Even in the daytime, you can see some zombies in iron hats at the castle's lookout post. They are taking an unhurried stroll on the lawn away from the castle walls. When the moon rises halfway into the sky, they begin their collective labor. The iron hat overseers wielded their whips and prodded the hard laborers from the kingdom of the half-stiffs to dig trenches and holes in the ground, cut down trees, and build tall archery towers and turrets. The zombies' night was restless and noisy.
The half-stiffs climbed the ladders and carried the stone chariots, sweet potato cannons, chestnut muskets, and countless strawberry shells to the turrets, despite the incessant scolding and painful whipping.
Before long, there were camping tents of the kind made of boar skins everywhere.
The tents housed an ever-growing zombie war party.
The Iron Barrel Zombie Troupe has been summoned by Dr. Stiffy King and is coming from all directions.
As soon as they arrive at the compound, they realize that they are understocked and curse. There was whining everywhere. Edible zombie garlic was only available in the early hours of the morning. The rest of the time they were starving.
The zombies had nowhere to direct their anger, and it all poured out on the half-stiffs.
They decide that the half-stiffs have stolen the garlic.
The thief is an abomination! Abominable people seem to deserve severe punishment!
The Half-Stiff is caught in his sleep and tied to a stake and hanged.
Of course, the half-stiffs at the construction site suffered even more abuse.
The half-stiffs were divided into groups of thirty to fifty according to their family tree and blood relations, and participated in collective labor. After labor, they stayed in place. Wearing an iron bucket hat supervisors strictly prohibit the free movement of the half-stiff people, not to mention not allowing each other to string together, gossip. At night, the half-stiffs lay in earthen dens far from the turrets. During the day, in the supervisor's yell climbed out of the earth nest, stumbling towards the site.
No one complained. Nor did anyone think there was anything wrong with it.
In that dark world of zombies, there are also ranks and rules. Half-rigid people is to be lower than zombies, belong to the lowly creatures. When a half-stiff person encounters a zombie, he must lower his eyebrows and behave meekly and courteously. Dr. Stiff King's code states clearly that a single Barrel Zombie can command up to eight hundred half-stiff people in battle. Once the subordination is agreed upon, he is the master and leader of these eight hundred half-stiffs for the duration of the war.
Soldiers of the half-stiffs are not paid. Only when the battle is over can they collect the few loot that belongs to them from the zombie leader. Other than that, they have no income.
The world is not fair. Every half-zombie understands this.
Some are noble, some are low. On the battlefield, some are born to give orders, while others are born to be cannon fodder. Some are brave and some are cowardly. Half-stiffs on the battlefield must be brave and fearless, and half-stiffs in life must be honest and disciplined. Half-stiffs herd sheep, half-stiffs farm, half-stiffs are content with all the status quo. Half-stiffs take shifts in times of peace, living around zombie graveyards, guarding property and family for the zombies. In times of war, they live in cold, damp dens, not unlike slaves, criminals, and savages exiled to the wilderness. But the Half-Dead have their pride, a pride that comes from a philosophy of survival that has been passed down through the generations.
They believe: accept the reality, this is the fate of half dead people.
Therefore, only in the dust that no one can see, can we hear the voice of the half-stiff people.
The zombies know this. The zombies think: half-stiffs are not worthless, absolute villains.
It is this skewed and narrow sense of identity that firmly binds the two races, zombies and half-stiffs. In this cruel world, you can't find another kind of person who can appreciate half-stiffs in this way. Humans can't do it. The knights of the Ant Kingdom couldn't do it. The prisoners of Volcano Island and the half-human half-beast race of Silver Ocean couldn't do it even more.
The zombies relied on the half-stiffs to take care of them during the time of death when they were sleeping underground and waiting to be resurrected. In life, they whipped the half-stiffs with such confidence; in death, they handed themselves over to the half-stiffs with such confidence. However, in the view of many half-rigid people, existence is reasonable. Guard the tomb for the zombie family, follow the zombie around the war, this is a special grace, not an imposed obligation. Everything, it seems, is not without reason. Who can know, in the end, what kind of historical stickiness makes both sides such a bond?
Dr. Zombie King sends balloon zombies to form an aerial transport to deliver food to the additional members of the Zombie Warriors and Half-Stiffs. The arrival of the Zombie Garlic eases the hostility of the Barrel Zombie Corps towards the Half-Stiffs.
The weather is getting drier.
Dead grass begins to grow on the ground and incendiary bombs can be dropped.
The balloon zombies end their work transporting garlic and begin bombing missions. They flew over the castle and threw incendiary bombs made of watermelon onto farmland and the yards of the residents. These incendiary bombs were filled with self-combusting flaming watermelon juice inside and covered with an outer layer of iron skin, which was painted with a realistic melon skin pattern using a pattern generator provided by the Zombie Research Institute. Delayed explosion of the timing device through the pattern of camouflage, hidden in a tip of the watermelon incendiary bombs, as long as the occurrence of touch will lead to the timing device three seconds alarm, rapid self-detonation.
Because the Ant Kingdom does not have an air force, balloon zombies run amok over the castle. The incendiary bombs are delivered with a success rate of more than 80%, but occasionally a little accident will happen. Because the bombing mission was so easy, some myopic zombie pilots would throw the watermelon incendiary bombs haphazardly to the wrong place, and as a result, they would be copied down by soft branches, flooded by pools of water, swallowed by stinking ditches, and hung up by barbed wire.
The watermelon stands in the branches of a date-palm, a laurel-tree, or a vineyard, and is a source of great wonder.
"A watermelon on a vine?"
When you think so, you may not be able to resist walking up and fondling it. If you're unlucky enough to touch the butt of such a watermelon, you're in for a rude awakening. Watermelon incendiary bomb triggered by self-explosion, the red pulp will be splashed to a long distance, the burning area of up to a circle of three meters. Houses, crops, clothes, these are not to mention. Even the tin roof will burn red until the surrounding area is reduced to rubble.
The Pea Castle is on fire every day.
From a distance, the trees were on fire under the moon. The owls that had built their nests in those poplars had nowhere to go and kept circling and shrieking. The young birds in their nests were too late to rescue them and chirped as the fire approached. After the branch burned off, the bird fell into the bushes with the ashes of the nest, making the parents who ran over to cry.
All creatures are equal in the face of fire. Eagles and tits made no difference, and the daigre at the water's edge and the frigatebirds that flew about on the surface gazed with horror at the tragedy of the destruction of their home. The insect song among the grasses subsided. The songs of the branches were dark and low. The cicadas are buried in fire. The shallow burrows of the cricket family were not spared. The giant tortoises with their black treads feel threatened as never before, and they form a long line and silently begin to migrate. Unable to endure the torment of fire, the gentle giant tortoises and members of the aquatic family vow to flee the hellish situation.
The balloon zombies avoided the pea-machine guns and purple-potato flak cannons that had been positioned in the castle, and massed on a rocky hill out of range, waiting for the mass of escapees about to cross the lower valley. Soon afterward, a massacre began.
The major aquatic races, led by giant tortoises, were intercepted. Crabs, frogs and lobsters made the zombies' barbecue feast. "Zombies are about to eat your brain!" Some zombies didn't even bother to shout this slogan, because the aquatic squares in front of them were defenseless against the watermelon incendiary bombs, and the little splashes of water spewing out of their mouths, and the pincers and claws that swung in the void only added to the absurdity of this massacre. It wasn't a battle, just a silent massacre. The giant turtles and lobsters that bravely charged, the water snakes that hissed in rage, all felt doubly powerless in the face of the flamethrowers and the wildly spreading watermelon incendiary bombs.
Just then, a miracle occurred.
Two long-tailed dinosaurs and a flock of eagles appeared behind the balloon zombies, covering the zombies' left and right wings. The long-tailed dinosaurs shook their powerful wings and opened their huge mouths like sacks of cloth, flying across the sky like whales cruising the sea, constantly adsorbing and devouring the zombies they encountered head-on. A small group of eagles under the command of three balloon pilots with cranberry hoes swooped down to the top of the zombies from the front and attacked from above. Five minutes later, the balloon zombies, who had just massacred the aquatic family, were all but wiped out. The zombies collapsed into a pool of black and sticky blood on the dead land. The black blood slowly seeped into the roots of the reeds, causing the water moon in the reeds to be tainted with a strong odor of soy sauce.
The moon in the water illuminated the exhausted members of the water tribe.
"Join us! Defeat the zombies and save yourself!"
The leader of the giant turtles gazed quietly at the half-stiff in front of him, and slowly shook his head.
"Aren't you a zombie?"
"No, I'm not. Join us!"
"You have an identical balloon flyer on your back."
"Join us! We'll all work together to defeat the zombies!"
"We'll always remember what those balloon zombies look like."
"You guys ......"
"We want to go to the Land of Fun. They say there's a real ocean in the distance."
"That's probably just a fantasy. You would be better off ......"
"No, we need fantasy. We want no part of any strife."
"Well, I wish you guys luck."
After massacres and rescues, as well as retentions and rejections, the aquatic chiefs resolutely decided to continue their quest for a paradise they did not know existed. The half-rigid Blacklight's companions, along with the long-tailed dinosaurs and eagles, watched as the Aquarians rearranged their formation and stepped away from the devastated valley to find their dream home.
Half Crane said, "I envy them."
Blacklight said, "They are free. Free to live and free to move."
Leafmon touched the long-tailed dinosaur's big mouth and said, "Dr. Stiffy King should be angry."
The aquatic camp faded across the reeds.
Blacklight said, "The air will be quiet for a while now. Before the duel, there's no telling when Dr. Stiff King will send his iron barrel zombie corps to attack. Gargamel said yesterday that there's a big wave of zombies coming from the ground soon! We need to speed things up and get the Pea Knights off the ice. Also, cultivate more Cannibal Flowers and get as many Angel of Death mushrooms as we can to get through this crisis."
"Do you think the wizard's word can be trusted?"
"We should trust in good judgment."
"You've changed. You used to be the last person to like witches."
"Maybe it's not us who have changed, but the world."
"O half-stiff, half-stiff."
On the way back, they saw a hazy shadow from high above. The shadow came from a dark cloud under the moon. They fly through the air as the shadow tracks on the ground. In the shadow is a newspaper-reading zombie, gazing at three half-stiff people and two long-tailed dinosaurs. The black light drops a mushroom named Angel of Death into the shadows. The zombie, hidden in the shadows, grabbed the Angel of Death with an open hand and brought it curiously under his nose to sniff it. The death mushroom immediately ejected purple smoke. The purple poisonous fumes of the mushroom invaded the nostrils of the zombie reading the newspaper, causing him to shake and fall to the grass. The shadows then disappear. As the newspaper-reading zombie fell, a parchment the size of a pancake floated out of his back pocket.
Blacklight slowed down, landed on the ground, and picked up the piece of paper.
He had the parchment and was ready to get up. Who knows that the newspaper-reading zombie, which had already fallen dead, suddenly opened its mouth and bit Blacklight's wrist like a dying viper. The teeth engaged a deep wound in the wrist, and the corpse poison spread rapidly along the arm, causing half of Blacklight's body to become numb and swollen with pain. Black Light pulled out the crane hoe with one hand and struck the zombie's head. Read the zombie's head was smashed to smithereens, and then melted into a puddle of ink-like substance, seeping into the ground.
Half-Summer and Leafgate landed on the ground and were already panicked at the scene in front of them.
Blacklight was infested with necrotic poison and was experiencing the most dangerous moment of necrotic transformation. His face was sometimes black and sometimes ghastly white. The eyes flickered at times with the red glowing light only found in zombies. The long-tailed dinosaur guarded the side vigilantly, ready to attack the black light of the necrotic transformation. Half-summer and Ye Men knew that as long as the black light was turned into an irreversible zombie by the corpse poison, the long-tailed dinosaurs would immediately suck him into their bellies and turn him into a fruit.
That kind of black light, really want to be miserable to the extreme.
Half-summer and Ye Men stood far away, did not dare to approach their companion black light.
Ye Men made a wink to Half Summer, the two pulled out the crane hoe, slowly approaching the dinosaur. Once they found that the long-tailed dinosaur made a move, they were going to strike immediately, not hesitating to kill these two beloved pets of the witch in order to rescue their companion. In fact, they also know that this will lead to the ant kingdom, the witch and the half-rigid people's covenant to break. But sometimes, "their own people" is more disturbing than the broken covenant. As for whether the black light after the mutation is still one of their own people, as a half-rigid people, they do not want to know, and do not intend to know.
After Blacklight killed the zombie, he staggered to sit on the ground, pulled out the dagger sticking out of the boot, cut the skin of the wound, and took out a leech, and put it on the wrist where the poison is concentrated, shivering. The leech sucked up the poisoned blood and fell to the ground with a snap. The black light total **** replaced three leeches to suck the blood. Seeing the leech's belly slightly red, no longer present that terrible bruise black, all the talents long breath, put down the heart.
Leeches cure necrotic poison. This is the half-rigid people for thousands of years to summarize the experience.
Today, this mysterious witch doctor's way is once again proven to be effective.
The long-tailed dinosaur wagged its tail, signaling the half-rigid people that it was time to take care of your companions.
The half-rigid and the leaf gate stood at a distance of three meters away and asked, "Are you okay?"
Blacklight said, "Yes."
After a while, Blacklight slowly stood up, coughed, and surprisingly spat out a mouthful of ink-black phlegm. He smiled miserably and said to his companions, "Don't get too close to me. I still have the smell of dashi on me." Having just recovered from the black light, his face looked exceptionally pale compared to the past. Seeing that Half-Summer wanted to come over to assist him, he reached out to stop them from approaching and said, "The odor of great sauce is getting stronger and stronger. If you get too close, you might go crazy. If it's not good, you'll tear me, your big brother, apart as a zombie."
Ye Men whispered, "Let's sprinkle you with a little perfume to cover the big sauce smell, shall we?"
Halfsia and Yemon rummaged in their pockets for a bottle of pea perfume and sprayed it on Blacklight's armpits.
"You won't be able to smell it as easily if you wear it thicker."
Blacklight nodded and let them have their way, pulling on a fox-skin undershirt over his clothes.
Upon arriving at the castle, Blacklight handed the parchment to Gold Bean and Silver Bean.
"We met a newspaper reading zombie on the way back. He left this behind."
Gold Bean and Silver Bean open the parchment. The paper was filled with strange characters and patterns, but they couldn't recognize any of them, so they handed it to Gargamel, who was chatting with Nayo. Nayo feeds the bobcat Rai Fu with the juice of the leaf-eating grass. With the help of the juice, Rai Fu gradually regained his body temperature. He was no longer as frenzied as when he first returned to the castle, but lay quietly at NaYe's feet. His pupils regained their former luster and became flexible and docile. "You changed this cat with your patience." Gargamel grabbed a magnifying glass and gestured on the parchment while speaking to Nay Night, who was tending to the bobcat, "Normally, it's hard to see how a life that's been stiffened by the Zombie King himself can be reversed, and it will only be severely ossified from its normal state, lose its body heat, lose itself, and then be lost in the world of stasis."
"He is an exception." Nayo said softly as she stroked Bobcat's brain.
The bobcat, Raffles, plopped down cozily on the ground, squinting his large eyes with extra-long eyelashes.
Blacklight stood next to them, glancing at Pea Knight, who was looming in the pea snow globe, and whispered, "Yes. He is an exception. He's a good friend of Pea Knight, isn't he?"
Nayo looked up at Blacklight and said, "You don't like Rifle?"
Gargamel looked up from his drawings, swept a glance at Blacklight, who had walked off into the distance, and said to the Bean Brothers, "Do you guys ever get the feeling that this kid is a weirdo? What's wrong with him that he's gotten so shifty?"
Golden Bean said, "He just knocked over a jar of vinegar."
Silver Bean said, "As if he's Othello who just came home to roost."
Gargamel said to NaNight, "Little girl, there are two knights waiting for you to save them!"
Nayoi's expression struggled a bit. "You guys are talking too complicated. I can't understand a single word." After saying that, she got up and went for a walk around the neighborhood. The bobcat Rai Fu followed without moving an inch, as if a follower that could not be shaken off.
Gargamel picked up a quill and greeted the Bean Brothers to help her hold the magnifying glass and move it to the desired position. She circled a few places on the parchment and wrote down a few words. When she was done, she tapped the tabletop once with her long fingernails and murmured to Nayo, "You'll get it. Men are like this old parchment, all linked together in riddles. You'll have to learn to read and decipher the riddles."
In the distance, Blacklight had broken the last layer of the pea snow globe.
He put down the crane hoe and shrugged off his black gloves in one smooth motion. Now that he could see what the Pea Knight looked like up close and in earnest, he muttered, "He looks like a pretty ordinary little fat guy, doesn't seem like much of a big deal." Blacklight waves to Gargamel and Nayo and says, "That'll do. The pea snowball is pierced."
Nayuki stepped closer and saw that the crane hoe had penetrated the blockage of solid ice, punching a teacup-sized tunnel right through the center of the snowball. The ice and snow on Pea Knight's body was slowly melting away as he came into contact with the air pouring into the snow globe.
Nayo can even hear his thin breathing now.
The bobcat, Rifle, seemed to be getting very manic once again, rushing to the mouth of the snow globe's tunnel and digging futilely at the ice with his claws. Nayo gently stopped the bobcat, telling him not to be so impatient, "Rai Fu, stop. This isn't going to help much. Did you know that only Blacklight Knights know how to dig up snowballs?"
Upon hearing this from Nayo, Blacklight's delight could no longer be hidden. Lai Fu turned back around and jumped in front of Blacklight, looking at him prayerfully. Lai Fu spoke, "Please, please, please save the knight!"
Blacklight shook his head in a helpless show of hands.
Blacklight couldn't understand what Rai Fu was saying. But everyone knew the urgency of Lai Fu. Blacklight said, "We have to be patient. Only he can save himself." At this time, Gargamel heard something moving, came over with a tense look and said, "Everyone get out of the way. Hide in the distance."
"The Pea Knight is getting out of the snow globe."
"If the Pea Knight can't merge with the Cold Archer, they'll all die."
"O Maitreya, O Allah."
"Trust me, people, don't be afraid."
"Wizard, what kind of a man do you think the Pea Knight is?"
"If you ask me, he is an ordinary man. A man who couldn't be more ordinary."
"You're lying ...... But he's cute, right?"
"He's read books. He's had the rigorous education a knight should have."
The top of the pea snow globe began to loosen. From the tunnel rushed a hot, dazzling blue flame, which climbed and glided along the front of the snow globe, instantly skyrocketing with the aid of oxygen into an orange payload that morphed into a blazing fire in the blink of an eye. The red color of the fire expanded silently. The towering snow globe began to melt from the top. The snowmelt water rises in the ring of fire into a sonorous vapor that accelerates the cracking of the snowball. Little by little, the pea snowball disintegrated like a mountain of snow in the blazing sun. Along with the deafening collapse and the clash of wind and fire, everyone also heard Dr. Stiff King's laughter. He, once again, appeared!
Dr. Stiff King's four transformations, guided by the laughter, surrounded the snowball. They kept spinning around the pea snowball, rolling up the crumbling snow and ice and attaching it to the pea snowball. The pea snow globe melted faster and faster, leaving the Zombie King's four changelings overwhelmed. Gargamel hugged her arms and leaned on her cane, a peculiar sneer on her lips. Blacklight stole a glance at the witch, finding the thin and eccentric companion unusually frightening.
He even felt: the witch's look seems to want to eat these zombies alive. Blacklight sighed darkly, thinking, "Poor stinking zombies, instead of being squeezed into juice by this gnashing-teeth Gargamel, you might as well die squarely in someone else's hands." He suddenly winced and thought of a question buried deep in his heart: Gargamel, isn't she the daughter of the zombie king? No matter how, they are also father-daughter relationship, what is the need to make such an incompatibility? Men's families say: there are three kinds of people in the world can not be messed with, crazy, dead people, plus infertile old witch. This is really not wrong ah. Black light fixed his mind, want to see these few zombie monsters sent to the door to face the witch, in the end, what will happen.
Berry zombie, looks like a round fig, he has a blood red cape; watermelon zombie, round stomach round face, he has a black and green watermelon rind style cape; Siamese zombie, which belongs to the autumn monster, he summoned magic white coat mimics the people's hospital nurses dress; snowman zombie, he is the only normal transformation, except that the wear is overly bloated, it really looks like an entertainment star endorsing some counterfeit down jacket brand. Well, don't think too much about it, keep your eyes open and memorize what each of the transformations look like. They're driven by the dreaded zombie king, adding to the chaos, but how ridiculous it looks in front of the awakened fighters.
A long, sad whine came from the pea snow globe.
It was the signal that the Ice Archer had risen again.
The Pea Knight launches more flaming peas in the snow globe. The flames on the snow globe returned from their incandescent state of red to a smooth, quiet blue. Fighters of ice and fire, they had merged! The tenfold shrunken snow globe lines up in a gigantic transformation, standing motionless and full of majesty to the laughter of Dr. Stiff King.
The laughter suddenly came to an abrupt end.
From the center of the snow globe, a blue light shoots up into the sky.
At the first sight of the blue light, it destroyed the invisible rope that Dr. Zombie King used to manipulate his transformations. Zombie King's four transformations like snow water suddenly melted, into nothing. The blue light returned to the snow globe. The quiet seemed to become even quieter. Into this still inner dance, a warm, bright bass voice opens the singing:
May the heavens shelter the hungry and thirsty. May the heavens shelter everyone.
Shelter the tin roofs of the poor and the jewels of the rich.
Shelter the healthy, and shelter the dead.
May the heavens shelter the rivers and the land, as a parent gives affection to a child.
May your glory be everywhere, as the sun warms the lost sheep.
Thank you, St. Juhanne! Thank you for the troubles and freshness of life!
The light that comes from the heart is soothing.
The light that comes from the heart, flashes forward.
Prayer over, Pea Knight shakes the snow off his body and slowly, step by step, steps out of the pea snow globe. That's right, Pea Knight was still the same chubby pea. Only, he had now grown at least ten times taller, more than a meter tall. After growing up, Pea Knight really looks like a funny rapper.
His green leather pants became a large pantsuit, and the green cape behind him was wrapped around his waist like a bath towel. His wig became a tiny ponytail, and his knight's sword was as if it were an iron ruler tucked into the waist of his pants by a running peddler. In short, the previous decorations were completely out of place on him.
The world as it was before became much smaller in the knight's eyes. He felt that his friends and the whole castle had become so strange. He realized that his palm was so big that it was almost a piece of rubbing board, while the knight's sword held in his palm was as light as an embroidery needle. He had just experienced an adventure and inexplicable battle that he remembered vaguely, but didn't realize what impact these things would have. All he knew was that the experiences had left him exhausted. He could see from everyone's worried glances that they were worried about his health. The knight stood shakily, and when he saw the wizard extend his hand to shake his hand, he put his hand out with great effort as well.
"Hello, ma'am. I'm freezing my ass off these days."
"My, you've grown!" Gargamel said with some surprise.
The Pea Knight greeted Gargamel, and then slowly made his way over to Nay Night, saying cheerfully, "Hello, little girl. Do you still know the Kathak dance of the Leaf Eater family for us?"
Nayuki nodded with tears in her eyes. "Do you still enjoy the Kathak dance as much as you used to?"
"Of course, I dream about it."
"Raffles, is your adventure over?"
Rifle the bobcat jumped over and arched his head over Pea Knight's legs.
"It's over. Our ordeal is over. You don't know, I almost turned into a zombie."
"Thank goodness you didn't. Oh, and these friends are ......"
Gargamel introduced, "These are the new ones. Knight Blacklight, Knight Half Crane, and Knight Yeomen. They are engineers from the Kingdom of the Half-Stiffs. They worked together to help you tunnel through the Pea Snowball."
Knight Pea hugged everyone one by one.
He realized that everyone was a bit formal.
"Aren't we friends? Why are you looking at me like that?"
The bean brothers looked at each other, weighing their words.
Golden Bean said, "You know, you beat Dr. Stiffy King today?"
"That was nothing, just a fluke."
Blacklight spoke up and said, "You have a power greater than magic."
Pea Knight said, "My friend, it's not that we're powerful, it's that Dr. Stiff King wasn't on guard."
Blacklight said, "Even so, it's worth celebrating."
"How about we have a drink, then?"
"A glass of juice with a bit of milk will suffice. We half-stiffs only drink juice."