The warm wind of March swept by, carrying withered leaves and an atmosphere entirely unsuited to the season.
A heavy stench of blood and decay hung in the air. Outside the window, the city was a landscape of shattered walls. Corpses caked in dark blood lay sprawled haphazardly in the shadows, while hideously deformed zombies wandered past them.
Time had reset, rolling back to the very first day of the apocalypse.
They had just finished caring for the director's sick daughter and had not yet gone down to that basement.
"I had a... rather bad dream," Yueyue said softly in the hospital room.
When she looked at Su Mingan walking out from the inner room, her gaze suddenly sharpened.
Su Mingan today seemed somehow different from yesterday.
An indescribable feeling made it hard for her to look away. She watched the young man walk over to her with slightly sluggish steps, sit down, and then stare closely at her for a moment.
"What is it?" she asked.
"What dream did you have?"
"Well... I suppose it was like a fairytale that was suddenly missing a page?" Yueyue said.
"..." Su Mingan walked toward the door. "We won't go to the archives today. Let's go outside and take a look."
"Okay."
Yueyue had always been an intuitive player with a miraculous, innate premonition about everything. When Su Mingan suggested checking out somewhere else, she abandoned her original plan to visit the archives without a moment's hesitation.
Su Mingan pushed open the door, and the live-stream comments began to scroll across his vision.
[Morning, host~]
[Morning~ What the hell, why is there blood?]
[Has the apocalypse started?]
"Good morning," Su Mingan replied with a smile.
He had already discovered that Death Reload affected the entire world; even higher-dimensional beings and the audience would have their timelines shifted whenever he died.
He had become the only person standing on the banks of the river of time.
He did not believe his sense of mission to save the world was innate; rather, since he had been given the chance, he would use every ounce of his strength to seize it.
Just like a hardcore Adventurer Player who had mastered the walkthrough for clearing a game, he simply acted on a subconscious refusal to see the worst possible ending.
To avoid being reduced to a toy for higher-dimensional beings, he was saving himself.
Though after this death, he found that his previously selectable Save 1 and Save 2 had vanished—now, the moment he opened his eyes, he respawned at a fixed point in time and could no longer choose for himself.
He did not know the reason for this, nor whether it was because the newbie stage was particularly special.
Still, it was fine.
Because everything still had a chance to start over.
He would forever have the chance to try again.
People turned into isolated islands, wandering through a dark forest eyed by monsters.
faraway travelers caught glimpses of each other's ships, their lights shining through the fog.
And as he shuttled between the rivers, catching glimpses of other silent travelers from his own boat...
...perhaps he would become a glowing Beacon in the eyes of these lost souls.
...
Smashing the heads of a few zombies with a steel pipe, he saw several notifications: [Exp+50] [Exp+50]. His experience bar would level up after killing about six more zombies.
Quests gave points, and killing monsters gave experience—this was the rule he had roughly figured out. The current level of the zombies wasn't high, making it the perfect time for players to build up their strength. Those players who had the bright idea of fleeing to the remote wilderness the moment the apocalypse began were destined not to get very far.
He fought his way out alongside Yueyue, a group of cowering people gradually gathering behind them. When they were about to break through the front gates, the people trailing behind still refused to leave.
"Should we take them with us?" Yueyue glanced back. There were many people with hopeful eyes gazing at the two of them.
"The target is too big, and they're useless," Su Mingan said. "If they want to follow, let them. They won't be able to keep up for long anyway."
Practically speaking, Su Mingan's only offensive skill, Oblivion, still required him to use his finger to cast it. Right now, he was just a player with physical stats comparable to an ordinary person, relying mostly on Yueyue's swordsmanship to kill zombies.
However, many people died in front of zombies not because they couldn't fight them, but because of the fear in their hearts.
—They didn't dare swing their blades.
Yet on this first day of the apocalyptic outbreak, carving out a path to survive was actually not that difficult.
...
After bashing in the head of a zombie standing by the door, Su Mingan shook his aching arm and heard the following prompts:
[Ding-dong! You have leveled up to a Tier 1-2 player. (Gained 3 free attribute points, partial permissions upgraded, store inventory expanded)]
[Experience Bar: 0/2000]
Without hesitation, Su Mingan poured his attribute points into [Spirit] and then headed out onto the main street.
[Combat Power: 206+9]
...
"Waaah!!"
On the street, a female student tripped and fell while running, her calves trembling. Looking at the weirdly moving zombie behind her, she was too terrified to even crawl away.
Ordinary players didn't start with off-the-charts points like Su Mingan. If you died early in the newbie stage, you might only get forty or fifty points—barely enough to allocate a single stat point and buy a low-tier skill, with no guarantee that the skill had any direct combat utility. Many people had been ordinary citizens before the game started, too afraid to even slaughter a chicken, let alone face a scene like this.
Seeing the zombie get closer and closer to the girl, Su Mingan stood silently at the street corner, watching the scene unfold, when he suddenly heard a zombie-like roar beside him.
A young male zombie waiting at the bus stop stared with wide, unblinking eyes, locking its gaze firmly on Su Mingan.
"Roar—!"
The moment their eyes met, the zombie lunged, but a slender sword blade instantly pierced its eye socket. With a light flick of Yueyue's arm, the zombie before them collapsed limply to the ground.
"Ah—!"
The female student let out a miserable screech, the final sound of her life. The next moment, the ferocious zombie pounced, biting straight through her throat.
Blood burst open like a blossoming flower, and the light in her eyes gradually faded. The zombie collapsed onto her body, her delicate flower-like face slowly turning into a terrifying, bloody mess. The scene was exceptionally cruel.
Yueyue paused.
"We've already given them five days to prepare, and she still didn't have the courage to swing a sword. For someone like that, even if you save her, what will you do afterward? Drag her along forever? Save her and then chase her away? People like her who only know how to scream will only put us in danger." Su Mingan wiped a splatter of blood from the back of his hand. "Our time is precious. There are tens of thousands of players destined to be eliminated in this game; we don't have the chance to save everyone one by one."
As he spoke, the live-stream comments gradually filled with a wave of condemnation.
[Save people one by one, can't you? We're all Zhaixing people, we should be cooperating to fight the game organizers. To insist on the natural law of survival of the fittest—this mindset is way too extreme.]
[It's because of people like the host that I died so fast.]
...
Though there were supportive comments in the mix arguing that in an apocalypse one should indeed avoid trouble, many people still clung to the notion of peace and mutual aid, flooding the chat to condemn him.
[The host has such a terrible attitude. Can't people even comment...?!]
[Why are you guys so triggered? Saving people is a courtesy, not an obligation. The host didn't do anything wrong...]
[No, how do you bunch of useless dead people have the nerve to curse an Adventurer Player? They're clearly our only hope...]
Su Mingan's gaze never drifted toward the text in the upper right corner again.
Yueyue looked at him. "So annoying. Turn off the live stream."
"No need," he shook his head, offering no further explanation.
...Not all players hiding in the rear were useless.
Fear of death was human nature. Some of them might genuinely find it hard to face a world beyond their imagination, pinning their hopes on other heroes stepping up to clear the levels—such a mindset was everywhere. But that could not become their excuse to sit back like hedonists, watching others march to their deaths from a god's-eye view.
In such a desperate and helpless environment, people easily lost themselves, becoming irritable and anxious. Moral kidnapping easily reared its head in every corner of such a chaotic world.
He streamed to earn bonus points, which didn't mean he had to submit to moral kidnapping.
People loved to ride the coattails of the powerful. Once his identity as the First Player was exposed, these fellows would probably come crawling back.
They were just grass in the wind. If these people were smart enough, they wouldn't have died so quickly.
Su Mingan had purchased an apocalyptic area map in advance. Glancing at the coordinates on the map, he pulled Yueyue toward another hospital.
Suddenly, his outstretched hand clutched empty air, and then his other hand was caught by a sudden force and forcefully dragged away.