His consciousness snapped back. Lin Feng's eyes flew open and he jerked upright from the bed.

Darkness all around, but the air was thick with stench, like damp, rotting flesh tossed into a dehydrator.

He barely registered the thought of opening the door before his hand was already on the knob.

Lin Feng looked down. He stared at his own hand for two seconds, motionless. A strange, mismatched feeling crept up from somewhere deep inside him.

He unlocked the door and stepped out. Through the dust-filmed glass, he could see the sun in the distance hadn't moved much.

So he hadn't been out long. But something had clearly changed in his body.

He stood still. Relaxed. The moment the thought of drawing his blade surfaced, his hand was already wrapped around the hilt.

His movements... had gotten faster?!

Not just faster. Completely unreasonable, completely unscientific faster.

No, it wasn't that his movements were quicker. It was that his neural reflexes and transmission speed had accelerated.

To put it in terms he could work with: if the whole process, command input, computation, output, used to take ten seconds, it now ran in six.

Those missing four seconds were Lin Feng still waiting on results that had already arrived. His body had finished executing while his mind was still sitting in the loading screen.

That was the source of that strange, hollow feeling of disconnection.

Simpler version: the hardware and software had upgraded to Version 2.0, but the operator running the system was still stuck on Version 1.0.

Lin Feng worked through it and let out a quiet tsk. Yeah. Talk about holding yourself back.

Tricky... Actually, wait. Maybe not that tricky.

He pulled up the system panel and dropped a point into Spirit, a stat he'd almost completely ignored up until now.

[Spirit: 6 → 7]

A wave of cool clarity swept through his skull, like the first sip of an ice-cold drink. It rolled all the way down to the soles of his feet, leaving behind something that had no clean name but felt unmistakably good.

When he raised his hand again, that bizarre sense of being out of phase with his own body was gone.

Body and soul, aligned.

The phrase rose up in his mind from nowhere.

Warning, or revelation?

Hard to say.

His gaze drifted to Agility. That was when he noticed: the number ten beside it was glowing gold, but the plus sign after it had gone gray.

The System wasn't letting him add more.

Wait—no. If it were a flat prohibition, the plus sign would have disappeared entirely.

So it was a cap, not a lock. Something that needed specific quests or achievements to break through?

Didn't matter. Even capped at ten across the board, his current strength meant he could legitimately claim a spot at the very peak of what a human being could be.

Lin Feng stopped dwelling on it, pulled out his high-powered flashlight, and headed deeper into the shop.

No workshop. No back warehouse. Nothing like that.

Then again, the wooden bed had been styled like vintage décor. Made sense they hadn't bothered leasing extra space.

He moved to the front lobby and started going through the place.

Scattered 5.56 rounds? Taken.

A forgotten firearm maintenance kit? Taken.

Hunting knives and daggers he'd normally never bother with? Still taken.

He let out a sigh. Until he had industrial equipment, the right people, and at least a rough industrial base up and running, the move was to grab anything that could be grabbed.

He packed away the melee weapons, ammo, usable firearm components, and maintenance tools, then walked out.

The sun was going down. Lin Feng looked at the walkers drifting through the streets around him and raised the M4.

A little exercise before dinner always made the food go down better.

And so the desolate street filled again with the soft, suppressed rhythm of shots and the quiet clink of brass hitting pavement.

He burned through four magazines before the ache started building in his shoulders. He finally eased off, found an apartment building nearby, and went in.

Bowie knife out, he worked his way through the stairwell, putting down the walkers one by one. On the way up he spotted a fire axe in a wall-mounted display cabinet and helped himself to it, dropping it into storage.

Every little bit.

As he pushed upward floor by floor, his knife work kept getting cleaner and more brutal. There was something about the instant his eyes found a target and his hand was already moving to end it—the way it just flowed—that felt like having god mode switched on. The raw satisfaction of it, that surge of conquest, settled in his chest in a way that was hard to describe and easy to get addicted to.

He came back to himself on the fourth floor, knife still wet, having just put down another walker. He glanced at the floor number.

He turned around. The staircase behind him was carpeted with bodies, wall to wall.

Dark blood moved slowly down the steps, pooling in the corners, trickling lower, pooling again.

He watched it for a moment. It was, he had to admit, a little unsettling.

Lin Feng moved into the hallway, found the least-bad large apartment on the floor, locked the door, shut the windows, and drew the curtains. He set a candle on the table. Lit a cigarette.

He exhaled. The hot smoke left his lungs and his restless mind started to settle. He began to think.

First: that giant walker. What had it actually been?

Cross-strain mutation from viral contamination? Something else entirely?

His memory had nothing. Absolutely nothing.

He cursed under his breath. Should've watched more zombie films back when he had the time, between all the slaughterhouse shifts. Now something shows up that he can't classify and he's just supposed to figure it out on the spot. Who wouldn't get a headache?

Second: this leveling run. Lin Feng wanted to grind a few more levels before going back.

Because once the camp hit its rapid development phase, it wasn't going to be so easy to just dump everything on Rick and disappear. That wasn't going to fly twice.

And with all these mutated variants wandering around out there, if he ran into one later, more strength meant more options.

"Urrgh—AAAAAHHH!"

A Volatile's shriek detonated out of nowhere, crashing into his ears like a thunderclap.

Lin Feng was at the window in an instant, yanking the curtain back toward the direction the sound had come from. His pupils pulled tight.

In the shadows of the high-rises further out, several Volatiles were crawling out of the dark, half their massive bodies exposed as they crouched low against the ground in the fading dusk light.

A few of the more restless ones didn't wait. They launched straight out from the shadows, fingers and claws snatching at window ledges and railings with fluid, terrifying precision, and began climbing.

Lin Feng stared. Something like genuine awe moved through him.

Crane's crew were something else. Living alongside these things for two or three months, that took a particular kind of nerve.

No wonder every single one of them came out the other side completely unfazed by regular walkers.

When your daily training regimen involves Volatiles, regular undead just stop being scary. Hard to argue with the results.

Lin Feng let the curtain drop. He stepped into the hallway, dragged two walker corpses back into the room, drew his knife, and broke them down. He smeared the remains across the windows and sill.

The smell was worse, yes. But it would bury the human scent underneath it.

If one of those things slipped in while he was sleeping, that would be a much bigger problem.

And given where his physical stats sat right now, if he ever got turned into a Volatile, the minimum floor on that outcome was undead overlord.

➤ Next: Just Like Huskies

Chapter 118 - Just Like Huskies

Morning came clear and total. Blue sky, no clouds, sunlight laid flat across the earth like it owned the place, loudly announcing that the midnight circus was over.

Lin Feng opened his eyes. Dark rings, hollow look. He was, in no uncertain terms, a mess.

Those damn Volatiles last night had been exactly like huskies.

One after another, full of energy, howling without end. Whether it was hunger or something else, Lin Feng had come within arm's reach of deciding to go out there and just fight all of them.

What kind of creature just doesn't sleep? What is this, spring fever?!

He rubbed his eyes, yawned, and pulled the curtains open. Sunlight poured in and the room brightened.

Lin Feng squinted toward the area where the Volatiles had been the night before. Nothing now. They'd all gone back to wherever they nested, as if the whole thing had never happened.

He'd already quietly marked that entire stretch as a no-go zone. He wasn't planning to go anywhere near it today, not even in passing.

Irritating? Sure. But not irritating enough to go solo a full pack of them.

This wasn't being a coward. This was strategic target selection ╭(╯ε╰)╮.

After breakfast, Lin Feng sat down and started loading magazines.

The first gun shop he'd cleaned out hadn't had aluminum M4 magazines, but civilian AR-15s and M4s both ran on the STANAG standard. The black PMAG polymer mags from the AR-15 would work just fine in the M4.

Thirty-plus minutes later, twenty magazines sat fully loaded. Lin Feng stretched out his aching thumb and stopped.

He'd need to find a truck while grinding EXP today. The pickup couldn't hold what he planned to haul back, no chance.

Plan in place. He drove a magazine into the mag well. Clack.

Locked solid. He racked the charging handle and sent a round home.

Pre-mission prep, done. Lin Feng pulled a few cans from storage, ate, and headed out the door, jogging southwest toward Atlanta.

Industrial district out that way. Heavy machinery, steel, construction materials, and all the variety you could want, plus those large warehouses where it was all stored. Clear out a few of those and the camp wouldn't be hurting for infrastructure materials for a long time.

The plan was simple enough: find a truck, use dimensional storage to do the heavy lifting instead of manual hauling, fill the truck to capacity, head back today, and send someone to drive it back tomorrow.

He ran it through his head a couple of times. Solid.

Down the stairs, knife back at his hip, M4 up, and he broke into a light jog.

Same approach as always: small groups got cleared fast, anything with enough numbers to risk encirclement got left behind.

Never initiate, never commit, never get tangled up. A truly seasoned approach to keeping his options open.

He worked his way through the streets, stopping and shooting, brass hitting the ground. He wasn't even halfway to the target area before another stat point landed.

Honestly—Atlanta. Best city. The locals were just incredibly welcoming.

He burned through the rest of his magazines, found a room, and settled in to reload. He dropped the point into Perception.

[Perception: 7 → 8]

The familiar sensation rolled in. Awareness of his surroundings sharpened up another notch. Dynamic vision, static vision, hearing, all of it tightened. He could pick up subtle environmental shifts from further out, with better accuracy.

As for why he wasn't putting anything into Strength: his current role was ranged. Strength gains wouldn't move the needle much.

Half an hour to fill the magazines. Back out the door, rifle up, continuing toward the target.

Before he reached the parking spot, another stat point was ready. Lin Feng put it into Perception again.

Perception: [8 → 9]

The familiar feeling came through. He exhaled slowly. And underneath it, that same premonition as before surfaced, the sense of a ceiling drawing close.

Lin Feng's mouth pulled slightly at the corner. Not much he could do about it. He pushed it down and kept moving.

He made it back to where the pickup was parked. Before he'd even gotten his breath back, a sound came out of the stairwell, a laugh, high and wrong, like someone talking in their sleep.

"Hehehehe..."

Lin Feng brought the rifle up, muzzle locked onto the darkness at the top of the stairwell.

Two seconds, maybe less. The sound cut out. Then a low, rhythmic thudding started from somewhere in the dark. Measured. Heavy. Like something large landing with each interval.

Not footsteps.

Lin Feng narrowed his eyes. He revised his first read from "unstable survivor" to "mutated walker."

Because those impacts weren't from walking. They sounded like landing. Like something dropping and hitting the ground with each bound.

Harran Virus product?

Screamer?

Screamers didn't move like that, did they?

Before he could work through it further, the thumping stopped. Then came another round of that same crawling laugh. "Hehehehe..."

His finger rested against the trigger. The laugh had less echo than before, whatever it was, it was almost at the exit.

Where—

Ice flooded Lin Feng's spine without warning, driving straight up through his vertebrae and spiking into the back of his skull like a needle.

Something was behind him.

He twisted at the waist. The muzzle swung back, and he saw it, a dark shape dropping from the second floor above, plunging straight for his face, fast and clinging like a monkey launched off a wall.

Lin Feng's eyes went cold. His finger pulled the trigger, again and again and again.

Puff! Puff! Puff!

Three shots in rapid succession, rounds punching out, and the thing came apart in midair, blown into several large chunks before it even hit the ground.

He was already turning back toward the stairwell. A second one, same shape, same build, burst out of the dark and launched itself high into the air.

Puff!

One 5.56 NATO round left the barrel and caved in the cranium mid-flight, skull splitting apart like a watermelon dropped from a roof.

Lin Feng let out a breath and swore quietly. Walkers studying military strategy now, were they?!

[Killed mutated walker × 1, EXP gained × 3]

[Killed mutated walker × 1, EXP gained × 3]

He looked them over. Long limbs, not thin, built lean but solid. Fingers elongated, tipped with claws of average length that caught no light at all, flat matte black.

Children's clothing.

So before infection and mutation, it had been a kid.

Attack pattern unknown. Best guess: similar to a Volatile, lead with the claws, tear into the target, then bite. The coordination between the two made him uncertain whether it was instinct or actual intent, but he logged it either way: suspected to possess rudimentary intelligence; capable of using sound to occupy prey's attention while a second individual initiates the ambush from an unexpected angle.

Notes logged. Lin Feng didn't linger. He got in the vehicle and drove.

A short while after he left, a wail tore out of the stairwell, shrill and raw and inconsolable, the kind that went on and on.

➤ Next: Future Infrastructure Materials Depot