Chapter 029 Chu Mufan

　　Back then, Chu Mufan had no idea that this handsome man was the strongest fighter in the entire camp—its guardian, known simply as Star.

　　Star had questioned Chu Mufan at length about the underground laboratory where he had been found. But Chu Mufan had no memory at all of those three years. He knew nothing of any laboratory, and could only stare back blankly...

　　Though left with no leads, Star did not press him. He spoke politely, telling Chu Mufan

　　to let him know immediately if he remembered anything about the lab. Then he turned to leave. Before stepping out, he told Chu Mufan to rest well, adding that he would arrange someone to take care of him...

　　That same afternoon, a delicate young girl stood before him…

　　This frail girl was named Youyou. She was only sixteen or seventeen. From what she told him, she had been an orphan even before the apocalyptic era. Her parents had abandoned her when she was still an infant, leaving only a bracelet as a keepsake...

　　She had been found in the wild and raised in a local orphanage. Not knowing her real name, the staff had named her Youyou, hoping she would grow up carefree and peaceful. When she was twelve, she was adopted by a close friend of Hu Gao. But her happy days did not last long. World War III broke out, followed by the zombie virus that destroyed human civilization...

　　In the apocalyptic era, she and her adoptive parents had fled with Hu Gao’s group and ended up here. Her adoptive parents did not survive the journey and died one after another. Thankfully, Youyou was hardworking, kind, and gentle—excellent at caring for others. After Hu Gao became the local lord, he continued to treat Youyou kindly, assigning her to look after his daughter and his mounts...

　　The day before yesterday, Team Star had met with Lord Hu Gao and asked him to assign someone to take good care of Chu Mufan, whom he had rescued from the laboratory. Hu Gao’s first thought was Youyou, who was so good at caring for others.

　　Perhaps due to long-term malnutrition, her slender, heart-shaped face always carried a faint yellowish hue. Under her crescent-moon-like slender eyebrows were a pair of clear, lively almond eyes. Her white teeth and red lips often curved into a smile—an angelic, pure, and kind smile that could make anyone forget the sorrows of the apocalyptic era. She liked to tie her black hair into a ponytail with a home-made rubber band. She alternated between a gray and a black hoodie, always wearing a blue down vest over it. Like most survivors’ clothes, hers had long been washed pale and faded.

　　Around her right wrist, she always wore a bracelet strung with small red sandalwood beads and several amethyst spacer beads, decorated with a Pisces-shaped jadeite pendant. Two small strings of purple disciple beads hung from the bottom.

　　According to Youyou, this bracelet had been left with her in her swaddling clothes as a token—most likely a gift from her birth parents. She had cherished it since childhood and never took it off, holding onto the hope that one day she might find her real family...

　　Thinking of her pitiful life story, Chu Mufan always felt a sorrowful sense of shared suffering. His parents had divorced when he was little. He had been sent to live with his father, and his mother rarely visited. His memory of her was vague. When he was ten, his father remarried. Chu Mufan had never liked his snobbish stepmother, so he shut himself in his room all day. That lonely life led him to fall in love with writing. At first, he only kept a diary, recording his feelings and what happened around him. Later, he gradually began writing novels, publishing them online to earn a little pocket money.

　　Hadn’t it been for the war, Chu Mufan might have become a writer and lived an ordinary life like everyone else on Earth…

　　If it hadn’t been for the war, the thousands of years of human civilization might not have become so fragile under the doomsday virus!

　　During the half month that Youyou had cared for him, he often asked her about what had happened in the world during those three years. Youyou had told him everything without hiding anything. The entire event that changed humanity’s fate had to start from the beginning of the war…

　　In late 2021, relations between Country C and Country M deteriorated continuously. Border skirmishes escalated into local wars. As the war escalated, more and more nations joined the fray. By the end of 2022, more than half the countries on Earth had entered the great war, and World War III had officially begun...

　　The war split into two major alliances:

　　the M Alliance, led by Country M,

　　and the C Alliance, led by Country C. By 2023, the conflict had reached a whitehot intensity. It was in April of that same year that Chu Mufan lost his memory. What happened next, he learned from Youyou: In September 2023, World War III ended abruptly, in a way no one had foreseen. A mysterious, highly contagious and highly lethal virus swept across the globe, erupting simultaneously in every corner of the world. Humanity had unleashed an unprecedented apocalyptic catastrophe upon itself…

　　The timing and origin of this bizarre virus were uncannily precise, catching every nation completely off guard. It broke out in silence, while countries were still locked in fierce combat — and its starting points were all major, densely populated cities. From there, it spread outward like a tidal wave.

　　Many nations fell before they even understood what was happening…

　　It was impossible not to smell a conspiracy. The most terrifying aspect of the virus was that it appeared everywhere on Earth at once.

　　It lingered in the air, though in concentrations too low to kill immediately. But once bitten by an infected person, the viral load would skyrocket within minutes to hours, triggering rapid, fatal mutation.

　　And that was not the end.

　　Bodies that died from the mutation would be reanimated under viral control, becoming walking corpses driven only by the most primal urge: hunger. In the end, the exhausted armies and governments of all nations put aside their differences, ceased the war, and joined forces to fight the virus. Yet even then, they failed to effectively stop its global spread. Experts from the World Health Organization were completely baffled by this virus.

　　Its pathogen was not a variant of any known virus on Earth. . It was something entirely new, unknown to humanity…

　　And it was not just one virus —

　　it was four different viruses fused together! Four viruses that could merge and mutate into one another. No one knew what they would become years later, if allowed to spread and evolve unchecked…

　　The civilized world built by humanity over thousands of years collapsed in an instant under this terrifying plague. The Earth was drowned in a sea of corpses. The few survivors endured unspeakable hardships, clinging to life on the edge of death...

　　……

　　Chu Mufan also asked Youyou how the search team had found him.

　　Earlier, while she was attending to the young lady, she had overheard the First Search Team reporting to the lord. She had learned quite a bit about what had happened...