The phoenix dorm room-mates started their quest after a small break. Huomei this time is trying to burn only the neck of the zombie, so they can identify people by the faces.
One of the rooms was open. Zombie must have come from that room. Suyan took a picture of the face for the record. They cautiously tied up everyone in the open room. This room is short of one person.
So there are only five unconscious girls. Another person woke up as they were tying up.
Explaining the situation took some time. Huomei kept watch. The girl was very skeptical until another one of the girls woke up as a zombie and attacked them.
This time, Huomei is even faster, the throat of this zombie burned into white hot ashes, the head fell off without even the help of Suyan.
The girl looked at them like monsters. If not for Meibing, who, even in the face of overwhelming fear and suspicion, explained everything patiently to the girl, they probably would have been labeled as witches and hunted.
The girl they found is a metal ability holder. She herself is surprised. Meibing and Suyan are greatly relieved. Now they don't need to carry around a bucket of water, the girl can just alter the shape of doors to bars.
Furthermore, she can lock in all the girls in their own beds. Thus, they went around with renewed vigor. Idea is first they will convert all the doors to bars, and put in a notice telling everyone to convene in the lobby area of their respective floors. After all, zombies can't read.
Fortunately, electricity is still functioning. They soon printed out notices, started distributing at each room, as they converted the doors to bars. Their first taste of apocalypse came as they opened the eighth room.
A strong stench of blood permeated as soon as the door formed bars. Wu li gasped and scrambled back.
Suyan and Meibing responded at the same moment, Suyan floating a water ball, Meibing ready to freeze it at moments notice.
when there was no sound, they cautiously peeked in to the room. What they saw turned their stomachs. Wu li is already busy puking in the corner.
A zombie has bit into the neck of a girl. Red blood smeared all over the floor, stinking up the place. Just as they backed away, the zombie turned its head, fixed its green eyes on them.
The zombie pounced on them. It is able to clear the distance to the metal door in a single jump. The metal door held on barely.
Wu li stood frozen in front of the door even as the zombie's hand broke through the door. Suyan pulled her back just in time, otherwise her eyes would have been poked into holes.
The zombie pushed forward. The metal rods and door obstructing it's path melted away to make way for it.
Huo mei, in panic, threw out her power, making a giant fireball with three foot diameter. The fireball only succeeded in burning off zombie's clothes. The skin underneath is quite shiny without a single blemish.
Meibing came to their rescue. She froze the zombie. In fact, she has been so sincere and thorough in throwing her power at the zombie, black ice covered the entire corridor. Huo mei started shivering badly, half from fright, half from cold. Suyan and Wuli are no better.
Only Meibing looked calm outwards, but Yanlong knew, she's just one step away from panicking. People expressed fear differently. Meibing became more still as her fear increased. Huomei is still the first person to come back to her senses.
"Mo..oo..v..e.. To dorm" she pointed at their dorm, hooked to one arm of wuli and started dragging her. Suyan moved a beat later, grabbing the other side. Wuli is barely awake, looking at her legs helplessly. Her skirt is wet all the way. All the girls looked away and pretended not to see it.
The girls entered their dorm room just as the zombie's fingers started twitching. Yanlong, who's crawling above the zombie in the false ceiling, gathered all the strength from the lightning crystal and zapped the frozen zombie. There was a loud crack, then the zombie crumbled.
A lighting of such magnitude can explode a boulder of three meters. Yet, all the zombie did is crack, then crumble slowly. It's a testament to the power of metal Zombie. Yanlong thanked gods that she has lightning energy with her. Otherwise, half the girls here would have been eliminated by this monster.
She slowly descended, using the ceiling frame as support. She only had to shake the skull a little for the nucleus to fall out. Yanlong took the nucleus, fled immediately.
She will be wrapped in quilts with a permanent guard if she were to be found. After all, she looked like a three year old child.
There's no bloody way any of her classmates will let her go out by herself. Worse yet, they might not even believe her identity.
Even if they believe her identity, they might insist on coming with her to rescue her parents. Yanlong needed them all to stay here to create a base.
She herself has no charisma, worse, no true fire power. While she can absorb all the skills of the nucleus, her body itself does not generate a drop of energy.
Like she said, she belongs to the super loser group of apocalypse.
She crawled back to her bag in the false ceiling. She started absorbing the nucleus. Her eyes widened as she slowly absorbed the ability.
'Blood String'
It is a very rare ability that belonged to a famous level 7 zombie which terrorized numerous bases and demolished Qingling base.
'Did I stop the disaster in its infancy?'
Yanlong wondered to herself. Regardless, this could be a useful ability for someone like her. She slowly pricked her finger and tried forming a metal wire with the blood.
It's almost afternoon and she exhausted what little energy she had working that blood string. The girls seemed to have come out of their dorm finally.
Yanlong could hear them poking around the corpse, then working on the remaining dorms. They killed two more corpses, one, fried by Huomei, another nailed by by Suyan and Meibing. They seem to have gained their confidence back.
Yanlong creeped from the false ceiling to the vent carefully. She is going to sleep in the vent, regardless of how unhealthy it is.
She picked up the remaining nuclei with the blood string's ability.
This seems to be the maximum weight a blood string can bear. The nuclei are about the size of a rice grain. Their only saving grace is they are power nuclei, thus suitable for any one and any thing.
Unlike her friends who are sleeping in their quarters, Yanlong caught a good amount of sleep in the daytime.
She could only work during night when zombies are active, for her presence is all too easy to be revealed otherwise. She moved about with a mud crawl on the false ceiling, making sure to put her weight on the frame, not on boards.
The first zombie was slow, but surprisingly accurate in its hits. As Yanlong removed the false board slightly, the zombie reached out it's hand claws and all straight towards her eyes.
If not for Yanlong being a veteran of apocalypse, she would have fell right on top of the zombie's claws face first. Yanlong sent a blood string out, looping the string around the zombies head and tying it to zombie's wrist.
If the zombie moves it's hand, it will be decapitated, just like a cake cut by twine. Yanlong pulled back, and started crawling in the opposite direction leveraging the string on one of the support poles like a pulley.
The zombie pulled towards the opposite side. As expected, the zombie is decapitated. Yanlong manipulated the blood string to pick up the nucleus.
That is the first of her nuclei collection. Fortunately, all the rooms are constructed using partitioning, so they have the same false ceiling.
The air conditioning vents are directly connected to the false ceiling. Thus, Yanlong can go to any floor she wants to without getting in touch with people or zombies, for that matter. That's probably a blessing among all the misfortunes.
Yanlong slowly but steadily started making her way through girls dormitories, killing all zombies that she can with blood string.
Fortunately, she can transmit electricity through the wire. She shocked the zombie, which gave her enough time to slowly slice through their necks. By herself, she's not physically strong enough to decapitate a zombie.
On top of that, the zombies seems to be strengthened with each passing moment.
She wanted to save the physical energy nuclei as much as possible. Sooner or later, it will become impossible to go through roads with cars.
Her very survival may depend on running away fast enough, she is just not confident of being able to do that without a physical crystal nuclei. Plus, female zombies never had the same amount of physical nuclei as males.
she did not want to go to boys dorms to clear zombies. The boys ratio to girls is high, on top of that, releasing both of them together will give wings to to all the little schemers among girls. She wanted Huomei and Meibing to consolidate their position as leaders before that.
The number of zombies in the dorms is not high. Between Yanlong and her friends, they cleared up and secured their floor. Night has fallen before they can so much as blink.
Suyan has provided water for every one. Huomei boiled those, Mei bing cooled them down to appropriate temperature.
They had some mishaps while doing this, but eventually, they got it down pat. Yanlong settled in ceiling of their own room, leaning her ears down the air vents to hear better.
There are about ten girls there, whom Mei bing and Huo mei apprised of the situation. They read through the Email out loud.
The predominant argument is that this is not an apocalypse and the army will soon come to their rescue. Clearly they are privileged girls who wanted to cling on to their previous way of life as little princesses.
Fortunately, by this time, Bi yu woke up. If there is one thing she specialized in, it is breaking bubbles people encased themselves in.
"We can easily check this out. The Internet is still working, I believe with the way things are, I bet half the country is live broadcasting their situation." Bi yu said.
The girls agreed. It's visible from the speed they moved to get their tablets how convincing that argument is.
As they expected, there are thousands of live broadcasts, all the way from S city to western border.
"The army is not coming for us!" Wuli said depressed.
The depression set in the room as they all looked gloomily at the search results. The man from S city is a second generation net red, who was in a penthouse alone.
He had metal ability. He hunted down zombies with a sword, posted the video along with how he sequestered himself inside his apartment. He is currently holding the live open, so that people can gather and discuss the situation in S city.
Yanlong messaged Huomei at this moment.
Yanlong - We need to do a live show too.
"Yanlong sent a message." Huo mei read it out loud to the group excitedly.
"Yanlong! Are you here? Come on out, show yourself." its Biyu shouting around.
Yanlong - No can do.
Huomei stopped them from getting up and looking around.
"Yanlong said she was a seer. She has her ways of seeing us. She may not even need to be here." Huomei added.
"She's a seer?" one of the girls questioned her.
It's Meibing who answered her.
"She may not be a seer, but I guess she has some kind of ability to predict the future."
The rest collectively looked towards Huomei, waiting for her to elucidate.
"We went to L city for my birthday party. On the return trip, she said she wanted to write an apocalypse novel. The events that happened now are far too in line with the novel she wanted to write." Huomei answered.
Minzhu continued from there on.
"First, the people fall asleep, some wake up as zombies. All the rest who wake up have powers of some kind, even the ones who feel like they are ordinary people. Only, for some, it's strong powers like controlling fire, for others, it's really ordinary powers like being able to repair bikes faster, or sew faster."
"We all have powers." one of the girls interrupted.
"The ones to wake early had simple powers. The ones to wake late had eclectic powers. All of them necessary for survival, the society could not afford to lose any of them." Meibing added.
Biyu picked up from there.
"The power group is divided into three types. Mutants. Actives and Talents. Mutants are people whose powers belong to a specific group, there will be no change to their powers regardless of the crystal nuclei they absorb."
"Actives are someone whose ability is in transition, as such, even when they absorb a neutral nuclei, their talent changes in some form. "
"They need to care very much what they take in. Talents are the rest of the people, whose powers are never quite visible, yet, it's them we will be in dire need of them if we are to survive."
"You mean to say we are mutants?" one of the girls questioned.
"Like X-man?" another added.
"Probably like that. Only, some of us could lose powers like Jean."
"Jean never loses all her powers." another added.
"We can never tell whether we are Actives or mutants. How ever, most elemental abilities like fire and water have higher chances of being mutants." Meibing added.
"So, Huomei is a mutant?" one of the remaining girls questioned.
"I think so." Huomei answered.
"There are chances you are not too." Biyu cribbed, snacking on ramen.
"Will we have food shortages too? Like an apocalypse?" one of the girls asked, staring at her own empty ramen box.
"If we are taking Yanlong's novel as gospel, we need not worry about storing food, for all food goes bad in a week, no matter how well packaged. Only way to eat is to get a plant ability to grow a crop and a poison talent to confirm it's edible. That's why talents are important." Biyu expanded.
The girls looked at each other's faces. There are no plant experts among those remaining. Meibing took the initiative.
"Let's sleep for today. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. We need to save as many of our friends as possible." She dismissed them sooner than later.