Chapter 1: The Last Meal Before the Storm
A sharp, chemical smell of artificial beef broth yanked Lin Feng into consciousness.
He woke with a gasp, the phantom weight of a truck’s grillwork fading from his bones. His last memory was of rain-slicked asphalt and blinding headlights, the searing pain of impact, and then the profound, grieving thought that he’d never taste his mother’s red-braised pork again.
Now, he was drowning in the scent of cheap instant noodles.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage of unfamiliar bone. The room was dim, lit by a single battery-powered lantern casting long shadows. Concrete walls. A narrow cot. The air was cool and carried an underlying note of mildew and something else… something metallic and grim. This wasn’t a hospital. This was a cell.
And he was not alone.
At a small desk cluttered with maps and scrawled notes, a man sat with his back to the cot. His shoulders were broad, tension visible even in the controlled way he moved. Lin Feng’s eyes, bleary with disorientation, tracked the man’s hands. They were deft, precise. He was preparing two bowls of instant noodles, tearing foil packets with neat, economical motions, pouring boiling water from an electric kettle. The ritual was performed with a chilling, military exactness.
Instant noodles.
The thought bubbled up, grotesque and unwelcome. His foodie soul wept. But a more immediate, primal terror swiftly crushed it.
This… this is how it starts.
The knowledge didn’t come from his own memory. It flooded in, a torrent of someone else’s life—lazy, arrogant, parasitic. Lin Feng, the cannon fodder. Han Chen, the male lead. A zombie apocalypse. A betrayal. A brutal death in a rain-drenched alley, forgotten and torn apart, over a stash of supplies and a woman’s whispered lie.
He’d read this novel. He’d skimmed the chapters about this pathetic, side-character namesake, feeling nothing but contempt. Now, he was the contempt.
A soft, desperate sound escaped him.
The man at the desk went still. Slowly, he turned.
Han Chen.
The novel’s descriptions didn’t do him justice. He was handsome in the way a honed blade is beautiful—all sharp angles and implicit threat. Short black hair, a stark face that seemed carved from granite. But it was his eyes that froze the air in Lin Feng’s lungs. They were dark, piercing, and held a depth of cold certainty that no twenty-something in the early days of an apocalypse should possess. This was the gaze of a man who had already lived through the end of the world. Twice.
Reborn. Avenger. Protagonist.
Lin Feng’s borrowed body remembered a cocktail of emotions towards this man: envy, resentment, a sycophant’s fear. His own modern soul felt only sheer, unadulterated panic.
Han Chen said nothing. He simply watched, his expression unreadable. Then he picked up one of the steaming bowls and a pair of chopsticks. He crossed the small room in three silent strides and placed them on the upturned crate beside Lin Feng’s cot.
“Eat,” Han Chen said. His voice was low, flat, devoid of the mocking tone the original Lin Feng would have expected.
This was wrong. All wrong. In the story, Han Chen had tossed the noodles at the cannon fodder with cold disdain, a perfunctory act before sending him out on a scouting mission that would be his doom. This silent, focused attention was a thousand times more terrifying.
Lin Feng looked at the bowl. Greasy broth, limp noodles, scant vegetable flakes. His stomach, the traitor, growled. The body was hungry. The soul was horrified. His hands, when he reached for the chopsticks, trembled so violently the wooden sticks clacked together like chattering teeth.
He could feel Han Chen’s eyes on him, a physical weight. He fumbled, nearly dropping the chopsticks, finally managing to scoop a shaky portion of noodles. He blew on them, the steam warming his face, and slurped them down.
The flavor was a nostalgic bomb—all salt and MSG. A cheap comfort from a world that was gone. A pathetic last meal. Tears, purely from stress and sensory overload, pricked at his eyes. He blinked them back furiously, keeping his head down, staring into the murky broth as if it held secrets.
“You’re quiet.”
Lin Feng flinched. He forced himself to look up. Han Chen was leaning against the desk, arms crossed, that relentless gaze fixed on him.
“My head… hurts,” Lin Feng mumbled, the excuse thin even to his own ears. The original was never quiet. He was loud, complaining, obnoxious.
“Hmm.” Han Chen didn’t push. He just kept watching. “The convoy leaves for the western warehouse cluster in an hour. We’re on the roster.”
The western warehouses. The scene of the betrayal. Bai Lian, the female lead, would be there. She would plead for medicine for a sick child, playing on the cannon fodder’s shallow sympathies. He would agree to steal from Han Chen’s private stash. Han Chen would discover it. The alley. The rain. The zombies.
“No.” The word burst out of him, too loud, too sharp.
Han Chen’s eyebrow lifted, a minute crack in the stone façade. “No?”
Lin Feng’s mind raced, scrabbling for purchase. “I’m… I’m not feeling well. Really. I’d just slow you down. A liability.” He tried to inject the old whine into his voice, but it came out as a genuine, frayed plea. “You should take someone else. Someone useful.”
“Your ability is useful,” Han Chen said, his tone still that infuriating, neutral calm. “Wood type. We need someone who can verify the integrity of the old storage containers. Check for rot, root infiltration.”
Lin Feng’s heart sank. He’d almost forgotten. The original’s weak, nascent power—the ability to sense and encourage plant growth. He’d used it for parlor tricks, to impress girls. Lin Feng had no idea how to even begin to access it. He clenched his hands in his lap. What good was sensing a rotting beam when you were about to become zombie chow?
“I… I don’t think I can focus,” he whispered, the tremble back in his hands.
Han Chen pushed off from the desk. The movement was fluid, predator-like. He walked over and stood beside the cot, looking down at Lin Feng. The lantern light cast half his face in shadow, deepening the intensity of his stare.
“You’re different today.”
The words were a silken trap. Lin Feng’s blood turned to ice. He knows. Oh god, he knows I’m not the same. He’s reborn, he’s comparing memories, and I’m failing the test.
“Scared shitless,” Lin Feng managed, which wasn’t entirely a lie. He gestured vaguely toward the single, grimy window, beyond which the ominous groans of the undead were a constant, low-frequency hum. “Who isn’t?”
A long, taut silence stretched between them. Lin Feng could hear the drip-drip of a leak somewhere, syncing with the frantic pulse in his throat.
Then, Han Chen did something inexplicable. He reached out. Lin Feng recoiled, a full-body flinch, expecting a blow, a grab. But Han Chen’s hand merely hovered for a second before picking up the empty noodle bowl from the crate. His fingers brushed Lin Feng’s, a fleeting, deliberate contact. A jolt, static and strange, shot up Lin Feng’s arm.
“Get your gear,” Han Chen said, turning away, his back once again a wall of unspoken threat and peculiar scrutiny. “You’re coming. If you’re a liability, I’ll deal with it then.”
The finality in his voice brooked no argument. This was the plot, grim and immutable, grinding forward. But as Han Chen returned to the desk, Lin Feng caught it—just for a split second in the dark reflection of the window pane. Not cold vengeance. Not impersonal disdain.
It was a look of burning, perplexed curiosity.
As Han Chen checked the action on a wicked-looking military knife, he spoke again, without turning around. “And Lin Feng.”
“Yes?”
“Stop trembling. The dead can smell fear.” A pause. “And so can I.”
Lin Feng swung his legs off the cot, his body moving on autopilot while his mind screamed. He had an hour. One hour to find a way to avoid a scripted death. The original’s plan was suicide. His modern foodie instincts were useless here. But maybe… maybe the power wasn’t. If he could just feel it, if he could do something, anything, to prove he wasn’t the same traitorous fool…
His fingers dug into the coarse blanket. Deep inside, somewhere beneath the panic, a tiny, stubborn spark flickered. He hadn’t survived a truck accident and transmigration just to die over a bowl of instant noodles. He was going to live. And someday, somehow, he was going to eat something truly delicious again.
First, he had to survive the male lead.
Han Chen slid the knife into its sheath with a definitive click, the sound like a period at the end of a death sentence. He finally turned, his gaze finding Lin Feng’s in the dim room. “I’ll be watching you,” he said, the words a simple, stark promise that hung in the chemical-scented air. He gave a faint, humorless smile. “Don’t do anything stupid.”