“...All 31 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions across the country have experienced varying degrees of heavy rain, torrential downpours, thunderstorms, and strong winds, among other extreme convective weather conditions... The meteorological bureau has issued an emergency warning... This wave of heavy rain will continue to intensify... Please be careful... Tonight...”
Hiss—
The wall-mounted LCD television had a flickering signal, accompanied by crackling electrical noise, and the broadcaster’s voice came through in broken fragments.
The emergency room at Yun City Hospital was packed with people.
The floor was covered in one wet patch after another. The cleaning staff had only just finished mopping when people hurried in and trampled across it, making it wet again.
The air was thick with a strange mixture of disinfectant, sweat, and rainwater, making it hard to breathe.
Every so often, waiting family members would glance at the television, frown slightly, then turn back to their phones, soothe their children, or answer a call…
Extreme weather occurred every year, but life continued as usual.
The air was filled with coughing, conversation, and the muffled sobs of children.
Crash!
The glass door slammed hard against the wall under the force of the wind, producing a deafening impact as shards of glass scattered across the floor.
Total silence!
After a moment of oppressive quiet, chaos engulfed the hall.
The children’s previously muffled cries suddenly rose into sharp, piercing wails. Family members backed away in panic; some screamed, some cursed, and others shoved and jostled to get inside. Even the nurses in the nurse’s station were startled and turned deathly pale.
Ji Qingyan had just come out of the operating room.
The six-hour emergency cardiothoracic surgery had nearly exhausted her.
Her white coat was still smeared with dried blood, and her handsome face showed signs of fatigue, but her back remained straight and rigid.
The loud noise made her pause for a moment. She turned toward the hall and frowned slightly.
Heavy rain had been falling for three full days, and instead of stopping, it was growing even heavier.
The heat of August had vanished, the temperature had plummeted, and a faint fishy odor filled the air. It was impossible to tell whether it came from the earth, the rainwater, or something else.
Something was wrong.
The thought had not yet fully formed in her mind when a shrill scream suddenly tore through the noise of the hall—
“Graaah—!”
A middle-aged woman suddenly shoved the nurse in front of her with terrifying strength. The nurse staggered back several steps, her lower back striking a waiting chair, and her face turned deathly pale with pain.
The woman’s eyes were red and watery, and murky saliva kept dripping from the corners of her mouth. She let out a low growl in her throat, like a wild beast gone berserk.
Her fingernails had turned black and sharp, gleaming with a frightening, icy light beneath the fluorescent lamps.
The young man beside her was covered in blood and trembling violently. His voice was shrill and distorted. “Doctor! Please save my mother! She… she suddenly became like this! Something’s wrong with her! Something’s very wrong!”
Ji Qingyan stepped forward, caught the nurse as she nearly fell, and pulled her to safety. Then she turned toward the woman who looked insane, her gaze calm but alert.
“Ma’am, can you hear me?” Her voice was clear and calm, neither hurried nor impatient, carrying the soothing strength honed through years of clinical experience. “Where do you feel unwell? Tell me slowly.”
The woman suddenly raised her head.
Her eyes looked cloudy and dull, the whites filled with spiderweb-like blood vessels, while her pupils seemed covered by a grayish-white film.
She stared intently at Ji Qingyan. Her growl grew deeper and more vicious, her entire body poised to pounce and radiating the aura of a predator, like a ravenous wolf stalking its prey.
A chill ran from her tailbone to the crown of her head.
Ji Qingyan’s heart sank.
In all her years of medical practice, she had seen patients with uncontrollable emotions and patients suffering from mental disorders, but she had never seen a look like that in anyone’s eyes—no pain, no fear, only a pure, instinctive, naked desire to attack.
“It’s just an emotional outburst brought on by a common cold. Everyone, disperse, disperse.” The senior attending physician, looking impatient, waved his hand to break up the crowd, then turned and instructed the nurses, “Give her a sedative injection!”
Ji Qingyan frowned even more deeply.
Wrong.
Since early yesterday morning, the emergency room had received several patients with similar symptoms that made absolutely no sense.
Their body temperatures showed no abnormalities, yet they were extremely manic and irritable; they gradually lost the ability to speak and became highly aggressive; and the skin all over their bodies felt cold and stiff.
This could not be explained by an ordinary cold or an emotional outburst.
Suppressing the unease washing over her, she took a tongue depressor from her pocket, slowed her steps as she approached, and said in a gentle but firm voice, “Ma’am, cooperate with me. Open your mouth—”
“Ho—!”
Before she could finish speaking, the woman suddenly stood up.
Those sharp black nails shot straight toward her eyes with a whoosh, moving faster than any human could, fierce and decisive!
Ji Qingyan’s pupils contracted sharply, and she instinctively dodged to the side.
Rip—
The white coat tore from her chest to her ribs, the fabric peeling back to reveal the white shirt beneath.
If she had been half a second slower, it would not have been her clothes that tore, but her flesh.
She grabbed the woman’s wrist with her other hand. It felt cold and stiff to the touch, and something seemed to be slowly writhing beneath her skin.
The woman’s struggle was astonishingly powerful. Her muscles and bones seemed strengthened by something, nothing like the strength an ordinary middle-aged woman should possess.
“Help me! Hurry!” Ji Qingyan shouted in a low voice.
Two security guards rushed over with riot forks and pinned her down. Lying on the floor, the woman continued to thrash wildly, her screams sharp and piercing, like fingernails scraping across glass.
Amid the chaos, someone’s phone slipped from their hand and fell beside the woman. Its screen was still lit, and CCTV News was broadcasting an emergency report.
“【Emergency Alert】Unexplained violent attacks have occurred at multiple locations around the world, suspected to be caused by mass mental disturbances triggered by extreme weather events. All citizens are urged to remain at home, lock their doors and windows, and minimize going outside…”
The woman suddenly slammed her head into the phone.
Bang! The screen shattered, and the broadcast abruptly cut off.
She lay on the floor, continuing to roar. Her skin visibly changed to an ashen blue, while the pupils of her eyes were gradually swallowed by a grayish-white color. Some kind of horrifying transformation was taking place inside her.
“Ah—a zombie! She… she’s a zombie!”
No one knew who had shouted it first, but panic spread like an epidemic in an instant.
The crowd staggered back several steps, screams, sobs, and the sounds of tables and chairs toppling over merging into one cacophony.
Security dragged Ji Qingyan to a safe area. She stared at the woman writhing in pain on the floor as a chill ran down her back.
She did not linger in the middle of the crowd for even a second. She turned and walked back to her office, locked the door behind her, pressed her back against it, and felt her heart pounding violently in her chest.
Outside the window, rain poured down like a waterfall. In the distance, screams, sirens, and the sounds of vehicle collisions drifted faintly from the streets and alleys, layered together like the wailing of a city.
She stripped off her tattered white coat and threw it into the trash can, then lowered her head to examine herself—a thin, elongated scratch was clearly visible on her arm, bleeding and stinging.
It was a wound caused by the woman’s claws. It was not deep, but the skin and flesh had been torn open, and it looked horrifying.
Ji Qingyan cleaned the wound, then took out iodine and gauze to bandage it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the green ivy in a pot on the desk.
She froze.
The potted ivy had been growing for more than half a year, but it was still half-dead, with wilted yellow leaves and dried roots and stems. Even the cleaning staff had suggested throwing it out and replacing it with a new one.
Yet at this moment, its branches and leaves were growing at a speed visible to the naked eye. The wilted yellow faded away, emerald green spread across the plant—one leaf, two leaves, three leaves… Within just a few seconds, the entire pot of pothos had become lush and full of life.
The mutation did not stop.
Its roots and stems continued growing wildly. New leaves sprouted rapidly, while its branches and foliage spread and crawled outward. In a short time, they had covered half the desk.
The green tendrils writhed and extended like living creatures, eerie and astonishing.
Ji Qingyan gasped and instinctively backed away several steps, her lower back striking the edge of the bookcase.
What was this?
She lowered her head to look at her arm, and her pupils suddenly contracted.
A faint green ring flowed across the surface of the wound, and the injury that had initially been bleeding healed at a speed visible to the naked eye—a scab formed and fell away, new skin grew, and in the blink of an eye, only an extremely faint pink mark remained.
Ji Qingyan’s heart pounded, and her fingers trembled slightly. Instinctively, she reached for the scalpel on the desk and gripped it as though holding on to her last sliver of hope.
Bzzzt...
A faint buzzing suddenly arose in her mind.
Immediately afterward, a vague, ethereal voice echoed from the depths of her soul, ancient, distant, and utterly devoid of emotion:
“Ji Qingyan… The inheritance descends. The mesospace is opening.”
As the voice faded, she opened her palm, only to find it empty; the scalpel had vanished without a trace.
Ji Qingyan’s pupils widened slightly, her thoughts racing. In the blink of an eye, the scalpel reappeared in her palm.
After practicing repeatedly, storing and retrieving objects became easy and intuitive.
She suppressed the turbulent emotions in her chest, held her breath, and focused all her Mental Energy inward.
Gray mist enveloped the air.
A Chaos Space roughly ten square meters in size appeared deep within her consciousness. There was only nothingness beneath her feet, gray mist above her head, and indistinct fog filling the air. The faint sound of flowing water could be heard from somewhere in the depths, but its source could not be seen.
Ji Qingyan slowly exhaled and clenched her palm.
Amid the apocalypse, this portable space was her most powerful trump card, her greatest means of survival in a desperate situation.
Outside, the rain poured harder, and the screams were drawing closer.
She raised her head toward the window, her eyes deep and contemplative.