Chapter 32: Lair Management (2)

Chapter 32: Chapter 32: Lair Management (2) Blaze sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at the system’s notifications. So it’s a game after all. A VR game of sorts. The words patch and updates made that much clear. From what he understood, the Collective were the developers of this game and the Earth was their testing ground. The humans, animals, and everything else on Earth were beta testers. As for systems, they exist to guide them. Blaze thought about it for a moment. In the end, he decided he couldn’t care less about it. Whether or not his life was a game didn’t matter. He was already dead. The only thing he could do was help others realize the life of a zombie was more fun. He looked around his lair. He had soldiers, food, and lots of creatures to experiment with. As much as he disliked the Collective, he also thanked them in a way. If not for them, the world would be stuck in the old era. The new era was chaotic, but fun. Just like Blaze wanted. Something as absurd as this is only possible in a game. The law of conservation of energy. Every human on Earth probably knew it. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but convert from one form into another. Yet the object before him defied that logic. It’s making chunks of flesh out of thin air. Blaze shook his head. The Collective could manipulate celestial objects like the sun, moon, and Earth. Compared to them, humans couldn’t even establish colonies on other planets or the moon for that matter. The mere fact that they could manipulate the sun suggested that whatever the Collective was, they were beyond type-3 civilization. To put things into perspective, humanity wasn’t even a type-1 civilization based on the Kardashev scale. It was foolish of him to compare such beings to humans. Flop! Another small chunk of processed flesh popped out of the grotesque creation. The system called it the corpse pit. The ten-foot-wide pit made of flesh and bones pulsed before his eyes. Its rim was lined with fused bones, while the pit itself was made of rotten flesh. It spewed out a pound of flesh every three minutes, along with some residual ammonia gas and whatnot. It almost felt like it was breathing and polluting the environment simultaneously. Blaze picked up the fresh pack of flesh and chomped. It tasted nothing like the spicy frogs or the honey-like humans. It was bitter, chewy, and downright awful. It was barely edible, but it was free. Still, I expected something better after sacrificing a third of the frogs to build this. As miraculous as the corpse pit was, creating it required a ton of resources. The level one corpse pit required a whopping five hundred and fifty pounds of flesh and bones. Twenty frog-lings. Blaze had to kill that many of them to create a single corpse pit. It was a good thing the frogs were the size of toddlers or else making a single installation would take days, if not weeks. As the lair evolved, the pit would evolve alongside. Over time, unlocking more useful and flavorful recipes for the undead. Till then, they were stuck eating the bland flesh. At least we have something to eat. Blaze created the pit first because he was worried about a constant food supply. With the pit, he could focus on other things. Namely, the defenses. At level one, he could have five installations other than the corpse wall and traps. There was no limit to how many corpse walls and traps he could build, as long as he had the resources. After building the corpse pit, he could have four more installations. More like three. As Blaze went through the list of installations, he noticed an issue. Unlike the corpse pit, almost everything required specific resources to build. Bones, muscle fiber, and flesh chunks were some of them. While one could separate bones from a body, the system didn’t register them as resources. These things had to be made by a certain installation. A little thing simply known as a separator. From the image, it looked like a twelve-foot-tall vertical barrel or cylinder. One would put a corpse inside it, and it’ll separate it into blood, bones, and everything else. The separator was one of the few things that only required corpses to exchange from the system. With a sigh, he waved the zombies into action. The frogs were massacred yet again, and this time, only a tenth of their original population was left. That’s it. I’m not killing any more frogs until they reproduce. The thought of living on flesh chunks was haunting. Blaze didn’t want to lose what little tasty food he had left. The exchange was successful, and an icon appeared on the screen before him. The function allowed him to get an eagle-eye view of his immediate surroundings, and place the structure within a thirty-foot radius. Blaze chose the spot next to the corpse pit and the separator miraculously appeared there. He was mesmerized by the sight. No, the separator looked as disgusting as the pit. He was awestruck by the technological advancements of the Collective. If humanity had achieved even 1% of such advancements, he wouldn’t have to spend nearly two decades of his life being bored. Maybe the Collective isn’t all that bad. However, Blaze wasn’t happy for long. Especially after he remembered a minor detail. The separator couldn’t make shit without a corpse. ...I take that back. I don’t like them. Not at all. The next moment, a notification flashed before his eyes. [Undead corpses can be used for corpse-required constructions.] Blaze’s already cold blood turned even colder. The separator and corpse pit could both be constructed using the undead. He wasted so many frogs to build them. In terms of base-building games, he just wasted a precious resource on dirt-cheap upgrades. He hadn’t made so many blunders in his life as he was making after dying. With a groan, Blaze got up. The undead surrounded him, awaiting orders. Kill every undead in sight. Except each other. Fuck everything. He was going into full pay-to-win mode. His zombies would be the only zombies around the reptile house. Fuck everyone else.