for food and firewood or clean up the usable houses in the village. As Jin Ye’s injuries slowly healed, she also gradually joined in on the camp construction.

They accumulated nearly half a cabinet’s worth of food. The spring yams in the nearby fields were all dug up and stored in a dry cabinet. They also picked some wild fruits and vegetables from the mountain behind them for their reserves. The only pity was the bamboo shoots in the grove. After a rainfall, they all sprouted and shot up at an incredible speed, becoming inedible.

Some of the village houses contained corpses left from some unknown time. They appeared to have been zombies that were eliminated by passing players. Holding their noses, the group dragged the bodies to the foot of the mountain, dug a pit, and buried them.

It wasn’t out of kindness; as the temperature gradually rose, exposed corpses would breed germs.

Tang Yu set up some spikes around the camp. The spikes were split from the trunks of several honey locust trees. These natural wooden thorns couldn’t stop players, but they could fend off the mindless zombies that wandered into the area.

Another half a month passed, and their camp began to take shape.

One day, just as they finished lining the path to the village entrance with spikes, Tang Yu’s wristband chimed.

The system panel hadn’t changed at all since they arrived in the village, and Tang Yu hadn’t opened it in a long time.

But now, the system issued a notification sound. Puzzled, Tang Yu opened it and saw that she had, for some reason, completed an “Establish a Camp” mission.

It was a common mission, worth twenty points. Tang Yu looked up in surprise to find everyone else in the same pose, staring at their panels. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who had received the notification.

“I never thought building a camp would award points,” Jin Ye remarked. As a human player, she had always roamed the mountain forests without a permanent shelter.

“If I’d known, I would’ve put more effort into it,” Tang Yu said with a laugh.

She saw a few lines of small text next to the mission, displaying:

“Camp Scale: Level 1,
Camp Name: To be named by the founder.
Camp Members: Awaiting additions. Applications require founder’s approval.”

Below this, there was a “Join Camp” button.

A name? Tang Yu looked up and saw everyone looking at her.

Jin Ye said, “You’re the founder. You should name it.”

Tang Yu scratched her head. This was all very sudden; she hadn’t thought of a name.

She tapped the input box, typed and deleted a few names, and finally settled on the words “A Family.”

“I hope we can be as close and loving as a family,” Tang Yu said, then suddenly recalled something. Just before confirming, she added four more words in front.

Jin Ye watched the camp name appear on her panel, and the corner of her eye twitched.

“A Close and Loving Family.”

Tang Yu was very pleased with the name she had chosen and was the first to press the “Join Camp” button.

“I can’t help but feel this name is a little tacky,” Xiao Li muttered, but she tried clicking the join button anyway. She didn’t have high hopes, since Tang Yu and Jin Ye couldn’t add her as an ally, the camp system probably wouldn’t work for her either.

To her surprise, however, she successfully joined the camp. It seemed the camp system was more inclusive than the ally system.

After Jin Ye was the last to join, a camp member group chat appeared on their panels, followed by a brief explanation that it could be used for communication among members.

Xiao Li stared at her panel, her attention caught by an icon. Below the input box in the group chat, a prompt read: Voice Input Supported.

“Try the voice input!” Xiao Li told the others excitedly.

Tang Yu didn’t understand what she meant and casually said, “I’d love some meat.”

Xiao Li tapped Tang Yu’s voice message, and the system played it inside her head in a voice only she could hear. A moment later, a wide smile bloomed on Xiao Li’s face. She replied in the group chat: “Extra dish for dinner tonight.”

This time, all three zombies were stunned. Jin Ye quickly tried the voice input as well. “You can understand us?”

Xiao Li finally explained, “I can understand it. When the system plays a voice message, it’s like a notification sound—only the recipient can hear it. Information sent through the system panel is essentially just a string of code, so I wondered if that targeted code would be converted by the system into a language I could understand. I gave it a try, and I can’t believe it actually worked.”

“That’s wonderful!” Tang Yu was overjoyed. “You finally don’t have to rely on guesswork anymore.”

Building this camp had not only earned them unexpected points but had also solved their communication problems. It was a truly fortunate turn of events.

Striking while the iron was hot, Tang Yu immediately shared the next phase of their plan with the others.

Although the camp had some basic tools, they were still short on many supplies. Things like clothing, knives, building tools, cooking staples like oil, rice, and flour, and medicine were all scarce. Their next step would have to be a trip into the city.

Before heading to the city, Tang Yu also wanted to scout out the situation at Shen Xu’s camp. That camp was extremely well-stocked and even had power-generating equipment.

Tang Yu thought optimistically that if Shen Xu’s camp had disbanded, they could go see if there was anything useful left to salvage.

The four of them discussed it and decided to have Lu Lu stay behind to guard their home and clear the weeds from the abandoned fields. After all, Lu Lu was the best organizer among them.

Tang Yu, Jin Ye, and Xiao Li packed their backpacks that night and headed into the mountains the next day before dawn.