Chapter 62: Zombies Also Need to Arm Themselves with Knowledge

The camphor wood scent of the ancient book section was wrapped in the cold wind of the central air conditioning.
Bai Ling held “A Study of Folklore” in front of her face, and her amber-colored vertical pupils reflected the elegant side profile of the person diagonally opposite.

The girl’s vision had long since become like a thermal imaging instrument.
Every person was dyed with the red and yellow of temperature.

This was a snake’s talent.
Snakes were naturally able to track their prey through thermal induction.

The girl could also achieve this vision without demonizing by injecting demonic energy into her eyes.
But without being fully demonized, this tracking vision would have a few side effects.

For example, she would have a headache for a while after using it and would need to ingest protein to relieve it.

But, why was he reading a book?

The girl caught a glimpse of the book he was flipping through.
It was a copy of “A General History of Ancient China.”

The young man’s long, raven-black hair was casually tied up with a leather band.
His left hand, with its prominent wrist bone, wore an old, blackened red string as he turned the pages.
If it weren’t for the fact that he had no temperature at all in the thermal imaging vision, he would be no different from a top student in the literature department of Lin’an University.

‘Do zombies these days know that knowledge is power? Is he even a history lover?’

“Excuse me, are you also preparing for the graduate entrance exam?”
A girl with a bun tied up on her head shyly handed over her notes.
A Kuromi sticker was on the binder.

When Feng Yi looked up, his pupils flashed with a momentary scarlet, and then returned to a gentle amber color in the reflection of the sun.
“I… I want to look up this…”

His fingertip tapped on an illustration on the page, his clumsy Mandarin carrying an accent from the nineties.

“Oh, this.
You can use the electronic reader for this…”
The girl with the bun skillfully helped him open the screen on the desk.

The girl clenched the frost that was seeping from her palm.
The demonic energy in her blood vessels boiled into a fine, stinging pain.
She watched as Feng Yi clumsily operated the electronic reader, his well-defined fingers trembling as they hovered over the touch screen.

‘No, I can’t fight him here.
There will be too many casualties!’

“You have to scan the QR code with WeChat here.”
A boy from the next seat enthusiastically opened the blue icon.
When Feng Yi hurriedly moved aside, his wrist bone knocked against the desk, making a crisp sound.
The entire reading area suddenly fell into a strange silence, and then returned to normal with the humming of the air conditioning vent.

The twenty-seven-year time gap had cracked into a deep abyss on his body.
Even the sound of the QR code login prompt could make his shoulders tremble slightly.

The girl with the bun secretly took a photo of him while he was operating the electronic reader.
In the photo, the young man was smiling gently and cleanly in the morning light, just like the black and white photo from 27 years ago.

On the screen of the electronic reader, a UP master from Bilibili’s study section was explaining the An Lushan Rebellion.
The bullet comments flew across the young professor’s figure like snowflakes.

The girl was hiding behind a bookshelf.
The faint, bitter-almond-like smell of corpse qi was diluted by the smell of mothballs in the ancient book section, and it actually had a hint of a scholarly air.

It seemed that he was indeed just reading a book.

“Ding-ling-ling!”
A sudden phone ring startled the girl so much that her heart nearly skipped a beat.
The string of rings was like a bomb dropped in the quiet space of the library.
In an instant, countless condemning gazes shot from all directions.

‘It’s over! I forgot to turn it on silent!’

While casting an apologetic look at the students who had been disturbed, the girl fumbled for the phone she had snatched from the fat man.
Blind Xu’s avatar was jumping on the screen.

“A-Lin! Where did you go!”
As soon as the call was connected, Xu Zhi’s voice, mixed with a piercing electromagnetic noise, came through.

“Didn’t I tell you not to run around?!”

The girl covered her mouth and huddled in the triangular area formed by the two rows of bookshelves.
Her breath condensed into frost flowers on the cover of “A Study of Folklore.”
“Um, I’m at the school now…”

The girl’s words were suddenly interrupted by the sound of a door opening in a hurry on the other end of the phone.
Then, she only heard some vague and noisy conversation.

“Listen to me, A-Lin! That guy is at Lin’an University now.
He might have already disguised himself as a student.
Leave quickly! We’ll be there right away!”

A moment later, Xu Zhi dropped such a sentence and hurriedly hung up the phone.

The busy tone vibrated in her palm and cracked.
The dimmed phone screen reflected the girl’s amber-gold vertical pupils.

‘Disguised as a student?’

‘Am I not one as well?’

The morning light, which was shining diagonally into the library, was cut into pieces by the bookshelves.

The girl was startled back to her senses by the suddenly raised conversation.
She poked her head out.
By the third row of wooden tables, a boy in ripped jeans was slapping “Linear Algebra” in front of his friend.
“Hey, how about we go and eat at that new chicken pot on the south street?”

“Keep it down.
This is a library.”

“Sorry, sorry.
Let’s go.
Let’s go eat! You bookworm, you’ll turn into a zombie if you keep studying!”

The word “zombie” seemed to have hit a nerve with Feng Yi.
His ill-fitting shoes scraped on the ground, making a fine sound.
The light in his pupils flickered like static on an old TV.

The two boys were playing and fighting, and they knocked over a pile of books on the table.
The yellowed pages flew in a parabola in the air.
While they were cleaning up, they were laughing and cursing, blaming each other.

It was exactly the way teenage boys would play and fight with their good brothers.

The girl stared blankly at the two.
If she hadn’t turned into a snake demon, maybe she would have gotten along with Xu Zhi like this.

The girl’s high heels left a mark on the carpet.
A faint frost condensed in her palm.
Her amber-gold vertical pupils reflected Feng Yi’s fluttering clothes.

If this guy suddenly went crazy here, she could deal with it at the fastest speed.

But, seeing his next action, the girl suddenly dispersed the frost that had condensed in her hand—Feng Yi’s gaze swept over the girls who were passing by outside the window, holding badminton rackets.
The look of longing to blend in but fearing the sunlight, that kind of look, she was too familiar with it.

In the past, after leaving Lin’an, she would often look at the groups of boys and girls who were playing and fighting with such an envious gaze.

‘Was he, who had this kind of look, really a zombie?’

But in her vision, his temperature-less body showed that he was not a living person.

‘No matter what, I should find a way to get him to an empty place first…’

The girl shook her head, dispelling the unreliable thoughts.

She deliberately lowered the flow rate of her demonic energy.
Her heartbeat gradually returned to the normal rhythm of 72 beats per minute.
At the same time that her amber-gold vertical pupils returned to a normal human’s appearance, the girl lifted her foot and walked towards the long-haired young man.

“Ah! I’m sorry!”
When passing by Feng Yi, the girl pretended to stumble and deliberately knocked the “General History of Ancient China” on his desk.
The book fell to the ground with a “thud,” and the open pages happened to be on the Southern Song Dynasty chapter.

“It’s… it’s okay!”
Feng Yi looked up, and his bangs slid down half an inch, revealing his pale cheeks.

‘So similar.
That clumsy look of wanting to pretend to be a human was so similar to her half a month ago, when she was hiding in a small alley, wrapped in a bedsheet to cover her scales.’

“Excuse me? Can you do me a favor?”
The girl bent down to pick up the book, blinked, and said.