Chapter One: The Planet of the Undead

“Not bright in the east... then bright in the west!”
“Let the setting sun burn away my sorrow!”
The odd song echoed halfway up the mountain, making the already strange melody sound even stranger.
A sturdy young man, bare-chested, was driving an old, rusted pickup truck up the winding mountain road, singing with great passion a song by the famous rock band “Secondhand Rose,” swaying and rocking his way toward the summit.
The bed of the pickup was tightly covered with a greasy, filthy tarp.
From beneath it, one could faintly hear bestial howls.
Suddenly, the pickup coughed a few times and then stalled out.
Ye Hai clicked his tongue in resignation and changed to a song more suited to the moment: “Ah, fate, tell me... is all this toil just for a meal a day...”
Singing, he kicked open the driver’s door and jumped down from the tall pickup.
Standing over six feet tall, Ye Hai’s bare torso was sharply defined, muscular but not overdone, the sort that hinted at explosive strength.
He wore a pair of camouflage pants stained with oil, and his hair was cropped close; he looked energetic and sharp.
He strode to the rear side of the pickup, felt along the lower edge until he found a handle.
With a hard tug, the pickup’s fuel tank slid out like a drawer.
But the tank was not the usual flat, round shape one might expect—it was a rectangular box, nearly two meters long, looking much like a large coffin.
Ye Hai fiddled with the four corners of the tank for a moment, then flipped it open, revealing the interior—not filled with gasoline, but with a barely living zombie.
Ye Hai frowned and gave the decaying face a pat.
With a tone of disgust, he muttered, “Look at you, so unreliable! One zombie per hundred kilometers! That’s some heavy fuel consumption...”
The slap left his hand smeared with a sticky, revolting fluid.
Unbothered, Ye Hai grabbed the dying zombie, hauled it out, and tossed it aside.
He wiped the slime from his hands onto his pants, then lifted his muddy black boots and crushed the zombie’s skull with a stomp.
Then he climbed into the truck bed and pulled back the tarp.
Beneath it, dozens of iron cages were crammed haphazardly, each one packed full of zombies—over fifty in all.
It was a good thing there were no traffic police in these remote mountains; otherwise, the overloaded cargo and “mixed transportation of people and goods” would have sent Ye Hai straight back to retake his driving exam.
Each cage was small, yet Ye Hai had managed to squeeze five or six zombies into each. They were twisted together like braided dough, their faces pressed so tightly against the wire mesh that the rotting flesh was torn open. Whenever the truck rattled along the mountain road, flakes of decayed skin would fall from the cage edges like dandruff, scattering white on the ground.
Setting aside their grotesque faces and gnashing teeth, the whole scene was almost comical.
After a quick inspection, Ye Hai pried open the lid of one cage.

He grabbed a tall zombie by the neck and yanked it out.
Dangling in the air, the zombie flailed its limbs and let out a furious howl at Ye Hai.
Yet anyone could hear a trace of fearful submission in its growling.
With a flick of his wrist, Ye Hai slammed the cage shut and covered it with the tarp.
He thumped the zombie’s head with a knuckle and grumbled, “What are you yelling for? Every time I sing, you lot start making a racket... always throwing off my rhythm, making me sing off-key!”
Heaven knows, though zombies can’t speak, this one seemed quite aggrieved—what did his off-key singing have to do with them? Was he perhaps a little mad?
But of course, the zombie couldn’t possibly understand a truth of the universe: who but the slightly unhinged would listen to Secondhand Rose!
Without another word, Ye Hai stuffed the fresh zombie into the fuel tank, tied up its limbs, closed the lid, and pushed the tank back into place.
He climbed back into the cab, started the engine, and roared off toward the mountain peak in the fading sunset.
The pickup’s speed even picked up a bit.
Ye Hai nodded in satisfaction. “Ninety-five octane really is better than ninety-two. Feels great!”
Ye Hai had been in this zombie-infested world for ten years now.
After all these years, he was certain he was no longer on Earth.
After all, on Earth you might drink “Six Walnuts,” but you’d never see six moons in the sky.
He didn’t know whether he’d traveled to some corner of the universe or slipped entirely into a parallel one.
Who could say what nonsense the universe might throw at you? Even Hawking didn’t have all the answers.
From the information he’d gathered over the years, Ye Hai had pieced together the basics of this zombie planet.
It was six times the size of Earth, yet gravity was about the same.
After the zombie virus outbreak, there were few survivors left.
But in this star system, including the zombie planet, there were seven habitable terrestrial worlds, all with their own civilizations.
Only the zombie planet lacked interplanetary technology.
The other six had already broken free of their surfaces and entered space, though they hadn’t yet mastered interstellar travel and remained system-level civilizations.
Among the seven, five were order worlds, one was a chaos world, and one a garbage world.
Unquestionably, Ye Hai’s planet was the garbage world.

Once, the zombie planet had been the strongest civilization in the system.
But its rulers chose their own destruction, triggering a global bioweapon disaster and bringing a thriving world to ruin.
Other planets’ inhabitants had considered conquering the zombie world.
But after some investigation, they all shook their heads—the cost of transforming the planet was simply too high.
Even the cheapest solution—wiping out all zombies and “viral bodies” like Ye Hai, purifying the atmosphere, and importing flora and fauna from their own worlds—would cost more than colonizing two planets of the same size. No one was foolish enough to make such a loss.
Besides, there was no shortage of intrigue between the planets.
Who knew if, after you’d cleaned up and started rebuilding, someone else would swoop in and steal your work?
Given all this, everyone chose to ignore the zombie planet.
Worse still, some clever soul discovered that dumping industrial waste on the zombie planet was much cheaper than processing it at home.
It was like running a red light—everyone knew it was wrong, but once someone started, the rest followed.
And so, the zombie planet regularly endured “garbage rain.”
Ye Hai had once despised this practice.
But everything has two sides; this industrial waste gave the survivors on the zombie planet some resources to cling to life.
Ye Hai himself had scavenged for years.
Back then, he’d fought fiercely over industrial waste, once beating someone so badly they couldn’t take care of themselves.
But after Ye Hai had stumbled upon a bioenergy conversion technology not native to the zombie planet—allowing him to use zombies as a power source—he gave up scavenging.
Life grew better, day by day.
By the time Ye Hai drove his truck to the mountaintop, night had fallen.
He parked, strolled leisurely into the luxurious villa he’d built with years of hard work, and opened the door—
Only to be greeted by the cold muzzle of a gun pressed right against his forehead...