The Blood Eclipse Begins: Humanity Mutates

"In the third year of the apocalypse, I severed the Zombie King's spine amid a tide of corpses. The moment its rotten blood splashed across my brow, the 'Devouring System has been bound.' Ordinary zombies' cores are supplements, mutated creatures' claws can be transplanted, and even the dying wishes of survivors can earn me a hidden food cache. When I awakened the 'Soul-Swallowing Raven' form atop a mountain of corpses, the man who always used a bronze dagger to take a blow for me in dark alleys suddenly grabbed the back of my neck. 'Want to find your dad? Help me burn down the Dark Web's lair first.' I thought this was a zombie apocalypse, until he broke the seal on the Jiuying Cauldron. It turned out the blood moon of the past three years had only been a prelude to their releasing strange beasts from captivity... And I became a 'human aberration' capable of devouring this whole scheme."

"Zombies crawled through the ventilation ducts of a wasteland hospital. As I crushed my last core, the System blared: 'Successfully devoured a King-class zombie. Beast transformation unlocked.' From then on, killing zombies let me absorb energy, burying corpses let me learn skills, and even fulfilling the dead's last wishes could earn me an armed squad for free. But when I found a bronze dagger engraved with the character 'Abyss' in a pile of corpses, the former officer who always said 'It's just a partnership' suddenly pinned me against a ruined wall, eyes bloodshot. 'The Jiuying Cauldron is about to appear. What you devoured wasn't a zombie. It was the key that opened the apocalypse.' Only then did I realize that the three-year zombie tide had all been a performance: the Dark Web was raising corpses to lure out strange beasts, and I had become a 'living bug' capable of devouring the calamity itself."

"I thought the most painful thing about the apocalypse was having a zombie bite through my bones, until the man with the bronze dagger said, 'Your mother died for the Dark Web.' On the night of the blood moon three years ago, I buried my mother, who had been devoured by zombies.