Chapter1

Rainwater, seeping through the cracks in the rubble, dripped onto my forehead. The coldness traced the curve of my brow and pooled in the corner of my eye. Huddled beneath a collapsed concrete slab, I listened to the crunch of heavy leather boots grinding glass shards into dust overhead. The footsteps echoed—one by one—drawing closer.

Three silhouettes loomed in the fading dusk. The man in the lead had a vicious scar slashed diagonally across his face, running from his left brow down to his right cheekbone. The puckered ridges of healed flesh twisted his features into a perpetual, grotesque grimace—half-smile, half-weep. Blue-white arcs of electricity occasionally spat from the tip of the stun baton in his hand. The sharp crack-snapof the current was piercing in the damp air.

I tried to twitch my fingers. My newly formed bones were still too brittle; bending a single joint felt like a rusted rasp grating back and forth inside the marrow. Just hours ago, that phosphorescent blue crystal core had slipped down my esophagus. Immediately after, my entire spine felt as though a red-hot wire had been threaded through it from the inside. Every single vertebra was subjected to an excruciating cycle of shattering and fusing. I had gritted my teeth through that hellish agony, forcing my form to transition from a crawling, carrion-feeding insect into this emaciated human shell.

Slade crouched, driving the tip of his stun baton into the gravel inches from my shoulder. Spitting sparks scorched my skin, forcing me to flinch.

"Lucky us. Found a live one." He grinned at the two companions behind him, smoke stains wedged between his teeth. "Haven't seen a single moving thing in this hellhole for three days."

I opened my mouth, but only a raspy hiss escaped my throat, like a gecko whose tail had been stepped on. The high-tier core had rebuilt my muscles and bones, but the nerve endings in my vocal cords hadn't fully reconnected yet. Every word I tried to form was trapped behind my epiglottis, dissolving into a string of meaningless, breathless gasps.

"Mute?" Slade frowned, then smirked. "Mute works. Saves us the trouble of hearing him wail in the middle of the night."

A rough hemp rope was tied to an iron collar around my neck. The serrated teeth on its inner edge bit into my flesh. He yanked the rope. The collar tightened, the teeth sinking deeper, and warm liquid began to trickle down my collarbone. I pushed against the ground with my knees, trying to stand, but my thigh muscles refused to obey. Barely half an inch off the ground, I collapsed heavily. My elbow smashed against a broken brick, the pain flashing black across my vision.

"Get up!" Slade’s boot slammed into my side. The iron nails on his soles tore three bloody gashes across my skin.

I swallowed the pain in silence. My pain receptors were like stripped electrical wires exposed to the air; even the slightest touch triggered a sharp, agonizing shock. I pressed my palms into the gravel, dug my fingers into the muddy crevices, and dragged my body forward inch by inch. My knees scraped raw, revealing the newly formed, pale pink muscle tissue beneath. The fibers were still weaving and aligning at a visible rate. I deliberately rubbed my mud-caked elbows over them, smearing dark, ashen dirt over the evidence of my rapid healing.

The two men behind me were talking. The scrawny one, Richie, asked, "Boss Slade, this kid's pretty tough. Still breathing after taking a hit from the baton."

The plumper one, Toby, spat on the ground. "Tough is good. The tougher they are, the longer they last as bait."

I listened closely, dismantling the cadence and pauses of their syllables into fragments, tossing them into the newly formed neural network in my mind. The high-tier core hadn't just granted me skeletal reconstruction; it had gifted me an insanely rapid rate of neural proliferation. With every unfamiliar word I heard, my cerebral cortex absorbed its phonetic structure, tonal shifts, and contextual logic like a sponge, deducing its syntactic rules at an exponential rate.

Bait

When Slade kicked me toward the rotting silhouettes lunging out from the shadows of the ruins, that action and that word were permanently nailed to the exact same coordinate in my memory.

When their claws tore open the skin on my chest, the agony hit me like a branding iron. But I suppressed every primal instinct to struggle. I let those barbed fingertips gouge into the tender flesh beneath my skin; I let the cold, insidious virus spread through my bloodstream to my limbs. I could feel the granulation tissue at the edges of the wound growing rapidly, so I used mud and ash to conceal the dark red layer of new skin. If they saw my regeneration speed, the next thing kicking me wouldn't be a boot—it would be a scalpel.

"Trash. Get up." Slade stomped on my lower back. He rested his rifle just above my collarbone and fired, the recoil vibrating painfully through my ribs.

The bullet grazed my ear and blew open the forehead of the leading zombie. As it collapsed, its rotting nails dragged a deep groove across my collarbone. I lay flat on the ground, feeling both that scratch and the torn flesh on my chest contracting inward simultaneously. Tiny tendrils of flesh wove back and forth like a sewing machine's needle, pulling the ruptured skin back together. I rubbed my calf against the newly formed blood scabs, letting the muddy water dissolve them into a dark brown paste.

"Move! We need to make it back to the Coastal Zone before dark." Slade yanked the hemp rope, and the iron collar bit another fraction of an inch into my flesh.

Dragged along, I stumbled forward on my hands and knees. Along the way, we passed a half-collapsed gas station. A rusted tanker truck lay horizontally across the road, the faded text on its side so weathered by the elements that only fragments of the word remained. I stared at that broken character for a few seconds. In my mind, I had already completely deconstructed its full structure and strokes. A human word. The Save in Save lives.

I couldn't speak, but those words were already lining up in my consciousness, waiting for the exact moment my vocal cords finally connected.