To the Start of a New World

3.2

Weeks passed since the day he went back in time. Lu Hao had kept himself incredibly busy.

He'd forgotten that he'd had a girlfriend until she showed up at his apartment, angry and spitting at having been ignored for so long. Lu Hao had stared at her with a blank confusion, only remembering her name after a short while—she was Xia Weiwei, his girlfriend who had turned into a zombie the first night and had nearly killed him on his bed.

Needless to say, they broke up.

Xia Weiwei had looked like she wanted to fight him, but she held herself back; and then she broke down sobbing, asking, why? Was she not good enough? Did he have someone else?

Lu Hao wasn't in the mood to comfort her, but out of consideration that their relationship had been healthy back in the day and he really had cared for her up until she'd become a zombie, he invited her in, gave her some water to help her settle, and talked things through with her.

She was a perfectly good person. He just wasn't able to be the one for her.

He didn't tell her that he had someone else in his heart.

Once their split was settled as amicably as could be with such a sudden break-up, Lu Hao got on with his preparations.

First he had to locate the supplies he needed to stock up on, most important being life essentials. The second priority was the technology the researchers would need to study the vaccine; these, Lu Hao didn't intend to purchase. He marked locations he could lift the machines from later.

The private investigators he'd hired struggled to find Hong Sheng. The young man was too low-key, likely only taking unofficial contract work that didn't leave much of a document trail. His utter lack of social life also complicated things, as Hong Sheng would never leave much of an impression on the people he interacted with—which in itself was very few.

But the fourth private investigator had quickly yielded results.

A picture of a high school girl, her back hunched, head down, hair covering her face in a miserable display of low self-esteem, sat on Lu Hao's desk. Lu Hao looked at the girl in this picture, a chilling cold deep in his eyes. He gave an uncharacteristic sneer, fingers twitching to tear the photo to shreds.

So this was Ji Ling.

The report that came with the photo was thorough. Ji Ling was a young girl from a neglectful household. She was bullied in school. An outcast. No friends, no loved ones. Her only personal connection was to her now-deceased grandmother.

But all that changed when the apocalypse hit, didn't it?

She became the beautiful, elegant swan by standing over a mountain of corpses.

In some ways, she was similar to Hong Sheng. They both had that negative air of people who had never truly escaped from the darkness of their childhood. Neither of them were accepted by the world. It was the type of situation to turn anyone into a misanthrope. But where his Hong Sheng had Lu Hao and Lu Hao's family, and where Hong Sheng had grown up to be such an earnest, sincere, and lovely but shy person, Ji Ling had only grown to be selfish and twisted.

Her desire to come out on top, to see herself become the heroine of some fantasy in her own mind, had lead to the deaths of everyone in this part of the world.

Lu Hao glanced at the photo with cold killing intent.

He liked to believe he was a moral man. He wouldn't go against the laws of society. But he was also ruthless. The morals he liked to grandstand on became nothing once his bottom line was touched.