Chapter 2

For an instant she was totally stunned; it took a long while before she felt herself return to her senses.
It hurts! It hurts! It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!
Tears welled in her eyes. She forced the bed off herself, grimacing as she hauled herself up, and stared at the toppled bunk in confusion, why were these antique beds so flimsy?
In her excitement she had tried to jump down and hadn't realized how high the bunk was. She instinctively grabbed the rail and pulled too hard, the whole bed flipped over with her.
She rolled up her pant leg and, sniffling, looked at the large scrape on her left ankle: blood seeping, the swelling already visible. Tears were on the verge of falling.
It hurt, and it was her own stupidity that caused it.
Could someone like her really be any help to her idol? She couldn't be dismissed the moment she got close.
Instinctively she tried to use her ability to heal herself, but... her body felt empty. Nothing.
She froze. Her ability, gone?! She hurriedly looked inward; a process she had performed countless times, more natural than eating or drinking, was now awkward and difficult. Barely before she made herself dizzy, she finally "saw" inside her skull.
The energy core was missing, replaced by a misty mass with five interwoven colors, it still seemed to contain all five attributes.
She exhaled. She'd heard that at the very start of the apocalypse, many ability users were so weak their energy cores, then called "crystal cores", hadn't formed, existing only as a fog-like lump of raw power. Once a core formed, it marked a new stage in their abilities.
She looked at this body. It should have been in the process of awakening an ability, but it hadn't made it. During the apocalypse, awakening took a long time and the death rate was high...
Wait, awakening? Has the apocalypse already begun?
She could barely feel the pain now as she fumbled with the phone in her hand. The time read 14:01. Lin Tantan remembered clearly: the apocalypse began at 13:45. It had been sixteen minutes already!
"Bang! Bang!" Someone started pounding on the door; the off-white dorm door shook with each blow.
"What is that..." Lin Tantan swallowed. At the early stage of the apocalypse, what else could slam on a door with such force if not a zombie?
The crash of the bed had probably drawn it over. Small mercy: there should only be one out there.
Limping over the fallen bunk, she peered through the gap and indeed saw only a pair of feet outside.
But even a single zombie was more than she could handle!
Though she had been called a powerful ability user in her past life, she'd never actually fought. Of her five-attribute powers she'd only ever used wood and metal; the rest were practically unused. And now, in this brand-new body, she was a raw novice, she couldn't even summon wood or metal.
She thought it over, then turned and painfully hauled the toppled bunk back up, dragging and pushing it to barricade the door.
The dorm entry had a wardrobe on one side and a bathroom on the other, leaving only a little over a meter of corridor, just enough to wedge the bunk in. As she pushed from behind, the door burst open with a bang and hit the bed, leaving it half-open. The zombie tried to come in through that gap.
Seeing a real zombie for the first time, she realized how movies had romanticized them, the tilted heads, rotten faces, trailing entrails and milky eyes were the toned-down versions.
She couldn't see its whole body, but the face alone was enough: shriveled flesh clinging to bone, eyes stark and dead-white as if they might fall out at any moment. Its gaping mouth dripped with saliva as it gurgled and hissed, blackened, long nails clawing at the door. The sight, and the wave of rank, putrid stench, would terrify even the faint-hearted to tears or worse.
Lin Tantan had seen plenty of gruesome wounds, but this time she still jolted in fright. She shoved the bed hard from behind, trying to block the door, but the zombie was strong. She wrestled with it, her temper flaring. Glancing around, she grabbed a dark, coiled stick of unknown make (a resistance bar) from the corner, climbed onto the lower bunk, and brought it down hard on the zombie’s head as it kept reaching in.
The bar had some weight to it, though its spring made it awkward to use. One blow knocked the zombie back a few steps, and it lunged more viciously. Lin Tantan watched her chance: just as only its head had slipped inside, she lifted her right foot to pin the door and pounded that head with all her might.
Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack!
Lin Tantan lost count of the blows. Suddenly she struck air, looking closer, she realized she had knocked the entire head clean off its neck.
Lin Tantan: "..."
She hurriedly shoved the neck and the attached body back out, closed the door, and looked down at the head rolling on the floor, its mouth still opening and closing, unsure what to do.
But soon a glutinous, gray-black mass oozed from the head, and with it came a hard little object. Then, as if drained of power, that foul mouth finally stopped moving.
Excitement leapt in Lin Tantan’s chest, the object gave off a faint green glow. Could it be the legendary zombie crystal core?
She scraped the thing out with the bar, opened the door and shoved the head back outside, grabbed a broom and swept the mess out, tossing the broom away too, and shut the door again.
The lock was broken, so she wedged the bed against the door, fetched a pair of chopsticks, picked up the object, wriggled between the bunks into the bathroom, and rinsed it in the sink.
Under the water it revealed itself: indeed a crystal core, pale green and not very pure, meaning a grade-one Wood-type core, with impurities and mediocre quality.
But Lin Tantan was overjoyed anyway.
It was said that during the apocalypse, supernatural users mainly cultivated using crystal cores from zombie brains. It wasn’t like three hundred years later, when advanced instruments could harvest energy from the air, soil, and sea, classify and refine it into engineered crystal cores.
Some places, after three centuries of accumulation, had even formed natural energy ore deposits.
None of that existed in the apocalypse. Although the air teemed with vast energy, its forms were too chaotic and volatile to be harnessed without proper techniques. People had to rely on zombie crystal cores, so you could see how crucial they were.
What thrilled Lin Tantan even more was that it was a Wood-type core, the very ability she most wanted to cultivate first! She could absorb Wood energy from the air directly, but with a core the training time would be dramatically shortened.
She smiled and looked up; the face in the mirror was strikingly similar to her own, and she froze.
She could vaguely recall some memories of this body. The girl’s name was Lin Tantan, twenty years old. It seemed her rebirth into this body wasn’t entirely a coincidence.
Lin Tantan had heard her parents say they had originally named her Tan-tan, hoping that although her life might be short like a night-blooming cereus it would be brilliant, but later they thought it unlucky and changed it to the name she now had.
She touched her face and whispered, "Dad, Mom, Teacher, little brother, I’ve been reborn. I came back to life on the very first day of the apocalypse. I’ll be all right from now on. You must be all right in that other world, too."
"Lin Tantan, I used your body. Though we didn’t have an agreement, I am still very, very grateful. I owe you a life; if you have any wishes, I will fulfill them for you."
She waited a moment; a faint swell of feeling rose in her chest, an attachment to family, but hazy. Lin Tantan hadn’t gained clear memories of the family, so she pushed it aside for now.
She felt her legs, hopped twice, then yelped as pain shot through her left ankle. Looking down, she saw the ankle swollen like a steamed bun.
Still, she was happy. She was alive again, with both legs intact, and she’d come to this era, where the people she admired lived!
Two wishes she had before dying had been granted!
Excited, Lin Tantan quickly washed the zombie filth from her hands, took the crystal core and slipped back out. She sat cross-legged in the open, placed the core in her palm, cupped her hands one above the other, and began drawing its energy in.
She sat with a straight spine, legs crossed, eyes half-closed, almost asleep. Her breathing grew long and steady, her chest barely moving.
Gradually the pale green core in her palm wafted a faint green mist that her cupped hands absorbed. If there had been a device to trace supernatural energy inside the body, it would have shown the green vapor entering Lin Tantan, flowing along a channel into her mind, emanating from the brain to wander the body, and finally forming a perfect circulation.
Inside her mind the still cloud of misty energy stirred: a streak of green began to rotate, faster and faster, deepening in color, while the other four colors of mist remained unaffected.
The green mist kept spinning; the inner power circulated, and the core’s energy was gradually absorbed until its color faded little by little.
An hour later the core’s energy was exhausted; with a soft pop it shattered. Lin Tantan opened her eyes feeling clear and refreshed. Even her left ankle hurt far less, the bun-sized swelling had subsided significantly, though it remained puffy.
A grade-one core had limited energy, and Lin Tantan was reluctant to spend it all on herself. She wiggled her ankle; since it only ached slightly and didn’t impede walking, she left it be.
She checked the time, 3:17 PM already, the sun beginning to set. She jumped up. Go, go, she had to leave at once!
She remembered that Ye Xiao’s first comrade was bitten by a zombie and infected on the afternoon of January 2nd, and just as he was about to turn, Ye Xiao had to kill him with his own hands.
It was the first time he had personally killed a companion, and in the seven years of the apocalypse it was also the first time he cried. The second and final time was when Deputy Bai died (don’t ask how Lin Tantan knew, movies show it that way, and the novels write it that way too).
When she watched the film, that was her first tear; after that, each time Ye Xiao lost a partner she cried again, and by the end of the movie she had pretty much cried her way through it.
A devoted fan couldn’t stand to see her idol shed tears. If she wanted to help him, she’d have to start from the beginning!
Right, she knew where to look for him, but where was she exactly?