Ch. 2 - Bloodline Awakening
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Chen Liu drifted through a vivid, endless dream. In it, he stood as a three-eyed, eight-armed demon god, towering over a primal continent. He battled ferocious beasts, shattering creatures the size of hills, and splitting the earth with his terrifying stumps. His massive hands could pluck stars from the sky, and his gaze, pierce thousands of miles. Yet, even a being as mighty as he fell before an unending swarm of savage creatures. They tore him apart, devouring him in a pool of his own blood.
Glug—Chen Liu awoke, choking on lake water, and frantically swam to the surface. The zombies on the shore had vanished. He dragged himself onto the bank, his mind heavy with thought. I didn’t turn. No strange powers from that scratch either. He paused, piecing together the truth. My bloodline woke up. His expression hardened with realisation.
At the moment of awakening, a torrent of knowledge buried in his blood had flooded his mind, offering clarity about the chaos around him. A week ago, perhaps longer, an invisible, undetectable substance had infected every living creature on Earth. Its purpose was to drive a massive evolutionary leap, akin to the Cambrian explosion over 500 million years ago. The planet’s biosphere teetered on the edge of a rapid upheaval, its ecological order about to be rewritten. This was an era of glory and tragedy. For humanity, the outcomes were threefold: those who failed to awaken became zombies, like Old Wang, comprising nearly half the population; those who succeeded, like Chen Liu, gained supernatural abilities, though they were rare; and those with thin bloodlines or poor timing remained ordinary, like the woman in black who had died, untouched by evolution. Yet hope lingered. Zombies could evolve further, potentially surpassing awakened humans, and ordinary people still had a chance to awaken if they seized the right moment.
From his bloodline knowledge, Chen Liu understood his own status: