Chapter 174. (Patreon)

Author note: New week, new chapters! I'm still in the middle of midterms, but we'll have regular schedule. However, I might not have time to quickly respond to any questions or queries.

-------------

Sui sighed as she reloaded her rifle once again. Bullets were running low as they’d harried the endless hordes for two days now. Unfortunately she had no alternative, as her skills were used for healing rather than killing, meaning she didn’t even gain any experience from her attacks. 

She didn’t really care about that, but what she did left a sour taste in her mouth. She originally ventured out into the Dead Zone in order to find a cure for her people, not to hunt them like animals. But still she kept going, slowly firing one bullet after another, taking great care to hit the brains of the undead in order to save on ammunition. Because like it or not, they had to do something. 

Yet it felt like they barely made a dent in their ranks with their tireless efforts. In fact, she suspected there were actually more of them now than when they began, simply since the undead numbers were bolstered as groups kept merging. 

She was traveling with the scouts that were the first amongst those realizing what was happening. The dead were organizing. They’d heard rumors of zombies being gathered up by elite undead who were passing through the area, but nothing like what they were experiencing now. It was as though all the dead were receiving some call, and mindlessly headed toward some destination in the central zone.

Even the elite zombies weren’t immune to whatever was beckoning them, as they too walked inside the ranks, hiding amongst their mindless brethren. 

Though the small resistance army that gathered from four frontier village knew they were shooting at their countrymen, there was nothing to be done. They couldn’t let the situation progress unimpeded. 

Not that a many of them minded, Sui noted with a sigh, looking over at the tired but gleeful faces of a few of the Zombie Hunters. They couldn’t care less about why the towns took action. They only cared about the fact that there suddenly were free targets just mindlessly wandering forward, largely ignoring the fact that they were getting attacked. 

They likely saw it as free money. They only needed to survive the occasional attacks from the evolved zombies as they kept cutting down the lower zombies, not caring that they were once someone’s family.

“Shit!” a roar suddenly could be heard from behind, startling the hunters close-by.

Sui quickly swiveled her gun around, only to see a Caucasian man with long hair and madness in his eyes rush toward the zombie-horde with an axe in his hand. 

“Stop, it’s too dangerous! There are elite zombies inside!” she shouted in English, trying to stop the lunatic’s charge. 

However, it was to no avail as he kept running, a growl echoing in his wake. However, the expected scene of a man being swallowed by a sea of zombies after desperately swinging his axe for a few seconds didn’t happen. Her eyes widened in shock as she bore witness to a level of carnage she’d never witnessed before.

--------------------------------

Zac grit his teeth as he pushed into the zombie horde, enraging the closest undead with his aura of life. With the time limit the System gave him there was no time to worry about exposing himself in front of the humans, so he rotated his cosmic energy to immediately create five huge fractal blades. 

He let the five blades rip through the air with a speed that made his arms look like a blur as they each carved a path of bisected bodies and pools of putrid blood. However, even with hundreds of them dying he barely made a dent in the army. A large surge of Cosmic Energy entered his body, as even the gain from killing weak zombies was noticeable when he instantly killed dozens of them. 

However, Zac almost paused his charge when he noted that Cosmic Energy wasn’t the only thing that entered him when he killed the undead. Along with the energy there were also large amounts of miasma piggybacking into his body. 

He never noticed something like that when he killed the beasts during the past days, but perhaps it worked differently when fighting with true undead, rather than corrupted beasts. Zacs mind frantically tried to figure out what to do, but he could only push more mental energy into fortifying the Dao-Swirl as he kept going. He couldn’t stop now, as failure wasn’t an option. 

In order to quickly reach new targets he also used [Loamwalker] to shorten the distance between himself and the next clump of undead. Explosions of blood and viscera kept erupting around him as he madly kept pushing forward getting completely drenched in the blackish blood.

Only after five minutes did he stumble, coughing out a mouthful of ice-cold blood as his bloodshot eyes looked around with a wild glare. His wound was going haywire from the exertion and the insane amount of miasma that had entered him by this point. 

The system didn’t really give him much of an option with this quest, making him once again wonder whether it was giving him extra attention or if it was just an asshole to everyone. The moment he decided to back away and not get involved he immediately received a quest that forced him into the fray.

The ten purification pills would be a blessing, especially now that he was getting drowned in miasma. However, that’s not why he decided to fight. The price for failure wasn’t something he could afford. Giving he Undead Lords his location and status was likely a death sentence. Not only would the Corpse Lord he fought earlier be warned of his proximity, but his boss would be as well.

Between his festering wound and the disadvantageous terrain, he was in no mood for a second round with the undead nobleman. Zac wasn’t even sure he’d survive the encounter, his improved Dao notwithstanding. 

Thousands of zombies were quickly whittled down, and Zac could actually sense glee from the spirit in his axe. The growls created by the swings in the air slowly were changing into howls of exultation. An evolved zombie suddenly tried to get the jump on him, trying to flank him as he once again stepped forward to the next pack of the zombies, but a spectral beast suddenly appeared and ripped it into pieces. 

This time the spirit didn’t dissipate immediately though, instead opting to go on a rampage on its own. It was like a bulldozer crushing everything in its path. Zac didn’t really understand how it worked, but he didn’t mind as he was on the clock. He could only hope that the kills from the Tool Spirit counted toward his own kills at least. 

The timer kept decreasing, and soon less than two minutes remained on the quest. Zac only needed a final push now, but he knew he was running out of time. Not the timer, but the amount of deathly energy that had entered him. 

If he didn’t do something quick he would turn to a zombie himself, even if he kept utilizing is Dao. In a final burst of violence he once again summoned more blades, this time completely overloading them and turning them into gargantuan blades of death. 

With a roar he unleashed them into five directions, and a prompt told him he’d finished his quest. However, there was no time to take a breather in relief, as his body was going haywire, absorbing miasma at an unprecedented rate. Even stopping the killing didn’t stop the miasma from entering his body, as it looked the huge surge had created its own momentum.

The small whirlpool in his wound from before had created a large a physical manifestation as dense clouds miasma whirled around him, even following him when he ran away.

An unimaginable amount of corrupted energy kept pushing into Zac, spreading through his whole body before he even had a chance to nullify it. His Dao was already overtaxed and it felt like he was an ant trying to stop an elephant with the Dao of Trees. A numbing cold entered his extremities as his mind was flooded with corruption. The deathly energy was quickly clouded his mind, and a blank rage was starting to take control. 

Using his remaining sanity Zac quickly finished the quest, and suddenly held an inscribed bottle with ten golden pills. Zac shakily uncorked the bottle and hurriedly downed a pill, and immediately felt as though a radiant sun flicked to life in his stomach. He quickly integrated the energy into his Dao-spiral in order to directly combat the miasma trying to seize control.

Unfortunately it wasn’t enough as there was just too much corruption inside him. The pill did what it was supposed to, but one of them wouldn’t cut it against this extraordinary situation. Zac hesitantly looked at the bottle, but could only take a deep breath and swallow another two of the golden beads. His hesitation wasn’t without reason, as he remembered what the Sky Gnome had told him. 

Swallowing Purification Pills was like swallowing fire that burned away the corruption. One pill was already taxing on the body. Taking two was putting your life on the line. Three was tantamount to suicide. Yet Zac felt he had no option, and could only hope that the two rampaging powers would cancel each other out somewhat.

The gambit seemed somewhat effective, allowing Zac to take a quick breather. But the torrential amount of miasma entering him was almost endless. Zac’s eyes suddenly widened in horror as he saw that even the zombies still standing in the horde around him started to lifelessly fall to the ground as the miasma was ripped out of their bodies to join the ever-growing whirlpool.

The effect was quickly rippling outward through the horde, and in just seconds even more zombies had died from loss of miasma than Zac’s assault, with hundreds falling down with every breath.

Whatever the Corpse Lord planted inside him was completely unleashed, and was creating a growing storm in the area. Not even the evolved zombies were safe as the whirlpool greedily sucked out their corruption, instantly killing them. 

A small solace was that the tens of thousands of zombies that were getting killed was counted as his kills, also awarding him with Cosmic Energy. However, Zac wasn’t happy with the huge sudden increase of experience, as his defence was quickly failing against the increased power of deathly energy. 

Completely ignoring the consequences of over-imbibing medicine Zac quickly downed another handful of pills, leaving only one in the bottle for emergencies. The miasma whirlwind around him kept expanding, and without any alternatives he could only flee for an area with sparser amounts of miasma. 

Even with 9 pills in his body creating a Dao-empowered blazing inferno of purification it was barely keeping enough to keep his sanity in check, and Zac’s mind was a blur as he started running towards the woods. Worse yet, it no longer only was a problem of being flooded with miasma, but his body was also burning from the inside from the radiant energy of the pills. 

The two powers almost seemed to be in contention of who could destroy his body first, as they rampaged through every part of his body, causing unimaginable pain.

However, Zac knew that if he relented the miasma would win, as the supply was almost endless in the Dead Zone. With no alternative he swallowed his final pill as he kept running, finally emerging from the core of the vast zombie horde.

By now a huge chunk of the horde was simply lying lifelessly on the ground while Zac’s figure was completely shrouded in miasma almost dense enough to liquefy. The whirlpool above him even started to look like a hurricane with him as the eye. It made Zac look like a specter that was fleeing for the woods, surrounded by uncountable azure will-o-wisps. 

“Wait! Let us help!” a voice from the distance entered Zac’s ears through the chaos, but he was barely coherent at this point and ignored the call. 

Through the haze of the miasma around him he finally spotted a line of trees, and he mindlessly ran toward it, his only goal to get away from this god-forsaken paddy and its zombies. His desperation lent strength to his legs, and with great strides he disappeared amongst the trees, leaving a shell-shocked resistance army. 

The zombie hunters and resistance fighters mutely overlooked the scene of carnage and desolation, unable to move for a few seconds. The scene of destruction they’d just witnessed was something they’d never forget. 

Only one pair of eyes hesitantly looked at the direction of the ocean of miasma receding between the trees, and the man inside it.