What?! I Became the Zombie Beauty in the Villain’s Arms – CH31

Chapter 31: Punishment for Mistakes

Duan Xiaolin didn’t feel much pain. Her bite wasn’t vicious, but the two sharp, hidden fangs that had grown out at some point had flawlessly punctured the vulnerable skin on the side of his neck.

Crimson blood welled from the puncture wounds.

The girl in his arms didn’t tear at his flesh. Instead, she simply extended the damp tip of her tongue, clumsily and innocently licking along the fresh laceration.

When she finally cracked her eyes open, they were glazed, devoid of any human clarity. She leaned against his shoulder, murmuring in a delirious, fluid-induced daze, “Your blood… tastes so bitter.”

Her blood-red eyes locked onto the man’s tightly pursed lips. She blinked, her voice dropping to a breathy whisper. “Why… why can’t you channel your elemental energy?”

She shifted closer, her breath brushing his lips as she let out a soft, questioning murmur. “Hey…”

To an infected mutant, the blood of an active ability user was an absolute, evolutionary delicacy; her primal senses couldn’t be deceived. Yet, the liquid pooling on her tongue was exceptionally, deeply bitter.

But beneath his skin, the latent pressure of an overwhelmingly powerful entity vibrated clearly.

A flash of genuine astonishment flared across Duan Xiaolin’s dark pupils. His towering frame locked in place for two agonizing seconds. His large hand moved toward her fragile throat. The grip, which had instinctively coiled to ruthlessly strangle the threat, slowly softened, transforming into a firm, grounding caress against the nape of her neck.

“Let go,” he commanded, his voice a low vibration.

Pei Xiqing immediately obeyed, her jaws relaxing as she slumped limply against his chest, completely motionless. A moment later, her eyelids fluttered shut, and she fell unconscious once more.

Duan Xiaolin reached up, his fingers tracing the wet puncture wounds on his neck as the bleeding stopped. He stared down at her still, silent face in the dark for a heavy moment before hoisting her higher against his chest without a single word.

He strode out of the rocky detour, carrying her away from the burning highway and pushing straight toward the abandoned outskirts of a small rural settlement outside City B.

Yunli Town was relatively hollow, but it wasn’t entirely clear of the infection.

The moment his living scent drifted through the fractured alleys, several rotting mutants began dragging themselves out from the dark drainage culverts and collapsed storefronts.

Duan Xiaolin kept his grip on the girl secure with one arm, using his free hand to draw his heavy sidearm. He fired with clinical precision, a single high-caliber round collapsing a mutant’s skull with every pull of the trigger.

Once the immediate path was clear of targets, he carried Pei Xiqing into a vacant, reinforced concrete room. The moment he deposited her onto a dusty cot, a sudden, white-hot agony violently erupted from the puncture wounds on his neck.

The virus was aggressively hijacking his circulatory system. Within minutes, a network of dark, sickeningly grey-green veins began pulsing visibly down his throat.

He had missed the narrow golden hour to inject a standard suppressant, and without his active elemental energy to act as a cellular barrier, the pathogen was spreading through his tissues with terrifying, predictable speed.

Duan Xiaolin stepped out of the concrete room, pulling a secure, military-grade encrypted communicator from his tactical belt. He clicked the channel open. “Coordinate sector: Yunli Town. Bring a high-concentration rapid-response serum. Immediately.”

Pei Xiqing’s sleep was a violent, suffocating nightmare. Her core temperature was fluctuating wildly, her body burning on the absolute precipice of neural shock as she tossed and turned on the thin mattress.

She violently snapped her eyes open, gasping for air as her gaze darted around the unfamiliar, raw concrete ceiling.

This wasn’t the special ops joint-camp, nor was it the backseat of the G-Class.

Turning her head, she froze. A few feet away, sitting in a metal folding chair beneath a single, flickering halogen bulb, was Duan Xiaolin. He was using one hand to violently plunge a heavy tactical syringe filled with clear serum straight into his thigh.

The man was engulfed by the dim shadows, his massive posture casting a terrifying silhouette against the concrete wall. He had discarded his gold-rimmed glasses onto a table. Without the pristine lenses masking his features, his sharp, aristocratic face looked predatory and wild—his jawline as lethal as a combat blade.

He had stripped off his uniform shirt, exposing the heavy, dense contours of his chest and shoulders. His left sleeve was violently hacked away at the shoulder, revealing a horrifying network of pulsing green veins that tracked from the side of his neck all the way down his bicep. The viral necrosis was significantly more severe than her own; the graying skin was literally blistering and peeling away from his muscles in thick, necrotic flakes.

An ordinary survivor facing this level of rapid mutation would have been screaming in agony before losing consciousness from the shock. But Duan Xiaolin sat in absolute, terrifying silence, using a blood-slicked combat knife to methodically carve the dead, infected flesh straight off his own arm, slice by excruciating slice.

The steel edge scraped roughly against the tissue, his massive frame giving a involuntary, violent shudder with every swipe of the blade.

Pei Xiqing’s eyes bulged in pure horror. “Brother Duan!”

She frantically threw her legs over the cot to reach him, but her limbs were still stiff from the fever. She tripped over the frame, crashing heavily onto the concrete floor.

A tall man completely disguised behind a high-tech black combat mask stood in the shadows beside the chair. Judging by the sheer density of the aura vibrating around him, he was an exceptionally high-tier ability user, but his tactical uniform bore markings she didn’t recognize. Before she could push herself off the floor, the masked operative lunged forward, pressing the cold muzzle of a heavy handgun directly against her forehead.

The operative’s voice was low, raspy, and distorted—sounding like a demon rising from a subterranean black site. “You’re the stray that bit him, aren’t you?”

“Do you have a single clue whose life you just compromised?” The masked man ground his teeth, a metallic click echoing through the room as he chambered a round, driving the barrel harder into her skin. “I think you are genuinely begging for an execution!”

Disjointed fragments of memory violently flooded Pei Xiqing’s brain—the burning city gate, Duan Xiaolin carrying her through a sea of monsters, and her own primal, infected jaw sinking into his throat, turning his protection into a death sentence.

An overwhelming wave of crushing guilt and horror seized her chest.

She forced herself up, completely ignoring the lethal firearm pressed against her temple. She reached out, her fingers closing directly around the blade of the combat knife in Duan Xiaolin’s hand, gently but firmly pulling it away from his bleeding flesh. “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry, Brother Duan.”

Duan Xiaolin looked up, his exposed green eyes perfectly calm amidst the gore. “Do you intend to finish the extraction for me?”

Pei Xiqing’s eyes burned, hot tears blurring her vision as she nodded frantically.

“Then proceed.”

He opened his hand, letting her take full possession of the handle. “There is still a thick layer of necrotic tissue anchoring around the base of my neck. We need to clear it out before the vanguard convoy tracks our coordinates.”

Pei Xiqing’s fingers trembled violently as she gripped the hilt. She took a deep, ragged breath, desperately trying to steady her hands. “Is… is the high-concentration serum still going to work?”

She had been trapped in her fever dream for hours; she had absolutely no concept of how much time had elapsed since they abandoned City B.

The masked operative beside her let out a cold, venomous snort. “The infection had already breached his primary threshold by the time I breached the town perimeter with the asset. Whether his cells accept the serum or reject it is entirely up to fate now.”

He didn’t lower his weapon, the laser sight remaining fixed on her chest. “Don’t make a single suspicious movement.”

Pei Xiqing ignored him, looking at the grey tissue on Duan Xiaolin’s shoulder. “Will the serum absorb faster if we aggressively purge every layer of this dead flesh?”

Duan Xiaolin closed his eyes, his breathing heavy. “Yes.”

“Is it going to hurt?”

“Exceedingly so.”

He spoke those two words with such casual indifference that a profound, aching sorrow gripped her chest.

She didn’t know what kind of horrific physical trauma Duan Xiaolin had survived in his past to be able to classify this level of agonizing mutilation as a simple, mechanical chore.

Pei Xiqing forced a long breath into her lungs, the frantic panic leaving her mind.

Loudly crying or screaming wouldn’t alter the cellular reality.

She recalled that the novel’s medical notes had indeed mentioned this brutal method of manual viral purging—but the survival rate was a coin toss, a strict fifty-fifty chance, and it required immediate, hyper-dense serum absorption.

The hand holding the combat knife solidified, her fingers tightening around the grip. She stepped behind his chair, bringing the razor-sharp edge down toward the margin of the infected tissue.

Surgical precision was irrelevant here; the objective was raw speed. She needed to strip the necrotic matter away as rapidly as possible, regardless of how crude or jagged her cuts were.

Pei Xiqing had never wielded a weapon like this, and her heart hammered against her ribs.

The special ops squad had treated her with unearned protection and humanity. She had drilled it into her mind a thousand times—even while drifting in her fever dreams—that she must never let the virus control her, that she must never bite or harm a single soul in this convoy. But tonight… her human mind had failed. Looking at the raw, bleeding crater on Duan Xiaolin’s neck, the absolute weight of her catastrophic mistake crushed her conscience.

“Why are you just staring at it?! Move!” the masked handler hissed, his finger tightening on the trigger. “Are your primal instincts acting up again? Give me a reason to blow your brains out.”

“Do not let him disrupt your focus,” Duan Xiaolin murmured, his tone steady and entirely devoid of malice. “Since the biological variable has already been introduced, we might as well see the extraction through to the end.”

“…Understood.”

Pei Xiqing locked her gaze onto the grey tissue tracking across his shoulder blades. Bracing her thumb against the spine of the blade, she pressed the edge deep into the flesh and sliced down hard.

In the dim, frantic chaos of the concrete room, neither of them noticed that the razor-sharp steel had slightly sliced into the tip of her own thumb. The tiny bead of half-mutated, dark blood welling from her skin quietly mingled with his blood as she scraped the tissue away.

The extraction was bloody, visceral, and unvarnished. Under any normal circumstances, a civilian from her world would have fainted or vomited from the sheer gore. But right now, her psychological panic was entirely channeled into a single, burning obsession: Duan Xiaolin cannot turn because of me.

Thirty grueling minutes later, the final margin of necrotic flesh was cleared from his shoulder.

The clear serum was pooling in his capillaries, but it was still too early to tell if his immune system would hold.

Cold sweat drenched Pei Xiqing’s forehead. Her hands shook as she dropped the knife onto the table, her muscles entirely failing from the intense physical and emotional strain. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed heavily onto the concrete directly in front of his chair.

Duan Xiaolin reached out, his long fingers closing firmly around the nape of her neck, tilting her face up to meet his gaze. “When the vanguard convoy arrives,” he commanded quietly, “you will state that a high-tier variant breached the perimeter and bit me.”

No matter how catastrophic the crisis, his voice remained an immovable monument of absolute calm, as if every terrifying variable in this apocalypse could be dismantled through sheer calculation.

“I’m sorry…” Pei Xiqing’s voice cracked, a burning ache seizing her nose as tears spilled over her lashes. “I will take absolute responsibility for what I did to you. If… if you actually mutate into a monster because of my bite, I swear I won’t run away. I’ll stay right beside you.”

The man’s lips curved into a faint, dark smile.

He tilted his head down, analyzing her face with a predatory intensity.

Looking at her huddled at his knees like a stray animal awaiting punishment for ruining a prized possession—her eyes swimming with tears, her delicate brows pulled together in unadulterated dread, her soft dark hair falling messily over her pale face—a dark, possessive urge to break her composure flared behind his green eyes.

“You won’t run away…?” He slid his hand down, his thumb hooking beneath her sharp chin, forcing her to look straight into his dark gaze. His voice dropped to a dangerously low rasp. “Then tell me, little zombie… do you have any idea how I typically deal with assets that make mistakes?”

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