Chapter 125: Decay

"What?" All 3 of the people in the room reacted the same. 

"What did you say, Hugo? The city is on fire?" Ikusa asked in surprise. 

"Yes, master. Please come out. We need to go and help," Hugo said and quickly walked out. The three of them quickly followed the man and walked out of the building. 

Far away in the distance, a reddish-orange hue could be seen in the night as the smoke reached the sky. The city was fully on fire. 

"What is happening? Hugo, go call every elder and disciple and tell them to go assist the city in controlling the fire," Ikusa ordered. 

"Volunteer Ning, I will rush forward, please come as soon as you can," Kaezir said and immediately flew away.

Ning was a little panicked when he saw the city on fire too. 'Is it the same group of people?' he thought. 'Fire? Are they trying to cause another panic? Or is this fire just a consequence of what is happening?' 

Ning stopped thinking about such a thing and started running. His 7th Qi Condensation realm cultivation base and 8th Level body cultivation together made him really strong and thus he could also run very fast. 

From time to time, he would send out bursts of Qi behind him to propel himself forward. He still hadn't learned how to fly but had gotten far enough to know that you manipulated Qi to push you up and around. 

He still wasn't used to doing that, so the best he could do right now. Fortunately, that was all that was needed. Ning didn't bother running all the way to the City gate. That was too far away. 

So, he simply ran towards the wall and jumped. A massive amount of Qi propelled him from behind and sent him flying up very high. 

From a single jump, he nearly crossed half the wall. He immediately opened up his fingers and turned them into hard claws. 

BANG

He dug his fingers into the wall and stuck there. He got his body as low as possible while hanging and once more pulled himself up with a massive force, jumping quite high. His Qi propelled him too. 

Within 3 such maneuvers, he reached the top of the wall.

Usually, there would be soldiers staying here, guarding the city and enforcing the no-fly law. But right now, there was nobody here.

Ning looked at the cityscape from up high. 

Flames engulfed much of the city. The cries of death and despair rung about everywhere. Man, women, children, animals, Ning could hear the cries of everything in the city from up here. 

This was truly a terrifying sight to see. Fear and Despair once again started budding up inside Ning. The 'curse' that the system had left him with hadn't gone away. However, Ning had felt this plenty of times before and learned to ignore it pretty easily. 

"AAAHH," he heard a sound from right below the wall. He quickly looked down to see someone attacking a woman. The woman tried to run away, but the attacker kept on coming after her. 

Ning swiftly jumped from the wall and used Qi to slightly deviate his course of fall just enough so that he fell directly on top of the attacker below. 

The attacker's body got crushed as Ning landed on top of his shoulders. However, no blood flowed from the man's body. "Noo! You killed him," the woman cried out. 

"Huh?" Ning was surprised. 

"You killed my husband!" the woman shouted. 

'Sh*t, he was clearly attacking her, why is she angry at me? Also, why would her own husband be attacking her in this chaos?' Ning couldn't understand the situation at all.

"Miss, he was attacking you. I saved you," he said. 

"But that's my husb—" The woman's eyes went wide as she looked behind Ning. Ning also slowly turned after realizing that something was happening.

The crushed body of the husband was slowly getting back up, with its arms and shoulders all disfigured. Ning could feel no cultivation base, so he was surprised. 'How is he alive?' he wondered. 

"ARRRGGGGGHHH," the husband spoke out despite being so broken. Ning couldn't believe that the husband was not only standing but shouting too. 

BOOM

An explosion rang out in the distance giving out a huge ball of flames that flew up into the sky, and in that flame's light, Ning finally saw the husband's body. 

His entire body was full of black spots, just like everyone else. However, his skins were incredibly wrinkly and it seemed that he had lost most of his hair. 

His eyes didn't even blink, and the most shocking part was that the husband wasn't breathing at all. Ning quickly checked the husband's cultivation and saw that he was indeed a mortal.

'How is a mortal alive and shouting without breathing. Also, what is wrong with his body?' Ning wondered if it was the side effect of the Yang Festering Bugs, but they were truly harmless, so it couldn't be them.

'Wait a moment,' Ning thought as a possibility came into his mind. He immediately walked forward and put his palms on the man's chest. 

He waited for a few seconds to feel his beating heart, but there was none. The man's heart was not beating at all. 

"He truly is dead. The fact that he is even walking and talking as a corpse means…. He is a zombie?" Ning said in surprise. He was immediately reminded of the movies he watched back in the orphanage. Those slow-moving, infected, dead people that attacked anything that moved. 

"RRRAAAWR"

The zombie walked forward towards him. "Honey!" the woman ran past him towards her husband. Ning immediately caught her arm and pulled her back, barely missing the zombie's attack. 

He then moved forward and used the Fanged Claw technique to blow away the zombie's head, immediately immobilizing it. 

"Miss get back. Your husband is already dead. He is now a— OW," he felt intense from his right arm. He immediately pulled it out in front of him and saw that his arm was decaying and wrinkling. 

His arm was turning into the same as the zombie's arm.