"So can we get back right now?"
Having heard Yu Xian's analysis, Zhang Shou immediately asked the question he cared about most.
He wasn't afraid of being unable to return himself; if it were just him, that would be fine, but if he dragged Yu Xian down into being trapped here too, he would definitely feel guilty for the rest of his life.
Yu Xian smiled. "If we could come here, we can naturally go back. But there's no rush. Since we're already here, we might as well look into why the zombies from this place keep teleporting over to West Gemini Mountain."
"As long as we can get back, that's good, that's good." Zhang Shou patted his chest and let out a sigh of relief.
At that moment, with a thought from Yu Xian, the two perfect creatures still inside the spatial bubble descended from the sky. He ordered, "Kill every zombie in the area. Don't stop until I tell you to!"
The two perfect creatures immediately went to work in silence. Wherever they passed, zombies were felled one after another.
The highest rank among the zombies here was merely Sparrow rank, while both perfect creatures were Dragon-rank, leaving no suspense whatsoever in the battle.
"Holy crap, Salty Fish, you got stronger behind our backs again!" Zhang Shou's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets at the sight, and he couldn't help but complain.
He had worked extremely hard during this period, but he had only gained two levels and figured out two skills on his own.
Compared to Yu Xian's cheat-like pace of growing stronger, he was basically a complete lightweight—an utter scrub!
"What gave you the illusion that you could ever catch up to me?" Yu Xian looked at Zhang Shou with a faint smile, answering with a question.
Zhang Shou's eyes went wide and his mouth opened, but in the end, he had nothing to say. After all, the facts were right in front of him; anything he said would just be making excuses.
Glancing at the fallen zombies all around them, he changed the subject. "There are way too many zombies here, and... their clothes are so ordinary. It's almost like regular people suddenly turned into zombies after dying."
"Is it possible... they really were just regular people who only turned into zombies after death?" Yu Xian said faintly, watching the zombies awakening from beneath the earth.
These zombies wore tattered rags, but the style of their clothing showed they hadn't been any special Transcendents when they were alive—just ordinary civilians.
They had simply undergone corpse transformation under the influence of corpse qi after dying.
"Come on, let's look around the area first!"
Yu Xian said to Zhang Shou, then ordered the two perfect creatures to clear the path, one in front and one behind.
The two walked across the black soil. As far as the eye could see, there was only desolation; not a single tree or blade of grass was in sight, only a ceaseless stream of zombies stirring awake from beneath the earth, subsequently slaughtered with ease by the perfect creatures.
In Yu Xian's mind, this space was utterly chaotic. The mental model generated by Super Smell and Super Brain was completely blank, as though this place shouldn't even exist.
Only when zombies crawled out of the ground did models of them appear one by one in his mind.
These zombies reeked terribly, so he finally shielded himself from the corpse stench altogether, which left even more blank space in his mental map.
Half an hour later.
Yu Xian and Zhang Shou halted, spotting a strange tree in the distance.
Roughly fifty or more corpses hung from this tree. Sensing the scent of living beings, they wriggled frantically like maggots, yet could not break free from the ropes bound around their necks.
"Salty Fish, look at that zombie over there," Zhang Shou whispered, pointing toward the third body hanging from the tree.
Yu Xian looked over and found that the zombie was actually carrying a battered, tattered briefcase.
He immediately manipulated a silver thread with his finger to extend forward, swiftly slicing through the ropes binding the briefcase to the body and retrieving it.
The zombie had intentionally lashed the briefcase securely to itself, suggesting there might be important information inside.
Yu Xian didn't touch the briefcase directly. Instead, he opened it using the silver thread. Sure enough, there were many aged documents inside. He took them out and examined them one by one, his brows gradually furrowing.
"What is it?" Zhang Shou asked curiously.
Yu Xian replied, "Look, it's all in Chinese."
"What's wrong with Chinese? Isn't that great?" Zhang Shou took a pair of gloves from his storage ring, put them on, took the documents, and glanced over them.
Yu Xian looked at Zhang Shou and asked, "What if... we're not actually on Earth anymore, not in our original world?"
"How could that be!" Zhang Shou said in shock.
Yu Xian looked at the documents and sighed. "I wish it weren't possible either, but all the evidence points to this not being our original world. At least... have you ever heard of the Yanlong Empire?"
As he spoke, he pointed to the stamp on the documents.
*Yanlong Empire Research Institute No. 9!*
Zhang Shou stared wide-eyed at the words on the stamp. It took him quite a while to say in astonishment, "So we've transmigrated?"
"Yeah. We've arrived in... a world that has already died!" Yu Xian nodded solemnly, his gaze on the documents.
Yu Xian had actually read about the Corpse Qi Expansion Theory long ago, but he had scoffed at it back then. After all, with so many ability users around, there would always be a way to resolve mere corpse qi.
Yet now, he seemed to have arrived in a world where the Corpse Qi Expansion Theory had completely come true. The corpse qi concentration here was already extraordinarily high. While it hadn't reached fifty percent, it was at least thirty percent.
For living creatures, that was already an utterly lethal concentration.
Zhang Shou was unharmed in this world because his body rejected the intrusion of any special abilities whatsoever, while Yu Xian was fine because he was a vampire—theoretically not much different from a zombie, both belonging to the category of undead creatures.
The problem was that just because the two of them were unaffected didn't mean other creatures would be.
Other living things could not survive in such a high concentration of corpse qi. Even if they stayed alive, they would gradually become infected with corpse poison and ultimately end up as zombies.
*Could the fate of this world be the future fate of ours?* Looking at the documents, Yu Xian couldn't help but speculate.
These documents explained the process of corpse qi expansion in detail and mentioned the ultimate fates of numerous Transcendents.
Powerful Transcendents who could no longer endure this world eventually fled into the Abyss, almost none ever returning. Once the weak lost the protection of the strong, they became food for the zombies.
Even without being attacked by zombies, humans living in an environment with high corpse qi concentrations would gradually become radical, irritable, and violent, their minds filled with negative thoughts.
In the end, they would turn on one another in slaughter, dying together only to become zombies.
The terrifying part was that corpse qi had no solution. As long as zombies existed, corpse qi would inevitably be generated. The more zombies were killed, the more corpse qi was released.
Not kill them?
If they weren't killed, the zombies would only grow stronger and more hazardous.
By the time killing them became unavoidable, a zombie's death would only release even more corpse qi from its body.
It seemed that as long as the Forbidden Fruit appeared, and as long as someone desired to become a zombie, this conclusion was inevitable, with no way to change it.
Chapter 118