"Fuck..."
That's all Damon could say. There was no other word that dared to leave his mouth as he looked at the scene in front of him.
As a reader, Damon knew that the disaster of Xi'an was apocalyptic, but imagining the words and living them as reality were completely different things.
Dispersing himself into black mist, Damon first decided to hide. Above the horses of minion-class zombies—mindless corpses, as one could call them—Damon floated stealthily as he properly analyzed the situation.
"Three or four monarch-class monsters and endless zombies," Damon sighed as he looked at the golden dome shielding humans from the black tsunami of undead.
"There's no way I can win against all this... or is there?" Damon thought hard, looking down at the rotting corpses that walked. He racked his brain.
"They smell bad..." The disgusting stench made Damon fight the urge to vomit, which he barely controlled. "Well, can't expect a rotting corpse to apply perfume."
As Damon thought, he froze, repeating the statement while looking at the zombies with newfound interest. "Corpses... they aren't living, just cursed containers of magic."
Theories regarding the undead came to his mind. Undead were basically beings whose souls had been cursed, corrupted, and, in a twisted way, caged within dead bodies.
They weren't living—surviving only on magic, turned into creatures of darkness.
"They aren't living," Damon thought as he looked at the zombies in a daze. A dangerous idea entered his mind as his left hand clutched the head of a mindless zombie, which had no idea of the hand appearing above it.
"Devour," Damon muttered, half expecting the experiment to fail. But to his shock, the purple-black swirling mass of energy devoured the zombie completely. In his inventory space, the corpse of the zombie appeared—its magic devoured, fed to the reserve, its soul joining the astral sea as the body floated through the void.
"Fuck!" He pulled his arm back as it disappeared into the black mist. The other zombies, too crowded, didn't notice the disappearance of one of their own.
Damon snapped back, his eyes widening in shock as he understood the implications of the discovery. Unlike with other monsters, where his left hand was useless in combat unless fueled by magic—in this battlefield, it wasn't.
Gluttony. Its devour worked perfectly against the undead.
"Come to think of it, in *Book Eating Magician*, it was the same, wasn't it?" The protagonist could devour phantoms and ghosts, struggling only against physical undead—until he obtained Pride. That thing was sorted.
"Oh... hehe... hahaha!" Damon laughed. Forgotten that he was in the middle of the undead sea, he laughed, understanding clearly the implications it held.
"I don't need to worry about undead... ever!" A mad blue light shone in his eyes as he looked at the undead not like monsters, but like magic gems—his hands itching with greed as he found the best way to deal with them.
"Just imagine... devouring all the undead, using their magic to grow my reserves and to..." Endless ideas surged in his mind. Against groups of opponents, he could theoretically function as a machine made for killing—but for the undead, he was basically a vacuum cleaner.
"So should I just clean them all?" The idea was tempting as Damon raised his hand, but looking north toward the towering zombie mountain, he didn't dare act just yet.
"If I eat too many of them, their disappearance would alert that mountain," Damon thought coldly. He had complete trust in his devouring ability, but against a ruler, he didn't want to take chances. Instead of charging without thinking, Damon thought carefully.
"If I rush ahead, other rulers won't sit quietly. They'll launch attacks on the remaining survivors immediately to end it all." Damon wanted to kill; he could follow that plan, but it demanded too much sacrifice.
He wasn't a hero. He knew that clearly. If a few died because of his actions, he wouldn't even care—but this wasn't a few, it was millions. Men, women, children. Charging blindly would demand too great a price.
So Damon controlled himself. Not only civilians or other mages, but Salan was in there too. Damon didn't want that bitch to escape and cause future trouble, so for now, he needed to act calmly and rationally.
With that in mind, Damon stealthily made his way ahead—no killing, no devouring, just floating silently through the minion-class zombies, careful not to go near the warrior or commander-class ones.
***
Elsewhere, inside the light barrier of the inner city, where humans had lost hope, above the museum two men stood face to face.
Wearing a blue robe infamous for its notoriety, an old man stood, his eyes filled with ridicule as he looked at the young man in front of him.
"Are you so confident that I don't have the Underground Holy Spring on me?" said Mo Fan with a cold grin. Wearing a black shirt, he laughed as he raised his cuff, ready to fight.
"Tsk tsk... do you really think that with the spring water you can still save the city?" Mu He laughed. "Oh, Salan... hahah, look carefully. It isn't even that long before the sun sets."
"Once it sets, the Underground Holy Spring will be useless." Like an actor in a play, he raised both hands dramatically. "It will be night—the time they all rule!"
Slowly bringing his hands down, he looked at Mo Fan. "So what do you say? Your Underground Holy Spring will only make a difference in the morning. Do you think this city can last the night?" asked Mu He as a diabolical grin etched itself onto his face.
"It's obvious that you've lured me here to learn Salan's identity. The truth is, I've come here because I want you to deliver a message, too," Mu He said calmly.
Multiple thoughts ran through Mo Fan's mind as he tried to understand Mu He's intentions, his guard up while his brain connected the dots.
Mo Fan might not have been the sharpest mind. His lack of knowledge and common sense in the novel often portrayed him as a dumb, arrogant pervert like the majority of protagonists—but that wasn't true.
He was simple-minded for sure, but not dull. Always sharp, quick to react, and practical. A redeeming quality—and a rare one to find among protagonists. He was genuinely ignorant, and maybe it was that very ignorance that allowed him to ignore normal logic and climb to a rank no human possibly could.
"You want to save Salan?" asked Mo Fan coldly.
***
A/N
Okay did some changes. It's evening not night, updated the past chapters too to match it all.
Well do you guys remember that I said from now on its time to fuck the plot?
Yeah it is time.
The story though would be progressing and following the plot in a fated sense but you know the plot is fucked.