Chapter 149: Ping'an Village

"Not dead yet?"

Lin Dong tilted his head to inspect.

Behind him, the four humans let out a fierce roar and lunged straight at him.

The square-faced man’s severed head fell to the ground, spinning around a couple of times before tentacles sprouted from the jagged stump, crawling back toward his body.

"Crack!"

He grabbed his head with both hands and pressed down, snapping it back into place as if nothing had happened.

Only his expression had turned unusually furious and extremely ferocious.

Seeing this, Lin Dong found it rather strange.

He hadn't expected the monsters to be so tenacious and thoroughly bizarre; they didn't die even when their heads were completely severed.

At that moment, the abdomen of a female student suddenly split open, and a thick tentacle thrust out from within, sweeping toward Lin Dong like a long serpent.

Lin Dong stopped holding back. With crimson light flashing in his eyes, his terrifying Corpse Domain expanded, instantly enveloping all the monsters within its radius.

The overwhelmingly oppressive force seemed to freeze the space itself.

Trapped as if in a deep quagmire, the monsters lost all ability to move. Evading the tentacle, Lin Dong appeared beside the female student in a flash.

The long saber in his hand danced.

"Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh!"

A sharp, brilliant beam slashed a Z-pattern across her body, cutting her into several pieces.

"Let's see if you die now..."

Lin Dong narrowed his gaze.

Yet, moments later, he discovered that those chunks of "fragmented flesh" on the ground were all sprouting dense little tentacles, crawling together, re-aggregating, and reforming into the complete figure of the woman.

"Oh?"

Lin Dong frowned slightly, feeling that this monster was somewhat troublesome.

He swung his saber once more, cleaving a young man's head straight down the middle—splitting it evenly from the chin all the way to the crown.

However, dense little tentacles appeared once again at the severed edges of his skull, sewing themselves back together like needle and thread, and the head grew back into one piece.

"Fine then..."

Lin Dong completely lost his patience.

When poor, rely on precision strikes; when rich, rely on firepower saturation.

The crimson light in his eyes grew even brighter, and his Corpse Domain instantly expanded to its absolute limit. The surrounding pressure intensified further, radiating an aura of destruction akin to the descent of a natural disaster.

The Corpse Domain in its current state was definitely not something these monsters could withstand.

With a wave of his hand, Lin Dong concentrated the entire pressure of the Corpse Domain onto a single point.

"Bang!"

The previously re-aggregated female student felt as though she had fallen into a giant millstone and was directly crushed into an explosion of green blood and flying flesh.

At the same time, a crystalline core shot out into the air.

Lin Dong had made up his mind: if she still didn't die this time, he would admit defeat and stop playing with them altogether...

Fortunately, the woman did not re-aggregate this time.

With even her body shattered into pieces, she was naturally dead.

Moreover, Lin Dong discovered that the position from which the crystalline core burst out was not the head, but rather the upper chest—precisely where the heart was located.

Clearly, that was their weak point.

Having learned this, Lin Dong thrust his long saber forward, piercing directly into the left chest of the young man, and twisted the blade. Sure enough, he dug out a crystalline core.

The young man let out a sharp cry of pain, collapsed to the ground convulsing, and his body rapidly withered and shriveled, piling up wrinkles until he looked like nothing more than a human skin draped over a monster beneath.

"So that's how it is..."

Having discovered the monsters' weakness, Lin Dong held nothing back. With horizontal sweeps and diagonal upward thrusts of his long saber, he swiftly dispatched the remaining monsters one by one.

As the monster corpses crashed to the ground, five crystalline cores were secured.

Based on Lin Dong's estimation, the strength of these monsters was around B-plus grade, which probably counted as mature forms. If ordinary awakened ones were to encounter them, they would undoubtedly face a grim fate.

After all, those people did not have Lin Dong's margin for error.

A monster capable of breaching a city's sanctuary was indeed no simple entity.

He wondered...

Did these monsters have other forms, such as complete forms or ultimate forms?

With a wave of his hand, Lin Dong gathered up the corpses.

Time to add some new flavors to the collection...

Yet his purpose for this trip was to find humans to inject with the G-virus, and he hadn't found any yet.

The humans in this village had already been parasitized by the monsters.

They were unusable...

It seemed he would have to rely on the Black Scorpion Organization and head to their stronghold—Ping'an Village.

***

After handling these matters, Lin Dong walked straight through the village and continued forward. Endless wilderness and ruined farmland appeared around him once again.

Now overgrown with weeds, it presented a scene of utter desolation.

Along the road, scattered zombies could occasionally be seen; most of them were farmers from nearby villages, wandering about aimlessly with dull, vacant expressions.

Some zombies still maintained the habits they had in life, using hoes to dig the earth. Their grayish-blue faces were stained with blood, and their eyes were completely milky white without pupils, looking utterly terrifying.

A zombie would dig into the earth, strike by strike, in an endless repetitive cycle.

Naturally, these zombies would not attack Lin Dong.

Out in the wilderness, however, there were more traces of mutated beasts or small mutated plants, but they posed no threat to Lin Dong nor did they hold any useful value.

About twenty minutes later, buildings began to appear ahead once more.

The farmhouses in the fields had long since collapsed halfway, completely dilapidated, leading far off into a village whose structures were even shorter than those of the previous one.

At the entrance of the village stood a massive stone monument, weathered by time, wind, and sun, with three large, flying, calligraphic characters inscribed upon it—Ping'an Village.

"I've arrived..."

Though Lin Dong had only been walking for twenty minutes, given his speed, he had already covered dozens of kilometers. Thus, the location of Ping'an Village could be considered quite remote.

Precisely because of this, some humans had managed to survive here by the skin of their teeth.

At the village entrance, two figures were loitering about, clearly acting as lookouts.

One of them was a middle-aged man with a heavily fleshed face and a black scorpion tattoo on his chin. With a cigarette clamped between his lips, he puffed out smoke, looking thoroughly content.

Every time he took a drag, the tattoo on his chin writhed along with it, as if it had come alive.

"Bro, smoke a bit slower, leave some for me," a young man beside him urged impatiently.

"Alright! Just watch your post properly, you'll get your share of cigarettes when the time comes."

The middle-aged man clearly had no intention of leaving any for him.

Little did they know, a figure was passing right past them at that very moment, walking into the village.

Using his concealment ability, Lin Dong slipped past without startling the two guards, intending to check out the situation in the village first.

There were quite a few humans in the village; the aura of "food" was everywhere.

Making a rough estimate, Lin Dong figured there were at least thirty or forty people, most of whom were awakened ones—after all, nearly half a year had passed since the apocalypse began.

Ordinary people simply couldn't have lasted until now. Even if any did, they would have either been tortured to death by the Black Scorpion members or treated as food.

They would only spare pretty women.

Or men with value.

Of course, those with special tastes would also spare "pretty" men.

At that moment, from a brick-and-tile house nearby, a weak voice belonging to a young man drifted out.

"Jie Ge, please don't!"

"Yo! It's been this long and you're still so shy? Hurry up and let me have a look."

Hearing the sound, Lin Dong walked over, his body passing directly through the wall.

And the moment he entered the room,

He was greeted by an utterly unseemly sight.

A robust, burly man was tugging at the clothes of a skinny young man, wearing a fiercely vicious expression tinged with a hint of excitement.

Meanwhile, the skinny young man was shaking his head desperately with a tearful expression.

"Morals are truly declining..."

Lin Dong curled his lips in utter disdain, thought that there was no rush anyway, and decided he might as well watch for a little longer...