Grace Sutton had been watching him all along. Even she couldn’t quite explain why she was with this young man she had only met yesterday. He was indeed handsome, but he exuded an extremely intense and mysterious aura. Yet more striking were the faint, yet unmistakable traces of melancholy, determination, and toughness that constantly flickered deep within those black eyes.

“It’s nothing.”

Henry Sutton showed no emotion. With nerves as tough and unyielding as steel, he forcefully pulled back the tears that were about to spill from the corners of his eyes, quickly restoring his stiff and indifferent exterior.

He carefully put away the tube filled with pus, and a slight smile appeared on his rock-hard lips. “We should find a safe and secure place to settle down. That’s important, isn’t it?”

Grace Sutton nodded silently, but suddenly felt that something was off.

They were still strangers, and were about to live together...

The girl felt a bit lost, wanting to object, but didn’t know what to say. Looking up, she saw that Henry Sutton had already picked up the fire axe and was striding toward the crushed zombie remains on the distant road.

……

The city was empty, with no bustling crowds, and even birds were rarely seen. There was no wind, and the atmosphere was quieter than ever.

Abandoned vehicles could be seen everywhere on the streets, most of them crashed together. Several intersections in a row were blocked by cars, many of which were tightly wedged front and back, their license plates and bumpers completely caved in or even torn off. Almost every car contained corpses—young men and women, as well as the elderly and children. Due to the limitations of the car windows and the biological nature of the infected, the flesh above the victims’ chests had been gnawed clean, while the lower limbs were mostly intact. Even though the muscles and skin had been eaten by zombies, the faces of the corpses still bore expressions of horror and terror. In the glaring sunlight, they looked like sculptures solidified from a mixture of white bone and dark red flesh.

Blood was everywhere, staining nearly a third of the ground. Under the scorching heat, it had long since coagulated, gradually turning black.

In the distance, faint screams could be heard, coming and going, their source unknown. They seemed close, yet also far away. This meant that not all the city’s residents were dead—some survivors still remained.

At the edge of the shimmering, heat-distorted horizon, figures could be seen moving. It was an eerie sight—those shapes were thin and blurry, just some indistinct black dots, impossible to tell if they were humans or zombies. They seemed lost, looking around, wandering, as if they had no idea where they were.

Henry Sutton took down another zombie, injecting a high-concentration heroin solution directly into its veins. He pressed down hard on the limbless zombie’s head, precisely extracting the fungal hormone from the back of its skull, and, with undisguised excitement and satisfaction, stuffed the hormone-filled tube into his pocket.

In a metal box lined with black foam, twenty-six tubes filled with hormone were neatly arranged. In another tube-shaped vial, there were the same number of silver bone pellets. This was the entirety of his haul in two hours.

A total of 130 milliliters of fungal hormone, and about 60 milligrams of silver bone.

This was an enormous fortune. In the future world, these things could buy a general’s rank, or control over several giant bases. Because, as zombies evolved to the second level, the strength of their nerves and muscles increased as well. The stimulating effect of the heroin solution on them far exceeded normal limits. Their extremely tense brains would collapse, and their muscles and ligaments would rupture from the violent expansion.

This was an unsolvable problem—if the solution concentration was insufficient, it couldn’t stimulate the pineal gland to produce the hormone. But the intense stimulation would also cause the monster to die on the spot, altering the hormone’s composition or making it impossible to extract at all. Under normal circumstances, the success rate of extraction was about one in two hundred thousand, or even less.

In no more than two years, the values of human society would be completely overturned. What Henry Sutton needed to do now was to accumulate as much capital as possible. After all, this was the golden period when obtaining fungal hormone was the easiest.

Swallowing the silver bone with mineral water felt like taking a sugar-coated pill. Though it seemed hard, it was actually easily dissolved by stomach acid. He had calculated: including what he took yesterday, the effect of these silver bones would be enough for him to enter the second stage of skeletal enhancement.

The results of bone modification were very obvious—Henry Sutton could already feel his strength increasing, and his body was more flexible and agile than before. Now, he could wield the fire axe steadily with just one hand, his arm and wrist strength even surpassing that of the infected. Even if he faced three zombies at once, Henry Sutton was confident he could kill them all without getting hurt.

However, silver bone could not produce the same effect on muscles. To become an enhanced human, he still needed muscle enhancement agents. That was why Henry Sutton had chosen this city as the landing point for his space-time marker.

But before that, he still needed a sufficiently safe place to stay.

……