Assault of the zombie army
Hidden in the bushes above the camp, Ding Hao watches the caravan and licks his lips. Kill a thousand people, raise a zombie army, and he can leave the mountain to become a formal disciple at Zhao Ze mountain, so the cave’s inscription promises. He was once a villager, recruited as a laborer by a passing caravan that was itself attacked by zombies on this mountain; abandoned with dozens of other servants as cannon fodder, he fled deeper into the mountain and found a cave no zombie dared approach. Inside was a demonic inheritance, hidden by the same Gu Master who had once destroyed the clan there and raised the tombstone. ch. 254
Only a mortal could inherit it. Ding Hao awakened his aperture there and began cultivating, his aptitude raised from C grade to B grade by a rare Gu he found in the cave. After more than eight years he reached rank three, the standard needed to enter the inheritance’s final chamber, where a stone slab named its author the Second Zombie King and offered discipleship at Zhao Ze mountain to whoever met his test: kill a thousand people and raise a zombie army meeting set numbers of white-hair, black-hair and green-hair zombies, or else raise even a single blue-hair zombie. Ding Hao, steadfast and moved by a background like his own, spent another three years working toward it, and realized the killing and the zombie raising fed each other: each corpse became a new zombie, and each new zombie let him kill more. ch. 254
Mu Bei mountain sits on a major Southern Border trade route, so caravans pass monthly, but Ding Hao could only move against the small ones; a large caravan he hid from, and a mid scale one he never dared attack. This caravan, smaller than even a small scale one and already battered, looks like a gift, and Ding Hao is confident he can finish it. ch. 254
At night, under a moon hidden by cloud, Ding Hao wills his zombies forward from every side. A wary investigative Gu Master hears something; a single white-hair zombie steps into the firelight, and the group laughs off the alarm as nothing, sending a young Gu Master to kill the unlucky thing. He freezes mid-boast, then flees screaming that there are zombies, and hundreds of white-hair zombies are revealed hopping toward the camp with stronger black-hair zombies mixed among them. The camp’s bells ring; Jia Long and the vice leaders climb the wall, grim-faced, and one of them says he has never seen a zombie horde this large in dozens of trips to the mountain. ch. 254
Ranged attacks, icicles, fireballs, vines and boulders, cut white-hair zombies into pieces, burn them to ash, freeze them solid or crush them into meat paste in large numbers, but the Gu Masters’ primeval essence runs low before the horde does, and the zombies reach the wooden wall. Ding Hao then sends over fifty black-hair zombies, stronger and faster than the white-hair kind and carrying the strength of a hundred beast king; they tear a gap in the wall like dried twigs, and several break into the inner camp. One sweeps a rank one Gu Master off his feet and pounces to finish him, but Fang Yuan blocks the blow, punches the zombie’s chest in, and when it still comes on, tears it apart by the arms; its corpse-poison blood splatters but is turned away by his white light armor. The rescued Gu Master thanks Lord Hei Tu with open reverence. ch. 254
