Undead

Chapter 60

Zhou Rong's lips moved as if he wanted to say something but restrained himself. Chen Yajing immediately sensitively asked, "Are you trying to say 'you're all a bunch of insane lunatics'?"

Zhou Rong remained indifferent, "I'm sorry, I'm just a rough soldier with little education. I'm not qualified to judge your actions." He pointed to the first person on the death list and asked, "Who is this person?"

"...My husband."

Chen Yajing paused, then almost breathed out quietly, "When my husband was an undergraduate, Ning Yu taught their class's specialized courses, and that's how they got to know each other."

Considering Chen Yajing's husband's age, he must be around forty, which means that when Ning Yu was teaching undergraduate courses, he might have been less than fifteen. Zhou Rong didn't say anything about it and instead asked, "How is the progress of the vaccine research you mentioned earlier?"

Chen Yajing replied, "Tens of thousands of zombies are surrounding the outside. Are you sure you want to talk about vaccines at a time like this?"

Zhou Rong said, "If you have indeed developed a vaccine to cure the virus, at least for this moment, I will prioritize the importance of the vaccine above all tasks."

Chen Yajing looked at Zhou Rong for a moment and seemed to have figured something out. She said, "You really are goal-oriented."

Zhou Rong admitted, "Yes, I am. That's why I didn't immediately execute you when I saw this death list earlier. Let's not get into other matters and talk about the vaccine."

"Oh? It seems I'll live a few more minutes," Chen Yajing said, with a slight smile and a touch of melancholy.

"Regarding the vaccine and Ning Yu..."

Chen Yajing changed her sitting posture in response to Zhou Rong's impatience and slowly explained, "As I mentioned earlier, when the zombie virus outbreak first happened, the institute sacrificed an unimaginable amount of manpower and resources to do two things: the first was to restore local communication, and the second was to search for Ning Yu."

"Ning Yu had previously participated in A-country's research on the zombie virus and had even met with their research sponsor, Romuel. After he withdrew from the research and returned to his country, he lived in a rural area for a while before we brought him back to the institute. He proposed a shocking idea."

"He believed that one of the reasons the zombie virus was so difficult to overcome was that it was too basic, constantly changing its form during transmission, making it extremely hard to develop a vaccine that could lock onto it. To overcome this, he decided to use genetic recombination technology to stimulate the virus's 'evolution.' When the virus reached a higher level of development, its rate of division and mutation would become more stable, making the development of a vaccine change from 'almost impossible' to 'possible.'"

"He quickly began experiments on genetic recombination for the virus, but the new virus needed to be tested, and we couldn't provide him with the necessary test subjects, such as chimpanzees or gorillas. The institute's only supercomputer that could simulate the human immune system was damaged early on during the disaster, and its system was too complex to be repaired for a long time. At a loss, the institute conducted its first lottery..."

Chen Yajing took a deep breath and continued, "The first five names drawn from the list you're holding, including my husband, were part of it."

In the dim light, the air flow became very slow, pressing heavily on Zhou Rong's lungs and blood.

"If the virus research were exposed, this base would face unprecedented panic and riots, as the people here are too scared. So initially, Ning Yu conducted experiments outside the base, sacrificing dozens of volunteers, and the virus finally succeeded in evolving. The new virus has characteristics that turn the infected into creatures with animal intelligence and hunting instincts."