"You're the zombie who lives in the city center. What do you want?"
"You also seem to have a great understanding of things, but the strange thing is that your lucidity surpasses your level. Are you a special zombie?"
"Who knows? It just was what it was."
The F-rank zombie's face was deteriorated, so nothing could be deduced from his expression.
"It's a shame you escaped. Perhaps the virus is quite concentrated in your body and evolved to your advantage. That's usually the case for the strongest zombies, unless the zombie originated from a high-ranking living being before becoming a zombie."
"Why are you telling me this?"
" "The way you act. The way you're wary of me. You think I'm the pinnacle of this terrifying world of death. This is just a small continent; beyond the horizons you don't know, you'll see how terrifying this world truly is. Not even the virus changed the desire of the strongest creatures to seek power, or the desire of the most evil to do evil."
The F-rank zombie remained silent. Seeing Matthew's silence, he continued:
"It's pretty morbid out there, which is why I'm trying to get stronger. Let's be allies."
Matthew stood up, his dogs keeping watch nearby.
"How do you know all this?"
"I escaped the chaos the moment I regained some lucidity, and now I try to get stronger every day. Only when the virus is pure and allows me to evolve further will I be able to avoid being devoured by them."
Matthew turned his back and continued on his way. At that moment, the zombie began to wander around as if he were lost.
"If you know what power is, it's impossible to trust someone like me. He'll surely try to devour me at the first opportunity," Matthew thought as he entered an area where there were ruins of collapsed buildings, partially covered by weeds, roots, and moss.
...
A week later, in a fairly open area, during the day, Matthew saw an impressive herd of horses. He led his dogs to hunt down two of them.
At nightfall, sitting on a rock, Matthew ate one of the legs of a brown horse, while his dogs ate another horse on their own.
Matthew was curious because he didn't see any zombies nearby. If there were any zombies with elongated limbs or Rank C- zombies, that would be enough to devour some of the horses.
"Is something around here killing the low-rank zombies?" he wondered.
When the sun had completely set, in an area of that open zone where there was a hill, the ground trembled, and a troll emerged from the earth.
[Young troll: Rank B+]
The troll took a few steps toward Matthew and said:
"Don't devour horses. Let them live... You've already eaten."
"How do you know I can talk?"
"Higher-ranking zombies develop abilities... but those same zombies... they don't eat living beings... they devour zombies."
"Don't worry, I'll leave the rest of the horses alone. I'll leave tomorrow."
The troll looked in different directions and then returned to the place from which he had emerged and lay down again, blending into his surroundings.
"What was this world like before the zombies? Now that I think about it, there are portals. Perhaps the origin of the zombies comes from those dimensional portals."
...
As promised, at sunrise Matthew continued on his way.
After the clearing, a few weeks later they entered a forest, where the sun barely penetrated.
The ground they walked on was cold and damp; occasionally there were small creatures. Matthew ignored most of them, except for some beetles, and zombie dogs devoured a few toads.
Almost a month after walking through that forest, they reached the end. Now a vast, open area awaited them, impassable to footpaths: a vast sea, and beyond the sea, land—not an island, but land stretching to the horizon. And for some reason, Matthew felt that these lands beyond the sea were extremely dangerous.
"I think I'll first explore the coastlines to see how far it extends, then I'll decide whether or not it's appropriate to cross the sea. If the danger is too great, perhaps there are also opportunities to grow beyond the dimensional portals."
The zombie dogs ran along the coast, surveying their surroundings, and Matthew followed them with a bone sword in his right hand and the "monster" pill in his left.