Chapter 4: 4

Chapter 4

Zombie-Rearing Diaries

Translated by boilpoil
Edited by boilpoil

 

Comics require far more preparation work compared to novels. From a synopsis to a rough timeline, character archetypes, and add to that the decisions to be made about style and storyboarding, it is practically impossible to have daily updates like novels.

He can take some time to prepare some more plot-heavy serial comics, but before that, maybe just some smaller ones with interesting ideas. Maybe the kind of cute and moe short comics, to test the waters. Cheng Zhaoci doesn’t know if the insectoid culture would be receptive to such concepts, but he’s going to try everything first.

He didn’t need serious planning for the cute, short story he’s planning, so he starts without delay.

Many comic artists like to create what is an ‘author surrogate,’ and affectionately refers to them as their ‘children.’ Cheng Zhaoci is similar, having hundreds of ‘children’ despite his young age. He thinks and picks from his mind – a little zombie with pale skin.

He set the zombie to be the ‘Zombie King’ after a zombie outbreak devastated humanity. He had no past, and didn’t know how to speak other than make baby vocalisations like ‘ee’ and ‘aa.’

When the Zombie King emerged from a massive pile of debris one day, he came face-to-face with the superpowered human warrior with the strongest ability, but even he fails to kill the little Zombie King. Even chopping him into pieces does not stop the little Zombie King from patching himself up.

After trying all sorts of methods and failing to kill the Zombie King, he turns to leave, only to find the little Zombie King following him.

The little zombie isn’t the brightest tool in the shed. In fact, he can’t even understand the killing malice the human ability user is exuding. He thought it was a game.

After that follows a slice of life between the strongest human ability user and the little Zombie King. From disgust and repulsion, the ability user gradually grew to care for the Zombie King, worried the little zombie whose daily schedule consisted of fashioning toys out of rubble would be discovered by other ability users and bullied.

It’s open-ended what a reader sees in the relationship, from friendship to family to even love. There is no clear-cut depiction of the relationship itself. It’s simply a heartwarming, feel-good story.

Though Cheng Zhaoci will have to change the settings pretty drastically. Insectoids obviously will not understand what zombies are, or humans for that matter. Zombies are easy to deal with, as he just needs to draw an outbreak and depict what they do in the first chapter. He’s not going to clearly depict the biological sex of the little zombie, but he knows for sure the shemales will slot the appearance of this small, ‘frail’ little zombie neatly into a male, thanks to insectoid biology.

If those typical males could still be so beloved despite each being worse than the last, this kind of obedient, cute and well-behaved ‘male’ would probably be adored. Who doesn’t want a perfect and cute boyfriend, no? Not only that, but this one has eyes for no other but that strongest ability user, too.

Oh, right, no ‘ability user,’ since shemales have enough fighting power to equal an ‘ability user’ anyway. They can even fight huge mechas with just their flesh and teeth.

So the strongest shemale of the insectoid military base? Tall, handsome, muscular, with an iconic scar down near his eye to look wilder. Let’s make him expressionless, the taciturn type.

Cheng Zhaoci basically stayed up all night just making a rough sketch of the two protagonists. When he hears Cheng Jin waking up, he finally realises how long he’s been drawing for. He quickly puts his stuff away and falls right back onto the bed.

As expected, the door to his room gets pushed open quietly soon enough. Cheng Jin tiptoes his way in, and gently ruffles his dear son’s fluffy hair, and then quietly retreats back out.

Cheng Zhaoci, who was pretending to sleep, sighs in relief. After hearing Cheng Jin has left for work for the day, he flips his blanket right over to get up… Though he immediately falls back down on the mattress.

Oh fuck! He’s never stayed up all night in this body at all. He can feel his heart jumping dramatically all over the place. Blood is rushing for his head – He remembers the feeling. It reminds him of his death, but it was much stronger a reaction back then.

And he has to keep in mind his body is even worse at handling such abuses. He mustn’t repeat his mistake twice before he even sees a dime for his work.

So Cheng Zhaoci, after overworking excitedly for a whole night, quietly pulls his blanket back up to get some shut-eye. He’ll do the actual storyboarding later.

And as fate will have it, sleeping in during the day never ends with a good sleep. Cheng Zhaoci gets woken up by noise outside not too long after he fell back asleep.

A bunch of young shemales are making a ruckus outside to mock Cheng Zhaoci for being useless. Typical teenage behaviour of insectoids who have nothing better to do on a landfill planet. Their parents couldn’t care less about whatever they do outside, as long as they’re home in time for meals.

Probably the sons of nosy shemales who enjoy shit-talking and these little brats are angry at such a ‘trash’ ‘shemale’ still mooching off his shemale dad at his ‘old age,’ so they’re here to ‘exact justice.’

And their exacting justice sure has been quite amazing consistent. They’ve been at it for two years.

Cheng Zhaoci, being woken up so rudely, rubs his temple in discomfort. Little insectoids always scream in that most annoying of pitches, reminding Cheng Zhaoci of that neighbour upstairs whose apartment unit was always undergoing some kind of renovation.

So the annoyed Cheng Zhaoci walks over to the window and opens it, cussing, “what the hell are you on about now?!”

Normally he’d ignore them – because, different to kids on Earth, these absolutely do not fear a beating. In fact, even if you could win and beat them up, the most likely outcome is for them to try to take revenge on you somehow.

And by revenge, it means nothing as innocent as smashing your window with a rock. So generally, Cheng Zhaoci has ignored and left them ago. The anger of being woken up from sleep has fried his rational side, though; although the insectoids in this world are complete realists, so they have no idea what ‘hell’ is, but that wouldn’t stop them from understanding that it’s something to scold them with based on the tone.

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Not that they seem to be paying attention to that, though, because the dirty little insectoids who look like they just trawled through mud, are staring at him, jaws dropped.

Noticing that, Cheng Zhaoci realises something – oh gods, he hasn’t had his dose of the ugly poison today. His normal, clean white face must be there.

He immediately closes the window shut and takes a small, dirty mirror out from his bedside – oh great, it did fail after all. The face looks like just his past life. Black hair, black eyes, tall nose. He looks pretty gloomy, like some typical necromancer a Western fantasy comic might have.

At least he can be sure no one will believe the little brats’ story; he’s just 16, and hasn’t matured yet, so there is no male pheromone on him. After concluding to his satisfaction that he’s safe, he sighs in relief.

Though the shock from realising he didn’t get his daily poison in has him wide awake. He should just start drawing now.

Meanwhile, outside, the little brats are all looking at each other.

The biggest kid of the bunch look shellshocked, “was I dreaming?”

The kids all shake their heads, to prove what he saw wasn’t his hallucination.

A deafening silence later, a young demi says doubtfully, “it was really pretty, like… like…” like the males his dad told him about.

He couldn’t finish speaking, though, because the big kid in the beginning has his hand on his mouth. He warns them, “do not tell anyone about this.”

“We cannot tell anyone; no one else knows he is a male here,” he explains, “if all the shemales knew he was a male, what would we do?”

The kids look confused and shocked, though, “what do you mean?”

“If we don’t say, he won’t be busted. If he’s not busted, no one else will court him. Then we will have our chance!” The little shemale, 10, at most, is saying with a dumb smile, “I can be the cijun, and you can be the concubines.”

“But isn’t he friends with Xiao Ji and He Huaijian?”

“They’re old. Males don’t like old shemales.”

Cheng Zhaoci, who doesn’t know he’s already had his future ‘arranged’ for him, is doing his storyboard right now.

He wants to do a 4-koma for this, but not in the very beginning, as he needs an expository beginning. He’ll have full-page comics for the first chapters instead.

First, to decide how the scenes are arranged. This step is quick, because it’s simply deciding the arrangement of the cells to draw and approximately what each scene contains. Cheng Zhaoci is drawing stickmen as placeholders.

Well, ‘quick,’ but it still takes him a full day just to get twenty pages in. It mostly deals with a newly discovered virus, the subsequent pandemic on a certain insectoid planet, where insectoids that died became ‘zombies.’ So to stop the spread of the virus, the Insectoid Federation placed the entire planet on quarantine – basically, abandoning the planet to its fate.

The insectoids who were lucky to survive established bases to fight against zombies.

An emphasis is placed on the horror of the zombies, and the survivors discovering unusual patterns in zombie movement, concluding that a ‘leader’ has emerged, dubbed the Zombie King. The strongest shemale in the base decided to venture out to look for the damned Zombie King. In the final four panels, the protagonist has his particle ray pistol aimed right at the pile of debris the Zombie King has buried himself into. His arms are sweating. Under the immense tension, a hand emerges.

Then the Zombie King crawls back out, with only a silhouette depicted. The difference in what the protagonist thought the Zombie King looks like and how he actually looks like is conveyed through the shocked expression of the protagonist standing, facing him. Then the last panel is a big close-up of the dumb-dumb Zombie King.

The pale Zombie King sits on the ground, with his lower face buried in the shadows cast on him by the sun through the ruins nearby. His red pupils look like the most valuable of jewels in the reflection of the light. The important point is that he’s clean – in a deep contrast to the messy rubble he emerged from.

It takes Cheng Zhaoci four days to finish his first draft.

The next two days, he meticulously draws a cover for the comic and put the title on it. The cover is drawn to even greater detail than the contents inside – he has to draw them to illustration standards.

When everything is ready, Cheng Zhaoci finally logs back onto his account with the very questionable user ID and posts it. Then he closes the website immediately.

He did have experience posting comics, sure, and it’s even his job, but this is a different world. He’s entirely new to this. He wasn’t nervous drawing, or even while posting, but as soon as it was up for the world to see, he becomes immensely anxious.

Tomorrow, he thinks. He will check how the numbers are doing tomorrow after waking up.

So thinking, he decides to go wait for his shemale dad who should be coming off work soon.

What he doesn’t know, is that, on the website for drawing on the insectoid network, his ‘Zombie-Rearing Diaries’ is being blasted into prominence at a frankly terrifying pace.

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