Chapter 64: Eight Hours of Campus Life

The artificial lake’s surface was splattered with shattered gold.
The sophora flowers that had been knocked down by last night’s downpour floated on the water’s surface, looking like pale white corpse spots.

Bai Ling’s index finger hooked a drooping willow branch.
The ice crystals condensed on the back of the leaves refracted the thin silhouette of the young man on the bank—he was bending down to scoop up water.
The torn hem of his T-shirt was lifted with his movement, and the tattoo on his lower back flickered in the sunlight, winding like a centipede on his skin.

“Is this the place?”
When Feng Yi straightened up, his fingertips, stained with duckweed, were still dripping with water.

The breeze, carrying the fishy smell of water, blew the young man’s long bangs, revealing his pale face, which was full of melancholy.

“Mmm, this is the place,” Bai Ling said faintly.

An ice cone was slowly condensing in her palm.
She was about thirty steps away from the young man on the bank.
At this distance, she could pierce the young man’s back of the neck with the ice cone in less than a breath’s time.

‘First, use the water in the lake to create a large amount of ice crystals to freeze him, and then pierce his back of the neck with an ice cone. At this moment, he has almost no corpse qi on him and cannot resist the girl’s sudden attack at all.’

“It’s indeed a good place for a long sleep,” Feng Yi suddenly said, his vocal cords rubbing out a sandpaper-like noise.

The snake scales on Bai Ling’s wrist stood on end in response.
The ice cone in her palm grew wildly to a length of more than three feet, and layers of ice crystals suddenly spread across the lake surface.

‘When did he find out?’

“Your gun, it’s showing.”

The breeze lifted the piping of her plain white cheongsam.
The tactical holster at the slit of her cheongsam was cinched with a red mark on her thigh.
The Demon Suppression Division’s standard-issue pistol was pressed against her thigh.
It was the one Xu Zhi had given her for self-defense last night.
The polymer grip still had the scent of cedarwood from Xu Zhi’s body.

“I was careless… I should have known not to bring this gun.”
The girl sighed.
“Don’t worry, it will be quick.”

If it weren’t for the fact that she thought the gun was cool and that carrying it made her feel like a top agent, the girl would never have brought a weapon she didn’t know how to use.

“Although I don’t know if zombies still have a sense of pain.”

A powerful cold air suddenly condensed in her palm.
The ice crystals crackled and condensed into the shape of a long saber.

Feng Yi suddenly turned and lifted the hem of his clothes.
The young man’s waist was as lean as bamboo, and the bluish-black tattoo was actually a Tai Chi fish with its head and tail connected.
The fish’s eye had the grayish-blue of a corpse spot.

“Stab here.”
He bent his finger and knocked on his lower back.
The sound of flesh and nails colliding was hollow.
“It will save you half an hour.”

“This position is the core of the corpse qi.
As long as you destroy it, my corpse qi will completely dissipate.”

“Why?”
The girl’s high heels crushed the sophora flowers on the ground, and her heels sank into the damp soil.

“I died 27 years ago.”
Feng Yi suddenly let out a chuckle, as if mocking his own comical fate.
“A dead person should look like a dead person, right?”

When he chuckled, the sound of his Adam’s apple rolling was like a rusty gear turning.
He pressed his hand on the rotating tattoo, and a worm-like writhing trajectory immediately bulged under his skin.

“Besides, I’ve killed so many people.”

The lake surface suddenly exploded with countless water splashes, and the startled heron flew over the old bronze bell on the roof of the teaching building.
White feathers fluttered down with the sound of the bell.
Feng Yi raised his hand and caught a feather—the tip of the feather, which should have been snow-white, had the inky color of corpse poison, like the bloodstains in his fingernails that he could never wash clean.

The sound of sneakers rubbing against the plastic floor came from the basketball court in the distance.
Teenagers in their teens and twenties were jumping under the basket.
When a boy in a purple and yellow number 24 jersey made a fadeaway jumper, his sweat drew a diamond-like arc in the sun.

“If only I had died a day later.”
He looked up at the flock of birds flying past, and a light laugh squeezed out of his hoarse vocal cords.
“At least let me experience university life, even if it’s just for a day.”

Feng Yi looked up at the increasingly dazzling sunlight.
The late summer sun still carried a scorching heat, and the autumn tiger was raging over the artificial lake, but he could no longer feel the temperature.

“After it’s over, can you draw a portrait of me for my master?”

His sense of touch had long since gone numb.
Under his pale skin, there was only a chill that seeped into his bones.

The Spirit-Transferring secret technique had frozen his body at the moment of near-death.
This had given him the ability to be almost invulnerable, but it had also made him forever immersed in the pain of embracing death.

In a sense, a zombie was a person living in the past, living in their most painful moment, and that pain would never dissipate.

“I want my master to see me again.”

“Remember to sprinkle cinnabar on the drawing paper.”
The frost marks dragged by the ice blade snaked into a white snake-like shape on the ground.
The young man unbuttoned the third button of his collar, revealing a festering talisman under his collarbone.
“My master’s eyes were struck by a lightning tribulation.
She can’t see ordinary ink.”

The sunlight pierced through his semi-transparent ear, and one could see the wisps of black gas swimming under his skin.

The girl slowly walked out of the shadow of the willow tree, her long saber aimed at the young man’s waist.
Wisps of black gas seeped from her pale skin and wrapped around the frost flowers, instantly dyeing the ice crystals the red of a spider lily.

When the sunlight pierced his grayish-white pupils, the girl saw that what was reflected was not herself, but the afterimage of a woman’s Daoist robe.

“There will be three sounds when the corpse qi core cracks.”
He suddenly grabbed the ice blade and sent it into the tattoo on his waist.
The moment the tip of the blade pierced his skin, they both heard a crisp sound like porcelain cracking.
“The first sound is the dissipation of the corpse qi.
The second…”

The sound of the young man’s Adam’s apple rolling was like sandpaper rubbing on a coffin.

“Is the heartbeat that stopped twenty-seven years ago.”

Bai Ling’s wrist, which was holding the saber, suddenly stung.
She thought of Xu Zhi.
If one day, her true form was discovered by Xu Zhi, would it be like this?

Would she also pull open her collar and point to her heart and say, “Stab here.”

Would she accept death as calmly as Feng Yi? Or would she resist? Or would she just run away?

She suddenly waved her hand, and the crisp sound of the ice blade shattering startled the cicada in the willow.

The girl lowered her eyes and looked at the ice shards on the ground.
The ice shards reflected a fine afterimage in the sun.
In the afterimage, her demonized self was overlapping with Feng Yi’s figure.

This kind of problem was too difficult for a novice snake demon.

“I didn’t bring a paintbrush.”
The girl took out her phone.
The jumping 10:25 on the lock screen had a faint green, scale-like glow.
“I lost it last week.”

She wasn’t lying.
She had indeed lost her drawing tools in the chaos at Lin’an University last week, but the deliberately amplified volume at this moment startled the sparrow that was drinking water at her feet.

Every time she lied, she would unconsciously make a small movement, just like now, when she was crushing the fallen leaves with her heel.

‘Is this an excuse?’

‘Or is it that she saw her own shadow in him?’

‘That clumsy way of wanting to pretend to be a normal person, desperately trying to maintain a normal daily life?’

The sophora flower bracelet on the girl’s wrist was getting hot, reminding her that both of them were branded with an inhuman mark.

“There’s a history lecture in five minutes.
The speaker is a very famous history professor.”
She swiped open her phone’s screen saver.
A bronze snake totem wrapped around a stone pillar was eating its own tail.
“I don’t want to miss this class.”

Guan Qing’s warning, “Remember, you have to do it before the Demon Suppression Division,” still echoed in her memory.

“The last class of the day ends at six.
There are still eight hours.”
As she spoke, she crushed a few more sophora flower petals.
This was the fourth time she had disobeyed Guan Qing’s instructions.
“I’ll draw a portrait for you after class.”

‘If she gave him eight hours, it wouldn’t be a problem, right?’

“You can also listen to that class.
That professor is very good.”

When she turned around, the hem of her cheongsam swept across the ice shards.
The basketball court on the opposite bank suddenly burst into cheers—someone had made a buzzer-beating three-pointer.

“Thank you…”

The pale skin was suddenly burned by the sun.
The sunlight that had been perceived for the first time in twenty-seven years was now corroding the zombie’s disguise like sulfuric acid.