On the second floor, a family of four laid in two rooms. The parents slept in the main chamber. The two kids, an older brother and a younger sister, stayed in two separate rooms.

In the main chamber, the mother suddenly felt very warm. This should be normal. She was having a cold for the past week and her health wasn’t exactly at its peak. Groaning, she kicked open the cover and laid in her pajamas, trying to cool down.

However, the heat didn’t disappear. Instead, it turned warmer and warmer. The mother suddenly realized something was very off. She coughed and tried to sit up, but her body turned very heavy. Her eyes started to lose contrast. She reached out to her husband, asking for help, but the man was too asleep to be woken up by a simple tap. He merely snored as her wife lost any sign of life.

He was still snoring when his wife’s eyes snapped open again...

In the secondary bedroom, sixteen year old Alia O’Neal slept in her bed. Suddenly, a desperate scream woke her up. She immediately recognized the sharp voice belonging to a man. She didn’t know who the scream belonged to, but she did know whoever it was something bad happened.

The door was opened, and Alia, still in sleepy eyes, jumped in fear. She calmed down when she recognized the door opener to be her older sibling brother.

“Paul, what’s wrong?” Alia asked, slightly calmer than before. Despite being the same age, Paul was always the big brother.

“Something’s off.” Paul locked the door and grabbed a stool as weapon. There was a gun in their house, but it was locked away in his parent’s room. “The scream...it came from mom and dad’s place. Get your phone and call 911.”

“On it.” The girl swallowed and nodded quickly. She reached for her phone and quickly tapped the three numbers that usually meant safety, but the result was unfortunate. No one was there to answer. “No one’s answering! What do we do now?”

The male teenager suddenly felt something slamming on the door. The door was locked, but then again whoever, or whatever, was on the other side, it didn’t know how to turn a door knob. Instead, it was constantly hitting the door was brute force.

He shook slightly as the door was continuously battered. Whoever the intruder was, it was more beast than man. Sweat covered his back, and he grabbed onto the stool with all his strength. A determined look was in his eyes.

He didn’t know what was on the other side, but he did know, unless a superhero miraculously descended from the sky, he was the only hope to saving his sister and himself.

All of a sudden, with another hit, the door collapsed, and both Paul and Alia were horrified to realize it was their parents at the door...only they were no longer the kind loving men and women they knew. Instead, they were something much more...menacing.

The blood and flesh on their mother’s lips and in her teeth, along with the hole in the father’s neck, showed the sequence of infection.

Both zombies looked at their former children. They showed no recognition of their own blood. This wasn’t a kid’s show. Love couldn’t get by the difference between life and death and human and undead and somehow make the zombies remember who they were and back off. The only emotion the zombies felt toward the kids was the desire to eat.

“Mom? Dad? What the...what are you doing? This is not funny!” The girl asked. Her voice shaking from fear. In a time period where internet was everywhere, she had more than enough hints from science fiction and horror movies to know something was incredibly wrong, but it was one thing to know something logically and it was another to deal with it when it became a reality. Anyone could joke about how they could take down a family turned zombie with a logical and decisive strike to the head, but when a zombie was truly in front of her, the only thing she could do was close her eyes and pray everything was a joke. Maybe the next moment everyone else would burst out into laughers and say something funny.

Well, it wasn’t something funny, at least not for her.

The girl was responded with a growl. The two zombies charged without hesitation.

Paul subconsciously raised his stool, but the weapon, in the hand of Jean could kill the zombies in a hundred different ways, was simply knocked out of his hands. Even if fear was not a factor, a zombie was much stronger than a sixteen year old teenager. Paul was not the strongest among his age group either.

Before he could do anything, the father zombie jumped on him and held him down. His claws moved, and a sudden pain dragged down Paul’s shoulder and left a trail of red fractured flesh. Almost instantly, the zombie bit down on Paul.

The teenager used all his strength to hold the teeth apart. His eyelids were sticking as a wave of fatigue washed over him. The pain on his shoulder was only enhanced by his extensive use of his muscles. For a moment he wanted to give up and let his father’s teeth go through him. What happened in the last three minutes was more than what an ordinary teenager like him could handle. Pain. Fear. Anger. Concern. Everything washed over his mind and broke his spirit.

A female cry came from beside. Paul’s heart sank and suddenly felt another surge of strength within his body. His sister...If he died, his sister would die as well. His parents were already gone. He wouldn’t allow his sister to suffer the same fate. She still had a great life in front of her...she didn’t deserve to die like this.

Paul screamed and pulled the zombie’s teeth apart. His fingers burned as the t-virus on the zombie’s teeth entered his body through fractured wounds. But before he could do anything else, a torching wave of flame washed over everything in a ten meter perimeter. Paul screamed as his clothing were ignited, bringing his skin and his flesh with it. The zombie above him burned as well, along with everything on the second layer of the house. A sickening smell of burnt flesh was covered by the overwhelming pain on his body.

Beside him, Alia was screaming as well. However, his scream was not due to pain. It was due to something else.

Everything around her was burning, but she wasn’t. It was as if the flame that came out of nowhere had a conscious and was actively dodging the girl.

The fire finally went out after rampaging for half a minute. When the smoke cleared, both zombies were on the ground. They were immune to the pain the flame brought, but even zombies couldn’t keep on moving when their flesh were literally melting into liquid form.

As soon as Alia realized what happened, she turned to her brother in horror. In the heat of the moment, she completely forgot about her sibling.

She was horrified to realize her brother wasn’t miraculously spared. He was below one of the burnt zombies that was formerly her father. The smell of barbeque made Alia turned and want to throw up.

No one could survive that heat...

“He’s not dead.” A female voice attracted Alia’s attention. The girl frowned and turned to find a blonde at the door. Her eyes went down to the two pistols in her grip, but her mind turned on what she said.

“What...what do you mean?” Alia asked, not even caring who the blonde was. “I...I killed him!”

Jean gestured at the body on the ground. She could see the body repairing itself. It was almost like what she was doing a few minutes ago, only it was much slower.

Alia saw Jean’s gaze. She turned and was more than shocked to realize her brother’s eyes just snapped open. His body was rapidly healing. There were still wounds, but they were getting better and better.

“How…” She ran to her brother and blushed slightly when she realized his clothes were gone. She ran back to her shelf and grabbed a set of suit for man. Why a girl would have clothes of a man in her bedroom was not the concern of the moment.

Paul quickly dressed and sat up. Jean realized he subconsciously stood in front of his sister. “Who are you?” He glanced at the zombies with fear in his eyes. “What is happening?” Something about the girl, who was just several years older than him, suggested that she had information he didn’t have. Maybe it was the way she acted. She seemed so calm, even after seeing the burnt zombies.

Jean’s mind was turning like the engine of a car that was at 200 mph. From what she just saw, her actions left a quite severe mark on this world. Virus has a tendency of messing up their hosts. In this case, as a result of her reckless use of celestial energy, the systems of this world was starting to fall apart. The very rule of this dimension was becoming blurry. These two were examples.

In the original history, they should be dead and then brought back as zombies. Instead, in this version of life, they became mutated and possessed some sort of power. This could be due to multiple reasons, but it was likely because Jean screwed up the original course of this world. As a result, the mechanism of this exact world was breaking apart.

Jean sensed a familiar feeling from the two. It was the feeling of crystal energies. It appeared like the world was leaking energy, and certain individuals were, accidentally, absorbing those exact energy. By doing so, they have received certain powers.

They have become mutated.