Chapter 1: Chapter 1
My mouth tasted like battery acid mixed with a two-week-old cum sock.
Don’t ask me why I know that taste through...
Dirt crusted my eyelashes before my eyes even managed to focus. Everything swam into view in a hazy, red-tinted soup as pine needles dug straight into my cheek with the kind of personal vendetta only the forest floor seems capable of holding.
It felt less like normal hangover and more like somebody had scooped out my skull and taken a long, steaming dump directly onto my cerebral cortex.
A groan tried to crawl its way out of me, the good kind, the deeply pathetic kind I felt I’d more than earned for waking up with my bare ass freezing in actual mud.
What actually came out was a wet, gargling wheeze.
So I tried again, straining everything I had left to push out one simple word.
Grrrrrgghhhk.
Thick black sludge spilled over my cracked lips instead and dribbled down my chin.
A second attempt got me the exact same gargle. A third got me the same wet rattle, plus a fresh glob of sludge for my troubles.
Okay. Okay, that’s... that’s not a normal can’t-talk-yet thing. That’s not even tequila-Tuesday hungover.
Well, fuck me sideways. My vocal cords were apparently pulverized.
My palms sank into the damp earth as I pushed myself up, and my elbows popped with a sickening, wet crunch that sounded exactly like a heavy boot stepping on a fresh bag of potato chips.
Then I made the mistake of looking down at my own hands.
Mottled, bruised grey, both of them. Jagged fingernails caked in dark dried gore that looked suspiciously like human flesh. Patches of skin along my forearms had peeled clean back to expose raw, weeping muscle and chunky yellowed fat.
What the fuck.
What. The fuck.
I flipped my hand over, like that would somehow fix it. Like flipping a pancake.
It did not fix it.
The grey stayed exactly where it was. The exposed muscle did not zip itself back up into a nice, tan, alive-looking layer of skin. I just sat there in the mud, turning my own arm over and over like a confused toddler with a busted toy, waiting for it to suddenly make sense.
It did not make sense.
Somewhere in the back of my rotting skull, my brain was still desperately trying to figure out why I currently resembled a background extra from a low-budget Romero flick.
Out of every fucking thing in the universe, I am a goddamn zombie?
Wait. Did I transmigrate?
My memories got dragged through next, frantically, in search of the last clear thing I’d actually done before waking up in the dirt.
The cramped apartment came back first. The empty beer cans stacked precariously on my desk. Half a bottle of cheap bourbon, gone, followed by a deeply degenerate session jerking off to a Las Plagas x Ada Wong animation that I will not be elaborating.
Men of Culture will know...
Then lights went out, face fell first onto my sticky mechanical keyboard.
There was no speeding truck anywhere in there or glowing summoning circle with big-titted elves rolling out a welcome mat to some magical fantasy realm.
Was I kidnapped?
Did a cartel drag me out of my gaming chair, drug me out of my mind, and dump me in a forest as some kind of sick prank?
Did a homeless guy inject me with weaponized bath salts while I slept?
Is the world currently mid zombie-apocalypse and I just slept through the whole outbreak because I was too busy blasting rope?
A jagged fingernail found the exposed yellowed fat on my left forearm and dug in deep, on purpose, fishing for the blinding spike of agony that should’ve made me piss myself.
Nothing came. Just a dull, distant pressure, like poking a stress ball through a winter coat.
A shaky, silent breath was as much of a reaction as I could manage. Mostly numb, apparently, and thank god for small miracles — with the absolute garbage state my body was in, full nerve function would’ve had me dying screaming from the agony alone. Nerve death, it turned out, was a massive perk in this particular scenario.
But if my brain was rotting, why could I still think this clearly? I should have been aimlessly drone shuffling, moaning for brains.
But I was still me, fully, just currently piloting a decaying meat suit that smelled like an abandoned slaughterhouse.
That was when the other memories crashed in.
Blinding, sterile fluorescent light flooded the vision first. A cold steel table came next. Heavy leather straps bit into wrists and ankles that weren’t mine, not really, but felt like mine anyway.
Some smug prick in a white lab coat loomed over the table holding a massive syringe full of glowing green liquid.
Then a fever, sudden and total, like drinking boiling lead. Skin melting straight off bone. An overwhelming, maddening urge to chew on something squishy, hijacking every other thought in the guy’s head.
A rent-a-cop’s throat showed up next, torn open, hot arterial spray coating a face that wasn’t mine. The sickeningly sweet taste of raw human muscle followed right behind it.
Glass shattered. Dark, rainy woods swallowed everything after that — days of aimless wandering while the infection finished rotting away whatever was left of the original guy, until nothing remained but static.
I blinked the disjointed nightmare fuel away and spat out a glob of coagulated black blood for good measure.
So, I was definitely an zombie.
A rotting, flesh-eating ghoul currently taking a dirt nap in some random-ass forest, and not the cool kind from a video game cutscene either.
Giant, looming pine trees walled the place in, blotting out most of the moonlight with their branches. The air carried a cold, heavy mix of damp earth and my own personal rot.
Where the hell was I even supposed to go? Was there a city nearby? Were the lab coat assholes still out there somewhere, looking for my rotting ass?
A high-pitched, digital chime nearly split my skull clean open. It didn’t come through my ears. It rang straight out of my rotting gray matter, like my brain had its own personal notification settings now.
[Monster Evolution System initializing...]
[Integration progress: 100%]
[Welcome, Host.]
[You have been selected for integration with the Monster Evolution System.]
[Purpose: To evolve. To consume. To become.]
Rubbing my eyes with the back of a bruised forearm did exactly nothing. The glowing blue text didn’t budge an inch.
Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.
A system?
My fingers found my nose on reflex, or at least the cold rubbery cartilage that used to be a nose. This had to be a hallucination.
Maybe the virus was just handing my consciousness one last, weird-ass fever dream before the lights went out for good and I went full walking dead.
The welcome text dissolved before I could argue with it further, replaced by a far more detailed diagnostic report.
[Current Form: t-Virus Zombie (Degraded)]
[Status: Near Critical]
[Biological Integrity: 33%]
[Host body is undergoing rapid cellular decay. Continuous biomass consumption is required to maintain structural integrity and mental stability. User may turn feral at critical or below biological integrity]
Thirty-three percent!?Since when did zombies get an expiry date? I mean they scientifically should but where’s the game logic!?
Is this real life? Or Is this just a fantasy?
The attempt to yell that out loud got me nothing but another desperate, bubbly wheeze, courtesy of a throat that now felt lined with wet sandpaper and broken glass.
That number sat there glowing at me, and the dread it produced had absolutely nothing to do with the freezing mountain air.
I needed to consume flesh or I was going to turn into a feral zombie that started eating someone or something.
None of this tracked. Hunting down innocent campers and biting their faces off was not on my bucket list.
I was a guy who got visibly uncomfortable when his mashed potatoes touched his steak on the plate, and now a floating blue box was handing me a mental expiration date unless I started acting like a feral garbage disposal.
Surely there was another option. A doctor, a cure, a green herb mixed with a red herb, anything.
The system, naturally, did not give a single flying fuck about my moral crisis. The blue screen shifted again, the text folding itself into a giant, spinning neon wheel.
[To assist with your initial survival, the System will now run the Genesis Lottery. You will receive two Buffs and one Debuff to establish your baseline evolutionary path.]
A lottery. Seriously?
Skin flakes were actively shedding off me like a cheap snake mid-molt, my elbow was popping with every twitch, and this thing wanted me to play gacha.
Telling it to wait, to maybe discuss the cure option first, didn’t get me anywhere — the wheel spun faster, neon colors blurring into a dizzying streak of blue and red right in front of my face.
My rotted brain practically vibrated watching it spin. A useless buff now, something like marginally faster shuffling or slightly stinkier breath, and I was as good as dead meat. I needed something that could actually keep me from melting into mush.
The wheel slammed to a halt with a loud digital chime that made my remaining teeth ache.
[Lottery Complete.]
[Buff 1 Acquired: Better Evolved.]
[Description: You no longer need to physically chew and digest flesh like a common degenerate corpse. You can absorb biological material directly through touch to sate your cellular degradation. Furthermore, you can assimilate special mutations from high-tier biological entities into your base form.]
My jaw hung slightly slack reading that one over.
Okay. Hold on.
No physical chewing? I don’t have to rip into someone’s neck and feel their warm stringy flesh get stuck between my teeth?
I can just touch them? Like a biological vacuum cleaner?
Relief hit in a big, stupid wave. That took a serious chunk of psychological horror out of the whole situation. A dead deer, a giant spider, whatever — I could absorb its biomass without having to taste its disgusting unwashed guts in the process.
And the assimilation part sounded broken in the best way. A Hunter, a Tyrant, anything high-tier — touch it, and maybe I just walked off with its powers.
That little window of optimistic theorizing didn’t last. The glowing blue text vanished, and a sound like a wet towel ripping in half tore out of my own body.
Sickening heat flooded my right arm next, starting at the shoulder and tunneling straight down to the fingertips. My nervous system was supposed to be dead — I’d already poked exposed fat earlier and felt nothing — but this completely bypassed all of that. This felt like a structural restructuring happening at the cellular level, with me as the unwilling construction site.
My dead muscles seized on their own. Back into the mud I went, thrashing like a fish on a dock.
A deep, horrific squirming took root somewhere inside my marrow. The grey flesh on my right forearm bulged in real time as I watched, in absolute horror, while something moved underneath the skin. Hundreds of somethings. They writhed and tunneled through rotting muscle fiber, pushing the yellow fat outward, tearing small openings in the skin as they went.
What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck is it doing to me?
Was the system was physically rewriting my decaying biology? I thought it would be some game like skill goddammit.
My elbow snapped backward with a loud crack. Spinning in the dirt, I grabbed for my own arm with my other hand and found nothing solid to hold onto, the meat shifting too fast under my fingers. The skin on my palm split wide open next, spraying black blood and foul-smelling pus into the cold air.
The squirming only intensified. The meat of my hand felt like a sack of angry worms fighting their way out from the inside. Fingernails popped off one by one, landing in the mud like a scatter of bloody coins. The tips of my fingers split apart completely.
Whatever pressure had been building finally broke through. The meat of my palm, my fingers, the underside of my wrist, all of it bloomed outward at once like some grotesque, fleshy flower opening for the first time. The writhing stopped being something I just felt and became something I had to look at.
Panting, I lay there in the mud while the wet ripping noises finally died down. The deep-tissue heat faded back into the same comfortable numbness as before.
Sitting up took a second. My left arm got tucked against my chest, hard, while I swallowed and stalled for time. Looking was the last thing I wanted to do. But not knowing wasn’t really an option either.
So I raised my right hand up to eye level and got my first look at the dripping, unrecognizable mass of meat it had become.
Hundreds of small, wet, dark red tendrils sprouted out of my shredded palm and split fingertips. They squirmed and lashed at the air like a cluster of blind, starving leeches hunting around for a meal.
What. The. Fuck.
My brain genuinely refused to file this anywhere useful. My own goddamn hand had turned into a fistful of hungry worms, every single one of them reaching around for something to grab onto.
Screaming felt like the appropriate response. So did face-planting into the mud for a full, dignified, five-star meltdown over the fact that my palm had apparently become a Build-A-Bear workshop for parasites. Somebody jumping out from behind a tree to tell me this was all an elaborate prank also would’ve been nice.
The system did not care.
The blue screen flickered back to life in front of my dripping, half-melted face, and the neon wheel started spinning all over again like it had somewhere else to be.
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