Living inside a literal iron box wasn't exactly a comfortable experience, so the highly energized Li Ke woke up early. While the two women were still sound asleep, lingering in their cozy beds, he planned to head out and take care of his physical urges.
There was really no helping it; having an overly powerful constitution came with its own unique set of frustrating side effects.
Stepping out quietly, he carefully shut the door behind him and washed up. Li Ke then lazily strolled over toward the trader woman's cabin, fully prepared to have another deeply satisfying encounter with her.
However, a sudden, violent gust of yellow sand blasted across his face. It forced Li Ke to instinctively squint his eyes, snapping his foggy mind wide awake.
"A dust storm?"
His groggy brain was still trying to process the sudden change in weather when a terrifying thought hit him. Li Ke snapped his gaze directly toward the opposite edge of the massive canyon walls that Tsunade and Kiri had excavated.
In the very next fraction of a second, every ounce of his sexual desire instantly evaporated, replaced by a sudden, icy chill that shot straight down his spine.
He saw the zombies.
An infinite, suffocating sea of the undead was shambling and swaying along the distant clifftops. They moved in an uninterrupted, relentless line toward a single destination. Their numbers weren't even a single fraction less than the catastrophic horde he had witnessed during his first days.
Furthermore, his newly upgraded sensory attributes now granted him enhanced vision, allowing him to see even further across the wasteland.
The zombies were packed tightly together, shoulder-to-shoulder, heel-to-heel. It looked like a completely bottomless, never-ending convoy of death, constantly marching forward into the horizon, never pausing for a single second.
He spun around to survey his surroundings. In every single direction, stretching out across the vast, bleak wilderness, there was nothing but a limitless ocean of rotting ghouls. There was absolutely no exception.
The celestial body hanging in the sky cast a sickly, hazy yellow glow over the world. The yellow sand whipped violently through the air, choking the atmosphere and making the daytime look as dark as a brutal night.
"..."
Li Ke stood frozen with his mouth agape. Even as the howling wind forced mouthfuls of grit and dirt past his lips, he didn't register the discomfort. He simply stared, dead-eyed, at the endless sea of monsters.
Wait... today...
Isn't today supposed to be only Day 6?!
Li Ke frantically pulled up his system interface menu in his mind. He locked his eyes onto the bleeding, blood-red number "6" displayed on the game calendar, staring at it for a long moment before silently, bitterly accepting the cold reality.
He walked over to the trader's cabin in total silence. He didn't have the stomach to engage in any playful antics this time. Instead, he directly withdrew all the completed Steel Frames from his crafting queue, purchased the final seven frag grenades left in her store inventory, tightly bolted the heavy outer doors of the trader's outpost, and headed straight back to their iron stronghold.
By the time he made it back, Kiri and Tsunade had just finished throwing on their clothes, preparing to step outside to wash up for the morning. Li Ke immediately blocked their path, his expression grim as he pointed toward the viewing slits outside.
Kiri's jaw dropped in absolute shock, while Tsunade's face went completely pale as she sank heavily to the floor.
There were too many of them. There were simply far too many. They had mentally prepared themselves for the zombie onslaught Li Ke had warned them about, but they had envisioned a scenario where the monsters would attack in manageable, successive waves. They had never imagined that the cold reality would be every bit as terrifyingly exaggerated as Li Ke had described.
"These things..."
Kiri swallowed hard, her hands trembling slightly. At long last, she fully understood why Li Ke had been so utterly obsessed with setting up traps and prioritizing fire attacks.
With a massive scale like this, she could pull the trigger on her revolver until the barrel melted, and she still wouldn't even make a dent in their numbers!
"Where the hell are they all coming from? And didn't you say this wouldn't hit us until the seventh day?!"
She instinctively lowered her voice. Even though she knew the zombies couldn't possibly detect them from this distance as long as she didn't outright scream, she still desperately tried to keep her voice down to a faint whisper.
"How should I know...?"
Li Ke began frantically patting down his pockets, instinctively searching for a pack of cigarettes. A massive wave of panic was threatening to overwhelm his mind as well. He still had so many defensive preparations left unfinished! He was supposed to...
"Calm down, Li Ke. You've still got us here."
Tsunade spoke up, her face still completely drained of color. Because the massive army of the undead was still a considerable distance away, she had managed to preserve enough of her mental composure to keep her severe hemophobia from completely paralyzing her.
"Besides, based on your initial descriptions and the actual threat level of the zombies we're looking at, they don't possess the tactical means to break our position. First, find something to cover up these viewing windows. I need to rest for a moment to gather my strength, and then I'll seal up the main entrance block."
Li Ke took a sharp breath and immediately sprang into action following Tsunade's orders, completely blocking off the viewing slit that was directly facing her position.
It took a considerable amount of time before Tsunade managed to regain enough composure to move. She stepped forward and used the materialized, real-world steel castings to seal the main entrance block completely solid, leaving absolutely zero structural gaps for the zombies to exploit.
Once the entrance was sealed, all three of them huddled inside the iron fortress in total silence. Li Ke and Kiri kept their eyes glued to the remaining viewing slits, silently monitoring the movements outside. Tsunade, on the other hand, retreated to the edge of her bed, her eyes locked onto the solid steel blocks blocking the doorway, terrified that a blood-soaked nightmare would breach the barrier at any moment.
An oppressive silence became the absolute theme inside the iron box. Every single ticking second felt like an eternity. Nobody wanted to spark a premature conflict unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Li Ke didn't want to, and Kiri didn't either.
"If we open fire right now, the noise will just draw that entire ocean of monsters down on us all at once, right?"
Kiri quietly muttered as she polished her Pipe Machine Gun and the heavy revolver Li Ke had handed her earlier. She had been incredibly ecstatic when she first received the revolver, recognizing it as a massive upgrade that would easily allow her to unleash her true combat potential as a Gunner.
But looking at things now, a heavy revolver was far less practical than a rapid-fire machine gun.
"Hand me another two of those machine guns," Kiri requested quietly. "Let me materialize them and see if they're easy to modify in the real world."
Li Ke didn't say a word. He silently queued up two more Pipe Machine Guns at his crafting screen and passed them over to her.
Without a moment's hesitation, Kiri grabbed the weapons and materialized them into reality. After closely inspecting their mechanical frames for a while, she closed her eyes in a helpless sigh.
There was absolutely nothing worth modifying. In fact, once these crude pipe weapons were manifested into real-world matter, they were significantly weaker and more unreliable than their gamified, system counterparts.
At the very least, a system-bound firearm completely bypassed the real-world physics of weapon jamming or structural fracturing under heavy heat. It also maintained a mathematically locked firing rate and bullet trajectory. The moment these crude scrap-metal pipes were materialized into raw reality, however, the structure was practically guaranteed to rattle itself apart under sustained fire. The ballistics were a total piece of dog shit; the barrels lacked even a single trace of rifling, making accurate shooting an absolute impossibility.
Left with no other choice, Kiri set the physical variants aside. She decided that when the battle officially commenced, she would test out a high-tier mechanical theory: constantly cycling the weapons between reality and the game system interface. She wanted to see if she could pull off a combat loop where she fired the weapon in its real-world form, snapped it back into the system to trigger an instant reload, and then manifested it again—or vice versa.
She couldn't run a live combat trial to verify the mechanic just yet, but she was entirely certain of one thing: when it came to running a revolver, the automated system reload animation didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of matching her own raw speed.
She possessed the muscle memory to completely pack a fresh cylinder of ammunition into her revolver in a fraction of a second, clocking a reload time of less than 0.4 seconds. For an amateur like Li Ke, however, relying on the automated system reload was visibly the faster option.
Watching the disappointed look plastered across her face, Li Ke immediately deduced that trying to physically modify these early-game scrap weapons was an absolute waste of effort.
He let out a heavy sigh, shifting his gaze back toward the viewing slit. He watched the massive, slow-moving army of the undead shambling across the desert, and then looked up at the sky, where a faint, ominous crimson radiance was gradually bleeding into the face of the moon.
If his memory served him right from playing the game back on Earth, the moon's color shift during a horde week wasn't supposed to accelerate this early in the day.
Li Ke took a deep, stabilizing breath. If the environmental countdown to every single Blood Moon night kept triggering ahead of schedule, and if the arrival speed of the crimson atmosphere kept accelerating, then what would happen by the time they reached the seventh week? Would they be forced to survive under a permanent, never-ending 24-hour Blood Moon?
The sheer, terrifying weight of that possibility caused Li Ke's hands to instinctively clench into tight fists. He locked his eyes onto the bleeding moon as it gradually turned a deeper shade of red, watching the system clock tick minute by agonizing minute toward high noon.
Sure enough, the exact millisecond the game clock struck mid-day, the moon had already transformed into a violent, half-crimson orb! Down on the wasteland floor, the physical mobility of the endless zombie sea suddenly spiked, their shambling movements visibly transforming into a much more agile, aggressive sprint.
Li Ke fell into a prolonged, grim silence. The environmental shift had triggered a staggering three hours faster than it had during his first week, forcing a bitter, self-deprecating laugh past his lips.
"Why is it that in a nightmare world like this, only the worst possible premonitions ever end up coming true?"