What?! I Became the Zombie Beauty in the Villain’s Arms – CH62

Chapter 62: Is That Enough…?

Something nudged at her feet, and the sharp pulling sensation finally brought Pei Xiqing back to her senses.

She lowered her head to look at the hound. Xiaobai was staring up at her anxiously, his tail drooping. He was gently biting the hem of her trousers with his teeth, only letting go when he saw her focus snap back to him.

She crouched down and raised her hand to soothe him, but she froze. In the dim light, her skin had taken on a distinct, light green tint.

She quickly pulled back her sleeves. The necrotic green zombie spots had actually spread all the way up her forearms. She touched her neck and chest; the marks were blooming there too.

The sun hadn’t even fully set, but a maddening, uncontrollable itch had already begun to consume her body.

Bracing herself against the sofa, she forced herself to stand upright. She silently fought back the overwhelming pain and itching, trying desperately to calm her racing mind.

She hadn’t been able to catch every detail of what those officers were discussing outside the window, and their parting words had cut off as they walked away, but their intent was clearly malicious.

The meeting Duan Xiaolin had mentioned must have gone badly. Otherwise, those men wouldn’t have been cursing the high command so openly in the middle of the base tower.

For some strange reason, listening to their bitter complaints had triggered a sudden spike in her own viral mutation. By the time she had recovered from the shock, the infection had already flared up to this terrifying degree.

Could the spread of the zombie virus be directly linked to my emotional state?

Thinking of this, Pei Xiqing tried to force her breathing to slow down. Just as she took a deep breath, the sound of the main door unlocking echoed through the quiet room.

It wasn’t the standard digital beep of a fingerprint scan. It was the mechanical rattle of a physical key sliding into the lock.

Realizing it wasn’t Duan Xiaolin, she immediately dropped into a crouch and hid behind the wide back of the sofa. Xiaobai instinctively mirrored her movements, ducking low, though his heavy breathing still sounded incredibly loud in the empty office.

If an outsider barged in, they absolutely could not see her in this mutated condition. Before Pei Xiqing could calculate any other options, a familiar female voice filtered into the room.

Xia Jingyu stood just inside the threshold. Her sharp gaze swept across the empty office space before she pressed the button on her tactical headset. “He isn’t here, and the secure documents are locked down. I can’t bypass the encryption grid. You will have to map out a separate trajectory.”

She turned toward the hallway, her tone flat and completely uninterested in whatever the voice on the other end was saying. “Drop the attitude. Do you genuinely think I’m operating as a common spy? Standing in this specific sector already risks a massive security flag against my line. I cannot extract the files, so route the task to a secondary asset.”

With that, she abruptly cut the communication channel.

Xia Jingyu cast one last annoyed glance at the locked inner desk. I’ve deployed every override code in my inventory, yet the interface refuses to clear. This architecture is ridiculously airtight.

Only after her boots clicked all the way down the hall did Pei Xiqing slowly peek out from behind the sofa. She stared at the empty doorway, her brow pulling into a tight frown.

Isn’t she the Marshal’s daughter, the general Ying highlighted earlier?

What precise business brought her to this office? And who was she reporting to on that headset? What specific data was she trying to plunder from Duan Xiaolin’s private files?

“Hiss…”

Lacking the spare processing power to dissect the mystery, Pei Xiqing dropped her head, her fingers clamping tightly over her arms to suppress the agonizing itch. She squeezed her skin with immense force, and within a few ragged breaths, her clothes were already drenched in a cold sweat.

The sweat dripped down her forehead in steady beads. Panting softly, she slid down the side of the sofa until her back hit the floorboards. She leaned her weight completely against Xiaobai’s furry frame, silently enduring the violent viral surge.

She had no tracking data to confirm how many minutes had drained away, but every single second felt like pure torture.

When the hound beside her shifted restlessly, she forced her eyes open. Through the blur of her vision, a tall, familiar figure came striding into the room. She opened her mouth to speak, but her physical battery hit absolute zero, and her consciousness fractured completely.

She didn’t entirely pass out, but her limbs felt heavy and useless, entirely drained of the leverage needed to lift her arms. When Duan Xiaolin’s large hands firmly locked around her shoulders to hoist her up, she finally processed how she had been snapped back to reality.

Blood.

The concrete floor beneath her was pooled with a bright film of crimson.

For some unknown reason, her fingers had desperately grabbed a sharp shard from a broken porcelain mug on the floor, using the edge to viciously lacerate her own forearms to fight the itch—and her mind had completely failed to log the action while the virus was raging.

Duan Xiaolin didn’t waste a second. He immediately summoned a division doctor to the office, his large palms compressing the bleeding wounds on her arms as he tightly wrapped a temporary field bandage around her skin to slow the loss.

The lacerations were deep, the blood flowing too rapidly for the linen to absorb. Pei Xiqing kept her eyelids half-closed, her voice a thin, ragged whisper against his jaw. “Don’t… don’t stop the bleeding yet…”

Only the sharp, burning pain of the cuts could override the deeper, sickening itch radiating from her bones. The physical trauma was the singular variable capable of reducing the agony of the infection.

Duan Xiaolin’s jaw tightened into a rigid, unyielding line. Without uttering a single syllable, his hands maintained their iron grip, forcing the pressure bandage down until the bleeding stopped.

An hour later, Doctor Zhan Da completed his work, neatly binding the lacerations before drawing a fresh syringe of her dark blood to secure inside a portable biometric incubator box. He stood up, adjusting his coat. “Chief Judge, I am routing this hematology sample back to the central laboratory to run a full diagnostic sweep. Calculating the structural anomalies in her cells will require a few days of processing. Ensure her perimeter remains entirely stable during this window; her system must avoid any intense emotional spikes or physical exposure to highly mutated frontier zombies.”

He gestured toward the reanimated Husky sitting quietly in the corner. “I executed a rapid diagnostic on the canine as well. The specific strain of the virus anchoring its cells is remarkably stable and low-tier. Provided your civilian personnel maintain standard hygiene protocols after running physical contact, the virus won’t trigger that violent, systemic itching reaction again.”

“Her own biological baseline is incredibly anomalous,” the doctor muttered, shaking his head. “I will need to transmit these files to my master, Director Qiu. My own database lacks the clearance to decode a cellular mutation this unique.”

“Fortunately, Miss Pei’s vital bars stabilized before hitting a critical crash. The chemical agents in the serum managed to stop the bleeding without inducing a shock response. If our unit had arrived a few minutes later, the volume loss would have emptied her system, plunging her brain into a permanent coma.”

Pei Xiqing intercepted his words in fragmented streams.

If her initial viral flare-up back at the villa had been triggered purely by physical contact with Xiaobai’s coat, what precise variable had jump-started this secondary mutation? Could intense psychological stress and emotional fluctuations genuinely override her cellular controls to accelerate the virus?

Her thoughts were a tangled mess, and she didn’t even notice the doctor clearing his equipment to leave the room.

When her awareness fully stabilized, the laboratory staff had completely cleared out, leaving only her and Duan Xiaolin remaining inside the cavernous office space.

“Um… Brother Duan,” Pei Xiqing whispered, her voice still weak as she cradled her bandaged arm. “Did the medical log specify what his division intends to do with Xiaobai?”

She distinctly recalled the technician’s aggressive greed to harvest the hound for research.

The man sat anchored behind his massive desk, methodically sorting through a thick stack of judicial folders without uttering a word.

She forced herself off the couch, her palm pressed flat over her bandaged arm as she slowly stepped toward his station. Before her boots could clear two paces, his cold, level voice cut through the quiet. “Sit down.”

The massive windows of the dreadnought still projected a brilliant grid of artificial light, mapping out dozens of adjacent wings where base personnel were still actively driving their terminals. The fortress seemed to operate entirely devoid of a standard civilian working schedule; automated shifts rotated across every sub-sector twenty-four hours a day.

“What tasks are your processors still running?” she asked softly, leaning against the edge of a chair. “Didn’t your comms indicate we were clearing the tower to return to the villa together? Is your work schedule still jammed?”

“The files are nearly cleared.”

“Understood. Then my line will anchor this coordinate and wait for your shift to terminate.”

Pei Xiqing sank back into the cushion, but her eyes continuously drifted to track his profile. Duan Xiaolin’s expression had reverted to a wall of perfect, unbothered composure, his face betraying absolutely zero trace of emotion.

It was only after she finally gathered Xiaobai’s lead, falling into alignment behind his long strides to clear the building, that she noted his absolute silence. He refused to look at her, his boots hitting the pavement in a rigid rhythm. Her processors finalized a clear deduction: He is furious.

Duan Xiaolin didn’t broadcast a single syllable to her station for the entire duration of the march.

His features were carved from pure ice. His statuesque jawline radiated such a terrifying aura of unvarnished hostility that the civilian guards and passing laborers along the boulevard frantically scrambled out of his path, terrified to cross his shadow.

They finally breached the secure residential perimeter of the North Courtyard.

A small cluster of neighborhood wives had gathered near the central lawn to exchange local gossip, and Pei Xiqing quickly accelerated her stride to slip past their scanning angle.

Tracking the main blast door of their villa only a short distance ahead, she deliberately slowed her boots, waiting until his long shadow caught up to her flank. Ensuring the passing sentries were out of range, she reached out, her fingers catching his broad, cool hand.

Duan Xiaolin lowered his head, his green eyes cutting through his lenses. “Mm?”

“Deactivate the anger,” she murmured, looking up at him. “My own system lacked the data to predict the reaction. The exact millisecond those officers broadcasted those threats outside the window, my internal controls simply failed to hold the line. I issue an administrative promise: my consciousness will learn to regulate its emotional spikes in the future.”

She calculated that his irritation was explicitly rooted in the reality that she had violently sliced her own arms and begged him to withhold medical treatment inside the tower. But at that exact millisecond, she had run out of structural options. Only the localized burning of physical trauma could numb the deeper, suffocating itch consuming her bones.

She methodically briefed him on every single metric she had logged while hiding in the office, explicitly highlighting Xia Jingyu’s unauthorized infiltration and her encrypted headset transmission.

True to her predictions, the administrator’s expression remained entirely flat, as if his internal database had already accounted for the general’s treason.

Pei Xiqing squeezed his large palm, her voice dropping. “Those hidden factions are actively organizing a major tactical strike against your board. Maintain strict caution.”

She stepped closer to his shadow, her fingers lightly tugging the fabric of his sleeve, a rare trace of vulnerability softening her clear eyes. “But my own biological baseline remains an uncalibrated variable… If a shift arrives where my mind completely loses control of the mutation, and my cells permanently transform into a mindless monster… what precise protocol will your office execute?”

Duan Xiaolin’s fingers suddenly tightened around her hand with crushing leverage. Reaching out with his free hand, he slammed the biometric override, violently yanking her pliant frame past the threshold into the dark foyer of the villa as the heavy blast door hissed shut behind them.

His voice dropped to a low, dangerously hoarse whisper in the dark. “What specific outcome does your mind project?”

“Your system will likely log a brief memory of my presence on rare occasions,” she whispered, a subtle, playful glint crinkling the corners of her eyes. “For a zombie asset, that allocation of data is more than enough.”

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