The World Turned into Zombies, So I Went Back to the Countryside to Farm 1

Chapter 1: Rebirth

Ding-dong—

Ding-dong—

The piercing sound of the doorbell echoed through the hallway.

The delivery person frowned. For two days, her calls had gone unanswered. She set down the package in her hand and began knocking loudly on the door.

“Apartment 4203, anyone home? Your delivery is here!”

She knocked for several minutes straight until the next-door neighbor poked his head out impatiently. “Stop knocking. Haven’t seen anyone for days. She’s probably not home. Just leave it at the door.”

“Oh, sorry about that.”

The delivery person sheepishly withdrew her hand, muttering to herself.

What a strange situation.

She was the courier responsible for this area and often delivered packages to 4203. She remembered that the resident was a young woman in her twenties. No matter the time of day, even on weekdays, she was always home. The girl didn’t talk much but was very polite. Once, during the height of summer, the courier had carried two cases of water upstairs for her, and the girl had treated her to a popsicle before she left.

The delivery person turned to leave but, on a strange impulse, turned back and pressed her face to the peephole.

I hope nothing bad has happened.

She grumbled inwardly, but before the thought was finished, a turbid, bloodshot eyeball suddenly appeared in the peephole. It was slowly rotating. The moment their eyes met, her blood ran cold. She let out a cry and sprang back.

Just then, the lock clicked open with a clack.

The young woman revealed only half of her face, her voice sounding utterly exhausted. “Thank you. Just leave it at the door.”

The hallway was dimly lit. The woman’s hair was a mess, and she wore a white nightgown. Her face was as pale as a sheet of paper. The delivery person, still shaken, patted her chest. “You scared me to death! I thought no one was home. This is fresh produce; it’s been in the warehouse for two days. You should eat it soon.”

The woman nodded. “Okay.”

After closing the door and hearing the footsteps in the hallway fade away, the woman finally relaxed the hand hidden behind her back. A gleaming kitchen knife fell to the floor with a clatter.

The sound of the knife dropping jolted her as if waking her from a nightmare. Jiang Zao suddenly shot up and frantically searched for her phone, finally pulling it out from under her bedroom pillow.

The battery was dead.

She fumbled to plug in the charging cable. The first thing she did after it powered on was check the time. The screen displayed: April 29, Saturday, 17:58.

Jiang Zao rubbed her eyes, thinking she was seeing things. In the time it took to blink, the minute hand ticked forward to 17:59. Her entire body began to tremble violently. She stumbled out of the bedroom, searching for a desk calendar, then turned on the TV, then rushed to the study to turn on the computer, iPad, and any other electronic device that could display the time.

It was useless.

Seeing the date—April 29—displayed uniformly across all the screens, Jiang Zao didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Clinging to a final sliver of hope, she called out to the voice assistant in the room, “Classmate Xiao Hen, what’s the date today?”

A gentle, robotic voice immediately replied, “Today is April 29, 2075, the 15th day of the third lunar month in the year of Yi Wei. Your schedule for today is a trip with your best friend, Chen Jianing. It is also your birthday. Classmate Xiao Hen wishes you a happy birthday. Happy birthday to you~ Happy birthday to you~”

The birthday song echoed through the room like a curse. Jiang Zao’s face turned ashen, and she collapsed to her knees, all strength leaving her body.

The good news was: she had been reborn.

The bad news was: she had been reborn three months before the zombie apocalypse.

She remembered the date so clearly because today was the first day of the May Day holiday. She had originally planned to go on a trip with her best friend, but a sudden flu and fever had forced her to cancel her plans and stay home.

Not only that, but more importantly, today was her 28th birthday.

If she hadn’t gotten sick, she would be vacationing on an island in the Pacific Ocean right now.

And because she hadn’t gone to the island, she had avoided the first wave of infection. What Jiang Zao had initially regretted, she later felt a sense of relief about, after numerous “rabies-like virus attacks” erupted across the globe.

“Thank goodness I didn’t go.”

Three months later, the virus broke out in Wu’an District of Linhai City.

Jiang Zao would never forget that day.

At two in the morning, she was jolted awake by a violent pounding on her door. Her neighbor was screaming “Help me!” from outside, the cries interspersed with a few curses. A moment later, the screams turned to pleas: “I was wrong!” “Stay away!”

The neighbors were a couple, and this had happened before. Jiang Zao fumbled for her phone on the nightstand and dialed the police. Strangely, the line was constantly busy.

“What’s going on?” Jiang Zao muttered, hanging up. She then found the number for the property manager. The pounding on the door was growing more intense, loud enough to tear the roof down.

This was a rental, after all. If the landlord’s door was damaged, she would have to pay for it. Cursing under her breath, Jiang Zao had no choice but to get out of bed.

The moment she opened her bedroom door, a shrill and hoarse scream tore through the night. It was a sound filled with such despair, one that could only be made at the very end of a person’s life, and it made her scalp tingle.

As the scream died away, a dead silence fell over everything outside.

Jiang Zao swallowed hard. In the end, curiosity overcame her fear. Clutching her phone, she slowly crept toward the front door.

As she got closer, she could hear it—a sound like chewing coming from the other side of the door.

Her slipper stepped on something sticky and wet. A faint, metallic smell hung in the air.

She looked down, using the light from her phone.

Dark red blood was slowly seeping into her entryway from under the door.

As if she had seen a ghost, Jiang Zao stumbled back two steps and crashed into the shoe cabinet with a loud bang, a sound that was especially clear in the dead of night.

The chewing outside stopped instantly.

There was the sound of rustling clothes.

It seemed the thing had stood up and was now facing her from the other side of the door. As fate would have it, the property manager’s number she had been dialing for so long finally connected. A man’s voice came through the receiver, “Hello…”

Jiang Zao quickly hung up, but it was too late. A massive force slammed against the door, making the frame shake and dust rain down from the walls.

Paralyzed by terror, she clamped a hand over her mouth and stood motionless in the pitch-black living room for a long time. Only when her legs ached and all sound had vanished did she collapse onto the floor in a heap.

The next day.

The hashtag for the “Vicious Attacks in Linhai City” was trending online.

Jiang Zao’s best friend and her husband said they were coming over. Their district, Wu’an, was where the virus had first broken out, and rumor had it that a full lockdown was imminent.

Jiang Zao lived in the suburbs, which was the safest of Linhai’s five districts and the most convenient for leaving the city.

When Jiang Zao’s best friend arrived, the “neighbor” outside was gone. All that remained in the hallway were two long drag marks and a bloody handprint on her door.

On the floor nearby were some grayish-black, sticky traces—perhaps some kind of internal organ.

Jiang Zao nearly threw up. Fighting back the nausea, she let them in. The moment Chen Jianing stepped inside, she threw her arms around her.

“Zao’er, you have no idea what I went through to get here. It was terrifying…”

Zao, as in jujube, and Zao, as in her name, were homophones. Only her grandmother and Chen Jianing called her by this intimate nickname.

Chen Jianing’s husband, Xiao Yu, was carrying a huge travel backpack, with more bags in his hands. “I brought all the food and whatever else I could grab from our place.”

Jiang Zao was an outdoor social media blogger. When she wasn’t out shooting content, she was a homebody, so she always bought instant food and bottled water by the case. She also had a stash of outdoor equipment at home, like lamps, gas canisters, and portable stoves. These were all things that could be used in an emergency, which was why they had come to her for refuge.

Jiang Zao didn’t hold back and simply nodded.

“I have some stuff here too. If we ration it, we should be able to hold out until help arrives.”

But help never came.

The situation deteriorated rapidly. At first, community workers delivered groceries, but a week later, Linhai City was under a complete lockdown. Water, electricity, and gas were all cut off. The sounds of police cars and ambulances that had once filled the streets below also disappeared.

Three months later, all the food and water in the apartment was barely enough to last the three of them for two days. They decided to go out together to find food. There was a convenience store in the complex, not far from their building.

It was just around a tree-lined path. Everything went smoothly.

They managed to grab a lot of food: instant noodles, self-heating rice, custard pies, and more—enough to last the three of them for a while.

The disaster struck on their way back.

Those creatures were extremely sensitive to sound.

Chen Jianing accidentally stepped on an aluminum can. The moment she lifted her foot, the distant shadows of the trees flickered, and something seemed to be rushing toward them. By the time they heard the roars, it was too late.

Dark figures charged at them from all directions.

Chen Jianing was still frozen in place. A roar escaped Jiang Zao’s throat as she shoved her hard. “Run!!!”

The three of them snapped out of it and began to sprint for their lives. Jiang Zao ran ahead and yanked open the building’s entrance door. “Quick! Get over here!”

Once they were inside and the door was locked, they would be safe. They had checked on their way down; there were none of those things in the stairwell.

Xiao Yu rushed in as well, but Chen Jianing, lacking stamina, fell behind. Just as the zombies were about to catch up, Chen Jianing tripped and fell on the steps, just a single pace away from the entrance.

Jiang Zao gritted her teeth. “Xiao Yu, hold the door!”

She dashed forward in a single bound and pulled the girl up from the ground. “Go!”

Xiao Yu also reached out a hand to Chen Jianing. Just as their fingertips were about to touch, a powerful force slammed into Jiang Zao’s back, yanking her violently backward.

Jiang Zao stumbled back two steps.

She could faintly smell the nauseating, fetid stench of the zombies.

Xiao Yu pulled Chen Jianing inside and slammed the door shut right in front of her.

“Let’s go! We have to go! There’s no time!!!”

“No! We can’t! Zao’er is still outside…”

“If we don’t close the door, those monsters will get in and we’ll die too! Besides, without her, these supplies will last us much longer…”

What they didn’t know was that the zombie had only grabbed her by the backpack strap. If she had just shrugged off the backpack in time, she might have had a chance to escape. But in that instant, she heard those words. She watched them run upstairs without a backward glance, carrying the supplies they had gathered together. Her brain seemed to shut down, and she froze on the spot.

The zombie behind her caught up and tackled her to the ground.

Pain—

Every inch of her body was in agony.

It felt as if a blender was churning inside her, tearing her body open, shredding it, and grinding it to pulp.

Jiang Zao struggled, crawled from the steps to the building entrance, and gripped the door handle tightly. Her blood-red eyes stared fixedly in the direction they had fled until darkness completely consumed her.

She thought she would become one of these bloodthirsty monsters, destined to roam and tear apart the flesh of others without a second thought. She never imagined that fate would play such a cruel joke on her.

Thinking of this, the foul stench from the monsters’ mouths lingered in her senses. A wave of nausea churned in Jiang Zao’s stomach. She ran to the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, and vomited until only stomach acid was left.

She stumbled to her feet, turned on the faucet, and frantically splashed cold water on her face to clear her head.

Jiang Zao looked at her reflection in the mirror. Disheveled hair, a haggard expression, a deathly pale face, and bloodshot eyes. No wonder the delivery person had been so frightened. She didn’t look much different from those zombies.

A thought suddenly occurred to her. She touched her face, her neck, then carefully examined her arms. Finally, she took off her nightgown and inspected her body in the mirror. There were no wounds on her fair skin.

The only bruise on her knee was from a yoga class a few days ago.

Only now did she slowly begin to accept the fact that she had been reborn. But she couldn’t help the anxiety that immediately followed.

Even if she was reborn, the end of the world was still coming in three months. She would still die. What was she supposed to do then?

Just then, the phone she had tossed in the living room rang like a clap of thunder. Jiang Zao’s scalp went numb. She instinctively lunged for it and fumbled to silence it, only letting out a long sigh of relief when she saw the name “Jiang Wuni” on the screen.

“Hello…”

The moment she spoke, a barrage of words came from the other end. “Aiyo, Zao’er, why did you take so long to answer the phone? Don’t tell me you slept in this late again. I’ve told you, you need to exercise and keep a regular schedule. Did you get the food I sent you?”

After all that, only the last sentence was the point.

Jiang Zao sliced open the package with a utility knife while replying, “I got it.”

The box was stuffed to the brim: a bag of corn and sweet potatoes from their own garden, a bag of tomatoes, half a bag of wilted green vegetables, and some potatoes and mulberries that she loved.

Before opening it, she had held onto a sliver of hope that perhaps it was all just a bizarre dream. That hope died when she saw that the contents of the box were identical to what Jiang Wuni had sent her three months ago.

Jiang Zao’s heart, which had been hanging by a thread, finally sank.

Aside from hiking, she didn’t have many other hobbies. She mostly just liked watching horror movies, zombie films, and reading apocalyptic novels. Was this a case of “if you play with fire, you’re going to get burned”? Had her obsession with zombie movies come back to haunt her?

Jiang Zao held the phone, her mind elsewhere.

Jiang Wuni was still chattering on. “I picked the mulberries from that big tree at the edge of the village. I remembered you loved them as a kid, so I sent you some. The ones in the city aren’t as fresh. Zao’er, Zao’er, are you listening to me!”

Jiang Zao snapped back to reality. Pinching her nose, she picked up the bag of mulberries from the bottom of the box and tossed it into the trash. Having been in the warehouse for two days, they had already rotted and spoiled, emitting a foul odor. Their dark, sticky appearance made her stomach, which had just settled, begin to churn uncomfortably again.

“I… I heard you.”

Jiang Wuni seemed to finally notice that she sounded unwell.

“Zao’er, what’s wrong with you? Weren’t you supposed to go on a trip with Jiajia for your birthday this year? Did you go? Where’s Jiajia?”

Jiang Zao replied listlessly, “I had a fever. I didn’t go.”

“Are you feeling better? Do you need to go to the hospital for a shot?”

“I took some medicine. I’m much better.”

“That’s good. By the way, you’re turning 28 this year, right? You should hurry up and find a boyfriend, date for a year or so, and then get married. Don’t be too picky! Look at Jiajia! She got engaged right after college. And you?! What’s the use of earning so much money if you still can’t afford a house in Linhai? Once you’re over 30, who do you think will want you! The village chief was asking me about you a few days ago. He said he has a nephew who just got out of the army…”

A vein throbbed on Jiang Zao’s temple. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore and roared into the phone.

“The goddamn end of the world is coming, who cares about getting married?!”

There were three seconds of silence on the other end.

“What? What did you say? What end of the world?! Kid, don’t tell me you’ve gone stir-crazy from being cooped up at home all day! I told you, you need to get out and walk around every day…”

Jiang Zao threw out a final sentence, “Don’t send me anything ever again!” before slamming the phone down with a smack and tossing it aside.

Completely exhausted, she fell backward onto the floor. It was always like this. Although her grandmother had been good to her—raising her, remembering her birthday every year, caring about her health, and supporting her education and career—she treated the fact that Jiang Zao was 28 and still unmarried as if it were a major crisis. It was as if a woman’s only purpose in life was to carry on the family line. If you didn’t get married and have children, no matter how successful you were or how much money you made, your life was still a failure.

Usually, she had the patience to argue a little, but today she couldn’t be bothered to waste her breath.

Her mind was consumed with the impending “end of the world.” Jiang Zao draped an arm over her eyes, letting the feeling of helplessness wash over her entire body.