"Diligent cultivation brings enlightenment, shedding mortality to become human.
Farewell, Mr. Long.
Yet, is all of this truly nothing more than a catastrophe forged from a millennium-old misunderstanding?"
On the Blue Star, a young man scrolling down the screen to read the Corpse Brother manga muttered to himself.
The final page was frozen in a still image—the wave-crossing boat carrying Corpse King Long You into the sun.
Yet, upon the sun itself, the phantom shadow of the Undead Bird emerged...
"Wait, that's not right. Why does this Undead Bird phantom look like it's bound with a few chains?
And is there something at its tail?..."
Suddenly, a flash of red light blinded him, and Lin Xia passed out instantly.
The Corpse Brother World—
In the suburban outskirts.
"Big brother, let's bury her right here." A sinister, ferocious voice rang out.
The speaker was a burly, bald man, poking at a dirt pit with a shovel.
"Alright, dig faster! With so many mutations happening lately, we should at least thank this chaotic world.
It's the only reason we can live such carefree lives.
It's just a pity; before I even got a taste, she had to go and slam her head against the wall.
Damn it, such a vibrant young chick, who would've thought she had such a fierce backbone..."
A brawny man with a scar across his face carried the corpse of an 18-year-old beauty, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he spoke with annoyance.
"Big brother! It's dug!"
"Throw her in the pit. Remember to use the dissolving agent. Once her flesh melts away, she won't be able to turn into a Corpse Brother. Damn it, such a hassle."
"Whoosh~"
"Sizzle~"
A delicate, pretty corpse was thus reduced to a terrifying pile of white bones.
After shoveling the dirt back over, the two men hopped into their off-road vehicle and sped away.
When Lin Xia recovered her consciousness once more, everything around her had become unfamiliar and bizarre.
"Snap~"
A skeleton burst out from beneath the soil, looking around the world with a bewildered gaze.
This place was known as the Corpse Brother World.
The millennium-old Corpse King Long You had been trapped within the Heaven-Mixing Coffin, only to be dug up later by tomb raiders.
On a rainy night, due to the slippery mountain roads, a delivery truck had overturned.
The Heaven-Mixing Coffin plunged straight into the H City water treatment plant, and the virus began to spread outward from the water source.
The Corpse Brother Virus possessed the power to alter genes, transforming ordinary humans and animals into mindless monsters driven solely by slaughter and consumption—the Corpse Brothers.
These Corpse Brothers varied wildly in form; some retained a fraction of their human appearance,
though their faces were covered in bulging, ferocious blood vessels, and their eyes were as pale and lifeless as those of a dead fish.
Others had entirely lost their original shapes, their limbs twisted at all sorts of grotesque angles,
their skin even covered in disgusting tumors
that writhed ceaselessly, as if possessed of a life of their own.
This world practiced martial arts and awakened supernatural abilities.
There were five major tiers in total: Human, Earth, Heaven, God Stage, and Super God Stage...
At this moment, Lin Xia finally recovered from her dazed state and began trying to control her body.
Just as Lin Xia was getting used to the icy touch of this skeletal frame,
a burst of fierce battle cries suddenly echoed from not far away.
A few survivors were being swarmed and attacked by a band of wandering Corpse Brothers,
those Corpse Brothers lunging at them frantically like ravenous wolves.
One particularly massive Corpse Brother, its muscles bulging high,
flailed its pincers—resembling iron tongs—and slammed them savagely toward a survivor.
The survivor widened his eyes in terror, raising his only weapon—a rusted machete—to parry.
With a loud "clang," the machete was instantly knocked flying,
and the survivor was sent tumbling several meters away by the immense impact,
landing heavily on the ground as a mouthful of blood spewed from his lips.
Several other agile Corpse Brothers darted through the crowd like phantoms,
their sharp claws effortlessly tearing through the survivors' skin and leaving bloody trails in their wake.
Yet these survivors did not simply give up. A robust, sturdy man let out a roar,
snatching up a wooden club and smashing it fiercely against a closing Corpse Brother.
The Corpse Brother's head jerked sideways from the blow, but it quickly recovered its balance and lunged forward with even greater ferocity.
Lin Xia discovered with horror that she was trapped within a chilling skeleton—a female skeleton.
The pale bones cast an eerie, candle-like shadow in the dim surroundings, standing back-to-back with the light of the sun and moon.
The stench of blood and decay began to permeate the air all around.
The buildings on the street were still relatively intact, yet their walls were stained with patches of blood and smeared with disgusting mucus.
Bodies lay sprawled haphazardly across the ground, some gnawed beyond recognition, the rotting stench piercing straight into her nasal cavity.
Lin Xia's heart was flooded with terror, and she screamed frantically in her mind:
"Where is this? Why am I inside this skeleton? Is this the Corpse Brother World?!"
Yet all that escaped from her mouth was a hollow, ghostly clicking sound.
Those bizarrely shaped creatures wandered not far away.
Lin Xia forced herself to calm down, understanding that panic was utterly useless here. She thought to herself:
"No matter what kind of nightmare this is, I must find a way to survive,
even if I am nothing more than this terrifying skeleton right now."
She tried to move her skeletal frame, her joints emitting a spine-chilling creak.
"Judging by the memories fused from the original soul's mind, this should be H City.
The television just broadcasted that drinking tap water turns people into Corpse Brothers.
I wonder how far the plot has progressed.
Has Bai Xiaofei run into any Corpse Brothers yet? Am I even considered a Corpse Brother right now?"
For the sake of safety, Lin Xia burrowed back into the earth to study her own body.
Deep within her mind lay a legacy cultivation technique—the *Bone Burying Scripture*, capable of leading straight to the God Stage, complete with the accompanying martial art *Heaven Burying Nine Forms*.
(And no, this is not Xianxia.
The God Stage here refers to the God Stage of the Corpse Brother World, and it won't break the power scaling.
Once the Corpse Brother arc concludes, there will be time-travel beyond the edges of the Earth.)
The core of her body was known as the Bone Spirit Source, which could refine certain vital essences and bones, extracting their genes to fuse into her own skeleton, ultimately giving birth to Mutant Bone.