TAP, TAP, TAP.
Footsteps sounded behind Feng Tiegen.
The Black Zombie's foot, covered in sticky, filthy blood, grated against the tiny pebbles on the cement road. In the silent shroud of night, the sound was exceedingly grating.
Feng Tiegen didn't dare look back. He desperately moved his already fractured ankle, staggering forward one agonizing step at a time.
The intense pain, so sharp it felt like it was stabbing his brain, had to yield to his fear and will to survive.
CRACK.
The sound of breaking bone was chillingly clear. Feng Tiegen stumbled and fell. He struggled to turn, his face a mask of tears, snot, and dust as he looked at the emaciated zombie.
The Black Zombie hunched its spine, stepping slowly toward Feng Tiegen. Unspeakable, vivid red organs dangled from its gumless mouth, its single remaining eye cloudy and vacant.
It stooped, its long, sharp nails swaying in the wind, unconsciously scraping the ground.
With a harsh grating sound, its nails tore deep gouges into the cement surface.
"Mom!" Feng Tiegen wailed, tears and snot streaming down his face as he screamed hoarsely, "Mom, it wasn't me who wanted to starve you! It was Zhang Cuifang! That woman, Zhang Cuifang, she's the one who wouldn't give you food!"
The Black Zombie paid him no heed.
Hatred, injustice, grief, despair—these extreme emotions, which had reanimated the dead, completely dominated the Black Zombie's consciousness. Beyond vengeance, its rotten mind could hold nothing else.
Facing the Black Zombie, Feng Tiegen sat slumped on the ground, scrambling backward with his hands and feet.
"I'm Tiegen! Tiegen! Your own son!" he cried.
"Mom! Do you remember? Dad died young, and you were the one who painstakingly raised me.
"That year the village suffered a natural disaster, and no family had food. You, who had been upright your whole life, had to become a grain thief to feed me and Grandma, smuggling food out of the commune's Windmill Room.
"When the commune noticed the grain disappearing, they started strict searches to prevent smuggling.
"With no other choice, you had to sneak into the Windmill Room before your shift ended, gulping down mouthfuls of dry, coarse grain in the dim light.
"Grandma and I were at home, dizzy with hunger. When you came back, your face was flushed bright red. You bent over a wooden basin and started to retch.
"Peas, mixed with saliva and the tang of blood, PLOP, PLOP, fell into the wooden basin.
"You looked up at me, smiled, and said hoarsely, 'Son, we're saved.'
"Day by day, Grandma and I finally stopped starving, but you grew thinner, as frail as a reed.
"Our family survived the famine."
Feng Tiegen's eyes were bloodshot. He knelt before his mother's zombified form, crying out, "Mom, I've wronged you! I'm not human, Mom!"
The Black Zombie stopped. It stood before its son, and for a moment, an unusual expression seemed to flicker across its withered, grotesque face.
It trembled as it bent down, reaching out to embrace Feng Tiegen.
Joy had just begun to show on Feng Tiegen's face when, in the next instant, the Black Zombie's arms clamped around him.
The Black Zombie's hands gripped Feng Tiegen, causing his face to turn crimson, veins bulging.
"Mom..." Feng Tiegen groaned, his eyes bulging as he forced the single word from his throat.
CRACK.
Bones snapped and organs ruptured. Feng Tiegen died, sliding from the Black Zombie's embrace like a heap of soft mud.
The Black Zombie stood motionless, gazing blankly at the corpse at its feet. After a long pause, it squatted, tore open the corpse's abdomen, and began to rummage through the intestines and stomach, chewing and swallowing.
As it consumed the bloody meal, the zombie's bark-dry skin gradually grew supple, and even the matted hair on its body began to glisten.
If its body had not decayed, if its consciousness were not extinguished, it would surely have laughed and wept hysterically.
But alas, on that pitch-black face, there were neither tears nor laughter.
Suddenly, while still chewing the organs, the Black Zombie caught the scent of a living person. It jerked its head up, looking toward the forest above the stone retaining wall of the mountain road.
RUSTLE. Li Ang emerged from the flickering tree shadows, leaped down the stone wall, and landed on the road.
Aided by the presence-diminishing effect of his Face-Changing Mask, he had been concealed in the woods for over ten minutes, silently observing as the Black Zombie completed its revenge.
"Every grievance has its culprit, every debt its debtor. Revenge must be sought for hatred, grievances must be resolved." Li Ang said calmly, not caring if the Black Zombie understood. "Zombies are born from the resentment, misfortune, and yin energy of the world, fueled by rage and sustained by flesh and blood. I didn't stop you from taking your revenge, but now that your vengeance is complete, it's time to move on."
The Black Zombie remained silent, its eyes completely suffused with crimson. Its gaze held only two stark, pure emotions: hunger and appetite.
So, no chance for communication... Li Ang sighed softly, facing the Black Zombie in solemn stillness under the night sky. The small truck, crashed against a stone pillar and emitting wisps of smoke, seemed to finally give out. Its headlights flickered erratically, then slowly dimmed.
The instant the headlights died, the Black Zombie moved.
Its figure was like a phantom. With a single stride, it seemed to float over ten meters, flashing before Li Ang and lashing out with a claw.
The long, narrow nails sliced through the air with a sharp whistle. Li Ang, already prepared, planted his feet like iron, his upper body as straight as a board as he leaned back.
Dodging the claw strike with an Iron Plate Bridge maneuver, Li Ang didn't even wait to straighten up before snatching his short-barreled Shotgun, loaded with steel ball bearings, and firing diagonally at the Black Zombie's chest.
The Shotgun roared, pellets spraying. Even with the protection of the thick black hair covering its body, the Black Zombie was blasted back several steps by the sudden, immense force.
As Li Ang pushed himself up, he quickly reloaded and, without looking, fired another blast from the Shotgun at the Black Zombie.
The steel pellets flew out, shredding the Black Zombie's burial shroud, but they were impeded by the tangled mass of long black hair, struggling to penetrate deeper.
Li Ang reloaded rapidly, firing as he retreated. In a few quick steps, he darted into the woods and vanished from sight.
The Black Zombie stomped heavily on the ground. Its small, plain burial shoes gouged bowl-sized craters in the concrete as its figure shot into the trees like an arrow loosed from a bow.
The forest was thick with leaves and tangled branches, dim, lightless, and utterly silent.
The zombie trod on the soft carpet of dead leaves, its nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air.
Suddenly, the zombie jerked its head up to see a dark figure plummeting from above—it was Li Ang, who had been lying in ambush over ten meters up in the treetops.
Relying on the presence-dampening ability of his Face-Changing Mask, he had evaded the Black Zombie's keen senses. The moment the zombie looked up, Li Ang leaped. He plummeted in freefall, axe in his right hand, Shotgun in his left, using the momentum of his descent to swing the axe viciously at the crown of the Black Zombie's head.
In a flash, the Black Zombie only had time to raise its left arm to defend itself.
The Camping Hatchet, forged from high-quality 420 stainless steel, was both tough and sharp. Its curved blade tore wantonly through the outer layer of black hair, biting into the zombie's shrunken, withered arm and gouging a deep wound into its radius bone.
Before the Black Zombie could react, Li Ang, already steady on the soft layer of fallen leaves, pressed the muzzle of his short-barreled Shotgun against the underside of the Black Zombie's left forearm, near the ulna.
Li Ang pulled the trigger. With a dull BANG, countless steel pellets embedded themselves in the black hair on the zombie's arm.
While the strange black hairs, of unknown material, could indeed resist and dampen the impact of projectiles, at such close range, the Shotgun pellets still pulverized the bones in the Black Zombie's left arm.
The entire arm hung limp, like soft clay.
The long black hairs on its left arm swayed in the wind, trying to snag the axe blade. But the stainless steel axe, with its anti-corrosive, anti-oxidation coating, slipped free from the hairs' grasp as easily as a heartless Casanova ditching a conquest.
Li Ang wrenched the axe free and delivered another diagonal chop, the blade whistling through the air as it hacked fiercely into the Black Zombie's neck.