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Bao suspiciously peeked through the blinds of her mud hut, looking at the pale corpse shambling across her herbal garden.
She'd found herself in this odd world several years ago and had just recently gotten her bearings.
Living in the desert under the volcano of the Blazing Fire Sect meant that she could exist quite safely despite her unaffiliated status and young age, but this was new.
Whereas in the past her homestead, attached to a larger village, sometimes found itself under attack by heavenly beasts, this looked to be a very different kind of threat.
It looked, as much as she hesitated to say it, like a very stereotypical zombie from her old world, which she'd left under the unfortunate circumstances of a flying forklift accident.
And no, she hadn't been driving or been driven over. A forklift had just fallen from the sky, likely from a cargo plane and crushed her underneath; such was life sometimes.
At least she hadn't died, but rather been reborn in this hellish desert landscape where she could eke out a meagre living through her comparably higher education and minor knowledge of farming and herbalism.
In hindsight, maybe this was just hell. She missed showers, modern plumbing, gender equality and most importantly of all, coffee.
She looked at the meagre inside of her hut. A pile of hay covered by a cotton sheet, racks of herbs drying, hanging from the ceiling, one chest and one small table on a threadbare rug.
Another glance outside showed that the zombie, for lack of a better word, was still shambling outside.
"What is this bullshit?" she complained quietly, which was a mistake, as the zombie immediately perked up, looked up and started shambling towards her.
It was a desiccated corpse, not much more than bones and skin. The desert had the habit of extracting the moisture out of anyone foolish enough to face it with the wrong apparel.
As the corpse shuffled closer, Bao lamented that she would have to hide in the cellar, again, until one of the disciples of the sect finally ended their patrol in this direction and got rid of the threat, again.
She just needed to prevent the thing from getting into her house and wrecking her herbs. She'd just managed to save up enough material to sell at the bazaar that she could technically afford to spectate the tournament that would be occurring in Koncho soon.
The life of a peasant was as uninspiring as it was gruelling. If she had to live in this hellhole, she might as well go out after having seen some actual magic in action.
Whenever a monster came, she just hid in the cellar and listened to the explosions and whooshes of fire. Why a sect cultivated fire in an already unbearably hot desert was beyond her…
Not that she would mind, but she'd gotten tested. No cultivation talent. Just a stupid spiritual malformation that had likely been the cause of her transmigration here.
Just as she was about to go, she heard a loud squelch from outside. Another glance revealed that a female imperial soldier had landed on top of the zombie and turned it into compost beneath her armoured feet. A wave of the hand engulfed the zombie in flame.
Finished with the job, the soldier's gaze swept around before eventually resting on her hut.
The soldier took a step towards it.
Bao considered going into her cellar and letting the soldier ransack the house.
At least it was a woman…
She sighed and opened the door. In this world, might was right, and she had no might, and thus no right.
It was better to be polite and boring until the other party lost interest, which was what she'd learned over the last few years.
"Honoured one," she greeted as she opened the door. "Many thanks for your assistance." She bowed.
"Don't need any thanks," a raspy female voice answered. "Got any water?"
Bao bowed again and nodded, silently bidding the soldier to enter her hut and to partake in the shade. A large cavern beneath the hut brought cold into the structure while the sun beat mercilessly from the top. She opened the door hidden underneath the rug and pulled up a water bucket. She poured the soldier a cup and gently laid it on top of the table.
The other woman removed her helmet, revealing an incredibly sweaty middle-aged face pulled into a scowl. She finished the cup in one gulp.
Bao dutifully refilled it.
This happened four times before the woman finally sighed contentedly. "Thank you," she said in a kinder tone.
"May I ask what happened?" Bao asked curiously. "I've never seen a…"
"A zombie," the soldier informed. "A virus that can infect mortals. Avoid them if you see them. They recently crawled over the border. This was the last one my unit had to hunt down."
Bao's eyes widened. The border was thousands of miles away from what she'd heard. That meant that the penetration of this new threat was…
"You live alone?" the soldier asked.
Bao nodded, she knew that it wasn't common for a woman in her twenties, a mortal one, to yet be unwed, but she couldn't be bothered to deal with the men here, as much as she would benefit from one's protection. The mortal men in this world hadn't yet heard of cleaning themselves quite yet, nor had they heard of simple things such as women's rights or the negative side effects of drinking every evening.
"That's dangerous, things are about to become a bit unstable," the soldier warned.
"This is Koncho, the home of the Blazing Fire Sect. We're in the middle of the desert. I imagine we'll be the safest, if anything. The zombies have to be burned, I assume?" Bao asked. She'd decided early on that she'd only accept getting married to a man rich or powerful enough that she could be one concubine amongst many and at least live a life of stability and luxury for whatever abuse would inevitably be thrown her way. That was partially why she'd been saving up to spectate the tournament.
The soldier paused at her words. "Perhaps you're right, regardless, consider yourself warned." She stood up and made to leave.
"Wait," Bao said, something nagging in her mind. "The name zombie, where did it come from?" she asked.
The soldier paused. "I'm not quite sure. All I know is that the army is using an Illusion Room called The Last of Us to train us soldiers in how to respond to the threat and to help them achieve the dao of protection. Perhaps the term originates from there? Regardless, I must go."
The soldier put on her helmet, exited Bao's hut and jumped off into the air.
Bao herself was left with a reeling mind.
The Last of Us. Zombies. She remembered a guy she'd dated back in college raving about the game almost as much as he'd raved about Witcher 3.
Bao had wished that he would have put the energy he put into gaming into getting a job, at which point the two of them could have had an actual daughter so that he wouldn't have to depend on digital surrogates anymore.
But, well, she'd learned her lesson. Trying to part a male college student from their video games and make them try to actually achieve something in life was a wasted effort.
"Someone else is here," Bao eventually concluded, pulling down her hood and blowing her long red hair out of her face.
The term zombie could have been a coincidence. The name The Last of Us couldn't.
The tournament had just gotten more important; she needed to gather information. Illusion Rooms, zombies, the army.
The preliminaries for the tournament must have just started if the actual tournament was in a week.
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Xiao Yung looked critically at the disciples of the other sects gathered on the large rock platform in the middle of the desert.
He had three other bald-headed disciples from the Mad Monks Sect with him, but they weren't the focus; he knew their names, he knew their skills. They wouldn't collaborate, but they also wouldn't stand in each other's way.
The other disciples were the problem, every one of them a potential enemy.
His eyes slid over other cultivators, noting down their characteristics, factions and weapons as they did the same to him.
He knew what they saw. A young bald-headed man dressed in orange robes and wielding a wooden staff. In other words, a generic Mad Monk. The others were dressed more individually, usually conforming in terms of colour, not dress and hair.
The disciples from the Purple Cloud sect wore purple, be it in pants and a shirt or a robe. Young and old, some of them had black hair, some of them had grey. The Blazing Fire Sect disciples were the most individualistic and the most present, wearing their bright red, orange and yellow garbs, their hair styled in the same colours, shooting upwards, like a flame.
Whereas most sects sent only four to five disciples, the Blazing Fire Sect was privileged as the host and had no cost to sending as many disciples as they wanted. Xiao was counting about twenty of them.
There were around 300 disciples gathered here, 89 different sects.
As the group waited on the hot rock, Xiao filed away who he considered the most dangerous competitors. An older girl with flame coloured hair was playing with a white hot ball of fire, a black-robed man idly juggled three small mandible scythes. There was a hulking beast wielding a hammer even bigger than himself, an invisible woman that he only perceived because of the qi sense that the sect leader had beaten into him before and after the border skirmishes.
The second biggest threat was probably the young Purple Cloud kid, a famous prodigy who'd supposedly comprehended the dao of space before even becoming a teenager. He was currently engaged in a one-sided staring match with the most dangerous disciple.
A twisted freak who Xiao had first seen standing at the same height as the Elders and the Sect Leader of the Mad Monks.
Jin Fan, the creator of the entrance exam for his sect.
He was sitting on the floor in a lotus position, looking completely unbothered and talking idly with a dark-skinned girl wearing the same beige robes he was.
Xiao's fists clenched. Cultivators like Jin, no matter how much they argued that their torture spared mortals a worse fate, were the cancer plaguing cultivation society.
He'd seen the effect his newest Illusion Room, The Last of Us, had on the brave soldiers he'd fought with at the border. They'd become sobbing wrecks once they exited, crying about humanity's fate.
The man was demented, and during this tournament, Xiao was going to put a stop to his reign of terror.
Jin was undoubtedly a powerful and twisted cultivator, already an inner disciple, while Xiao was still in the outer ring. Quite possibly, the man was even stronger than his role, considering that he'd been entrusted with such important missions back then. This meant that he likely remained unpromoted due to his rotten character rather than his skills.
It was going to be hard. But it was time to start curbing the sadistic excesses of a cultivation society.
One rotten apple at a time.
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"Hey Jin?" Hashimi asked curiously as they waited for the proctor of the first preliminary exam. She was feeling the heat of the scorching sun and the huge platform they were standing on.
"Yeah?"
"Do you think dragons could shout from their asses? I mean, isn't a fart just another shout?"
Jin turned to look at her with a deadpan expression. "Are you getting a heatstroke?"
Hashimi shook her head. "I don't think so."
A palm came up to meet her friend's face, then he paused. A small smile could be seen from underneath his hand. "It would be kind of funny," he whispered.
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AN: This chapter is the result of Patreon interlude votes. It's what spawned the character of Bao into existence… A contrast to showcase how lucky Jin got in where he landed, insignificant to the larger context of the story… or is she…?