I Got Reincarnated as a Zombie Girl

The somewhat rough hand-drawn bark map made by Lu Feng was spread across Sylvia’s slender fingers. Beneath the soft glow of the afternoon sun filtered thinly by coastal mist, the ink lines drawn by the Lord of Black Steel City revealed the rough topography of the Tianhua Kingdom’s border regions.

According to his notes, the nearest large city from that defensive fortress was Black Lotus City, a medium-scale border city that served as the main trade hub for dozens of smaller fortresses around it. The distance was no less than eighty kilometers from Black Steel City, stretching across the ruins of an old city, a mutated swamp region, and a wilderness forest that had never been touched by cleansing magic.

Sol, perched sweetly on Sylvia’s shoulder, meowed softly. The golden dragon in cat form flicked its tail, and its body radiated a dim golden glow. Sol gave an invisible signal that it could transform back into its original form, a dragon dozens of meters in size capable of splitting the skies. If Sylvia rode Sol or Noir in their true dragon forms, the eighty-kilometer distance could be covered in less than five minutes. Even without the two dragons, Sylvia only needed to activate a spatial teleportation spell or fly through the clouds at supersonic speed to arrive at her destination in the blink of an eye.

Yet the Queen of Death slowly shook her head while smiling faintly.

"No need," Sylvia said, her fingers stroking Sol’s soft chin. "Shooting above the clouds and landing directly in the destination city would be boring. We have been confined for months inside the Dreadnought ships only to stare at the open ocean. Now that we have set foot on a new land, why rush?"

Noir, who walked leisurely within the shadow of Sylvia’s evening gown, let out a low purr as if agreeing with its master’s decision. For immortal beings like them, time was not something that needed to be chased. An eighty-kilometer journey considered a hell full of dangers by the mortal humans of the Tianhua Kingdom was, in Sylvia’s eyes, merely an afternoon stroll through a somewhat messy flower garden.

With the map already memorized completely after a single glance, Sylvia folded the parchment again and stored it inside her Spatial Ring. She stepped leisurely along the remains of the elevated highway that had already been destroyed, filled with ground cracks and the roots of gigantic trees.

The scenery along the path truly showed how the wild had reclaimed human civilization after the apocalypse. Rusted modern-era cars appeared crowded on the highway, some of them pierced by mutant tree trunks that had grown through the steel floors of the vehicles. Concrete buildings along the roadside were covered by glowing green moss and climbing plants that radiated a dim magical glow as day began to turn into night.

Sylvia observed the flora around her with deep curiosity. As a queen accustomed to Nocture’s ecosystem rich in pure mana, the ecosystem of the Tianhua Kingdom presented a very unique sight.

To her left stood a group of gigantic flowers two meters in diameter with blood-red crowns. The plant was known as the Carnivorous Spore Flower. It did not absorb nutrients from the soil; instead it radiated a sweet fragrance that attracted passing monsters or humans. The moment a living creature came within a three-meter radius, the flower’s crown would snap shut instantly and spray a concentrated acid liquid capable of dissolving iron armor in a matter of seconds.

When Sylvia walked past the clump of poisonous flowers, the carnivorous plants reflexively opened their petals sharply, about to spray the acid. Yet before the poison could leave their pistils, Noir, walking beside Sylvia, merely glanced with its red eyes.

One second later, the entire clump of Carnivorous Spore Flowers suddenly withered, turned pale black, and crumbled into dry dust from exposure to the death aura that drifted from Noir’s body.

"Hm, the cellular structure of the plants is extremely fragile," Sylvia murmured while observing the falling plant dust. "These plants mutated forcibly because they were exposed to soil mana concentrations contaminated by corpse toxins. Pitiful, yet their biological adaptation is quite aggressive."

The journey continued through the mutated wilderness forest that stretched between two mountain ranges. In this place the vegetation grew denser and stranger. Black wood trees with copper-needle-shaped leaves blocked the sunlight, creating an eternal twilight atmosphere. Beneath the canopy of those trees grew thousands of bioluminescent mushrooms in neon blue and pure purple that illuminated the ground with a calm, pure light.

In the midst of that strange beauty, the mutated fauna of the new continent began to reveal themselves.

From behind the dense trees emerged a herd of creatures that resembled a hybrid between deer and insects. Their bodies were the size of adult bulls, covered by thick olive-green chitin shells, yet they possessed deer heads with antlers made of slightly turbid pure mana crystals. The creatures were known as Mana-Armored Deer. They were low-rank mutant herbivores usually raised or hunted by border-city mages for the crystal of their antlers.

The herd of mutated deer momentarily pricked up their ears upon sensing Sylvia’s footsteps. Yet instead of attacking or fleeing in fear, the pack of wild animals that were normally extremely aggressive toward humans lowered their heads. They bent their front legs to the ground, prostrating in silence as Sylvia passed among them, as though the wild itself knew who the true sovereign over the entire order of life and death was.

"Look at that, Sol," Sylvia praised while pointing toward a young Mana-Armored Deer that had clear antlers. "These animals at least possess sharper instincts than the thugs in Black Steel City yesterday. They know when to submit."

Sol meowed softly and leapt down from Sylvia’s shoulder. The golden cat walked over to the young deer that was trembling while prostrating. With a playful motion, Sol gently patted the young deer’s nose using its small non-lethal claws, making the thickly armored wild animal tremble with excitement at receiving a touch from a primordial dragon.

However, not every creature in this forest possessed intelligent survival instincts.

When Sylvia arrived at the ruins of a stone bridge that crossed a river of dense black water, the roar of the rushing current was suddenly interrupted by a violent water explosion.

SPLASHHH!

A gigantic monster leapt out from the bottom of the black-water river. The creature was a Spiked Armored Crocodile, a water mutant monster fifteen meters long with eight short legs and a back covered in poisonous ice crystals. This monster stood at the peak of the food chain in the border swamps, possessing physical strength capable of crushing steel-armored vehicles with a single bite of its jaws.

The giant crocodile roared loudly, opening its jaws filled with hundreds of serrated teeth, and shot downward from the air to swallow Sylvia whole together with Sol and Noir.

Sylvia did not even stop her footsteps. She continued walking gracefully across the cracked stone bridge.

Just before the gigantic monster managed to land three meters above Sylvia’s head, Noir lightly leapt from the shadows. In its small black-cat form, Noir floated in the air, aligning itself with the mutant crocodile’s giant eye.

Noir opened its small mouth and released a single wave of extremely dense spatial pressure.

BOOM!

The sound of a vacuum explosion echoed above the river. Without any blood spraying or flesh being cut, the entire molecular structure of the fifteen-meter Spiked Armored Crocodile suddenly contracted, shattered into pieces at the atomic level, and vanished into black ash before it could even touch the river surface.

In the span of a single second, the apex predator of the swamp region was erased from the face of the earth without leaving the slightest trace.

Noir landed back on the stone bridge railing extremely smoothly, licking its clean paw as though it had just completed a trivial, meaningless task.

"Too aggressive," Sylvia commented casually as she passed Noir and patted the black cat’s head. "The ecosystem of this continent is truly unbalanced. Animals exposed to toxic mana energy lose their reason and are driven only by primitive killing instincts. Without large-scale cleansing, the human race on this continent will indeed be gradually pushed toward extinction."

The journey continued until the sun had fully set beyond the western horizon. The night sky of the Tianhua Kingdom stretched vast without the light pollution of modern cities, displaying a carpet of stars and two moons hanging elegantly in the heavens, one bright silver, and the other dim purple due to the refraction of atmospheric mana energy.

Instead of seeking shelter or setting up a tent as mortal hunters would do, Sylvia decided to rest for a while atop a high rocky hill. From this point she could see the vast land stretching eighty kilometers ahead of her.

Sylvia waved her right hand lightly. From within her Spatial Ring appeared a refined wooden tea table of porcelain, two high-backed comfortable chairs, and a complete set of Nocture royal tea utensils. A silver teapot floated automatically in the air, brewing fragrant Crescent Rose tea leaves that radiated a deeply calming floral aroma amid the cold night.

Sylvia sat gracefully in the chair, crossed her legs, and calmly sipped her hot tea. Sol curled up in the chair beside her, while Noir sat upright watching over the darkness of the hill.

From the top of this hill, Sylvia’s heterochromatic eyes, which possessed perfect night vision, scanned the scenery across the land.

In the distance, about fifty kilometers from her current position, she could see a gigantic golden magic dome pulsing brightly in the middle of the night’s darkness. That magic dome was dozens of times larger and denser than the dim magic dome of Black Steel City. Behind the golden dome stood magnificent stone towers and old-era skyscrapers illuminated by thousands of never-extinguished magic lamps.

"Black Lotus City..." Sylvia murmured softly, placing her teacup back onto the porcelain saucer.

The scale of Black Lotus City clearly far surpassed the squalid settlements of the border. That place was one of the main defensive fortresses belonging to mid-tier nobles of the Tianhua Kingdom, inhabited by tens of thousands of humans and ruled by Rank 5 and Rank 6 mages.

Sylvia narrowed her eyes, sensing the flow of mana radiating from the direction of that large city. Although their magic dome looked magnificent from afar, in Sylvia’s eyes the spell structure that formed the dome was full of gaps and instability.

"Luxurious on the outside, yet fragile on the inside," Sylvia analyzed with a mischievous smile on her lips. "Just like their social structure. It will be quite refreshing to see how people who regard themselves as ’elite mages’ manage their city."

The night grew later, yet the bone-piercing cold air did not affect Sylvia in the slightest. She spent the night atop that hill enjoying the silence of the wild, observing the changing mutation patterns of the night insects that passed, and savoring the natural scenery of the new continent that still held many secrets.

For the Queen of Death, this eighty-kilometer journey was neither a trial nor a heavy struggle. It was a slow performance in which she acted as the sole grand spectator, enjoying every act of the ecosystem’s and civilization’s changes as they moved toward their own destruction.

When dawn began to break on the eastern horizon, casting golden-orange light that split the darkness of night, Sylvia rose from her chair. She waved her hand, storing the tea table and its utensils back into the spatial dimension.

Sol leapt back onto her right shoulder, and Noir merged once more with the shadow of her gown.

"The remaining distance is only thirty kilometers," Sylvia said softly, gazing straight toward the silhouette of Black Lotus City that was beginning to appear clearly under the morning sunlight. "Let us finish this leisurely journey and see what surprises the ’nobles’ of that large city have to offer."

With graceful and unhurried steps, the Queen of Death walked down from the hilltop, continuing her path across the dew-covered grasslands of the new continent that did not yet realize that the fate of their civilization was drawing near.