Chapter 191: Raising a Little Zombie 9

Xie Hui had always been a gentle father, but now his expression turned cold for once. The sudden change startled Yunyun so much that he nearly burst into tears, but he forced himself to hold them back. His eyes shimmered with unshed tears, looking pitiful beyond words.

“Yunyun, do you know what human experimentation is?”

Yunyun’s thoughts were immediately pulled off track by his father’s question. He looked up at him curiously.

“Nope. Are you going to tell me, Daddy?”

“And besides, what you’re doing now doesn’t count as human experimentation anymore. It’s zombie experimentation!”

Before Xie Hui could respond, Yunyun earnestly corrected the flaw in his father’s statement.

“It’ll hurt a lot. It’ll be unbearable. You might even have to watch yourself being…”

Xie Hui’s voice abruptly cut off at that point. He reached out and pulled the little one tightly into his arms, planting a kiss on his cheek.

In the client’s memory, the experiment had been led by the female lead. Yunyun had been tortured to the point where there wasn’t a single patch of uninjured flesh left on his body. Every method imaginable had been used on him, and in the end, he died on the operating table.

Because he was a zombie, no one considered his death noble or meaningful. From beginning to end, he had been treated like nothing more than a lab rabbit.

After receiving that kiss from his father, Yunyun’s face inexplicably grew hot. Embarrassed, he nestled closer into his father’s arms and started rambling to mask his nervousness.

“Aww, Daddy, I know you’re worried about me. But I’m a big kid now! You’re still kissing me? That’s so mushy.”

“You say no, so it’s no. But we still have to go back eventually, right?”

Yunyun remembered that his father used to be a very sociable person, someone who should’ve had tons of friends. But now, because of him, the only one left in his father’s world was a zombie son.

“Yunyun, do you really want to go back?”

Xie Hui took a deep breath, pushing down the ache in his chest. He tried to keep his tone calm as he asked.

“Yes, I do! Daddy, I want to go to that Survivor Base they say the government built. I promise I’ll stay rational and won’t bite anyone. If it gets bad, you can have Fugui’er tie me up. Or if you notice something wrong, we can run away right away.”

“And if someone finds out I’m a zombie, that’s okay too. Daddy, I believe in our country.”

After he finished speaking, Xie Hui fell silent for a long time. Then he gave a small nod.

“Alright.”

He couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be any casualties if something went wrong with his son. But if he noticed Yunyun starting to change, he could at least get them out in time.

“Daddy, what do you think the base will be like? I’ve never seen it before.”

As they traveled, Yunyun bounced along cheerfully, chattering nonstop about the base, his eyes full of hope for the future.

“You’ll see when we get there.”

“True! Daddy, do you think they sell yummy food there?”

As soon as he said that, his face fell.

“Ugh, even if they do, I can’t eat it anymore.”

In the original storyline, even the medicine developed by the female lead couldn’t turn a zombie back into a human. This little guy would probably never get to eat human food again.

That was something Xie Hui chose not to tell him just yet.

“We should collect more crystal cores while we can. Once we’re in the base, it might be hard to go out again. If that happens, you’ll be stuck going hungry.”

That one sentence was enough to snap Yunyun out of his fried chicken and soda mourning and bring him back to life, full of energy.

“Let’s go, Daddy! I’m not going hungry!”

Before, Xie Hui never let him participate in the fighting. But this time, no matter what anyone said, the little guy insisted on killing zombies himself. He killed them and retrieved the crystal cores in one smooth motion.

Normally, Xie Hui only let him follow behind and collect the cores. But seeing how eager he was, he didn’t stop him.

What he feared most was that the boy would feel guilty about killing his own kind. Xie Hui never liked holding children to adult standards—especially in matters like this. Most kids were still far kinder than the emotionally numb adults.

Today was Yunyun’s first time killing zombies on his own, and he didn’t seem upset at all. In fact, he looked pretty excited.

Fugui’er, who had been fed a lot of foul-tasting crystal cores, finally proved useful today. It used its vines to entangle the zombies’ legs, giving Yunyun the perfect chance to strike.

That night, Xie Hui sat by a fire he had built. Winter had arrived, and the nights were growing colder. Without a fire for warmth, a person could freeze solid by morning.

Yunyun sat on a small mat nearby, dumping out all the crystal cores they had collected that day from a cloth bag onto the ground.

“I got one, two, three, four, five. Fugui’er got one.”

Xie Hui didn’t comment on the clearly unfair distribution. He just used the firelight to prepare their dinner.

After the food was ready, he noticed Fugui’er inching closer to the fire, seemingly wanting to warm up too. Xie Hui chuckled and called out:

“Fugui’er, want to try some of this?”

The little sapling’s trunk froze for a moment, then quickly shrank back, its leaves flattening against the ground.

Yunyun saw this and poked one of its leaves with his finger.

“Daddy, Fugui’er has such a bad temper.”

After complaining about Fugui’er, Yunyun scooted over to sit beside his father, resting his head against him. Watching his dad eat, he frowned and started complaining again.

“Daddy, your haircutting skills are awful. You used to be such a handsome guy, and now look at you.”

Xie Hui gave the kid a helpless glance. His haircutting skills weren’t that bad.

But without a mirror, he had just hacked away at his own hair. He thought he did a pretty good job cutting Yunyun’s hair, at least.

“Do you think there’ll be barbers at the base?”

“There should be.”

In the client’s memory, life inside the government-run Survivor Base wasn’t all that different from life before the apocalypse.

“Then why didn’t you go earlier, Daddy? You really don’t know how to enjoy life.”

Xie Hui didn’t argue with him. After they finished eating, he cleaned up a bit, and they spent the night there. Along the way, they ran into a few people and asked for directions, then continued heading toward the Survivor Base.

When they arrived, a long line had already formed at the entrance.

Xie Hui and his son stood at the end of the line. They could hear people chatting around them—most had come from far away.

“The government hasn’t abandoned us ordinary folks.”

An old woman leaning on a cane said this with tears in her eyes. Yunyun, standing beside Xie Hui, instinctively nodded.

That’s right. The government wouldn’t abandon a little zombie like him either.

After a while, a man in uniform walked over, holding a megaphone. He called out loudly to the crowd:

“Ability Users, please line up over there! Ability Users can’t be infected, so you don’t need to wait in this line!”

Although Xie Hui himself was an Ability User, the child he was holding wasn’t. When the man walked past them, Xie Hui stopped him and asked directly.

“I’m an Ability User, but my son isn’t. What should I do in this situation?”

The man glanced at Xie Yun and, noticing how young he was, pulled out one of the number tags he had been distributing and handed it to Xie Hui.

“This is your son’s number tag. In a bit, take him into one of those private rooms over there. If there’s no change after twenty-four hours, you can enter the base.”

Based on their long-standing experience, anyone bitten by a zombie would show signs of infection and turn within twenty-four hours.

They had tried checking for wounds before, but injuries in hidden areas were often hard to detect. So they eventually settled on a standard procedure: isolate everyone for twenty-four hours.

The small room was truly cramped. Aside from a bed and a stool, there was only a tiny bathroom.

Once they stepped inside, the door was locked from the outside. The man who locked it even came over to the bed and reminded them:

“If your son shows signs of infection, press that bell. I’ll come get you out. Your son’s too young to be left alone, so keep a close eye on him. I’ll bring you food later.”

The atmosphere inside this base was completely different from the numbness Xie Hui had seen in other parts of the apocalypse.

If not for the solid isolation rooms, he might have doubted whether this was really the apocalypse at all.

With so many ordinary people to feed, it was no wonder that this base couldn’t compare to the one run by the male and female leads, which only accepted Ability Users. The gap between the two was just too wide.

Yunyun sat obediently on the small stool, holding his beloved stuffed animal. After sitting for a while, he couldn’t help but get up and walk around the room.

As luck would have it, the room next to theirs belonged to the Old Madam they had seen earlier while waiting in line.

The Old Madam seemed too shaken to sleep. Leaning on her cane, she paced around her small room. When she saw Yunyun, she struck up a conversation.

“Little one, how old are you?”

“I’m six years old!” Yunyun replied sweetly.

“Grandma, how old are you?”

“Me? I’m sixty-two.”

Xie Hui sat on the edge of the bed, watching the elderly woman and the young boy chatting through the small window. With sunlight streaming in, the scene felt unexpectedly warm.

“Grandma, you can’t sleep either?”

“How could I sleep? Just yesterday, I thought I was going to die. At my age, those privately run bases don’t want people like me. Even though my son is an Ability User, he still yelled at me, asking why I didn’t just die earlier.”

Yunyun was a very attentive listener. Hearing that, his mouth fell open in shock.

“Huh? That really happened?”

“Of course. That’s why you have to trust our national Survivor Base.”

As she spoke, the Old Madam’s eyes welled up with tears. Yunyun handed her a tissue, then ran back to his father’s side, resting his head on Xie Hui’s knee and muttering,

“Daddy… see? I told you I was right.”