Lin Qiao continued to roar at the zombie for a while without receiving the slightest response or reaction from the latter. She felt like she was talking to a cow, which could understand rudimentary instructions but not answer any questions.
She had no way of communicating with this zombie at all.
Understanding this, she sighed and gave up on asking it for directions.
'Hungry…'
Suddenly, a thought popped up in Lin Qiao's mind, seeming to come from someone other than herself.
'Hungry... Hungry... Hungry...'
Her head ached slightly, as she felt similar to when she first woke up and found that she was processing a lot of information composed of thoughts belonging to someone other than herself. She remembered passing out from the pain due to such a huge amount of information flooding into her brain yesterday or the day before. But now, she merely received a small amount of information that wasn't as strong as what she had sensed earlier, and the headache was faint as well.
She lifted her head and looked around. 'Who is crying out that they're hungry?' She wondered.
'Hungry... Hungry...'
Just then, the thought emerged again.
Lin Qiao sensed it, and could hear it shouting 'hungry'. Suddenly she realized that this thought was from no one else but the zombie right in front of her.
"Roar", Lin Qiao couldn't help but roar at the zombie.
'Are you hungry?' she asked.
The zombie only looked at her in confusion, then roared back at her, "Roar."
'Hungry.' The zombie replied.
"Roar", Lin Qiao tried again to ask him, 'Is there any human in this place?'
This time, the zombie didn't reply, but simply continued to look at her blankly just like before.
She sighed and waved a hand at the zombie, signaling it to leave. At this moment, the zombie showed quick reflexes and left immediately.
Lin Qiao kept looking around, thinking that she should maybe explore this place to see if she could find those people. However, as she was preparing to go, a voice suddenly burst into loud cries inside her head, startling her.
'Damn! Where is this cry coming from?'
She fretfully looked left and right, then front and behind, but couldn't see anyone or sense any child crying in the vicinity.
Wahhhhh... Wooooo...
Another wave of the child's cries was heard, still ringing inside her mind. This time, Lin Qiao changed her expression slightly and immediately said 'in' silently in her head.
In the next moment, she disappeared from the obscure corner where she had been hiding.
As soon as Lin Qiao entered the space, the crying in her head instantly turned into actual crying sounds.
"Whooo… Wahhhh… Wooooo!" The child sitting on the blanket was crying on finding herself all alone in a strange place after waking up, due to which she was terrified. After she cried for a short while, a horrible-looking zombie suddenly appeared right before her eyes, which frightened her and made her shut up at once.
The moment she saw Lin Qiao, she opened her eyes wide, staring at the latter in terror. Her body stiffened so badly that she even began to tremble.
She wanted to cry, but couldn't open her mouth or make any sound emerge from her throat. Gripped by pure terror, she watched this zombie whom she had seen once before walking toward her.
'She's coming over to eat me! She's gonna eat me! I'm going to be eaten!' The little girl was scared to death, but at least she didn't pass out again.
Lin Qiao was lured by Wu Yueling's aroma and couldn't help drooling, but at the same time, she was also reading the latter's mind. She saw that Wu Yueling was staring at her in horror with her lips pressed together and body stiff, not daring to move at all.
Lin Qiao tried moving her foot, but saw a tremor run through Wu Yueling's body the moment she did. Wu Yueling then quickly curled herself up, wrapped her arms around her knees, and hung her head.
'Daddy! I'm gonna be eaten! Daddy! Please come to save me! Daddy...'
Lin Qiao had to take a small step backward when she heard the little girl screaming in her own head. She thought for a while, then turned around and left the space.
Quite a while later, Wu Yueling realized that she seemed to be fine. Why hadn't the zombie bitten her yet? She slowly raised her head with surprise but saw nothing in the spot where the zombie had been standing.
Wu Yueling had been given quite a fright. She hurriedly looked around, but still couldn't find the zombie.
'Where is the zombie? Where did it go? It was standing right there, preparing to eat me.'
She looked to her left and then to her right, but found no zombie. After that, she sighed slightly in relief. And before long, she pouted, her mouth curved downward as she struggled not to cry again.
'There is no one here! It's so scary! Where is my daddy? Why didn't he come to find me? I want my daddy! Daddy...'
After leaving her space, Lin Qiao stood quietly while looking at the sky. She didn't know what the time was because she didn't have a watch, but judging from the starlight, it should be around three or four o'clock in the morning.
She looked around, suddenly noticing a very tall building. Her black eyes shone as she turned around and quietly ran toward the building's gate under the cover of darkness. She moved as quietly as a cat which had stood up on its rear tires. Only her clothes made some slight noise while fluttering in the air.
This building had thirty to forty floors. As there was no elevator, her only choice was to climb the stairs.
The surrounding zombies all stepped away from her or turned around to avoid looking at her once she approached them.
Ordinary zombies couldn't climb stairs because their knee joints were too stiff. Only zombies which had evolved to level-one or above were able to walk and run nimbly, capable of going up and down the stairs like Lin Qiao was doing now.
The evolutionary process of zombies was slow. The unintelligent zombies could only find food by relying on their instinctive hunger, and only a small number of evolved zombies fared slightly better than that. Due to this, Lin Qiao hadn't seen any of the higher-level zombies in Lu Tianyu's memories until this moment.
At level one and two, the zombies were still unintelligent. They were merely a group of nimble and swift monsters whose only awareness was their desire to eat human beings.
Only at levels three or above would zombies with intelligence emerge.
To evolve to level one or two, ordinary zombies needed to consume a great amount of blood and flesh of ordinary human beings, or some blood and flesh of superpowered human beings. After that, the evolvement from level two to three was even more difficult.
Not even one in a hundred level-two zombies could evolve to level three.
However, as soon as Lin Qiao opened her eyes, she had directly evolved to level-three from an ordinary zombie. She even had almost reached level-four, in fact!
She had memories and a soul, and of course, she had her intelligence.
However, she still didn't like climbing floors, even though she had become a zombie. She felt dizzy while climbing the stairs floor by floor, despite the fact that she couldn't feel tired or be out of breath, or that her heart was going to explode like a living human being's would by now.
She felt dizzy! Dizzy!
After climbing a dozen floors, she even felt tight in the chest.
'Damn it! Am I not a zombie? How can I possibly feel dizzy and chest tightness? Can't I even live happily as a zombie?'
She stopped on the twentieth floor, walking to the window around the side while complaining to herself.
This was already the twentieth floor, and this height should allow her to see the things present in the area.