Others awaken through talent. Li Ran awakens by touching corpses.
A zombie’s brain holds the core of the person it was before death: gray fragments are memories, green ones enhance skills, and blue ones are supernatural abilities. Extract them, use them, and once his proficiency is high enough, the ability is permanently written into his body.
He stayed hidden for two years, keeping his nine-square-meter room spotless while resisting the voices of dozens of dead people in his head. Then a zombie horde forced him to act, and his secret caught the attention of a researcher named Zhong Wanqing.
“We need you to deal with some… more advanced specimens.” She opened the door to the deepest room in the archives. A semitransparent humanoid floated inside a cold-storage chamber, a ball of blue light pulsing slowly in its chest.
It opened its eyes and spoke to him through consciousness:
“You… can… see… me…”
From that day on, Li Ran realized that what he extracted wasn’t an ability, but access privileges. And the dark purple rift stretching across the sky was waiting for someone to open the door.
