Zombie Queen has the Biggest Thigh of All (12)

The next day, just before the sun rose, they arrived at a place a mile or two away from the outskirts of H City. Because H City was a zombie hotspot, they couldn't get any closer or the car's noise would attract all sorts of unwanted things.

They first rested for several hours (and Yin Mei slept a little), before moving on. In the beginning, Yin Mei didn't think there would be any more humans left in the area, but she was proven wrong, much to her surprise.

With H City being infested with zombies, any humans that hadn't died would surely have already long gone off to other cities?

But there was a small group of humans that was camping out on the outskirts of H City, as if intent on entering.

Seeing Yin Mei's group, they were wary at first, until they saw that they appeared human. At least, save for the one with the aura of a dead man. But, no one had yet to encounter such a human like zombie yet, so they simply believed that he was on the pale and sickly side, and his extreme beauty only helped them believe he wasn't a zombie.

The group's leader was actually a girl, who had a small but energetic and straight forward appearance. She directly cut to the chase, "are you guys trying to go to H City?"

"Yeah," Yin Mei said, also not beating around the bush.

"It's impossible. That place is infested to the brim with zombies. Recently, they've even started to organize themselves, believe it or not," the girl said, shaking her head.

Yin Mei put on a thoughtful expression. This should probably mean that a rank 3 zombie had appeared. Considering H City's state, probably several had already ranked up to level 3. In the information, in the beginning years, H City had been split into different territories ruled by the stronger zombies. In those days, it had already been a formidable enough place, but then the zombie emperor appeared, killing or bringing under his wing all those strong zombies and uniting all of H City under one leader.

"Well, then what are you guys doing here?" Yin Mei said, raising an eyebrow. When she looked at the group, there was at least over ten of them.

And one of them was actually a family of three, one father, one mother, and one young looking girl who could be no older than three or four. A child! Yin Mei's eyes immediately glinted. She had not forgotten her idea of forming an all child special forces unit, it was just that she hadn't had the time to do so. But, sadly, this child had luckily been able to survive with the help of her parents, though she didn't know how long that would last. But a family that was able to survive together really attested to their strength - it was very rare for this to happen. After all, surviving by yourself in the apocalypse was hard enough, let alone with the burden of having to protect extra people.

Their leader seemed to laugh drily, shaking her head. "All of us have some sort of family in H City. We all know that they have probably long been eaten by zombies, but all of us here just refuse to give up..."

Yin Mei nodded. There were people who gave up, and those who didn't. Sometimes not giving up was a good thing, but most of the time, it got people killed.

Well, that was their decision though. Yin Mei could tell that some of them had already resigned themselves to death, while others just simply didn't want to believe in the reality of things.

But, it had already been almost a year since the start of the apocalypse. At this point in time, there was no way that their family members had survived. If they had, then they would have already long left H City.

"What are you five here for?" The brown-haired girl asked, feeling like the group was a little odd. The oldest seemed to be the beautiful man with pale skin, and even he appeared to be only in his early twenties, and the rest looked like no more than children. Lu Mei's body was 17 years old, Qin Shuang was reaching eight years old, and the Ri twins were both fifteen, so the girl, who was in her late twenties, was not wrong in calling them a bunch of kids.

"Oh, us? We're here to hunt," Yin Mei said as she flashed them a fierce and toothy grin.

"Hunt? Young ones, you shouldn't throw away your lives so easily. Anywhere else is okay, but in H City, the zombies are practically never ending. You'll end up dead before you know it." One older man said, from where he was sitting by the campfire.

When the group heard that Yin Mei and them planned on going into the city to hunt, they all started to crowd around, saying things similar to the first man, telling them not to be rash or overconfident and etc.

"Haha, don't worry about it. You guys can wait here." Yin Mei said, and not acknowledging their words, walking with the other four into the city.

Calling H City a zombie's nest wasn't wrong. One could find a zombie roaming around every ten feet, and rank 2 zombies were unbelievably common, even though outside of H City they still had a rarity of about one rank 2 zombie every hundred to five hundred rank 1 zombies.

"Does your confidence stem from me being here?" The zombie emperor asked as he walked behind them. He was no longer bound by Qin Shuang's threads, though the boy had been reluctant to unbind him. The Ri twins didn't know his true identity, but Qin Shuang had been listening in at the lab the entire time so he knew - this man that looked almost no different from a human was, in reality, an extremely strong and highly evolved zombie.

He didn't know why his big sister would insist on keeping him with them, but when the time came, he would definitely protect his big sis. Although his big sister seemed extremely strong and all seeing, as time had passed, Qin Shuang had realized that Yin Mei had been sacrificing advancing her own strength in favor of advancing Qin Shuang's. Because of that, Qin Shuang felt guilty and had taken it upon himself to further improve his skills in order to protect her. Though the boy was young, children could be surprisingly smart and perceptive.

"Yeah, it does," Yin Mei said. In the previous life, the one who gave her confidence from being by her side was the demon king. Now it was switched out with a zombie emperor, but the feeling didn't seem to change. It was probably because they were so similar in appearance that caused this, but in the end, Yin Mei didn't know.

Anyways, the reason why Yin Mei was confident was because lower rank zombies felt naturally suppressed by higher rank zombies. It was the case for humans as well. Those with weaker abilities would naturally feel suppressed by those with stronger ones. The world of the apocalypse was truly one that had evolved into a dog eat dog world where the strong ruled supreme.

Because of the zombie emperor's presence, the lower rank zombies all scampered away from them like headless chickens.

The Ri twins both looked at each other, even more curious over the identity of the mysterious man. Was this his special ability or something?

The only thing that was a pity was that the suppression weakened the closer in strength people were, so the rank 3 ruling zombies of the area could still somewhat put up a fight, though it depended on the zombie. Even the stupid low ranked zombies had their personality differences, after all, it wasn't like they were completely incapable of thought. They were just more on the level of drooling mentally impaired toddlers, that was all.

At the time that the zombie emperor goes to H City, it had already been four or so years since the apocalypse started, so Yin Mei couldn't trust that all the rulers of H City at that time were the same as the current H City rulers.

Because of this, Yin Mei felt she might have to go on a bit of a wild goose chase to find those zombies, since they were fairly important to the zombie emperor's forces.

"Can you sense the high rank zombies in the city?" Yin Mei asked, glancing at both Ning An and Qin Shuang as she said this. Of course, Qin Shuang could look with his ability, but the zombie emperor as well would be able to sense other zombies within a certain radius - research in the previous timeline showed that this was an innate skill that even lower level zombies had.

"Big sis, this city has seven really strong zombies, all in different places." Qin Shuang said, as he extended his threads out as far as possible. "But, the place is too big, so I can't sense the rest of the north side."

Yin Mei nodded. This was already good enough. Seven rank 3 zombies! It was more than she could imagine. This was probably already more than half the number of rank 3 zombies that there were in all of C Country?

She looked at the zombie emperor, who shrugged, not saying anything.

Well, there was no problem if he didn't help out. Though with just Qin Shuang and her, it would be a little difficult to defeat the rank 3 zombie. There was also the Ri twins, but one was a sickly boy and the other was a young girl with no fighting experience.

"Oh, that's right! I almost forgot to ask, what are your abilities?" Yin Mei said. Since she thought this might take a while, she first had them find a spot to rest at before asking the question again.

Ri En and Ri Yi looked at each other before each shaking their heads. "We don't have one," Ri En said in a slightly disappointed tone of voice.

"Eh? One year already and you haven't awakened one yet?" By now, Yin Mei knew that about less than half of humanity should have already awakened their abilities, though because there were many rare and unique abilities that were difficult to activate, it probably appeared less than that, at maybe thirty percent.

Ri En and Ri Yi looked embarrassed, though at the same time thought that they couldn't be blamed for this! They just didn't have an ability okay, it's not like they chose such a thing, right?

"Hmm, well, how about we test it out first?" Yin Mei said. If they still showed no progress, then she would probably just have to throw them into a horde of zombies and then they would definitely awaken an ability then.

The Ri twins shivered, as if able to sense Yin Mei's thoughts. But they still nodded reluctantly. It wasn't like they hadn't tried something like this before, just that it didn't have any results.

"Ri En, you go first." Yin Mei looked around before scooping up a handful of dirt. "Try moving it. Just stare and think about moving it." She said, and Ri En stared for several seconds before sighing.

"Is there any point in this? It's not moving at all." He said, embarrassed.

"Just keep going. For at least half a minute," she said. Half a minute passed and nothing happened. She nodded. "Okay, let's try this next," she said as she kicked the grass dirt ground in front of her, gouging out a piece of it and creating a small hole. She raised her hand, an orb of water appearing above it which she casually tossed into the hole she created, making a small puddle. "Try doing the same to that puddle now," she said, pointing at it. For newly awakened powers, asking for them to summon water from the air was a bit too difficult of a task, so she could only prepare the water in advance.

Again, nothing happened. Yin Mei continued her test, like telling them to try lighting a small twig on fire, or blow away the flower in her hand, or make the grass on the ground grow, and etc. She cycled through all the most common powers.

Ri En had no success, but Ri Yi was a surprise. She had a nature ability and was able to make a flower grow and bloom with her thought. This was a pretty good ability, and it was strong for someone who had never consumed a single energy core. Ri En was a little embarrassed that his sister had surpassed him and gained a power before him, and began to try even harder. But, even then, it seemed to have no effect.

He was beginning to feel extremely disappointed and about to give up, when Yin Mei spoke up. "Don't worry about it. Actually, even if you fail this test, you could still have an awakened ability. It would just be rare and hard to discover how to activate. Because of that, a lot of people who appear like they don't have an ability actually have very strong abilities."

To top it off, you two are the siblings of the Fire Emperor. There's no way that you wouldn't have a strong ability. Those were the words she left unsaid.

Though at first glance, abilities were unaffected by genes, it was later discovered that this was only partially true. The type of ability you had was unaffected by genes, and to this day, there was no solid theory over the reason for why people had a certain type of ability versus another, but that was besides the point. The type of ability was unaffected, but the strength of the ability and speed of evolution was partially based on one's genes. In other words, if a member of one's family possessed a strong ability, it was highly likely that the rest of their family would also have a fairly strong ability.

Of course, this wasn't always true, and in the apocalypse, many people had lost their family members so such an idea couldn't be properly confirmed, but it was normally acknowledged as fact, as there were many examples that seemed to prove this idea.

But the issue was that many of the strongest members of humanity were all people who no longer had any family. Many people thought that this was a part of the reason they were so strong, aside from their ability, of course, but it was also because each and every one of them had used the despair of losing their family to further strengthen themselves.

Though, this was something that couldn't really be confirmed.

"Well, if anything out of the ordinary happens, tell me. It could be a hint to activating your ability." She looked him in the eye. "There is no one without an ability. It's just a difference of awakening time and how difficult it is to activate it."

Because Yin Mei spoke with such conviction and confidence, Ri En couldn't help but believe her words.

In the end, Yin Mei decided to spend the rest of the day picking off weak zombies for Ri En and Ri Yi to enhance their bodies and abilities with, acting like a drill instructor from hell as she forced them to battle agains the zombies.

Qin Shuang was tasked with something else, and the zombie emperor sat and watched them afar, looking like a king in this desolate wasteland. Well, that just sounded cool, but in actuality, it was an abandoned and ruined city and not an actual desolate wasteland.

Looking at Yin Mei as she said something to the Ri twins, the zombie emperor wondered why he found this girl so familiar. Racking his brain for answers, he didn't come up with anything. She talked like she knew him, but there was no memories of this girl in the memories of his body.

She seemed to turn to look at him for a moment, her eyes showing a complicated emotion. There, that sadness was back. And something else that he didn't know how to describe.

She reminded him of something... that's right. She looked like... a little rabbit. A shadow of something seemed to flicker in the back of his mind, but before he could grasp onto it, it disappeared. In the end, he could only sit there in frustration, unable to recall anything.