When I woke up the next morning, I was really surprised to see that the monster was peering into the room at the window again.

I dragged Jiayang out of bed and pointed to the monster outside, urging him to come up with a solution quickly.

The monster had a scent of decaying flesh on it. It had made the house smell foul after just a moment of being at the window last night. I wondered how Jiayang could tolerate that smell and play with it all night.

It was even worse today.

"The smell on them is really unbearable, getting worse day by day," I said, pinching my nose.

Jiayang had just woken up and clearly hadn't adjusted to the polluted air. He also covered his nose and said, "It really stinks."

The monster seemed to understand that we were criticizing it, so it started to howl pitifully again, with a hint of a pitiful look in its eyes.

"Stop howling! You still have breath! My goodness!" I turned away from the stench, waved my hand towards Jiayang, and said, "Hurry up and get rid of it."

He sniffed and then went to the storage room to get three bags of potato chips and a few cans of salmon from Niko, intending to hang them on the clothesline and hand them out to the monster.

But the monster suddenly straightened up, revealing its face with a headless zombie in its mouth, covered in black and blue all over.

Jiayang and I couldn't help but gag at the sight. The monster seemed confused and tried to give us the headless zombie's body.

Jiayang took a few steps towards it, raised his hand, and said, "Brother, we don't want this. We don't want to eat this. You eat it."

The monster seemed to understand, turned its head, and dropped the body of the headless zombie from the twenty-third floor.

Damn, when I heard the body hit the floor with a thud, for a split second I felt sorry for these ordinary zombies.

It turned its head and looked excitedly at the snack bag in Jiayang's hand. Jiayang explained the rules to it.

"I can give you this, but you can't keep coming back. You only get it once a day. If you take it, you have to go eat, understand? Otherwise, you won't get anything. Show me that you understand by nodding like me." He then pointed his head twice in a slow motion to demonstrate to it.

Surprisingly, the monster actually nodded in response to Jiayang, eagerly following his lead. But due to its stiff and twisted body, the nodding looked weird and slow, with its body unintentionally swaying slightly along with the head movements.

It was somewhat similar to the children at the supermarket entrance playing the game of "Dad's dad is grandpa... Dad's mom is grandma..."

As Jiayang held the snack bag out to it with the clothesline pole, it gently took the bag and looked just like the Alaskan dog on the fifteenth floor that used to deliver packages to its owner. After Jiayang retrieved the pole, it smiled at him with a somewhat strange but non-threatening smile, then slowly crawled down the wall.

Jiayang and I observed it through binoculars, watching as it climbed down while holding the bag and sat under the big banyan tree by the neighborhood's landscape pond. Like a child, it opened the snacks and cans with its mouth. It poured the chips directly into its mouth with its tentacles and licked the cans with its tongue.

We discussed it nonstop, as if watching a scientific channel program on TV.

"I can't believe it actually opens the packages to eat. I thought it would just eat them with the packaging." I was a bit surprised.

"This further proves that it is intelligent, and it can understand our conversations." Jiayang said, holding his chin.

After eating and drinking its fill, the monster casually threw the packaging on the ground.

"Not very environmentally friendly," I commented.

"Hmm... indeed. I need to teach this kid well. Tomorrow when it comes for food, I will educate it properly." He pondered.

While we were heatedly discussing its education, it seemed to have nothing to do after eating and started aimlessly wandering the streets like the other ordinary zombies.

But it was different in the way that it acted like a child, playfully patting the heads of other ordinary zombies with its tentacles. The zombies who were patted on the head would turn their bodies to look at it.

Most ordinary zombies would just glance and ignore it since they were of the same kind. However, there were a few zombies who seemed slower to react, and when patted on the forehead, they would assume there was movement and rush towards it. It would just stand there and look as the zombies approached, then entangle them with its tentacles and gnaw on them until they became a tattered corpse.

"This kid is a bit brutal..." I sighed.

"Good! Let's add in the education plan for it to clean up the zombie group downstairs every day and teach it basic counting. Once it reaches a certain number, we can give it an extra can of food." He was excited, seemingly proud of coming up with this perfect plan.

I was speechless. This plan was similar to how I trained Niko to catch mice...

"But the stench on them is really getting stronger day by day. Luckily, we're on the twenty-third floor and it hasn't reached us yet. If we were on a lower floor, it would be unbearable." I recalled the smell and felt nauseous, it was too overpowering.

"Decay is normal. They are originally living dead, and decay is just a matter of time leading to death," Jiayang explained.

"So, do you think it's okay if the military doesn't conduct a massive cleanup? Eventually, they will just die from decay. It's been over three months now."

"Who knows how long it will take for them to decay to death? If it takes two or three more years, we might not survive. The city needs to be restored to functioning as soon as possible, and people need to get back to their normal lives." Jiayang rolled his eyes, looking at me as if I were mentally handicapped. "Sis, you have a boyfriend like me, but you still think like a child. I feel like your mental age is not far from that downstairs monster." He nodded towards the monster outside.

"Get lost."