"No! We're doomed! It's all Baldy's fault!"
"Huan Tian, we didn't mean to upset you! Please—take us with you! We'll follow you anywhere!"
"Huan Tian! We're begging you!"
But Huan Tian never stopped. His footsteps were steady, deliberate—like someone who had already cut all ties. As he moved farther down the hallway, hope drained from their faces. Still, not a single person dared to follow. One by one, they turned and closed the office door behind them. With that hollow thud, their last chance at escape vanished.
Silence thickened. Not the silence of calm, but the kind that presses on the chest and stirs something primal.
Despair, once suffocating, curdled into something else—darker, hungrier.
Eyes turned toward Wang Susu.
What remained of humanity in those stares was long gone. Something raw and feral had taken its place.
She was still on the floor, dazed, her face drained of color. But the shift in the room snapped her back to awareness.
"What… what are you doing?" she stammered, panic rising in her throat. "I want to leave! Huan Tian, please—take me with you!"
She tried to run. Scrambled up and rushed toward the door—but a guard caught her and threw her back down like discarded trash.
More figures closed in around her; shadows cast by broken men.
"This is your fault. You angered him."
"If we're going to die, so are you."
"She doesn't get to go peacefully."
Wang Susu's screams shattered the air—sharp, desperate, human.
But outside, the shrieks of the undead were louder, more savage, drowning her voice beneath a rising tide of chaos.
And inside that sealed room, what little remained of order and reason crumbled, devoured by the darkness that had been waiting all along.
...
This building had forty-seven floors. The president's office was located at the very end of the top floor. To reach it, there was only a single elevator, one emergency stairwell, and two long corridors running east and west. At the end of each corridor sat a small waiting lounge, where visitors would usually wait before meeting the president at their scheduled time.
Now, however, the echo of gunfire had long since attracted a horde of the undead, clogging the eastern corridor completely. Fortunately, the west side remained quiet, for now. Huan Tian moved cautiously along the western hallway, retreating step by step.
His pace was slow, deliberate. The silence was suffocating. Only the occasional distant growl or scream cut through the stillness. But the acoustics of the building distorted the sounds, bouncing them off walls and ceilings. Even someone like Huan Tian—seasoned in survival from a past life—couldn't tell where exactly the danger lay.
He knelt and pressed his ear to the floor. After a few tense seconds, he exhaled in no frantic footsteps. No sudden crashes.
It seemed the nearby undead had been lured away by something else.
Or worse—they were still nearby, simply waiting for the scent of living flesh to stir them.
That possibility was far more terrifying.
Behind him, the pounding and snarling outside the president's office was growing louder, more urgent. There was no time left. Huan Tian had to keep moving. He slid along the wall, inching forward, his heels touching the floor first with each step. Through precise control of the muscles in his feet, he made almost no sound at all.
Ahead lay the west-side lounge. Using a large potted evergreen placed near the corner as cover, he carefully leaned forward and peered through the dense leaves.
What he saw inside was devastation.
The small lounge was in complete disarray—overturned couches, shattered coffee tables, toppled bookshelves, and blood-smeared carpets. Severed limbs lay scattered across the floor, and torn organs were piled in one corner. Bloody handprints streaked across the walls—evidence of those who had tried, and failed, to escape.
The massive crystal chandelier still glowed overhead, the only thing in the room left intact. But even it was speckled with gore, casting a pale red tint across the room. The light, once warm and elegant, now bathed the lounge in the soft hue of death.
Everything in that room screamed of what had happened.
A massacre. Brutal and absolute.
But what tugged at Huan Tian's heart wasn't the horrifying scene before him—it was the fact that there wasn't a single corpse left here.
"Judging by the rate of transformation, all the zombies were likely infected by the rain. And it seems there were quite a few of them."
After searching through the small reception lounge, Huan Tian was slightly disappointed. He didn't find any food, but at least he found several bottles of unopened mineral water. He tore off a large piece of fabric from the sofa, wrapped the bottles securely, and tied them tightly around his waist before continuing.
Ahead was the corridor leading to the executive office area. As he walked forward, he carefully examined the bloodstains and footprints on the ground and along the walls, his brow furrowing deeper and deeper.
One set of tracks belonged to the zombies that had been chasing from behind. The other set belonged to survivors, and those survivors were most likely heading toward the same destination as the first strategic location in Huan Tian's plan:
The staff break room.
There, the company had stocked a variety of snacks and drinks for employees, along with enough water and food. In his previous life, Huan Tian had received his first supply of resources in the apocalypse from that very place.
But now, that first strategic goal might already be out of reach.
Just as he lifted his leg to move forward, he suddenly heard a flurry of chaotic footsteps coming from the emergency stairwell door ahead. He quickly retreated to create distance.
The very next second, the emergency door was slammed open from the outside, and a man covered in blood rushed into the corridor. Due to the momentum, he crashed shoulder-first into the wall with a loud thud.
The moment the fire door opened, Huan Tian immediately heard disordered footsteps and growls behind the man. There were at least five zombies!
The man, having slammed into the wall, braced himself with a hand, ignoring his injuries. He turned back and kicked the emergency door shut with all his strength, then swiftly jammed the handle of his fire axe into the gap of the door handle to lock it in place.
Almost simultaneously, a heavy bang came from outside—the zombies crashed into the door with such brutal force and inertia that the man was lifted off his feet and slammed back against the wall behind him, leaving behind a smear of blood and flesh.
The fire door barely held against the first fierce impact, and a look of joy immediately spread across the man's face.
"I made it out. I finally made it out! Hahaha!"
"I'm a leader. You lowlifes deserve to be my stepping stones—trying to drag me down? Bah!"
He slumped to the floor, leaning against the wall, laughing wildly as if reborn from the brink of death.
His face was smeared with blood, obscuring his features, but his exquisite suit, though soaked in blood, still exuded nobility. The glossy black crocodile leather boots on his feet would have cost no less than a thousand dollars before the apocalypse.
The moment Huan Tian saw those boots, a cold gleam of killing intent flashed in his eyes. Though he couldn't see the man's face, he already guessed his identity from the shoes—Zou Wen, head of the project management department and Huan Tian's direct superior.
Huan Tian hadn't forgotten what Wang Susu said. Though she rambled nonsense, the fact that she used Zou Wen as a scapegoat in desperation meant he was involved. After all, he was Jiang Qing's top lackey—the kind who would wag his tail and smile even if Jiang Qing fed him shit.
Zou Wen had just laughed twice when suddenly three heavy thuds sounded near his ear.
The zombies outside were incredibly strong; the screws on the emergency door had already loosened from the pounding. The smile on Zou Wen's face instantly turned to horror. He frantically lunged at the door, bracing it firmly with his shoulder.
The door held, but the glass panes couldn't withstand the zombies' pressure.
Bang! Bang!
Two frosted glass panels shattered under the zombies' heavy blows. Three bloodied hands reached through the broken door into the corridor, clawing wildly as if trying to tear apart everything in sight.
As the door wobbled on the verge of collapse, Zou Wen's heart sank completely.
At that moment, he saw Huan Tian.