In her second life, she decided to play it safe. Undead, yes, but not suicidal. She'd accepted her fate as a member of the shuffling undead, but seeing her fellow zombies still gave her the heebie-jeebies. So, she high-tailed it out of the cinema (well, more like shuffled) and tried to make her way back home. It was a long and arduous journey, filled with zombie-dodging and human-avoiding excitement. Think Frogger, but with more groaning and less lily pads. After days of trudging along, she finally stumbled back into her own ridiculously oversized house and locked herself in. "Ah, safety at last!" she thought. After all, zombies don't need food, right? Wrong!
As time passed (and she lost all track of it, because who needs calendars when you're undead?), she started to feel a rumble in her tummy. And not just any rumble - a full-on, brain-craving hunger pang. Who knew zombies could get hangry? Apparently, she was a pioneer in the field of undead digestive distress. She grew weaker and weaker, until she couldn't take it anymore. She closed her eyes, thinking she'd just take a little snooze... but nope, she ended up meeting her maker (again). Talk about a zombie fail! She might just be the first undead creature to kick the bucket due to hunger. And that was the end of her second life. A truly embarrassing way to go.
In her third life, determined to avoid starvation-induced death, she decided to skip the whole "going home" thing and just stayed at the mall. Resourceful, right? She tried eating human foods. A Twinkie? Nope. Sushi? Nope. Even a juicy-looking burger proved to be a culinary dead end. In the end, she tried eating fresh meat, which, fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it), succeeded. Cooked food was still a no-go, but raw meat - the bloodier, the better - seemed to do the trick. She was crying inside while eating it at first, but in order to survive, she had to do what she had to do. After eating it for a long time, she finally got used to it. After all, zombies can't be choosers. She couldn't bring herself to eat human flesh, so she had to endure eating animal meat. It wasn't tasty, but it could relieve her hunger. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of slightly-less-disgusting invention.
She awakened her superpower in her third life - the power to devour others' abilities. If she devoured someone else's ability, she would gain a new one. It just so happened that once she devoured a superpower, the original owner wouldn't die but would become an ordinary person. The end times were cruel, so she never devoured superpowers from humans but only devoured the superpowers of her zombie comrades. Morality, even in the apocalypse, was apparently a thing.
She could detect what powers other people had as long as she was near them. It was her second awakened ability, which complemented her devouring ability perfectly. Think of it as a superpower buffet, where she could scan the menu before deciding what to eat. In the end times, there were a lot of weird abilities floating around. Like the guy who could throw stinky fart bombs. As a zombie with super-sensitive smells, she almost died of suffocation at that time. Seriously, some powers were just a curse.
She managed to survive for two years in her third life. A personal best! The reason for her death in her third life was that she was killed during her first encounter with the heroine's group. Let me explain. She saw a couple of parents throw their child in order to save their own lives. At that time, she was just passing by, minding her own undead business, and didn't want to get involved. But the moment she saw the child being pushed out, her body moved on its own, propelled by some long-dormant sense of decency. Using her newfound speed ability, she caught the child and retracted her long, sharp nails to avoid scratching him.
She breathed a sigh of relief and ran faster, escaping with the child. She brought him back to her (relatively) safe home and would bring him some food and water to drink. He was just a five-year-old boy. At first, he was terrified of her, but after a month of being together, he no longer got scared and lived peacefully for a few more months. They were an unlikely pair, the zombie and the small child, but they had formed a bond.
But one day, a group of people suddenly barged into her house while she was away. They looted the food she gave to the boy and abducted him as well. When she went back home, the boy was gone, and the house was in a mess. In her last life, no one had ever dared to barge into her house, so she had been confident in leaving the child alone while she looked for supplies. Lesson learned: never underestimate the depths of human depravity. She tried to chase them and save the boy, and at that time, she was already a level 2 zombie, so she moved faster. But it still took her five days to find where they had taken him.
When she finally arrived, it was already too late. Those people were a group of criminals that ate human flesh. It was only the second year of the apocalypse, and there were still a lot of supplies if they worked hard to search for them. But this group of beasts had decided to skip the hard work and started eating their own kind. And they liked eating children the most because of their tender flesh. When she saw the boy's head on the table and saw his other body parts being cooked in a pot, it was like a bolt of lightning hitting her brain. She stood there stupidly, paralyzed by the horror of it all, until one of the guys noticed her presence and attacked her.
At that time, she was filled with a rage she had never felt before. She killed all those guys to pieces. It was the first time she had killed a human being, or rather, a former human being. After killing them, she looked at her bloody hands, and her body shook. She wanted to vomit, but can zombies vomit? The answer is no. She kept on telling herself they weren't humans, they were worse than beasts, worse than zombies - they were a bunch of devils. It was the only way she could justify what she had done.
After calming down, she decided to bury the child. She picked up his head and was about to pick up his other body parts when she sensed a powerful gaze locked on her. That was the first time she met the group of the heroine. How did she know they were the heroine's group? Because of the abilities of the only girl in the group. She had dual abilities - healing and a magical space, which was endless and could plant vegetables and have animals on it. Basically, the ultimate survival cheat code.
There were only four men in her group at that time. One of them had a lightning ability, and the three of them had ice, fire, and mental abilities, just like the abilities the protagonist group would have. She was about to escape because they were much stronger than her, but she couldn't leave the boy's body behind. So, after collecting it, she tried her best to escape, but they didn't want to let her go. They thought she wanted to eat the child's head.