Chapter 148: Child Zombies

"Squeak! Squeak!" Shuke's claws were extremely sharp; the Non-Ranked Zombies on the outermost perimeter had limited physical defense and were soon torn into several pieces by Shuke.

"Haha, let's see how many zombies you can tear apart." Hiding inside the two-layered ball of flesh, Zuo Moyan was not flustered at all. After slightly waving his Command Flag, a large group of Non-Ranked Zombies walked out from the Valley once again.

Luolong County lacked everything except people; as long as there were people, there were corpses, and Zuo Moyan could refine them into zombies.

Zuo Moyan had plenty of such Non-Ranked Zombies; for every few the Bloodthirsty Ghost Rat finished off, he could quickly replenish them to reinforce the defense of the flesh ball.

If Zuo Moyan's Spiritual Power were more powerful, he could absolutely command an even larger army of zombies.

One person is an entire formidable army; this is the terrifying aspect of a Corpse Controller.

"Eh!" Meng Yifan saw it very clearly: many of the zombies that appeared later were five or six-year-old children. They had not been dead for long, and their bodies had not yet rotted.

A few children seemed to have died in an instant, their stiff faces still retaining a childlike smile.

But most of the child zombies had twisted, deformed faces and expressions of pain, as if they had suffered inhumane torture before they died.

Some child zombies had intact bodies, while others were indeed missing limbs or parts.

Some children had their eyes gouged out, leaving only bloody eye sockets, while others had their arms and legs bent backward, forcing them to move forward in a bizarre posture.

Others had large and small holes in their chests, their internal organs missing, looking extremely horrific.

It seemed Zuo Moyan had used these children for some evil experiment, which made Meng Yifan's blood boil with rage, his teeth grinding with a crunching sound.

"It's them." Meng Yifan's heart skipped a beat. After he occupied Luolong County, he reviewed the cases in the county office and discovered that many residents had recently come to report that their children had gone missing and could not be found anywhere.

Such cases were not isolated; there were over a hundred in total, causing panic among the city's residents.

Children were all locked inside by their parents, who dared not let them go out on the streets, saying there was a monster outside that ate children.

When Meng Yifan saw these case files, he initially thought these missing children had been abducted and sold, but now, in these chaotic times, the Refugee Camp outside the city had already seen the tragedy of people trading children to eat; what would human traffickers need so many children for?

After Meng Yifan took charge of Luolong County, he had been busy training troops and handling other miscellaneous matters, keeping him busy every day; he hadn't yet had the chance to investigate the child disappearance cases.

However, Meng Yifan now possessed an extremely powerful memory, nearly photographic; he had looked through the images of those children stored in the county office and had committed their appearances to heart.

At this moment, seeing the appearance of these child zombies and comparing them to the images in the case files, Meng Yifan already knew that those missing children had all been refined into zombies by Zuo Moyan.

"Bastard! You conscience-less animal!" Meng Yifan was burning with rage. Zuo Moyan practiced an evil Corpse Refining Method; if he used corpses from the Mass Grave outside the city to refine zombies, Meng Yifan couldn't stop him and didn't want to.

But Zuo Moyan abducting these children to refine into zombies and torturing them so cruelly—such behavior was something Meng Yifan absolutely could not tolerate.

"Evil Daoist, you actually dare to use children to refine zombies; are you not afraid of being struck by Heaven's five thunders?" Meng Yifan shouted.

"Pedantic! Heaven and Earth are unkind and treat all things as straw dogs; this is a world where the strong prey on the weak. As long as this old man masters powerful strength, I can control the fates of others. These children dying for this old man's research into the Corpse Refining Technique is their fortune," Zuo Moyan said dismissively.

By a stroke of luck, Zuo Moyan had obtained half a volume of a remnant Corpse Refining Technique manual and this Triangular Command Flag Dharma Artifact from an abandoned cave, embarking on this evil path of cultivation.

That half-volume of the remnant text recorded many incredible corpse-refining techniques, capable of creating all sorts of strange zombies.

Hiding in Luolong County, Zuo Moyan constantly experimented with corpse refining, naturally requiring various types of corpses; those children were merely his test subjects.

"You deserve to die," Meng Yifan shouted.

"Haha, if you have the ability, come and kill me. If you don't, just wait for this old man to refine you into a zombie as well," Zuo Moyan laughed.

Both sides fell into a stalemate again. Meng Yifan felt secretly anxious because after Shuke evolved to the third rank, it could only survive for ten minutes.

When the time was up, Shuke would automatically explode. Zuo Moyan surely knew this characteristic of the Bloodthirsty Ghost Rat and was prepared to use the two-layered zombie shield to withstand the Bloodthirsty Ghost Rat's explosion.

Meng Yifan did not want Shuke to explode, because if Shuke exploded, he would completely lose a third-rank combatant.

During the time he had used Shuke in battle, Shuke had behaved very obediently, just like Meng Yifan's pet; Meng Yifan could not bear to consume Shuke like a cannonball.

Time was passing quickly. Shuke's body was like a continuously inflating balloon, becoming larger and larger, expanding directly by two or three times.

Under normal circumstances, Shuke's body was about the size of a village dog, but now Shuke's body had surged to the size of an African buffalo.

With the expansion of its body, Shuke's scales had been stretched open, its blood vessels had burst, and a large amount of blood was flowing out; it looked extremely ferocious and terrifying, and it could explode at any moment.

Zuo Moyan's expression was grave; he kept waving the Command Flag, mobilizing more zombies to hold hands and hook feet, increasing the thickness of the zombie flesh ball in preparation to resist the Bloodthirsty Ghost Rat's final explosion.

There was half a minute left before Shuke would completely explode. Meng Yifan was burning with anxiety, his mind rapidly thinking about how to break the deadlock, when suddenly, he had a flash of inspiration and thought of a method.

"Let's try it; maybe it will work." Meng Yifan took out the Luolong County Great Seal, then merged his mind with the seal, and through the mysterious connection between the Game Panel and his Subjects, he sent the miserable images of those child zombies to his Subjects.

Inside Luolong County, Wang Laoshi and his wife were filled with sorrow; their five-year-old son had been missing for ten days, neither seen alive nor dead.

Wang Laoshi and his wife hadn't slept well for these ten days; they had walked the streets and alleys of Luolong County countless times, but they just couldn't find the figure of their son, Wang Shitou.

They had also been to the places their son often played, but they couldn't find him; Wang Shitou seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Wang Laoshi's wife looked haggard, her face covered in tears, sobbing: "Shitou, my child, where are you? Come home quickly."

In his heart, Wang Laoshi understood that if they hadn't found their son after so long, it was very likely he had met with misfortune. He didn't want to believe this fact and, holding onto a sliver of hope, continued to search bitterly.

Wang Laoshi and his wife were both over forty; they only had this one son, and he was their lifeblood. If their son was gone, they didn't want to live either.