Zombie Life Begins in Hongxi Village

Three more days passed.

Over the past three days, the Yun County Marshal's Mansion appeared calm on the surface, but a small but significant disturbance was quietly brewing beneath the surface—ghost messengers and officials from the underworld of Fengdu King of Hell were constantly submitting their resignations.

A record keeper responsible for organizing the files accidentally discovered that the number of ghosts and spirits who had left their posts in the last half month was more than the total number of ghosts and spirits in the past ten years, and that's when he vaguely felt that something was wrong.

But when he saw the names of those who had left, he felt relieved.

They were all Taoist priests from the mortal realm who were now marginal figures in the underworld after their deaths. They had no real power, so their passing was not a loss.

The official in charge of registers approved them all with a stroke of his pen, not even bothering to try and persuade them to stay.

These marginal ghost messengers, who were not doing well in the underworld of Fengdu, were all remarkable figures in the mortal world.

There is the chief disciple of a certain generation of the Maoshan Sect, a talisman master from the Celestial Master's Mansion of Longhu Mountain, and the head of a family of ghost hunters from a branch of the sect...

These people, despite their exceptional skills, were completely overwhelmed by the seniority-based system of the Fengdu Underworld, and had been doing the lowest-level jobs for hundreds of years, until they were utterly disheartened.

So when Qian Youcai, Maoshan Jian, Shi Jian, and Uncle Jiu, these newly promoted underworld gods, came to their door, they nodded on the spot without much hesitation.

Qian Youcai found his master's master's master—a patriarch who worked as a copyist in the underworld of Fengdu.

The patriarch was stunned the moment he saw Qian Youcai—the Sun-Wandering God, a proper god of the underworld, with a golden crow chasing the sun embroidered on his robe, an inspection token hanging at his waist, and his whole body shining with divine radiance.

Because of his straightforward nature, he has remained a copyist for over eighty years.

Now his grand-disciples have all become day-roaming deities, and their ranks are seven or eight levels higher than his.

The old man threw down his pen on the spot and roared, "I've copied files for eighty years, I've had enough!"

Maoshan Jian already had a good relationship with the patriarchs of the Celestial Master's Mansion in the underworld, and this trip made him even more comfortable.

The Celestial Master's Mansion has a larger lineage in the underworld than the Maoshan Sect, which also means that the competition is more intense.

There are over a thousand people in the underworld who are waiting in line for official appointments after their deaths, just from the disciples of the Celestial Master's Mansion throughout the ages.

Among them were many people with profound Taoist skills and great merit, but because there were no vacancies, they could only serve as temporary ghost messengers and could not even get a formal rank.

Mao Shanjian's trip took away a group of the most elite ghost messengers from the Celestial Master's Mansion in Fengdu Underworld.

Shi Jian and Uncle Jiu then went their separate ways.

Shi Jian visited several of the main branches of Maoshan in the underworld. He was originally the acting head of Maoshan and had a very high prestige in the Maoshan sect. Now he had become the judge of punishment for evil, and his divine power was even more awe-inspiring than when he was in the mortal world.

Those Maoshan disciples who were struggling in the depths of the underworld were all completely convinced of his abilities when they met him.

Uncle Nine went to the strongholds of several familiar branches of the Maoshan clan in the underworld. He was humble and had a much better reputation in the clan circles than Shi Jian. Those experts who did not want to waste their time in the underworld were more willing to follow him.

Within three days, the two recruited over a hundred people.

These ghost messengers and officials who resigned from Fengdu Underworld were gradually brought into the Netherworld Minor Dimension.

The once quiet and deserted underworld suddenly became lively.

This once empty underworld has finally begun to resemble what an underworld should look like.

Lin Yi kept her word.

He had Shoubo arrange a unified pre-employment assessment, going through each of these new ghosts and spirits one by one.

In terms of Taoist cultivation, merits accumulated in life, and seniority in the underworld, these people are all quite formidable.

None of the marginalized people who can survive in Fengdu Underworld are useless.

Lin Yi assigned them to Shi Jian's Punishment and Evil Judge Division, Uncle Jiu's Investigation and Judgment Division, Qian Youcai's Day-Roaming God Patrol Division, and Mao Shanjian's Dharma King Enforcement Division according to their respective strengths.

As the divine registers were cast, a new array of underworld deities formed a neat square formation in front of the Underworld King's Palace.

There are a total of 128 official ghosts and deities, of which there are as many as 3,600 ghost officials and ghost messengers.

This was only because Lin Yi allowed them to recruit one-tenth of the authorized staff—if they were allowed to recruit more openly, the number would be even greater.

However, Hong Kong Island is only so big, and its capacity to support religious deities is limited, so the number of religious offerings must be strictly controlled.

The benefits of recruiting major sects like Maoshan and Longhushan were fully demonstrated at this moment.

Those veterans who have toiled in the depths of the underworld for hundreds of years are intimately familiar with the operational processes of each department within the netherworld—

What should be the trial process for cases involving severe punishment, and how should the inspection routes for cases involving serious misconduct be planned?

How should the performance evaluation criteria for day-roaming deities be determined, and how should the law enforcement authority of the Dharma King be divided...?

These are details that require decades or even centuries of administrative experience to fully grasp.

With the guidance of these senior figures, Uncle Nine and his colleagues had a very clear division of labor among the various departments and the spirits, without the slightest confusion.

Even the experience of performing various religious duties was passed down from the seniors, from how to judge cases to how to write judgments, from how to patrol the streets to how to write inspection reports, everything was taught in detail.

Once the handover of the Hong Kong Island jurisdiction to Hades is officially completed, this new Netherworld will be put into operation immediately. The efficiency of this operation even surprised Lin Yi.

This wasn't the only thing that surprised Lin Yi.

When Uncle Nine invited Qianhe to take up a position in the Underworld, Qianhe did not immediately agree.

He asked Uncle Nine to tell Lin Yi that if all his fellow disciples went to become ghosts and gods, then there would be very few people left in Maoshan on the surface.

In this generation of the Maoshan main lineage, Shi Jian is gone, Uncle Jiu is gone, Si Mu is gone, Wang Lin, Zhao Ying, Peng Yunfei, and Li Guoliang are all gone. Only he and a few junior brothers, Ma Ma Di, who was sentenced to eight years, are still holding on to the facade.

After hearing Uncle Jiu's account, Lin Yi did not insist.

Chizuru has principles, but she's too rigid.

However, everyone has their own ambitions, and his willingness to stay in the mortal world to guard the facade of Maoshan is his own choice.

But once this opportunity is gone, it's gone forever.

After he dies of old age, if he wants to take up a position in the underworld, he will have to go through the normal underworld recruitment process himself. By then, the queue will be incredibly long, or he may simply be overwhelmed by the underworld's system.

King Ai of Zhou also completed his mission on this day, bringing the flying zombie from the Tang Mansion underground in Dafangbo Village back to the Netherworld.

It had been suppressed underground for so many years, relying entirely on absorbing the corpse energy of the wax corpse to prolong its life. Although it had not dissipated, its body had become extremely weak.

However, its foundation is still intact; the flying zombie's base has not been damaged. As long as it is given enough energy to replenish itself, its strength will soon be restored to its peak.

To Lin Yi's surprise, this flying zombie, like the Zhou Ai King and A Qiang he had previously subdued, was also a zombie with special attributes—an earth zombie.

No wonder it could burrow underground in the original series and move around freely underground.

Earth-elemental zombies excel at moving underground, traversing mountains and valleys as if on flat ground, making them extremely effective for digging tunnels, launching sneak attacks, and setting ambushes.

In this way, the special zombies under his command possessed all three attributes—

King Ai of Zhou was a golden corpse, his body as if cast in metal, with extremely high defensive capabilities, and he was invincible in a frontal charge.

The water corpse, A-Qiang, was subdued by him during the Seven Heroes of the Ghost Chase storyline. He can move freely in the water and control water currents and underground rivers.

With the addition of this newly subdued earth corpse, which can move freely through the soil and is adept at traversing mountains and underground, this creature is also incredibly powerful.

With the three elements of metal, water, and earth all present, only wood and fire are missing.

Lin Yi recalled an extremely ancient method in the Maoshan lineage—the Five Elements Corpse God Formation.

This formation utilizes flying zombies of the five elements to set up a grand array. When the five zombies attack together, they can synthesize a Primordial Corpse God that is not afraid of Taoist magic and can fight against gods.

According to records in the Maoshan School's classic texts, apart from the second-generation patriarch Wang Zhiyuan who once gathered the Five Elements Flying Zombies and set up a great formation to kill the demon god Wutongshen who was causing havoc on the human world, no one has been able to gather them together in the more than a thousand years since.

Although Master Wang successfully killed the Five Gods in that battle, all five flying zombies perished in the battle, and the Five Elements Corpse God Formation was lost from then on.

While absorbing Uncle Nine's memories, Lin Yi happened to receive the complete inheritance of this formation.

Uncle Nine's memories contain the principles of formations and the formulas for setting them up, as well as the core secrets of the Five Elements Corpse Refining Technique.

He immediately used the Five Elements Corpse Refining Technique from the Maoshan tradition to re-refine the water corpse A-Qiang and the earth corpse.

After the refining was completed, the connection between Ah Qiang and the earthen corpse and his soul became even stronger, no less than that between King Ai of Zhou and the earthen corpse.

……

On the third night, as Lin Yi lay down in bed, a familiar stream of information surged into the depths of her consciousness.

"Complete the storyline of 'Zombie Supreme'."

They subdued Shi Jian and Uncle Jiu, wiped out all the zombies in the Zombie Forest, Qiu Sheng and Wen Cai were expelled from their sect, Shi Shao Jian survived, and Ghost King Xiao Li was sent to the eighteenth level of hell.

The plot disruption level is S+.