Even facing certain death, Li Ke refused to simply lie down and take it. The chassis was violently structural-disintegrating under the relentless pounding and tearing of the undead, but he gripped a nearby wood frame, forcing his battered body to crawl toward the crumbling perimeter of the RV.
He could hear the catastrophic damage clear as day. The outer sheet metal layer had already been shredded completely. If he didn't move fast, the makeshift wooden reinforcement blocks he had hastily deployed inside wouldn't hold out long enough for him to finish his preparations.
"You absolute bastards..."
Li Ke closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and pulled a massive quantity of gunpowder from his inventory.
In his storage, the gunpowder was stacked by the thousands. In this reality, a single unit appeared as a large handful of black powder. Disregarding the physical impossibility of the task, he ripped open the burlap sack and began pouring the black powder toward the front of the vehicle.
A thick stream of powder erupted from the sack, quickly burying the interior of the cabin he had worked to seal. The dashboard disappeared under the dark mound, and even the doors were soon blocked by the volatile substance.
"What was it they said on that show? A single wall is enough to block most of the blast damage?"
As he continued to pour, he reinforced the remaining gaps in his makeshift wooden defenses. Then, amidst the shrieking of the undead, he heard the screech of tearing metal and the sound of claws scraping against the wood.
He threw the remaining sack into the front of the car and instantly summoned several blocks of earth and stone to form a protective barrier in front of himself.
Just as he finished, the front windshield area shattered, revealing the snarling faces of the monsters outside.
Without a moment's delay, Li Ke flicked his lighter, ignited a piece of plastic, and tossed the flaming material into the gunpowder.
As the flame tumbled through the air, he used a final stone block to seal his small sanctuary and curled into a ball.
A heavy silence followed, then a massive tremor shook the world, followed by a blinding flash and a roar.
The force of the explosion sent him flying. The sounds of the zombies and the roar of the blast were replaced by a piercing ringing in his ears. Through the haze, he saw his stone walls crumble, replaced by a strange sensation of dizziness and displacement.
A feeling of weightlessness took over, followed shortly by another jolt—though this one was far gentler than the last.
The next instant, Li Ke collapsed hard against his own wooden frame structure. His head throbbed with a deafening, ceaseless ringing. He could distinctly feel that both his left and right arms were screaming in too much agony to move, and his vision was entirely veiled in a bloody crimson haze, blurring everything in sight.
Yet, he wasn't dead. He hadn't completely blacked out either. squinting through the dust at his defensive stone barrier, he was stunned to see that the blocks had taken almost no structural damage. Instead, the entire roof of the RV had been blown clean off, granting him a sudden, unobstructed view of the outside world.
He was no longer out on the fringes of the town. He was only a stone's throw away from the Trader's compound and the gas station. Unfortunately, filling that short, agonizing distance was a dense, unfathomable sea of burning zombies.
Burning...?
Li Ke's concussed brain short-circuited for a split second before snapping back to reality. Staring at the blazing corpses, and the roaring inferno consuming what was left of the RV's engine block and fuel tank, he finally pieced together what had happened.
The detonated black powder hadn't just created a massive shockwave; the blast had directly ruptured and ignited the fuel lines. As a result, the immediate horde surrounding the vehicle had been turned into walking tindersticks. Because the undead were packed together with zero breathing room, the fire was rapidly spreading like a chain reaction, igniting zombies that hadn't even been close to the original blast radius.
Taking a ragged breath, Li Ke forced himself to stay conscious. Several charred, flaming zombies were already sprinting straight toward his exposed position, and the uninjured stragglers further back were still relentlessly shoving the ruined chassis.
He tried to shift his weight, but his lower half refused to budge. Looking down, he realized the RV's heavy storage cabinets had completely collapsed across his legs. Aside from the reinforced bed frame, the entire interior of the vehicle had been reduced to splintered debris.
Gritting his teeth, Li Ke used a mental command to swap his pipe machine gun into his grip. Firing one-handed, a torrent of white-hot lead erupted from the barrel. In his current panic, the concept of controlled bursts went completely out the window—he simply held the trigger until the magazine ran completely dry.
But when he went to reload, his pinned arms made the manual motion impossible.
Then, a bizarre anomaly occurred. Even though his physical hands hadn't moved an inch, a fresh magazine magically slotted itself into the weapon via the system queue. Meanwhile, the sheer weight of the encroaching horde pushed the skeletal remains of the vehicle even closer to the Trader's outpost, bringing the static, motionless NPC back into his field of vision.
Li Ke braced himself, fully expecting the burning sea of flesh to ram the wrecked chassis straight into the concrete walls of the shop. But instead, a violent wave of dizziness and spatial displacement washed over him yet again. Before his brain could even register the shift, the entire environment violently swapped.
The crushing weight on his legs vanished. The scorching heat disappeared. Even the dense, never-ending wall of mutated zombies had completely vanished from sight.
In their place stood a brand-new wave of pristine, unburnt zombies, caught mid-sprint as they broke toward the wreckage of the RV!
It took Li Ke a full second of utter bewilderment to realize what had just happened: the system had forcefully teleported him across space, dropping him right next to the structural steel pillars of the gas station. The newly spawned horde immediately pivoted on their heels, altering their trajectory to lunge directly at him.
Reacting purely on muscle memory, he executed a frantic leap, landing squarely on top of a deployed wood frame. Ignoring the white-hot agony flaring through his battered legs, he forced his body to spring upward again, barely scrambling onto a second, higher wooden platform just as rotting fingers clawed at his boots.
By then, the first wood frame he had deployed was already being torn to splinters by the crushing weight of the horde. Li Ke couldn't afford to waste a single microsecond. He executed another frantic jump, instantly snapping a third wooden block beneath his boots.
His feet slammed onto the fresh platform, but a sudden, blinding flash of agony nearly caused him to slip and plunge into the abyss. He was forced to drop into a seated position right on the narrow block, panting heavily as he looked down at the chaos. A legion of charred, flaming zombies was sprinting away from the burning wreckage of his RV, joining forces with waves of fresh mutated monsters converging on his position from every single direction.
Though he had secured a fleeting moment of safety, the reality on the ground was grim. In less than three seconds, the throngs of zombies below had already begun piling on top of one another, forming a sickening human pyramid to claw their way up to his level.
Suppressing the blinding pain, Li Ke glanced up at the structural pillar. Abandoning the risky jump-building technique, he systematically placed two adjacent frames to act as makeshift handrails, providing just enough stability to safely continue his vertical ascent.
With every single leap, he could feel his stamina draining away, his very life force trickling out of his battered body. Yet, to keep struggling against his fate, he had no choice but to keep climbing.
The agonizing tears in his muscles left his mind floating in a heavy, concussed fog. By the time he finally scrambled onto the corrugated roof of the gas station, finding sanctuary among the thick structural steel beams, he let out a jagged, rattling sigh of relief.
Using his remaining loose stones to bridge the gaps between the girders, he hastily built a flat, secure platform. Only then did he finally have the luxury to look down at the nightmare unfolding below.
One look was all it took for a bitter, defeated smile to break across his face.
"This world... it really is hell-bent on killing me, isn't it?"
Directly beneath his perch, the zombie pyramid had already scaled halfway up the massive steel pillar. Worse still, several of the hyper-agile, frog-like mutated variants he had noticed earlier were already flexing their decaying limbs, testing their launch angles to leap straight toward his platform.
As the words left his mouth, a violent cough forced a mouthful of dark blood past his lips. He didn't even bother wiping it away. In a catastrophic situation like this, vomiting a bit of blood was the least of his worries. What difference did a internal hemorrhage or a missing limb make anyway?
"Fuck it. If I'm going out, I'm taking as many of these bastards with me as possible."
Spitting away the copper taste of blood, a gasping Li Ke stared down at the wood frames in his hotbar. He manually manifested his last two remaining stacks of black gunpowder. Ripping open the unscientific, physics-defying burlap sacks, he hurled them straight down into the writhing mass of flesh below.
The two magical pouches tumbled through the air, creating a continuous, dark curtain of volatile black dust that blanketed the scaling horde.
Summoning the absolute last reserves of his fading strength, Li Ke squeezed the trigger of his machine gun. A frantic burst of white-hot lead sliced through the darkness, striking the falling powder.
Instantly, twin firestorms erupted in mid-air. To Li Ke's utter surprise, the burlap sacks themselves ignited, triggering a secondary, catastrophic detonation that unleashed a massive, concussed shockwave.
Having leaned over the edge to deploy the trap, Li Ke bore the full, unprotected brunt of the blast. The violent kinetic wave lifted his body completely off the platform for a fraction of a second before slamming him heavily back down onto the jagged stone slab.
Blinding, agonizing trauma washed over him yet again, followed by a deafening, high-pitched ringing in his ears as a wall of roaring flames consumed the ground below.
But this time, Li Ke simply didn't care anymore.
Reaching into his jacket with a trembling, numb hand, he pulled out a piece of the grilled meat Erina had prepared for him. He had stashed it in his inner pocket earlier, a desperate emergency ration meant to sustain him if he managed to escape into the wilderness.
But looking at the state of his broken body, escaping was a pipe dream. Surviving for another thirty minutes would be a certified miracle.
Taking slow, deliberate bites of the cold meat, Li Ke's consciousness began to fragment and blur. Finally, against a hazy backdrop of distant, muffled explosions and the crackle of a roaring inferno, his eyes slowly, heavily closed.
I...
Is this where it ends?
As the suffocating darkness completely enveloped him, only one final, peaceful thought echoed through his fading mind.
At least... she made it out.
————————
As the night finally receded, a crisp, refreshing breeze brushed against Li Ke's face. He opened his eyes in a daze, his confused gaze meeting a soot-blackened ceiling.
A violent, throbbing headache brought a sharp wave of dizziness. It took every ounce of his remaining strength just to push his battered upper body into a sitting position on the shattered stone wall. He stared blankly at his surroundings.
Spreading out before him was a vast graveyard of charred corpses. The entire main town had been completely incinerated, and thick columns of black smoke were still billowing into the sky from the nearby forest—grim testaments to the sheer insanity of the night before.
Naturally, the Trader's outpost stood entirely unscathed, pristine as always.
Was this place just a living hell right from the very start?
The thought flickered through Li Ke's concussed brain. But a split second later, the sharp stabs of physical pain and the hollow, gnawing ache in his stomach forcefully snapped him awake. He realized he was actually still breathing.
"So... how the hell did I survive that?"
Li Ke couldn't understand it. He looked down from his perch at the gas station. The structure—which had been perfectly intact yesterday, save for the dried-up pumps—was now a smoking crater of debris. The ground was scarred with massive blast holes, and a colossal deep trench had been hollowed out right where the rear underground fuel tanks used to be.
Yet even so, scattered pockets of flame were still flickering violently along the ruins below, looking as if they might erupt into another raging inferno at any moment.
Li Ke sat frozen for a long while before his brain finally assembled the puzzle.
"The blast ignited the underground fuel reserves? Then the stampeding horde got caught in the chain-reaction explosion and burned to cinders... and the fire has just been raging until now?"
That was exactly what had happened, though not entirely. After Li Ke had passed out, his improvised gunpowder charge successfully ignited the residual gasoline in the fuel lines. The fire instantly traced back to the massive underground tanks, triggering a catastrophic detonation that transformed the entire biome into a sea of fire.
Yet, the boundless sea of zombies had continued to charge blindly into the inferno, burning alive by the thousands.
It was only four hours into his coma that the remaining horde abruptly lost their feral movement speed. Deprived of their nocturnal aggression, they lost all interest in the compound and scattered back into the wilderness just as quickly as they had arrived, leaving behind nothing but mountains of charred, smoking bones.
Li Ke had no way of knowing these hidden mechanics, but simply being alive was a miracle he was deeply grateful for.
"Whatever the reason... since I'm still kicking, I might as well keep fighting to stay that way."
Coughing up a speck of ash, Li Ke pulled up his system interface. Instantly, a massive, catastrophic wall of status debuffs flashed across his vision.
Concussion: 54 hours, 36 minutes.
Broken Bone: 68 hours, 7 minutes.
Internal Bleeding: 72 hours, 21 minutes.
Infection: 23% (Halting).
Deep Laceration: 36 hours, 21 minutes.
Erina Nakiri's Love: 38 hours, 42 minutes.
"Huh?"
Li Ke could fully comprehend the standard survival game injuries, but that absolute anomaly at the very bottom made his jaw drop. Curiously, he manually clicked on the prompt to read the hidden item data.
[Erina Nakiri's Love]:Triggered upon consuming a dish from the Erina Nakiri series. Based on the sheer depth of affection infused into the cooking, grants Maximum Health +50, Maximum Stamina +50, Stamina Regeneration +200%, and Health Regeneration +20 HP/hour. Furthermore, the user cannot be killed by any negative debuffs, physical trauma, or diseases while active.
Infection Treatment Speed +50%.
Li Ke immediately recalled the piece of grilled meat he had eaten right before blacking out. He quickly checked his pocket, and sure enough, the item profile had completely transformed.
A large, glowing letter "E" was prominently stamped over the steak.
The moment he dragged it into his secure inventory slots, the basic label vanished, replaced by its true, system-designated title.
[Erina Nakiri's Honeymoon Grilled Meat]:Increases Maximum Health by 50, Maximum Stamina by 50, Stamina Regeneration by 200%, and Health Regeneration by 20 HP/hour. The user cannot be killed by any negative debuffs, injuries, or diseases.
Infection Treatment Speed +50%.Description: A spectacular piece of meat infused with a young maiden's pure devotion. It is profoundly delicious!
Li Ke couldn't hold it back anymore—he burst into a wild, roaring laugh. Glancing down at his character health bar, which was sitting at a dangerously critical 6 HP, he laughed even harder.
Wincing through the stiffness, he stood up on his own two feet, thoroughly re-energized to continue his survival empire and prepare for the next inevitable horde night.
But right at that exact second, a mind-boggling anomaly materialized right before his eyes.
Two massive, blinding spheres of pure light abruptly manifested over the scorched ruins of the incinerated town. A breath later, the luminescence shattered, and two bewildered figures materialized directly in Li Ke's line of sight.
One was a blonde girl clad in a traditional, flowing kimono-style dress. But the other... with just a single glance, Li Ke's eyes went completely wide as instant recognition slammed into his brain.
"Kiri... Kiri?! Kiri the Gunsmith?!"