Deadly Breath!

Zhang Xiaohou had never thought that nightfall could be such a terrifying thing. As the sun dipped lower on the horizon, the peace inside him slowly dissolved, and an endless dread crept across the vast, open land...

"The sky... it's going dark again." No one could tell who had muttered it, but everyone felt their legs seize up, as if countless filthy claws were already hooking into their ankles.

"Let's hope last time was just bad luck — that we were camped too close to a corpse pit," Shi Shaoju said.

"Everyone stay sharp. We're not getting caught off guard again like last time." Qin Hu reminded them.

The mountains to the south rose high — like an enormous black dragon lying across the earth a few kilometers to their left.

They marched westward, the dying sun hanging above them like the hand of a clock, counting down the final seconds. Crimson as blood, it spilled over the long, dragon-shaped ridge in the distance and poured across the black soil they were about to walk through.

Behind them, darkness had closed in without anyone noticing when. The path back felt invisible now. A rotting stench drifted through the spreading death-miasma, enough to turn one's stomach.

He remembered the first time they'd stepped into this place — laughing, chatting, treating the minor Undead as nothing worth worrying about. Now, not a single person spoke. The footsteps of all eight were heavier than before, and their hearts had begun racing for no reason at all.

"Will the village chief's method actually work?" Wang Tong couldn't quite hide his unease.

Village Chief Fang Gu had explained that the Undead don't track living creatures by sight. Many were so far gone that their skulls had rotted through and their eyes were long gone — yet somehow, they could still sniff out exactly where the living were.

Undead had poor eyesight, especially the lower-ranked ones. Yet whenever a living being passed through an area, every Undead within hundreds of meters would begin converging on that spot. The reason, it turned out, was that they sensed the breath of the living.

Wherever the Undead roamed, death-miasma saturated the air. The Undead exhaled it; the living exhaled life-breath — or more precisely, carbon dioxide. The Undead, nearly blind and dull of hearing, could detect the life-breath drifting through the death-miasma from hundreds of meters away when they inhaled and exhaled. To them, it was the scent of a hot meal — detectable from a great distance.

The Undead were perpetually starving, and the living could never stop breathing. So the nearby Undead would always follow the scent.

The only way to evade them was to solve the problem of breath itself.

Servant-class Undead were mostly witless. As long as a person's exhaled air was masked or minimally altered, the creatures would barely register them.

Battle-General-class Undead were a different matter — their sense of smell and hearing were sharp, their eyesight merely average. If any Battle-General-class beings were in the area, solving the breath problem wasn't enough: total stillness was also required.

"This thing looks just like a garlic clove. I can't imagine how awful it tastes," said Bi Lu, one of the squad members.

"It's going dark. Eat up — not one of you has taken one yet!" Squad leader Qin Hu snapped the order.

Everyone did as the squad leader said, quickly pulling from their packs a crop that looked almost exactly like a garlic bulb but was jet-black all over.

This was called gray garlic — one of the few plants that could grow in Undead-tainted soil.

It tasted far worse than actual garlic, several times over. After eating it, the fumes of one's breath became absolutely foul. The locals, however, kept a few on them at all times, just in case of emergencies.

After eating gray garlic, a person's exhaled breath turned rancid, masking the life-breath entirely, fooling the Undead into mistaking the source for one of their own — maybe one who'd slept all day without washing up. And with that, the Undead would have no reason to give chase.

The old saying that garlic wards off evil spirits probably traces back to exactly this. Even a ghost wouldn't want to go near something that smelled like that.

The moment the sky showed the first signs of darkening, every member of the group forced one down. Immediately, a chorus of dry-heaving broke out.

"God, this is worse than eating—"

"Sounds like you'd know from experience."

"It really is awful... let me just gag for a second."

They were all Military Mages — people who could stomach practically anything in the field. The fact that this stuff had them all fighting not to retch said plenty about what it was.

"Everyone hold it together. Unless you want to die—"

"Squad leader, please don't breathe on me when you talk."

"Shh — not a sound!"

Shi Shaoju's expression had gone sharp, and she cut everyone off with a look.

Faces already pale, the group held their breath as one.

The soil began to shift in a deeply unnerving way — like something buried in a grave trying to claw its way out, the sound of something pounding against a coffin lid disturbingly clear.

They all looked at one another, eyes locked on the ground beneath their feet.

Then — a head bristling with maggots burst up through the soil.

Dry, withered hair. Half a scalp remaining. A skull gleaming like polished bone. The sight made everyone's skin crawl.

That head had emerged right beside another female officer in the squad — Xiao Jing. Her face had gone white as paper, and almost instinctively her hands moved to trace a Star Chart and blast the disgusting thing to pieces — but Shi Shaoju clamped a hand on her arm before she could make a move.

Shi Shaoju's instinct was the right call. Because on the heels of that first head, several more half-skeletal skulls came shoving up through the earth.

Within just a few minutes, more and more rotting corpses and skeletons had clawed their way out of the ground. They bathed in the darkness and breathed in the death-miasma. Had their eyes held even a hint of focus, they'd have looked for all the world like a crowd of people stepping out for some fresh air.

All eight officers had turned to stone. Their hearts were hammering so hard it felt like their chests might burst.

Where Zhang Xiaohou stood, two skeletons had emerged — one directly in front of Wang Tong, one directly behind him.

He was close enough to see the hole punched through the back of the forward skeleton's gleaming skull — clearly, this one had died from a spike driven straight through the back of its head.

He didn't dare move. He'd stopped breathing entirely.

But a person can only hold their breath for so long. A minute, perhaps — and then came suffocation.

Finally, Zhang Xiaohou reached his limit. He tried releasing the faintest possible breath through his nose, little by little...

**Crack. Crack.**

The moment he exhaled, the skeleton in front of him wrenched its head around. Two eyes blazing with a deep crimson light locked onto him, and the rusted cleaver clutched in its bony grip began to rise.

Zhang Xiaohou's heart lurched into his throat.

*These two skeletons aren't the threat — one Wind Disk and I'd send them flying. The problem is there are at least a hundred Undead on this stretch of land. The moment I use magic, every last one of them will home in on the fluctuation and swarm me from all sides.*

He couldn't move. But he'd truly hit his limit. He had no idea whether the gray garlic actually worked, and in a situation like this, staying calm was nearly impossible for anyone — because they were surrounded. Surrounded by Undead. By dead things that would gnaw the living down to bare bone.