The Whole Map Turns Red!

"Hey, Mo Fan..."

"You're asking about Captain Zhankong? No idea — now that you mention it, I realize I haven't heard him yell at me in ages."

"I'm in the middle of a mission, so I haven't been in contact with Captain Zhankong. But from what I've heard, after he came back to Bo City carrying the Wing-Azure Wolf's head, he just... vanished."

"Sure — the moment I hear anything about him, you'll be the first to know. But this mission of mine could take a while, and I honestly don't know when I'll make it back to base."

"How's the little Flame Queen holding up?"

"How could anything possibly happen to *me*? I'm the fastest in this entire squad — if I can't fight my way out, I can always outrun them. We're officers, not deserters. Whoever keeps their head goes back to report. If everyone else goes down, I'll be just fine."

Zhang Xiaohou walked and talked at the same time, earpiece in, chatting away with Mo Fan. They hadn't entered the Xianchi zone yet, so there was no need for full alertness.

He ended the call. Beside him, Wang Tong's eyes were brimming with barely contained irritation.

"Who exactly are you putting a curse on?" Wang Tong demanded. "Let me tell you — if anything actually goes wrong out here, the first one to drop dead is going to be you and that rotten mouth of yours!"

"Ha, I was just giving an example," Zhang Xiaohou said, scratching the back of his head with an awkward grin.

"A bad one at that... And who was that on the phone anyway? You kept calling him 'ge.' I thought you said you were an only child."

"We grew up in the same alley," Zhang Xiaohou said. "He's no different from an actual older brother to me. He's had my back since we were kids — still does."

"You're a military officer," Wang Tong said flatly. "A strong one, too — mid-tier at the Intermediate Level. And yet the way you talk about yourself, you sound like some little kid who can't get by without someone else watching over him."

"He's way stronger than me."

"Sure, sure. Even the strongest fighters in our whole military district still haven't managed to clear out all the filth around here."

The nine-person squad gradually stepped into the Xianchi area.

Xianchi was simply a place name — a stretch of barren land where vegetation was almost never seen, the soil loose and soft, dusted at all times with a layer of fine white sand.

That white sand was in fact the powdered remains of bones, ground to dust by years of wind and sun. It lay across the earth like scattered salt. The locals, reluctant to name it for what it was, had taken to calling it Xianchi — Salt Pool.

Geographically, Xianchi was nothing more than the flatland where the northern foothills of the Qinling Mountains met Xi'an's Chang'an District. The terrain there dipped slightly below the surrounding land, so from a map it resembled a shallow basin — and the name had eventually stuck for good.

To the northeast of Xianchi, the Safe Zone extended in a long strip. In most other regions, the Safe Zone took the form of interlocking fortresses, outposts, Waystations, and Barriers — a system maintained jointly by military garrisons, hunter settlements, and the Magic Association.

But the Ancient Capital was different. The Demon-Beasts that called this land home were unlike any found elsewhere, and as a result, the Safe Zone here was never entirely stable. In place of the usual network, a long earthen wall served as the clearly visible boundary.

That wall had been raised by Earth Element Mages. Because it was occasionally repositioned, certain villages that had once sat safely inside the Safe Zone would sometimes find themselves quietly pushed to the outside without anyone noticing.

In coastal regions, or in the north and south of the country, any village left unprotected outside the Safe Zone was effectively a death sentence — within a few years at most, Demon-Beasts would overrun it and leave no one standing.

Here in the Ancient Capital, however, things were different. The Peril-Dwellers — a people native to the northern Qinling foothills — possessed a remarkable inherited ability to evade the Undead, which allowed villages beyond the Safe Zone to persist. And there were no small number of them. Foreign Magic Associations had taken to calling these settlements "miracle villages," and it was not hard to see why; the sheer audacity of those villagers defied all common sense.

"Our first destination is here — Yangyang Village." Captain Qin Hu dropped from the air, a crisp new map in hand. "It sits at the base of the mountain. Peril-Dweller people, northern Qinling foothills. About thirty households."

Maps, as a rule, were better the newer they were. Only a fresh map could accurately reflect how the terrain had recently shifted. Old maps were a different story — nine times out of ten, they'd get you killed.

"That's a funny name for a village," said Lu Hongjing, who moved through the group with the unfiltered energy of an unruly kid.

"No idle chatter," Qin Hu said, brow set firm, cutting off any further commentary before it could start.

"From our current position to Yangyang Village is roughly four kilometers," said Shi Shaoju, the squad's female military strategist. "The sun's just about to set. Shouldn't we work out how we're going to handle that?"

"We fight through," Lu Hongjing said with a shrug. "What's there to figure out? A handful of low-level Undead and small-fry Demon-Beasts aren't going to stop a whole squad of Mages. Something shows up, we put it down."

"Don't underestimate this." Qin Hu was clearly a leader who left nothing to chance, and the instant he saw his teammates shrugging it off, his expression turned serious. "This area has already been surveyed and classified as an Orange Zone."

"Orange Zone, Red Zone — I wander around in those all the time," Wang Tong put in.

One of the Hunters' Alliance's regular duties was mapping the distribution of Demon-Beasts and expressing their density through a layered color system.

The more numerous, the more concentrated, the more powerful the Demon-Beasts — the colors scaled from white to orange, then to red, and finally to black, mirroring the corresponding city alert levels.

**Green Zone** — the Safe Zone.

**White Zone** — where Demon-Beasts roamed sparsely, scattered and few.

**Orange Zone** — where Demon-Beast Clans had established their habitat. Danger territory, off-limits to all but seasoned hunters, specialized teams, and high-ranking Mages.

**Red Zone** — also known as the Scarlet Territory. A death zone, where Demon-Beasts surged in numbers like a rising tide.

Between red and black lay the **Purple Zone** — a Demon-Beast kingdom. Even Transcendent Tier Mages who entered had no road back.

And then there was **Black** — the life-forbidden zone. No human being had ever set foot there. Apparently, even Demon-Beasts did not dare enter. It was known simply as the Forbidden Land.

Green. White. Orange. Red. Purple. Black.

Six colors in total. The last four — Orange, Red, Purple, and Black — each corresponded to one of four tiers of military alert.

The Scarlet Alert that had once resounded throughout all of Bo City was the second tier of city alert.

The Ancient Capital stood planted at the heart of the Undead realm, making it — without question — the most frequently alerted city in all of China. For the people who lived here, the sound and sight of alerts had become as unremarkable as the morning and evening bells that roused them from sleep. You drank your tea, you gossiped with your neighbors, you marched to the front lines. Life went on.

Of course, this city had one small mercy to offer. While the sun hung high overhead, the electronic map's zone indicators were mostly green and white. An orange would appear here and there — usually because a stray Qinling Demon-Beast had wandered in by mistake.

But the moment the sun dipped below the horizon, the light that had sheltered this great land slowly withdrew — and outside the Ancient Capital's Safe Zone, across every last corner of that map, **the whole map turned red.**

Night fell, and what ruled here was no longer humanity.

At this moment, the special squad from the Lintong Military District stood outside the Safe Zone. The last trace of sunset had long since been swallowed up. Dusk and the reek of death seeped into the air around them together, indistinguishable from one another.

From beneath the ground — beneath that fine, salt-pale sand — came a strange, low sound. Something between chewing and knocking, rhythmic and relentless.

For Zhang Xiaohou, this was his first time truly setting foot in the Land of the Undead. He was wound tight, eyes sweeping in sharp, wary arcs across every direction.

Then — all at once — pairs of desiccated, rotting, grotesque arms tore through the earth like bamboo shoots after spring rain, erupting from a small mound of dirt less than five meters away from where he stood, twisting and clawing wildly at the air.