Chapter 149: A Big Shot [Please Subscribe!]

The guard and Hu Huayao were frozen in place at this unimaginable sight. The guard, in particular, knew from his understanding of the world that humans turned into bloodthirsty, mindless zombies due to the virus, but what on earth was happening right before his eyes?

Just a second ago, the man had merely been babbling incoherently. The next second, his abdomen suddenly ruptured, and several barbed tentacles shot out like iron whips, lashing toward their heads.

Fan Li watched everything unfold. Although it happened far too quickly, he forced himself to stay calm.

Seeing the two men paralyzed with terror, Fan Li lunged forward and shoved them hard, sending them crashing to the floor due to momentum.

Simultaneously, the three barbed tentacles darted rapidly toward Fan Li.

A layer of gray, stone-like substance visibly covered Fan Li's skin. With a few muffled thuds, the tentacles failed to inflict any damage upon him whatsoever.

The tentacles were extremely agile.

However, the unexpected turn of events remained under his control.

Fan Li gripped his samurai sword tightly, took a deep breath, and showed no fear in the face of the mutated appendages. He suddenly charged toward the man lying on the bed. Since the tentacles could not pierce his defense, handling the situation became straightforward.

With only two meters between them, Fan Li closed the distance rapidly. His samurai sword swept horizontally from right to left. With a sharp slash, the three tentacles protruding from the abdomen were severed in an instant.

"Woof!"

Meanwhile, Ellie detected the situation the very first instant. Running all the way there, she sensed the enemy's exact location, bent her legs slightly, and leaped high into the air, bringing her hammer crashing directly down onto the mutated man's head.

"Boom!"

Red and white matter splattered everywhere. The man stopped struggling altogether. With the host dead, the severed tentacles still wriggled aimlessly on the ground, twitching like a snake whose head had been chopped off, evoking an intense sense of dread.

Fan Li walked over and stomped down fiercely. One of the tentacles shattered instantly, turning into a puddle of scattered pulp.

[Kill Value +3]

It was a surprising gain. A single tentacle had yielded three points of kill value.

Nearby, Ellie put down her hammer, grabbed two tentacles in her hands, and began gnawing on them with her teeth. Within mere seconds, the tentacles began to shrivel visibly at a speed discernible to the naked eye, drying out like sun-cured kelp until not a drop of moisture remained.

"Brother Li, I was the one who let this man in. I didn't vet him properly and committed a grave mistake," Hu Huayao said as he stood up, taking full responsibility for the blunder.

The guard beside them looked at Ellie with eyes full of panic and terror. Under Fan Li's stern and scrutinizing gaze, he actually dropped to his knees, burying his head deep into the ground, not daring to look up again.

Compared to the man who had suddenly mutated, Fan Li and Ellie were undoubtedly far more terrifying.

Fear was an instinctive reaction.

The reason Fan Li scrutinized himself—knowing he was no longer a purely normal human—was because his behavior and that of his closest subordinates had undergone some drastic departures from conventional humanity.

Fear stems not only from slaughter, but also from the unknown.

After all, Hu Huayao was merely an ordinary person; facing an unprecedented mutation, his brain inevitably stalled in a daze.

After confirming that the man on the bed was dead, Fan Li commanded, "Carry the corpse outside and burn it to ashes with gasoline."

The commotion in the room had drawn attention from outside. Several people stood at the doorway, gazing into the blood-stained room, and swallowed hard. For a moment, no one dared to step forward, terrified of contracting the virus and turning into horrifying zombies.

Realizing he had appeared somewhat flustered just moments before, Hu Huayao forced down his nausea, stepped forward to wrap the corpse in a bedsheet, and glared with a gloomy expression at the people gathered at the door. "Come over and give me a hand!"

His sudden shout startled the onlookers, jolting them into motion. Several of them hurried forward, and together they carried the shattered bed and the corpse out of the building.

"Light it," Fan Li ordered with a cold expression.

Hu Huayao nodded, poured a bottle of gasoline over the corpse, and set it on fire.

The blaze quickly engulfed the body, producing a sizzling sound of roasting flesh. The pungent smell of cooked meat permeated the surrounding air, making the stomachs of the onlookers churn with nausea; a few could not suppress their revulsion and threw up on the spot.

People who were unaware of the true situation gathered in small groups, whispering among themselves, wondering which unfortunate soul had angered the leader to be burned alive right inside the residential compound.

Rumors spread like wildfire.

In an instant, Fan Li's terror index rose once again. To the survivors, the mere name of Fan Li was enough to stop crying children in their tracks.

Fan Li's core team sat around the table, while the fighters previously responsible for carrying and guarding the man stood nervously off to one side.

Fan Li swept his gaze over them and said, "From the moment you first encountered him, tell me everything he said and did, word for word."

Daring not conceal anything, the men immediately began speaking in a flurry of overlapping voices: "When he first arrived, he was already acting a bit crazy, saying he had been starving for a long time and didn't dare eat anything."

"Right, he also asked if this place was safe, if there were any women here, and muttered something about women being terrifying and eating people."

"He mentioned that to me too, telling me to stay away from women—especially the women at the gymnasium, claiming those women had two heads and dozens of tails, and that they would swallow people whole like eating steamed buns the moment they laid eyes on them."

The men described everything they knew without holding anything back, yet the more Fan Li listened, the deeper his frown became.

"And then?"

"That was it. After that, he completely lost consciousness, lay on the bed, and ignored us no matter what we said, just rambling incoherently to himself."

"Leader... we were close to him. Are we going to get infected?"

Fan Li looked up at them and said indifferently, "It's fine. His condition was rather special; it doesn't transmit easily. Alright, you have nothing more to do here. Dismissed."

"Understood!"

Hearing that they were not infected, the men lifted their previously drooping heads, chorused their assent, and hurried out the door.

Aside from Lu Tao, Fan Li's other core confidants sat around the table, including a middle-aged man whose build was even more intimidating than Hu Huayao's. Having spent his life butchering pigs, he possessed immense physical strength and was the former captain of the second squad.

Perhaps out of long habit from his profession, his real name was rarely used; everyone simply called him the Butcher.

Wielding a heavy, thick butchering knife, he had managed to survive the apocalypse for seven days before finally arriving at the camp. Because of his formidable combat prowess, he had earned the position of squad captain.

The Butcher's strength had caught Fan Li's attention, leading to his inclusion in the round table meetings as one of the core members.

After everyone was seated, Fan Li said in a deep voice, "I'll keep it short. Based on my experience over this period, zombies are merely ordinary infected individuals. Above zombies are mutants, and beyond that, there are entities even stronger than mutants—what I call monsters."

Hu Huayao and the others had encountered these before and remained relatively calm, but Lu Tao and the Butcher exchanged glances, seeing mutual astonishment in each other's eyes. Jingmen Huafu was located in a remote area, which was precisely why they had managed to escape disaster and avoid being attacked by monsters.

Of course, during their previous scavenging runs, they had encountered unusual zombies and suffered some casualties, but they had never imagined that those zombies were so powerful simply because they had undergone some kind of mutation.

Who could have guessed that those immensely strong zombies, which had virtually no weaknesses other than their heads, were merely at the bottom of the ladder, and that far above them existed terrifying entities like mutants and true monsters?

Fan Li had no intention of hiding this information. After all, from now on, everything here belonged to his foundation—whether it was the food or the survivors.

Fan Li continued, "I examined the corpse; the man wasn't a zombie, but was infected by some other organism. I suspect the culprit who infected him is a monster that surpasses mutants!"

"Compared to ordinary zombies, monsters possess much more miraculous abilities. Some can mimic human voices, create illusions, or even attach numerous corpses to their bodies to form a bloated, giant monstrosity."

Everything Fan Li described sounded too bizarre to be believed. Lu Tao, who knew nothing of this, swallowed hard and asked, "Leader, how many monsters have you encountered?"

Without concealing anything, Fan Li replied, "Enemies of the monster tier—I've encountered six. One escaped, one was subjugated, and the remaining four were all killed by me. As for mutants, there are even more, probably numbering over a dozen."

Not only had he killed them, but he had even subjugated some of the monsters?

Was he talking about that creature outside the door whose face was covered in teeth and resembled a dinosaur? Yes, only that kind of organism could truly be called a monster.

A trace of fervent excitement flashed in the Butcher's eyes. To him, this was what a true big shot looked like!

Although he acknowledged that Li Bing had some methods for managing people, compared to the new leader, Li Bing wasn't even qualified to shine his shoes.

"The deceased had contact with a monster, and it couldn't be very far from us. Otherwise, he wouldn't have managed to stumble upon our stronghold by sheer luck."

"I refuse to sit here and wait for death. When facing danger, my dictionary only has one word: initiative."

Hesitation, silence, terror.

The men sitting around the table were ordinary mortals; they lacked even the basic experience of fighting monsters. At this moment, they were like green recruits, lowering their heads as they awaited Fan Li's orders.

"Our stronghold has just begun to develop. I cannot tolerate monsters lurking in the vicinity. I will go out alone to hunt it down."

Fan Li's voice gradually turned icy. "After that, I will kill it!"