Chapter 23

“I don’t know if I like this.” Dr. Evans spoke out, the last words of wisdom before it was too late.

Having done as instructed, Frank walked forward into the dark tunnelway filled with moving miasma.

“Hey, aren’t these corpses…” Frank asked, but before he could fully finish his thought, he heard it.

SCREEEK!

The slow grinding sound of old metal grinding against metal as the door used to seal away the passage that Frank had been asked to go down was closed behind him.

With it, so too did most of the light that filled the darkened tunnel.

Now all that remained was the bright light coming from a small window slit that had been carved into the giant metal doors and was protected by no less than three, three-inch-wide bars that further reinforced the door.

Then as if stirred by either the sound of the closing door, or Frank’s own question the corpses that Frank had noticed earlier began to come to life and slowly rise up.

From a glance it was clear that these were animated zombies, just as Frank had fought on his way out of Death Row not four days ago.

Before Frank could even ask, Major Demoniker began. “Consider this to be your first joint training mission. Your job is to both replenish both your death and life Qi pools, while trying to save as many of these poor zombies from their fate as you can.”

Hearing that, Frank could only nod in understanding as his body began moving and darting away from the slow clunky movements of the zombies. Zombies that looked like they were grinding against their own bones with the amount of miasma that had been built up within them.

Seeing the first one.

Frank mentally reached out and was about to ignite the zombie, when he realized just how confined the area he was in was. While destroying zombies was one thing on the surface, down here in a confined tunnel that likely had limited air supply was something that Frank didn’t want to deal with.

“Oh, your little exploding dark energy thing, I would try to avoid it. You don’t want the old structures to be knocked down on top of you.” Major Demoniker noted.

Hearing that, Frank glanced and realized that this was yet another reason not to try a mass detonation of the corpses.

Realizing that there was nothing much that Frank could really do other than kill the zombies, he moved. Lashing out, striking brittle bones that shattered upon impact.

Moving quickly, Frank lashed out striking the four of five zombies that were the closest to the entrance, dropping all of them into a pile that would be hard for the other zombies to climb over. With that, Frank realized that this was one of the likely few places where he could refill his death energy.

Splat, squish, pop.

Despite how dark the tunnel was, everything in here glowed to Frank’s Energy Sight. Even the dark specks of Miasma only served to show heightened places of power that all Frank needed to do was go to and cultivate, to refill his recently expended core energy.

The amount of life energy came from the life energy that somehow still remained within the rotting corpses of the zombies.

It took a while, but after the first five or so, Frank found that he managed to gain about one third the life energy from the zombies as he did the death energy.

“Focus on pulling out the death energy before you completely destroy the consciousness of the zombies.” Dr. Evans suggested.

Hearing that Frank could only nod.

To his surprise there was more life energy in the zombies that had their death energy stripped from their bodies.

“It worked.” Frank called out, over his shoulder.

Flicker.

With that Dr. Evans’s shadow danced across the floor. Apparently, the act of responding was too tough for the good doctor to stomach at the moment.

How had he gotten here? Where exactly was he?

Well to answer all of that, he had to go back to his earlier lesson, where he showed up for morning cultivation class with almost no energy due to his breaking through the ninth and final realm of the Body Cultivation stage.

This was when his two instructors decided to take him to the Forbidden Tunnels.

Why these tunnels are forbidden is easy to understand, as they are filled with miasma and the undead. Why this is Frank’s first day in training, and why this is the first place he was taken is likely because his two professors are sadists.

That said, Frank couldn’t really complain about the conditions, as he felt energy flowing into him easily from each of the zombies he killed.

These apparently were the older sections of the Forbidden Tunnels. There were newer sections with likely more recently transformed zombies, but the two instructors decided to hold off on that for whatever reason.

Honestly, Frank was glad that this was the older section of tunnels, as this meant the zombies he was facing off against were so old and aged that determining the original sex of the cadavers was tough. Even with his enhanced senses and feelings of power.

This was good, as the last thing Frank wanted was more scarring incidents of him inadvertently punching zombie boobs, or other intimate organs. Instead, all that happened was Frank let his mind drift and wander to that natural preservation phase. The phase where his body both moves and reacts to perceived threats from all around, without getting into danger.

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Frank had grown a lot since his original battles with the rodents, and found that zombies, despite most being former cultivators of some kind were easier to deal with than the swarms of rodents. First, the rodents were thinner and more agile, working as a coordinated team that would simultaneously strike out, and retreat immediately. This meant they moved more as a wave than anything. By comparison, zombies seemed to only be able to move forward, their attacks being linear and almost deceptively easy.

Every once in a while, Frank would be blindsided by a zombie that moved slightly faster than the others, reacted slightly quicker. It took a moment, but Frank soon found that the difference was in the coloration of the eyes of the zombies. Those with glowing yellow eyes were the ones to watch out for, as apparently those were close to some form of change. Going from being just a mere zombie to some form of exalted state.

At least that is what Frank began thinking, while moving in and reacting.

Worse, the glowing eyed zombies pretended to be slow at first, almost as if they were trying to stealthily blend into their environment, only to speed up when they got close.

Fortunately, Frank too was slowing down his attacks, feeling that he was going at half or a quarter of his regular speed in order to not impale himself on the attacks of the zombies. Meaning that when he saw the faster zombies move, his body just sped up to normal speed and managed to strike out.

The first yellow eyed zombie did manage to drag a jagged grime encrusted fingernail through Frank’s PT shirt, and into the first layer of his skin.

Normally such an attack would be a death blow for normal students, but all it did for Frank was give him a slightly faster boost to his ability to absorb the energy of the zombie.

Unsurprisingly, the yellow eyed zombies also had the lowest amount of life energy left, as if the part of their body that was keeping them alive had almost been converted into a newer form of energy that would be miasma based alone.

In fact, the darker the glowing yellow state of the eyes, the more sinister the feel of the miasma felt. Even to Frank, the intense energy that radiated from the yellow eyed zombies was slightly unsettling, but there was no real reason why he felt slightly uneasy by the ominous glow of the energy, emanating from the eyes of the zombies.

Perhaps it was the way the movements of the glowing eyed zombies seemed to be more feral, preferring to crouch down and lunge at an opponent, rather than strike from a cumbersome awkward gate that the slower moving zombies seemed to have.

Then again, it could be the way the power seemed so much purer, as if the zombies had begun understanding how to condense their cores to get more energy out of their bodies.

But mainly the reason why the zombies with the glowing yellow eyes seemed to unnerve Frank was the fact that they were sentient. Or rather, they seemed to have clear hunter like thought patterns. Patterns that showed they were more than just slightly faster mindless drones.

These zombies all seemed to have a slight malevolence to them, the way their faces came alive with thoughts and expressions that were far more complex than the base hunger that drove their counterparts.

Instead, the yellow eyed zombies even seemed to catch onto his tricks.

One trick in particular seemed to be very effective for luring away smaller groups of zombies. In a process that Frank mentally called tag fishing, he would cycle a small microburst of glowing green energy to his hand while touching a wall.

The result often caused chaos, as the zombies would often chase the afterglow of life energy that still seemed to radiate on the rocky walls, thereby tagging the forbidden tunnels with his energy.

During this time Frank learned that he could easily mask his life energy from his body by quickly cycling death Qi in the same pathways.

This was great as it meant a group of zombies would focus on a wall while Frank would escape backwards to a spot a few feet away, where he would repeat the trick of cycling a bit of life mana on the wall, before moving back.

Then once the group of zombies were far enough away from a larger pack that would no doubt swarm Frank in the small hallways, Frank would fight the group. First working on disabling the zombies, then slowly draining the different energy types from the zombies.

Oddly enough, this was how Frank found out that quite a few of the zombies still had their cores. He found this out as his first one had a dense blue core that reminded Frank of water.

Just by feeling the excess energy Frank felt the now familiar burn of taking in non-compatible Qi, or at the very least Qi that was not life attuned. That said, he found that with a bit of work he could convert the water Qi to something similar to his preferred life Qi if he focused his will on dominating the new energy and truly forcing it to be part of his body.

Similar to the way he got lower conversions for the life energy, this time it was finding ways that his body could adapt and change the energy. Though honestly all the other forms of Qi burned slightly less than death Qi. The only difference was that he could eventually compress or convert enough of any other type of energy into life Qi, but he could not do the same for converting Death Qi to Life. Though Life could be changed quite easily to death, though there was a long smoldering process where it felt like the Life energy had to rot first, in order to be more palatable to his death energy.

Oddly enough the more he began to understand about his own internal processes of energy, the more he also understood about the yellow eyed zombies.

For at first, Frank thought that the other zombies avoided him due to his being able to cloak his life force with death energy. It wasn’t until he saw the unrelenting nature of the yellow eyed zombies that he began to see certain emotions on their faces.

Yellow eyed monsters didn’t stop, once they found you, got your scent as it were, they would chase you down to the ends of the world. No amount of cycling his Qi or anything other than flat out destroying the yellow eyed monsters would stop them.

That was when Frank began to realize that he wasn’t masking his life Qi from the other zombies, when he did his tag fishing tactics. Instead, he realized that the regular zombies somehow knew not to mess with beings that had more condensed forms of dark energy. At least that was what Frank had come up with.

The yellow eyed zombies on the other hands, those were the ones that would track him relentlessly once he entered their territory. Then like a never trying bull that saw red, it would chase Frank to the ends of the earth, unless put down.

Another thing that Frank found was that often times the yellow eyed zombies all seemed to have previously had cultivation cores that had all rotted away.

The implications of these findings were a lot, and quite honestly more than Frank could fully comprehend. Though he figured that this was part of why he had been placed here, to see the differences between the different types of zombies and for him to come out and ask about them.

Also, this entire process had helped him understand quite a bit about Qi cultivation. For starters he could now pull stagnant energy from a dead cultivator’s core, even if that core had been partially corrupted. He could then take and convert that stolen energy into life Qi. And found that all forms of Qi felt gross and sticky when you let them rot inside your body, but eventually any form of Qi could be turned to death. Whereas every type of Qi other than death Qi could be turned to life Qi.

By the time he was done making these discoveries about himself and about the world, Frank finally decided to head back out.

There were a few other things that he could not understand either. Chief among those were how to bring back someone who had suffered from the rot so much that they became a zombie. As far as he could tell there was no logical way back from that point, though he did intend to ask Dr. Evans about that.

As he got closer to the door, he could see the glowing outline of light still shining brightly through the opening in the metal door, along with the words of his two instructors talking anxiously to each other.

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen or heard anything coming from the tunnels for a while now.” Dr. Evans stated.

“You think he’s dead?” Major Demoniker asked, his voice carrying deeply into the cave system.

“I’m saying, I would feel a little better about all of this if we could see him and see what happ…” was all Dr. Evans could say, before her voice cut out as she saw signs of Frank coming from the winding turns that line the entrance to this section of the forbidden tunnels.

Frank for his part looked like a complete mess. There were cuts and gashes along his shirt and shorts that revealed thick layers of condensed corded muscles.

“Oh, oh my…” was all Dr. Evans could say.

“Close your mouth, less you drool over the floor.” Demoniker stated, his voice mocking as he turned his face to Dr. Evans.

“No, that isn’t it. I was just shocked by his appearance.” Dr. Evans stated, as she began cycling Qi through her eyes, just as Demoniker began to do the same.

“Yeah, he looks like he might need a bath, but other then that he seemed to fill up those reserves of energy nicely.” Demoniker stated, as his gaze peered deeply into Frank.

Frank for his part just nodded.

“You, um. Okay?” Dr. Evans asked, her voice sounding slightly concerned as she continued, “is that blood?”

“Don’t worry it is dried by now.” Demoniker states.

Frank for his part just got to the doorway and stared.

With that Dr. Evans looked slightly flustered by the whole situation. Especially with the nearly exhausted look that Frank was giving her.

“You going to let him out?” Demoniker asked.

“I would, I mean I will, but first,” Dr. Evans began turning from Demoniker to face Frank, when she stated, “first you need to tell us you’re okay.”

“You’re okay.” Frank said dryly, while just staring at Dr. Evans like she was stupid.

Dr. Evans just had a blank expression on her face, and the entire scene would have almost been too much had Demoniker not chosen that moment to laugh.

A deep guttural laugh that was slightly unnerving to listen to, one that spoke of rocks grinding against each other. Only at that point did the spell that had taken over Dr. Evans shatter as she realized, “that was a joke?”

“No ma’am, just following order ma’am.” Frank replied, his voice sounding like he wanted to be far away from here.

Hearing that Demoniker could only laugh harder. “Oh gods, no wonder he is my favorite student.”

“He is your only student.” Dr. Evans shot back.

“So he wins by default, no need to be so mean about it. Also, are you finally going to let the kid out. I think he has been through this training for long enough, don’t you?” Demoniker asked.

“Me? You were the one that suggested the Forbidden Tunnels.”

“Which you agreed and then threw him in and practically threw away the key to the door.”

“Why, I never…” Dr. Evans began.

“Look, you’re both great teachers. Now can I get out of this zombie infested prison and actually attend a classroom?” Frank asked.

With that both Dr. Evans and Demoniker stopped bickering and looked at Frank.

Frank then sighing made sure to say the magic word, “officers.”

With that Demoniker could only laugh, as Dr. Evans looked embarrassed while unlocking the tumblers that held the metal door in place.

“Sorry about that.” Dr. Evans said, opening the door and letting Frank out.

Frank only nodded, and then began going to his room.

Dr. Evans looked like she wanted to say something, but Demoniker cut her off.

“Go take a shower and meet back up at class.”

Frank just gave a two-finger wave over his shoulder in acknowledgement as he made his way out of the underground section of the Academy, so he could finally begin learning about his new specially chosen career path for the military.

He was already regretting the times he thought about how great it would be to be trained at the Academy, though he somehow knew this was not the worst that was still to come. Sadly, he would be correct in his assessment of what the future held for him.