“Everyone, watch your step while we’re moving. Try not to touch any of the plants by the roadside.”
Jiang Jingchao quickly noticed that the seemingly unremarkable plants around them were actually far less harmless than they usually appeared.
Or rather, under the influence of the Tier 3 wood-type zombie, all the plants in the residential area had mutated. Not a single one of them was normal.
So while fleeing for her life, Ruan Ning also had to spare part of her attention for that.
But when people are running in panic, how could they possibly keep track of everything? Even though Ruan Ning had tried very hard to avoid them, she was still hit quite a few times.
The others were the same.
Before they had even gone very far, the long trousers everyone was wearing had already been corroded by the slime into finger-sized holes here and there.
And having the plants’ slime stick to bare skin felt even worse. It didn’t hurt, but that patch of skin would very quickly start to itch and go numb, making people unable to resist scratching at it.
Among the mutated plants living in this residential area, quite a few probably had a certain degree of toxicity in their slime as well.
As she ran, Ruan Ning found herself bitterly resenting how well landscaped the university had been. Especially this new campus of B University — there were so many flowers, grass, and trees planted all around. You never knew which tree or patch of grass beside you would become the next ticking time bomb.
And that ticking time bomb wasn’t a metaphor. It was the kind that would really explode!
The plants catalysed by powers would suddenly go *bang* and burst open from the middle without warning.
If the few of them hadn’t dodged in time, then although the force of the exploding plants was nowhere near as powerful as grenades or explosives — not enough to blow off arms and legs or leave them mangled and bloody — it was still dangerous enough to make anyone’s scalp go numb.
When B University was first being planned, the people in charge probably never imagined that one day, in the not-so-distant future, those flowers, shrubs, and trees transported here from all over the country and planted for decoration would end up becoming biochemical weapons that devoured students’ lives.
“What kind of plants even are these? Even fire doesn’t work on them?!” Xie Fei, relying on his elemental advantage over plants, was handling things more easily than the other three. He even had spare energy to help them deal with the vines tangling around them.
But sometimes the effect of his fire-type ability was much worse than he expected. He would throw a fireball, thinking it could wipe out a whole patch at once. But in reality, that was not the case at all — some plants still clung stubbornly to life.
Who would have thought that one day, plants could become such a major threat, evolving into weapons that killed people like this?
In the entire residential area, the only places that could shield them from these bizarre mutated plants were the dormitory buildings nearby.
After all, no matter how powerful those plants were, not all of them could uproot themselves and run around.
Ruan Ning and the others had been tormented badly enough, so they hurried into the nearest dorm building to take shelter.
In the dorm building they chose, the main door downstairs had been forcibly torn off and thrown aside. The blood-sucking vines chasing them outside still hadn’t given up, but once they neared the building, their speed clearly slowed a great deal.
Because of that, they managed to run up to the second floor without much difficulty.
“Good thing we didn’t run into that Tier 3 zombie, or there’s no way we could’ve escaped like this,” Xie Fei said, patting his chest and still shaken as he looked at the vines that had not yet caught up from behind.
Just the plants outside had already reduced them to this state. If they had run into that wood-type Tier 3 zombie as well, whether they would even have had the strength to survive would have been a serious question.
Jiang Jingchao slowed his steps, looked around, frowned, and said, “Have none of you noticed that something feels off here? When we ran up from downstairs, I think I saw a lot of corpses that had been drained dry.”
And there was more than one mummy-like corpse in this building. All the ones they saw had been stacked neatly by the stairwell.
It was just that earlier, they had been too busy running for their lives to think much about it. But now that they had stopped, the more they thought about it, the more wrong it felt.
Because he had overused his powers earlier, Jiang Jingchao could no longer spread out his mental net again to probe the situation in the whole building. But after they had taken shelter inside, he realized that not only had the sense of danger in his heart not lessened in the slightest, it had instead grown even stronger.
Jiang Jingyang had the strong feeling that the inside of the building was even more dangerous than outside.
Xie Fei was somewhat thick-skinned and hadn’t noticed as much, nor had he sensed any danger. But hearing Jiang Jingchao say that, he also started to feel that something was indeed strange. Scratching his hair, he hesitated and said, “Maybe we’re overthinking it. It’s not impossible that survivors who used to hide in this building piled these bodies here.”
“I also feel like this place is weird… How about we leave this dorm building as fast as possible and go find my brother and the others?” Ruan Ning pressed her lips together and suggested.
Just like Jiang Jingchao, she had a bad feeling in her heart.
It might sound a bit mystical, but this feeling had helped Ruan Ning avoid death flags ahead of time every single time.
“But the ground floor is full of vines right now. We can’t leave through the entrance either,” Li Bao said.
Jiang Jingchao thought for a moment and said, “Maybe we can find a dorm room and jump down from a second-floor window.”
Ruan Ning froze. “Huh?”
The second floor?
Are you serious??
Gu Yicheng and the others fought their way out of Dorm Building 3-A and arrived at the place where they had split up from Jiang Jingchao’s group earlier, but they didn’t see any trace of the other four people there — only a scene of utter wreckage left behind.
Lin Yang: “Brother Gu, Chaozi and the others are gone?”
When the two groups split up earlier, they had agreed that the other group would wait here. Unless they ran into some kind of trouble they couldn’t handle, there was no way they would have left.
Gu Yicheng stared at the empty spot, a trace of anxiety flashing through his dark eyes. “Hurry and find them.”
The other four had already vanished without a trace, and with the situation as it was now, it was no longer suitable for the team to split up again.
Among them, Jiang Jingyang, who was the most seriously injured, said after hearing that Jiang Jingchao and the others might be in danger that he could still manage. He did not need to rest and could go with them to search for the others.
Xi Chen’s injuries were not as serious as Jiang Jingyang’s. He only looked weak because his ability had been exhausted and his stamina was depleted. Since Jiang Jingyang could still hold on, there was no reason he could not continue acting with everyone else.
…
At the same time, in a dorm room on the third floor of Dormitory 4-B—
“Quick! Quick, bring something over to block the door!”
Inside the small dorm room, the four of them were in a panic. Ruan Ning moved the fastest. Just as the door was about to be forced open and the vines were squeezing through the gap, she pulled heavy objects out of her space and wedged them against the doorframe, finally managing to block the zombie outside, at least for the moment.
“Ruan Ning, good thing you reacted quickly. Otherwise we’d all have ended up as zombie food in here.” Xie Fei, a fire-type ability user, could not help but be traumatized by plants after everything that had happened today. When plants went mad, they were no less terrifying than mutated animals—if anything, they could be even fiercer.
“But I feel like I’ve practically been knocked apart by the thing outside.” As he spoke, Xie Fei rubbed his shoulder.
Listening to the repeated *bang bang bang* from the door outside, Ruan Ning wore the same miserable, despairing expression, like life had lost all meaning.
And this all had to be explained by what happened five minutes earlier, when they had run into the Tier 3 zombie by chance in the second-floor corridor.
At the time, it had been crouching on the ground, chewing on someone’s internal organs. That person was not completely dead yet—they could still see his hands and feet struggling weakly. But his entire body was bound by plant vines, leaving him unable to speak, let alone escape from the zombie’s grasp.
No one had imagined their luck could be this catastrophically awful. There were so many dormitory buildings in the residential area, and they had casually picked one to hide in—yet somehow, by sheer rotten luck, they had run straight into this Tier 3 wood-type zombie??
But by the time Ruan Ning and the others discovered the Tier 3 zombie, it was already too late to regret entering this dormitory building. All they could do was run upstairs as fast as they could.
As for why they did not run downstairs, it was because the entrance on the ground floor was still blocked by all the blood-sucking vines they had drawn over. If those things had not left yet, going downstairs would have been nothing more than walking straight into a trap.
Fortunately, the four of them were fast and reacted quickly enough to find an unlocked dorm room on the third floor and hide inside before the Tier 3 zombie could catch up.
Although they had temporarily survived and escaped the Tier 3 zombie’s notice, the situation had now fallen into a stalemate. If not for the fact that wood-type zombies did not have especially strong direct attack power and relied mainly on their claws and fangs—or rather, the plants they controlled—to enhance their attacks, then at its level, none of them would have been able to get away.
On top of that, the commotion they had caused had successfully drawn the Tier 3 zombie over. Now that hulking thing was blocking the doorway and slamming into the door. Caught between advancing and retreating, they also had to constantly worry about what would happen if the dorm room door could no longer withstand that kind of force and suddenly gave out.
Jiang Jingchao used his knife to cut away the mesh screen on the window. Then he found a sturdy spot nearby, tied the thick rope he had taken out of his space to it, and said to Ruan Ning beside him, “You go first. The rest of us will stay behind and cover you.”
“Me first?”
Ruan Ning looked toward the doorway. Xie Fei and Li Bao were still searching the dorm room for desks, chairs, and anything else they could use to block the door, trying their best to keep the zombie from breaking in too soon and buy more time for everyone to escape.
Only…
Standing by the balcony, Ruan Ning glanced downward at the full three-story drop, and immediately felt dizzy. She could not help swallowing hard. “……”
Wait… jumping down from somewhere this high—wouldn’t something definitely happen?! What if her hand slipped and she failed to grab the rope?
For someone like Ruan Ning, who had been a well-behaved girl all her life, dutifully attending class at school and never even skipping once, even climbing over a wall would have been difficult for her.
Who would have thought that after transmigrating, she would actually get to experience what it felt like to jump off a building?
Back when Jiang Jingchao had first suggested finding a place on the second floor to jump down from, Ruan Ning had already been scared. But now things had escalated nicely—from the second floor straight to the third. So… may she apply not to jump now, or is it already too late?
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