Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Out of Nowhere
Lian Yi felt her soul slide into a body like a blade into its sheath. The instant she took control, a cold glint flashed—then a dark, stinking, withered hand clawed for her face. The nails were bruised blue-black, long and hooked like talons.
She didn’t even blink.
Lian Yi dropped flat onto her back, her spine smacking the ground, and the claws ripped through empty air. She rolled, came up, and kept rolling until the attacker lost her in the dark.
In her head, she cursed the black-suited bastards who’d shoved her into this mission. Didn’t they swear it was an entry-level assignment? Youth. Campus.
Where was the campus?
Where was the youth?
All she saw were claws meant to tear out her throat. All she smelled was sour rot—blood and decay baked into the night.
It should’ve panicked her. Instead, it sharpened her.
Something had gone wrong—badly wrong—but she wasn’t about to let her first task end in failure.
Screams tore through the darkness. So did wet, ragged cries from the injured. Under it all ran a different sound: harsh, hungry breathing—huffing and snorting—followed by the skull-crawling crunch of chewing.
She used the shadows as cover and sprinted into a side alley. Twenty meters in, she ducked behind a trash can and pressed into the deepest darkness she could find.
Only when she was sure none of those things had followed did she look out.
The mortal world had turned into a slaughterhouse. Men and women, old and young, ran for their lives. Behind them shambled stinking monsters—slow, stubborn, relentless.
“What the hell is going on?” Lian Yi breathed.
Dizziness slammed into her. A flood of memories—none of them hers—crashed through her mind and left her gasping like she’d been punched.
This world was in the middle of an apocalypse.
The body she’d taken over belonged to someone named Lian Yi, same as her. And in this apocalypse, that Lian Yi was supposed to be nobody. A disposable extra.
When the end began, the original Lian Yi had been at a restaurant with friends, celebrating her good sister Yun Rou’s promotion to department manager. She’d been a little depressed—she’d missed her own chance to move up.
But she hadn’t resented Yun Rou. She’d been happy for her. They rarely got together, so she drank too much. In the end, her fiancé, Ma Tao, came to pick her up.
Yun Rou and Ma Tao half-carried her toward her rental.
They didn’t make it.
Just after midnight, the world snapped.
Everyone dropped into instant sleep.
Half an hour later, they woke to a different reality. Some of the people around them had changed into zombies—no mind, no self, only hunger. Bite. Tear. Eat.
The original Lian Yi, Ma Tao, and Yun Rou were unlucky enough to be caught at the very beginning. Zombies attacked. In the chaos, the original Lian Yi was the one left behind.
Ma Tao grabbed Yun Rou’s hand and ran.
They hid in Lian Yi’s place—close by.
Inside the rental, Yun Rou found the green-jade peach pit Lian Yi’s grandmother had left behind. It awakened a spatial ability.
By then, Lian Yi was already one of the zombies.
As a zombie, she advanced by devouring flesh, step by step. When she reached seventh rank, something impossible happened—she regained memories from before she’d changed.
When she later went hunting for Ma Tao to take revenge, she learned he’d already died in the first year of the apocalypse.
Yun Rou had killed him.
And Yun Rou’s story to the outside world was neat and clean: Ma Tao had killed her best sister.
Lian Yi’s brow tightened. A thought cut through her like lightning: Too neat. Too perfect. Yun Rou is suspicious.
In her past life, Lian Yi had been a Mahayana True Venerable—brought down by the disciple she’d loved most. She didn’t believe in coincidences.
A cold, mechanical voice echoed inside her skull. “Tasker has located the bug. Transmitting chain of events in god’s-eye view.”
Lian Yi rubbed her ear on instinct. The voice was ugly—flat and wrong, like metal scraping bone.
The original Lian Yi wasn’t a throwaway at all. She was the true protagonist of this apocalypse. That was why, even as a zombie, she could climb to seventh rank.
The real problem was Yun Rou.
In the early chaos, Yun Rou had entered the Pocket World as an otherworld soul. She had replaced the real Yun Rou. With sharp instincts and ruthless timing, she stole opportunities meant for the protagonist and clawed her way up—strong, beautiful, unstoppable.
But her obsession wasn’t this world. It was going home.
To her, the Pocket World was a low-level plane—nothing but a steppingstone. At first, she worked with a base to wipe out zombies for survival. After that, she chased power: scheming, climbing, taking command.
Then she began stripping the Pocket World for resources to build an interstellar ship.
It was too much. Too fast. Too far beyond what the Pocket World could evolve to handle.
In the end, the war between zombies and humans tipped in the zombies’ favor, and the Pocket World collapsed.
That collapse was why the Time-Space Management Bureau had accepted this reversal mission. A whole Pocket World destroyed by outside interference meant countless lives snuffed out—bad for the world’s natural evolution.
And the goal of the little World Consciousness was simple: it wanted the tasker to help it evolve successfully, and to erase the otherworld wandering soul.
Lian Yi swallowed the last of the god’s-eye transmission and snapped, “You told me my first assignment was youth campus. Why did you dump me in this hellhole?”
Static crackled. “Bzz… bzz… signal weak. Communicator going offline. Tasker, complete the level three mission as soon as possible! Good luck!”
Then silence.
Lian Yi bared her teeth. A level three mission—on her first run. And she was entry-level.
The apocalypse environment made this a level three task. During transport, some freak twist had sent a rookie—her—instead of the intermediate tasker who’d originally accepted it.
That intermediate tasker, right now, was probably still sitting in a classroom, fighting textbooks.