Chapter 38: Missed Encounter

When Ye Yunan arrived at the scene, all she saw was a ground littered with corpses. From inside the nearby building, faint voices and suppressed sobbing could be heard.

After ensuring that there was no immediate danger, Ye Yunan flipped through a broken window on the side and entered the building.

At that very moment, Shu Xin and her group were rappelling down the other side of the building, leaving the area just as Ye Yunan arrived—completely missing each other.

Shu Xin’s team had eliminated the gangsters, ensuring no further trouble would arise. They took all the firearms and ammunition, leaving not a single bullet behind.

These thugs had likely looted a police station’s armory. Their stock wasn’t large, but even a small amount was valuable. Firearms had become a non-renewable resource, and no matter how many they hoarded, they couldn’t match the sheer number of zombies.

Zombies weren’t static creatures. They evolved.

Simply put, zombies and ability users were both products of human genetic mutations triggered by external factors. These mutations allowed humans to adapt to the new world.

A small number of people with strong physical constitutions survived the genetic shift, enduring the agonizing high-fever phase, and awakened supernatural abilities—becoming ability users.

Most people, however, weren’t as fortunate. Their bodies couldn’t withstand the sudden transformation, and they died before completing their mutation. But even in death, the altered genes remained active, pushing the body further down a twisted evolutionary path—turning them into zombies.

The remaining survivors neither awakened abilities nor mutated into zombies, remaining as ordinary humans.

Both zombies and ability users relied on the crystalline nuclei found in zombies’ brains to evolve.

By consuming human flesh and the crystalline nuclei of their own kind, zombies would evolve, growing stronger. Higher-level zombies appeared more human-like, making it impossible to distinguish them from ordinary people without special detection methods.

As zombies evolved, the amount of ammunition needed to kill one also increased. Bullets were consumables, a crucial resource for their future power struggles.

Other than the four thugs who had been shot outside, the rest had been dealt with up close and personal. Wasting bullets on such scum would have been an insult to the ammunition itself.

From today’s events, it was clear that the outside world had already descended into utter chaos.

Their neighborhood was far from the city center. In an era where gasoline had become a rare commodity, the fact that these thugs had traveled so far to loot meant that most other places had already been ransacked or had fallen under the control of other forces, leaving them with no easy targets.

However, as long as these external events didn’t directly affect them, they wouldn’t concern themselves too much. Living their own lives in peace and security was far more important.

But Ye Yunan, on the other hand, wasn’t as calm.

She hadn’t seen who had taken out the gang. The survivors she questioned had no idea either, which immediately put her on high alert.

After inspecting the corpses of the murdered residents, Ye Yunan noticed that the bullet wounds on them didn’t match the ones on the four thugs who had been shot. This ruled out the possibility of a desperate counterattack.

The only explanation was that someone in this neighborhood possessed firearms and exceptional combat skills—someone capable of eliminating an entire group of armed thugs in such a short time without leaving a trace.

With no way to determine if these people were friend or foe, she couldn’t afford to let her guard down for even a second…