When Yin Mei opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed was the stench, and the second was the sounds. Yin Mei had always been sensitive to smell, so when she inhaled in that terrible smell of blood, rotting meat, and all things bad in this world, she immediately proceeded to vomit onto the ground.
"Ew! God, vomit somewhere else!" A woman's voice said, and Yin Mei was just barely able to grab ahold of what was going on around her.
In her hands, she held a gun. She was behind some concrete slab, while the people around her occasionally looked beyond the cover to shoot at something.
She had a bad feeling. "F*ck, I can't be so unlucky right?" She muttered, wiping away the vomit at the edge of her mouth with her dirty shirt sleeve. A thousand grass mud horses trampled on her heart as she also took a peek at what lay beyond the concrete slab.
Another sharp wave of nausea hit her. She was indeed just that unlucky. It was a zombie apocalypse.
She could only grit her teeth and raise her gun up, firing several rounds into the skulls of the approaching zombie-things.
Yin Mei was a decent shot, having a small amount of training in her original life, as her father had been in the military. But, she had also just finished living several centuries in an ancient xianxia world, so admittedly she was rusty. Only after she had wasted several bullets did she start getting back into the swing of things. If that xianxia world had taught her one thing, it was definitely patience.
It took a while, but the zombies had finally all been killed off and the group took a break. Yin Mei sat down on a rock, disgusted with how dirty she felt. This was definitely worse than the xianxia world, if only because everything was so unclean. Going from a noble daughter of the upper realm to someone trudging along in the zombie apocalypse, it was literally like going from heaven to hell.
She slowly began to review the information. As expected, this was a zombie apocalypse world. In addition, humans would awaken superpowers, so it was a zombie apocalypse plus superpower world. And to top it off, the male lead would also go back in time, so it was a classic zombie apocalypse + supernatural abilities + transmigrating back in time protagonist world.
As for Yin Mei, she was actually this male lead's ex-girlfriend. Frick, couldn't she drop this title of the male lead's ex-woman already? Anyways, to fully understand this world, it was required to explain a little further.
In the original, original storyline, before the male lead went back in time, the male lead and Yin Mei's current body, Lu Mei, had been lovers in the apocalypse. The male lead, whose name was Lei Han, had been a special forces soldier under the command of Lu Mei's father. At the beginning of the apocalypse, Lu Mei's father died saving Lei Han and he made a promise to his commander that he would definitely protect his daughter. After being together and weathering so many life and death situations, the two gradually fell in love before finally doing it and becoming official.
But sadly, Lu Mei was only a cannon fodder so this happiness didn't last forever. Ten years into the apocalypse, humanity had begun to carve out an existence in this wretched world, regaining some semblance of civilization as they established safe haven cities around the world. But, getting into one of these cities was really hard. In the end, Lu Mei betrayed Lei Han, selling him to a lab that experimented on humans (though for good reasons, their methods were less than ethical). She received quite a lot because Lei Han had a coveted lightning ability.
In the lab, Lei Han was tortured day and night, his only solace a small apprentice researcher known as Ming Yu, the female lead, who secretly helped Lei Han because she had a crush on him. In the end, Lei Han died to the experiments, but he miraculously went back in time to ten years ago, when the apocalypse was just starting out!
Of course, he got his revenge against Lu Mei and all those people at the lab and got together with his beloved light of his heart, Ming Yu. Lu Mei was speechless. He had actually heartlessly destroyed the only chance humanity had of creating a zombie cure, was he crazy? Not only that, but so cruelly torturing and killing his lover of 4 years and daughter of his life benefactor, even if she had betrayed him, wasn't this a little too much?
Like Yin Mei thought, she really couldn't understand the thought process of these crazy people. Actually, Yin Mei might even be worse than those male and female leads, but she didn't realize it.
Currently, Yin Mei had just transmigrated into the period where Lei Han had also just transmigrated back a day or so ago. Lu Mei's father had already died and she was traveling together with Lei Han. They had joined up with a small group of people and were trying to get to B City, which had a military base. This B City would also eventually become the safe haven in the future that house the lab that Lei Han had destroyed, but Lu Mei and Lei Han would have both left B City before that in order to find the rest of Lu Mei's family.
In this time around, Lei Han would definitely not leave B City for the sake of a hopeless goose chase, and instead firmly insist on staying in B City. In the end, Lu Mei had no one else to rely on so she could only also stay in B City. But, Lei Han would not support her at all and she would be left to fend for herself. Although she was the daughter of a military commander, she was a rich miss who had been spoiled for all her life, unable to do anything but sell her body in order to survive. Of course, she began harboring a grudge against Lei Han. It was only after awakening her ability, a water ability, was she able to live a little better as clean water was precious in the apocalypse.
Now that Yin Mei had a general grasp of the situation, she shifted her attention to the villain and the main mission.
The villain was actually... hahaha, the zombie emperor. Yin Mei wanted to kill herself. The villain was actually a zombie, wouldn't she be eaten before she could help him? Why do all the other protagonists of the transmigrating systems seem to have such an easy time and it was only her who was suffering so much hardship??
She sighed, checking the main mission now.
"Main mission: Help the zombie emperor escape from the lab."
Yin Mei looked to the sky. Why is it only her?
To explain the meaning of the mission, the zombie emperor's overwhelming strength was the result of being experimented on during the early days of the apocalypse, at the same lab working on the cure for the zombie virus. Initially he could get out perfectly fine all on his own, so why is it that she had to act out the knight in shining armor and save him herself?
She felt that if she saved him in advance, not only would the lab have less data and perhaps be unable to formulate the virus cure because of it, the zombie emperor would also be less powerful. Well, she guessed that there was one bonus in that it could potentially foster a sense of gratefulness in the zombie emperor toward her. That is, if the zombie emperor would be capable of coherent thought by the time she rescued him. If not, then she would just be his lunch ticket for the day.
"Alright, if everyone is rested, then we'll continue," the leader of the group said. He looked like an honest and leader-like sort of guy, though in the apocalypse, no one trusted anyone. After all, wasn't it well known that the most dangerous thing in the apocalypse wasn't zombies, but humans? But, this was also just the beginning of the apocalypse, so the people weren't so jaded yet.
Yin Mei hefted up her backpack that had been thrown nearby, taking a quick glance at this world's male lead. Lei Han certainly appeared like the special agents soldier he was, looking very manly and handsome, with just the right amount of muscle to him.
But, Yin Mei just had to say that he wasn't her type. She thought that she preferred someone like She Ming... maybe she was traumatized because he was that sort of overly arrogant and chauvinistic type like Long Aotian. Or perhaps it was simply because he would be the one to kill her original body. She wasn't quite sure and felt that both were perfectly legitimate concerns.
Lei Han caught her looking, so she furrowed her brow and looked away, feeling slightly annoyed by his hostile gaze. She was only relieved that he wouldn't make a move against her while they were on their way to B City, or she would tire herself out trying to guard against the male lead all the time. This body was already so weak, wouldn't she just straight up die from exhaustion if she had to deal with the male lead on top of surviving?
If her first complaint about this world was how filthy everything was and how she had to deal with rotting corpses scatter all over the grown, then her second complaint was how weak her current body was. She had lived so many years as a cultivator, that seemed to almost never grow tired or weak no matter what, that she was finding it difficult to adjust to being a weak mortal again. Especially in a world that required her to exert extra effort in order to survive.
The only benefit of it was that Lu Mei's ability could actually be considered very good. She had a water ability, and though it didn't seem very strong at first, her water ability was actually a mutation that produced spirit water that could heal fatigue and minor wounds. Sadly, Lu Mei had yet to awaken her ability, so Yin Mei could only suffer until then.
The group continued to trudge along, and Yin Mei knew that it would take them a couple of weeks until they could reach B City. Aside from a certain child that they would pick up along the way, there wasn't anything really important. Yin Mei thought that if not for the constant hiding and killing zombies, it would be the perfect opportunity to plan out a course of action.
She could only bear with things and think during the time that they were allowed to rest.
The matter of Lei Han, for the moment, could be set aside. Lei Han didn't do anything drastic until later on in the story, when he had gained enough power to take over B City and destroyed the lab. The important thing was stealing away Lei Han's allies and rescuing the zombie emperor.
In this zombie apocalypse world, the amount of treasures that could be found was infinitesimal, mostly existing in the form of energy cores that could be extracted from the head of a zombie. The true treasure here were the allies that Lei Han gathered up through the story, including but not limited to humanity's elite from the former timeline. Since Yin Mei couldn't steal treasures this time, then she would steal allies. She decided she would even steal the people that Lei Han didn't make his allies, like the head researcher of the lab, whose brain was practically a national treasure. She disdained the fact that Lei Han had killed him instead of making use of him for the benefit of mankind.
The first ally that she would steal would be the child that she had mentioned earlier. Ten years later, he would become one of humanity's powerhouses. Wouldn't it be hilarious if she grabbed him first and humanity's powerhouse ended up on the side of the zombie emperor? She almost laughed out loud thinking of this. Although she was ultimately on the side of the humans, for the sake of the zombie emperor, she felt that she would have no choice but to switch sides to the zombies.
As for whether or not zombies and humans could even work together, well, that was a question that she would have to save for later.