The main door was locked from the inside, but that wasn’t a problem.

Wrapping her fist in a fold of her clothes, Paige Summers took care of it with a single punch.

After listening for a moment and hearing nothing, she was the first to push the door open and step inside.

The windows and door let in no light, plunging the space into pitch-black darkness. It was also eerily quiet; the only sound was her own breathing, giving the place a sinister feel. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

A couple of steps up a short staircase brought her to a long hallway stretching about ten meters in either direction. Rooms lined both sides of the hall at regular intervals.

There were a lot of rooms. Paige Summers took one look and decided she and Ben would split up.

They quickly split, one taking the left side and the other taking the right, and began to investigate the rooms.

Paige Summers did a quick sweep and was surprised to find that every door was locked. Left with no choice, she picked one and forced it open.

A strange, foul odor immediately assaulted her nostrils, nearly making her gag. But when she saw the pile of bones scattered in a corner of the room, she instantly understood the source of the smell.

The room was a mess. A table was overturned, and fragments of test tubes, beakers, and other glassware were scattered amidst fallen metal racks. It looked like this had been a laboratory.

She walked over, picked up a piece of bone, and examined it for a moment. Then she took out a knife and scraped at its surface. Amidst the dark discoloration, she confirmed that they were indeed human remains. And the cause of death wasn’t starvation or something else—it was poison.

Finding nothing else of interest, she left and opened another room.

It turned out that all nine rooms on her side were the same!

Tightly locked doors, and inside each, the skeletal remains of people who had been poisoned...

Returning to the head of the hallway, she had a pretty good idea of what had happened.

Ben was already standing there. She glanced over at his side of the hall; it was the same story.

With no need to see any more, the two of them headed straight for the second floor.

The moment she stepped into the second-floor hallway, Paige Summers sensed something. She could hear breathing other than her own. It was incredibly faint, but it was unmistakably the respiratory pattern of a human!

Chase Woods felt exhausted.

Not just physically, but mentally.

The food had run out long ago; he’d even forgotten the taste of it. Whenever he reached his limit, he would give himself a nutritional injection. How long had it been? This was how he’d survived. His body should have given out long ago, but he held on, fueled by a single belief and sheer willpower, desperately trying to delay the inevitable arrival of death.

For him, there was no joy in being alive.

His other comrades had taken poison long ago, both to conserve the nutritional injections and to avoid turning into Zombies. Only he remained. But even bearing the weight of such great expectations, he still couldn’t win against time.

His body grew weak, his limbs began to atrophy, and then he lost the ability to speak... Fortunately, he had recorded everything he wanted to say on a digital voice recorder. Now, even giving himself an injection required every last ounce of his strength.

The only thing he had left, perhaps, was a mind that could still think.

He was focused on a single thought, a solitary wish that felt branded deep into his soul: ’I hope a real person, not a Zombie, comes in here soon... someone who will find me, and find our research logs.’

Until today. In the darkness, it felt as if someone was standing beside him. Amidst the sound of steady breathing, a soft female voice asked, "Are you still alive?"

It felt as though Chase Woods’s heart had slammed back into his chest. The exhaustion completely seized him.

He smiled faintly, moved his fingers, and pressed the remote in his hand.

The sound of a safe creaking open filled his ears. It was like the most beautiful music in the world, accompanying him on the final leg of his journey.

In that instant, countless images flashed through his mind.

His younger self, arriving at the military base for the research project; his comrades, bustling about together in the lab... and then, the day the disaster struck, the way familiar faces twisted into crazed, distorted masks.

The survivors had fought through hell to break out, only to find themselves trapped in the mountains. With no other choice, they had retreated to this small building.

Some of his comrades developed a superpower, but most remained ordinary people.

To protect the others, the comrades with superpowers had heavily fortified the small building, granting them temporary safety.

However, in their attempts to find a way for everyone to escape, for everyone to survive, they died one by one. Some even turned into Zombies...

’It was a bitter end, wasn’t it? In the end, no one made it out.’

As the head of the research project, he had calmed himself and led the others to continue their work, shifting the focus from their original project to studying the viral infection.

Back then, they all vaguely knew that their chances of survival were minuscule. But no one gave up. As if trying to burn the very last spark of light their lives held, every single person worked with exceptional diligence.