I Got Reincarnated as a Zombie Girl

Time never stops flowing, even in a world whose natural laws have been turned upside down.

Several months had passed since the incident at the Inverted Gravity Archipelago and the discovery of the Lumina Civilization Archives. The Eclipse-class Dreadnought fleet of Nocture continued sailing without pause, cutting through new oceans never before recorded in history, piercing dense magical fog, and navigating anomaly storms created by the forced dimensional fusion of the World Avatar.

These months of voyage were by no means time spent in vain. On the contrary, this was a period of massive incubation and evolution for the undead fleet.

With the integration of the Astral Star Furnace into the main engine room of the ship, the problem of energy limitation had been completely solved. Yet the modifications did not stop there. Stacia, with her genius mind now supplied by knowledge from the Lumina crystal books, led the Dwarven engineers and Elf mages aboard the ship in a total overhaul of the fleet’s structure.

Of course, this process could not be carried out while sailing at full speed. From time to time, the Nocture fleet had to drop anchor and dock at small islands or unclaimed landmasses they encountered along the mapping route. These landings were not for leisure, but for rapid mining operations. Elite Zombie Knights were deployed to dig rare metal ores newly created from the shifting of the earth’s crust, while the alchemists harvested exotic flora that absorbed mana radiation from the new environment.

These new materials were then melted down and reforged using the remnants of Lumina technology. The results truly defied reason.

The ship hulls that had previously been purely made of Black Star Steel were now lined with veins of white-gold metal that radiated a constant protective glow. This material upgrade made the ships’ weight far lighter while their durability increased exponentially. They no longer needed to avoid gigantic whirlpools or acid ice storms; the new hulls could ram straight into them without leaving a single scratch.

The hybrid fuel refinement system between mana crystals and the energy of the Star Furnace also drastically increased the ships’ cruising speed. However, Stacia’s most pride-worthy achievement in this overhaul was the enhancement of the mapping sensor range.

Previously, the fleet’s mana radar could only scan topography and life fluctuations within a radius of 10 kilometers. For the size of the old Earth, that was already quite wide. But for the new Earth that had swollen a hundredfold, a 10-kilometer scan was the same as trying to cut grass on a savanna using nail scissors.

By combining the Lumina spatial matrix, Stacia succeeded in expanding the mapping sensor range from 10 kilometers to 50 square kilometers in a single wave sweep. Their mapping efficiency skyrocketed. The ships no longer needed to turn into every bay or circle every coral island; the radar would automatically draw highly detailed three-dimensional digital maps from tens of kilometers away.

Despite all these fantastical advances in military and magical technology, reality confronted them with one truly terrifying fact: This new Earth was far too vast.

After months of sailing and mapping day and night without rest, the percentage of the new world map they had managed to complete had only reached 1%. The scale of this planetary expansion was completely beyond reason.

Within that mapped 1% of territory, they discovered that the oceans were not only filled with gigantic sea monsters, but also clusters of continents and massive islands inhabited by various civilizations. Many strange humanoid races that had never existed in the records of the old continents scaled humans, humans with insect wings, even three-eyed giants lived and built independent kingdoms upon these new lands.

However, long-range observation from the Nocture fleet revealed a bitter social reality. On the majority of these new islands and continents, peace was a myth.

Unlike the Kingdom of Nocture led by Sylvia, where all races whether Human, Elf, Beastmen, Dwarf, or even demon were accepted and lived side by side in peace under the absolute protection of the Queen of Death. On these new lands, the law of the jungle reigned supreme. The stronger races or those who mastered high-level magic systematically oppressed the weaker ones.

The fleet’s radar and long-range telescopes often captured heartrending scenes: minority races chained, whipped, and turned into forced-labor slaves in open-pit mines. Some races were even treated as nothing more than livestock or entertainment toys for the tyrannical ruling races.

When Celes reported this with an angry tone and requested permission to intervene and destroy those slave kingdoms, Sylvia calmly refused her.

To Sylvia, those scenes were not the least bit surprising. Racial oppression of that kind was completely normal throughout the history of civilization. Even on the continent where Nocture stood, many human kingdoms had openly enslaved Elves and Beastmen. That was the primary reason why millions of refugees from various races were willing to risk their lives crossing the borders just to seek asylum in Nocture’s territory because they felt far safer under the protection of an undead ruler than under kings who claimed to be holy yet possessed rotten hearts.

"Let them oppress one another for now, Celes," Sylvia had said at the time. "We are conducting mapping, not a charitable liberation campaign. When the time comes for Nocture to claim these lands, the slaves themselves will open the kingdom gates from within to welcome our arrival."

This afternoon, the weather above the unfamiliar waters was exceptionally clear. The sun shone fiercely, reflecting golden light upon the blue sea waves.

On the bow deck of the main Dreadnought, a large umbrella made of black magical silk was spread open, providing comfortable shade. Beneath that umbrella, Sylvia was reclining leisurely in her lounge chair. Sol, the dragon-cat, slept soundly curled up on the Queen’s stomach.

In her right hand, Sylvia was toying with a small object that circled her wrist. It was an extremely elegant flat metal bracelet, blackish-silver in color.

With a single soft tap of her thumb, a colorful hologram projection the size of a palm appeared floating above the bracelet. Its display did not look like complicated magical runes, but rather a neat and easily understood series of flat icon boxes.

It was a User Interface. An interface extremely familiar to Sylvia’s soul from before she had reincarnated into this world.

Yes, Sylvia had just recreated the concept of a ’Smartphone’ from her modern era, yet this time it was powered entirely by magic and technology.

Creating this device had turned out to be far easier than she had expected. With the projection matrix from Lumina technology as its hardware foundation, and shadow-manipulation magic as its signal transmitter, the basic circuitry of the object was completed in less than a week.

For the energy problem, usually the main obstacle in small magical artifacts, Sylvia found a brilliant solution. She used residual powder from low-rank Monster Cores that had not been compressed. In Nocture’s alchemy laboratory, this leftover crystal dust was normally regarded as worthless waste. Yet when inserted into the circuitry of this bracelet, one gram of monster-core dust could serve as a ’battery’ that continuously supplied power to the bracelet for months without pause. Extremely cheap, and extremely efficient.

Sylvia did not only make one for herself. The Queen, who could occasionally be very generous, ordered the ship’s alchemy factory to mass-produce the bracelets and distribute them to every living crew member aboard.

For the Zombie Knights, the object was useless because they possessed no individual consciousness. But for the Elves, Beastmen, and humans who formed the ship’s crew, this communication bracelet became a miracle that cured boredom.

Sylvia slid her finger through the air, flipping the page of the hologram projection, then opened an application with a chat icon. This was a simple Social Media feature she had designed herself. The system was connected through a server network centered in the ship’s command room.

The hologram displayed a continuously scrolling timeline filled with status updates from the crew.

[Lyra_Scout_Elf]: Just saw a flying stingray the size of a mountain in the southwestern sector. Anyone want to shoot it for dinner? #MappingToday #Hungry

[Garrick_Beastman]: @Lyra_Scout_Elf Don’t be crazy! Its skin is harder than steel armor. Yesterday my axe broke trying to cut the scales of a similar sea monster. Better just eat the potato soup ration from the kitchen.

[Celes_Commander]: ATTENTION TO ALL OF DECK 4: Sword training session starts in 10 minutes! Anyone late will be punished by cleaning the main cannons without magic!

[Stacia_Genius_Alchemy]: Please don’t make noise near the laboratory! I’m calculating spatial algorithms. Oh, and I just uploaded 50,000 books from the Lumina archives to the Digital Library. Feel free to read them.

Sylvia chuckled softly while reading the interactions of her subordinates.

This hologram bracelet did not only function as a long-distance communication tool between ships, but also contained a vast library feature. Stacia had translated and digitized millions of pages from the pile of Lumina crystal books and Nocture’s magic archives, compressing them into light-data format. Now every crew member could read world history, learn magic formulas, or read fiction novels written by Elf authors simply from their wrists.

The combination of internal social media and unlimited entertainment access kept the ship crew’s morale at its peak, eliminating the stress and depression of a long voyage across unfamiliar seas.

Sylvia slid her hologram screen once more, opening her personal contact list. Her finger stopped on a name pinned at the very top: [Sofia_Beloved_Wife].

Unlike the names of Celes or Stacia that radiated green light indicating they were within network range, Sofia’s name was dim gray.

A soft sigh escaped Sylvia’s lips. A flash of longing and a touch of frustration appeared in her heterochromatic eyes.

She desperately wanted to send this smart phone-bracelet technology back to the capital of Nocture. If every citizen of Nocture possessed this device, the efficiency of bureaucracy, education, and information dissemination in her kingdom would leap forward thousands of years ahead of other racial kingdoms. She also wanted to see Sofia’s reaction upon receiving this strange yet extraordinary gift.

Unfortunately, the distance now separating this fleet from the continent where Nocture stood could no longer be measured easily, because they had already traveled far too far from Nocture.

Sylvia had asked Stacia the previous week whether the genius girl could open a teleportation portal to send one cargo crate filled with bracelets and blueprints to Nocture. Yet Stacia, with a pitiful face, had apologized.

According to Stacia, the spatial coordinates on this new Earth were still completely chaotic and in the adjustment stage. The World Avatar had attached the continents from pocket dimensions randomly, causing spatial longitude and latitude lines to overlap one another. If Stacia forced open a long-distance teleportation portal now, the goods sent might not arrive at Nocture’s castle, but instead stray into the Earth’s core or, worse, be flung into outer space.

They needed more time to map spatial reference points before a stable and safe teleportation route could be rebuilt.

"Well, it can’t be helped," Sylvia murmured, closing her chat screen with a light touch that made the hologram slowly fade away.

She shifted her position to be more comfortable, propping her chin while gazing at the endless horizon stretching before the ship’s bow. The sea breeze gently caressed her black-and-white hair.

"We still have time," she whispered to herself, a confident smile once more carved upon her beautiful face.