Chapter 4 Deterioration

After being infected with the zombie virus, the body’s fever was really just the immune system waging war against it.

But among the countless people Mo Chu had seen infected in her previous life, most never even had the chance to fight back. The majority turned into zombies within half an hour of infection. Some burned with fever through the night, only to either transform by dawn or die before they ever could.

The people who survived the infection—and even awakened abilities because of it—were incredibly rare.

Mo Chu had watched many people become zombies with her own eyes. Even after she broke through to Tier Three and gained the ability to purify the zombie virus, there were still plenty who didn’t survive long enough for her to reach them… or transformed right in front of her moments before she arrived.

Among them were ordinary people desperately clinging to life, and powerful ability users who once dominated entire regions.

But despite everything she had witnessed, she had never been as tense as she was now.

She stared at Li Chen.

His face was flushed with fever, yet beneath the redness lurked a strange gray pallor. Pain and struggle flickered across his expression from time to time, and every twitch made her chest tighten as though her heart itself were being squeezed dry of blood.

She couldn’t stop wondering how he had survived in her previous life.

No one had saved him then. He’d been trapped among a swarm of zombies, torn apart for so long—

How had he lived through that?

And then another thought surfaced, impossible to suppress.

What if, in her previous life, Li Chen had only survived because he’d encountered some unknown stroke of luck after infection—some chance encounter that allowed him to awaken his terrifying powers?

And what if this time, by rushing in to save him while knowing nothing at all, she had accidentally cut off that opportunity instead… and doomed him?

She knew the possibility was vanishingly small.

But she still couldn’t stop herself from thinking it.

In the end, reason barely managed to overpower panic. Knowing useless speculation would solve nothing, Mo Chu forced herself to move.

She searched through the warehouse until she found a bottle of high-proof alcohol. Wetting a clean towel with it, she began wiping Li Chen down to bring his fever under control.

She didn’t know how long this condition would last, but she knew one thing—

If this fever kept climbing, an ordinary person would burn themselves to death before they ever defeated the virus.

At that point, she couldn’t care about propriety anymore.

She unbuttoned his shirt directly, revealing a lean, powerful body layered with old wounds and fresh injuries alike. After quickly cleaning him up—washing away grime, blood, and bits of unidentified rotting flesh lodged in the wounds—she began wiping his body down with alcohol.

His entire upper body was covered in injuries. Avoiding them while cleaning him was nearly impossible.

Which meant she was practically rubbing concentrated alcohol directly into open wounds.

Mo Chu knew exactly how agonizing that kind of pain was.

Yet even after every wound on his body had been scrubbed with alcohol, Li Chen still didn’t wake up. Only the muscles around the injuries trembled instinctively. Beyond that, he didn’t even show extra signs of pain.

The good news was that after one round of wiping him down, his temperature visibly dropped.

Mo Chu let out a breath of relief.

Carefully supporting his head, she fed him a few mouthfuls of water.

With supplies this limited—and her powers still weak—this was all she could do.

Afterward, she started rummaging through the warehouse again, searching through the clothing that had been mostly ignored even after the place had already been looted once.

She found a thick black jacket made of stiff material, a sports T-shirt, a pair of loose pants, and a pair of imitation military boots.

The pants were made of the same heavy, rigid fabric as the jacket. Wearing them in this weather definitely wouldn’t be comfortable, but against zombie bites, this kind of thick material could save a life.

She changed out of her long-sleeved shirt, shorts, and sneakers and put them on.

When she finished, she gathered two motorcycle helmets as well—one men’s, one women’s—and placed them nearby to take later.

Crude as it was, once the helmets were on, the outfit could at least count as full protective gear. Against the zombies at this stage, the thick clothing would provide decent protection.

After that, she ate two bags of chips and half a pack of wafer biscuits, then chewed two candies, making sure she had enough energy to handle whatever came next.

Only then did she sit on the floor and stare blankly at the unconscious Li Chen.

Outside, darkness had already fallen.

The world was deathly quiet. Every now and then, strange chewing sounds drifted through the silence, mixed with the hoarse snarls of zombies.

Listening to those sounds, Mo Chu finally felt it.

Reality.

As though a lifetime had passed.

Not long ago, she had personally experienced the agony of death. And now, everything around her was telling her the same thing—

She had been given another chance.

And this time, from the very beginning, she had chosen a different path.

She had saved Li Chen.

She had left Chu Ming and the others behind.

Mo Chu didn’t regret leaving them. The only thing she regretted was that, in her previous life, fear had made her wait far too long before finally deciding to go.

Back then, Chu Ming’s obsession with her had never stopped.

At first, he still held some restraint because she was an ability user. But as his own strength grew—and after discovering her ability was considered a “useless power”—he became increasingly reckless.

First came the hints.

Then the open suggestions.

And finally, outright threats.

He had never forced her physically, not because he possessed any sense of morality, but because he seemed determined to break her pride completely. He wanted Mo Chu to lower her head willingly. He wanted her to beg him herself.

Just like he’d said before she left this time—

He would wait for her to come crawling back.

Everyone else in the team chose to pretend they saw nothing.

And after Mo Chu realized that Qin Xue—who had already become Chu Ming’s lover—was secretly helping him scheme against her, she finally made up her mind to leave.

Not long after, she heard by chance that Qin Xue had been shoved out as a human shield by Chu Ming.

A “useless ability user” couldn’t survive alone in the apocalypse.

That was the reason she’d hesitated for so long.

But once she truly left, even though she came close to death countless times afterward, she never regretted it.

She only regretted leaving too late.

And Li Chen…

Looking at him now, she remembered what he had said before her death, and her emotions became tangled again.

He had saved her.

He liked her.

During the period after she left Chu Ming’s group and before she finally found stability in her previous life, she had nearly died several times. Yet somehow, every time, she survived.

Once, she encountered a fifth-tier mutated plant. She had been moments away from being devoured by a man-eating flower before she suddenly blacked out.

When she woke again, the plant’s corpse lay beside her.

She was completely unharmed.

That was when she began suspecting someone had been secretly helping her.

Later, there was another time when she went two days without finding drinkable water. An old woman traveling with her had watched coldly from the side the entire time, yet after Mo Chu slept for a while, the woman suddenly offered her half a bottle of water.

Back then, Mo Chu had accepted it tearfully, overwhelmed with gratitude.

Much later, after becoming “Doctor Mo,” she went through enormous effort to track the old woman down. She paid two second-tier crystal cores just to learn the truth.

The old woman told her that after Mo Chu fell asleep that day, a man had exchanged those same two second-tier crystal cores for half a bottle of water and asked her to give it to Mo Chu once she woke up.

At the time, second-tier crystal cores were worth far more than they were now.

Who would help her like that?

Again and again, she wondered who had saved her.

Until the moment before her death, she finally learned the answer.

Li Chen.

And he had said—

He liked her.

That was the part she could never understand.

If she had gone through what Li Chen did back then, she knew with certainty that she could never fall for someone who had abandoned her alongside the people who betrayed her.

And in truth, that was exactly what happened.

Among all the people who left Li Chen behind with Chu Ming back then, aside from Mo Chu herself, not a single one survived past the second year of the apocalypse.

As for Chu Ming—the true mastermind behind everything—he received Li Chen’s brutal revenge.

Later on, Chu Ming assembled a special operations team of more than twenty ability users.

Not one of them survived after crossing paths with Li Chen.

The Li Chen she knew was ruthless to the bone. There was nothing gentle or refined about him.

So she couldn’t understand why he would like her.

Much less why he had secretly saved her so many times.

She would rather believe it had been a comforting lie told to someone on the verge of death.

But with Li Chen’s personality in her previous life, how could he possibly tell some meaningless “kind lie” for no reason?

Logically, it made no sense.

And so, no matter how impossible it felt, the truth remained—

The Li Chen of her previous life had genuinely loved her.

Mo Chu looked at him with complicated eyes.

The Li Chen of her previous life had been a devil among men.

Compared to zombies, the name “Li Chen” inspired even greater fear among ability users. Merely hearing his name was enough to silence crying children.

He acted entirely on whim, temperamental and vicious, crueler than even the most infamous villains of the apocalypse.

And above all else—

He was terrifyingly strong.

Rumor said he tortured Chu Ming for three days and three nights before finally killing him. By the time he left, the blood-soaked scene was so horrifying that even battle-hardened ability users didn’t dare approach it.

When he was in a good mood, he could casually spend several fourth-tier crystal cores to buy an ordinary rock.

When he was angry, he could reduce half a city to scorched earth.

Even the terrifying zombies of the apocalypse became helpless prey in his hands.

He was nothing like the man in her memories—the one who had once rescued them from the climbing gym.

Mo Chu didn’t know whether betrayal and surviving among zombie hordes had twisted him into the monster he later became.

Nor did she know whether saving such a future demon king this time had been right or wrong.

Because no matter how many times he had saved her…

He was still the apocalypse’s bloodstained tyrant.

Everyone’s nightmare.

She had saved a monster.

And yet—

Even if time rewound again, back to the moment he was thrown into that sea of zombies, she knew she would still choose to save him without hesitation.

He had saved her more than once.

The whole world could abandon him.

But she couldn’t.

In this life, he had done nothing yet. And if she still chose to stand by and watch coldly, then she would be no different from the people who pushed him into hell in the first place.

Mo Chu let out a long sigh.

She stood and checked on Li Chen again, only to discover that not only had his condition failed to improve, the fever she had finally lowered was rising once more.

She wiped him down with alcohol again.

By now, the bloody smell in the warehouse had completely faded, replaced by the sharp scent of disinfectant alcohol.

That entire night, Mo Chu repeatedly cooled his fever with alcohol, barely resting at all.

Still, Li Chen showed no signs of waking.

An ordinary person would’ve died after burning with fever for an entire night like this. Yet although Li Chen remained unconscious, his pulse stayed remarkably steady.

But just before dawn, his condition suddenly worsened.

She had only just finished wiping him down when the wounds across his body abruptly turned gray.

Then, like a zombie’s flesh, they began rotting rapidly from the edges.

Mo Chu’s heart jolted.

Before she could react, Li Chen’s face suddenly twisted in pain. Then, just as quickly, the decaying flesh slowly returned to its normal color, as though something inside him were forcibly suppressing the corruption.

But his expression became even more agonized.

Even unconscious, the muscles across his body trembled faintly.

This was not a good sign.

Mo Chu reached out and touched his forehead, about to call his name—

When suddenly, from beyond the warehouse’s lowered metal door, came a faint sound.

Click.

Author’s Note:

I’m here! I’m here!

Banxia Novels — more happiness awaits.