The rain had stopped — but the damage lingered.
By morning, the skies had cleared, revealing a pale, lifeless sun struggling behind sickly clouds. But what it illuminated was a world painted in red. The soil was darker. The trees had a matte, blood-flecked sheen. Puddles steamed with an acrid stench, and the rivers ran sluggish and thick, the color of rust. The rain had stopped — yes — but it had soaked deep, down to the roots of the earth.
Rui was the first to wake.
She crouched by a shattered window, fingers pressed to the wall, listening. Not with ears, but with that new part of her. She couldn't explain it yet. A vibration. A sense. It told her the silence was lying.
Chen Yu stirred next, stretching like a cat. "If that was Heaven's idea of a bath, I'd like to unsubscribe."
Li Wei hadn't slept at all. He stood in the shadows, half-cloaked in what was left of a curtain, staring at the horizon.
"We move now," he said, voice gravelly.
"Wait, no breakfast?" Chen Yu made a face. "Not even a ceremonial blood pancake?"
But Rui was already packing.
They left the half-collapsed house behind and cut northeast — away from the false refuge and deeper into the wild. What they didn't say — what none of them wanted to admit — was that something had changed inside them, too.
Three Days Later
The cities were no longer just abandoned.
They were grown over.
Trees with bark like cracked leather sprouted from concrete. Vines pulsed along gutters like veins. Crows circled — dozens, maybe hundreds — and their feathers shimmered wrong in the light, tinged with green-blue iridescence and… teeth. Rui watched one tear a squirrel apart in mid-air.
But it wasn't just the animals.
A man — or what used to be one — emerged from a building as they passed the ruins of an old pharmacy. His skin was smooth like plastic. Translucent. He had no eyes, only blackened sockets. His hands were wrong — extra joints, blades of bone protruding from his knuckles.
It moved like water and fire all at once.
Chen Yu, not even joking now, whispered, "That's not a zombie."
"No," Li Wei muttered. "That's something new."
They killed it after a hard fight, barely escaping with Rui's knife buried in its throat and Li Wei's elbow shattered. The thing didn't go down easily. And when it did, it twitched for hours, long after its heart stopped.
That night, Rui stitched Li Wei's arm while Chen Yu kept watch. But something happened as she sewed.
Her fingers moved faster than she could follow — like muscle memory not her own. The skin closed before she finished. And Li Wei's eyes met hers.
"You healed me."
"No," she whispered. "Something did."
One Week Later
They found a ruined laboratory buried beneath an overgrown hillside. Most of the tech had been fried, but there were signs of what had been tested there.
Cages. Skeletons. Symbols scorched into the steel walls. A journal sealed in plastic.
Li Wei read it aloud by firelight.
"Subject X-09 showed neural convergence after exposure to Variant Rainfall… Unpredictable behavior. Enhanced aggression. Increased regenerative capacity. Subject terminated after 6 hours."
"Subjects with higher pre-frontal activity showed delayed onset. Latency may indicate cognitive mutation pattern."
"Do not expose healthy specimens. Mutation is not uniform. Intelligence may remain."
"God forgive us."
No one slept that night.
Mutation War Begins
As the days passed, the line between zombie and beast blurred. Wolves with gnarled limbs and human-like eyes hunted in packs. Birds dive-bombed humans in coordinated waves, as if they had generals. Insects, fat with blood, gathered in swarms that darkened the sky for miles.
And humans? Some grew faster. Stronger. Some went mad.
Not everyone could handle the change.
But Li Wei did.
It started with his dreams — ancient things, cold and perfect. Then came the reflexes. The speed. He could hear footsteps five buildings away. He could snap a rusted chain with one hand. And worst of all, he remembered things he hadn't seen — battle formations, pressure points, languages he never studied.
Chen Yu, on the other hand, changed in a different way.
His jokes grew sharper. His laughter echoed with something… unnatural. He could vanish in an instant. His skin took on a ghost-like tone when he was still, making him almost invisible in shadows. And when he touched certain things — dead batteries, broken tools — they sparked to life.
"Am I a god now?" he asked one night, tossing a flaming stick like a wand.
Li Wei didn't smile.
"You're something. But god's not the word."
An Unstable World
The balance was shifting.
Mutated zombies began to form packs.
Animals with human traits stalked roads and ambushed settlements.
But now, humans were mutating too — and they didn't all stay human.
Some grew claws. Others lost speech but gained strength.
Some built cults around the rain.
And others, like the trio, became the hunted… not just by the monsters, but by the people trying to control them.