[Alternate History + A Detective Dee Spinoff]
In 697, a zombie plague erupts in the Turkic Jinshan Mountains and sweeps across the Turks. Mochuo, son of Qilike Khan, seizes control of the zombie army, hoping to achieve so-called “ultimate evolution” through death. As the northwestern frontier falls one stronghold after another, the court remains completely unaware.
In September, a horde of zombies suddenly appears amid the night rain in the divine capital, Luoyang. Only then does Wu Zetian realize that traitors are lurking within the court.
The empress urgently dispatches Chancellor Di Renjie and Pei Zhao, a general who survived the zombie horde, to the northwest. With help from Hui She and others, they kill Mochuo before the Lantern Festival, but fail to stop a million evolved zombies from carrying out their final orders. The combined forces of Wu Zhou and Tibet suffer hundreds of thousands of casualties before winning a costly victory amid a sea of corpses.
Just as everyone believes the disaster has passed, a new kind of “monster corpse” appears near Hongzhou in Jiangnan West Circuit. The mysterious organization that once colluded with Mochuo resurfaces, and Di Renjie sets out for Jiangnan with Pei Zhao and Li Yuanfang.
There, they must face terrifying half-human, half-zombie creatures, as well as an old enemy who should be dead.
Zeng Tai is assassinated. “Mochuo” returns. And “Hui Ying” has a new plan.
On this land shrouded in hidden currents, the real conspiracy is only just beginning…
(This book is the second installment after the author’s previous work, Zombies: A Thousand-Mile Journey Through the Apocalypse. Its world is based on Detective Dee. Li Yuanfang appears, but many of the original storylines never happened, and many others have been changed. The “Snake Spirit” organization does not exist, but a much more powerful counterpart does.)
