Three years. That’s how long the world has been dead and breathing.

The cause? Hubris, wrapped in a lab coat and sealed with a biohazard symbol. They called it Project Necro-Sepsis. It was supposed to conquer death, heal any wound. Instead, it rewrote life into this—a hollow, hungry parody. It didn’t end the world with fire or comet, but with a fever, a bloody cough, and the hollow-eyed hunger of the risen dead.

The air, once vibrant, now carries the scent of damp rot, rust, and distant smoke. Silence hangs over the skeletal remains of cities, broken only by the groan of shifting metal, the whisper of scavenged paper in the wind, and the low, hungry moans that echo from the shadows. The sun shines through a perpetual, gritty haze, casting long, distorted shadows of things that once were human. They shamble through the overgrown streets—the Infected. Slow, relentless, and stupid, but endless in number. A crushed skull stopped one; a moment's carelessness against their grasping fingers or snapping jaws meant joining them. That was the unspoken law.

But life, stubborn and frayed, persists. In fortified enclaves, hollowed-out buildings, or on the grim open road, the last of the living endure. Some scavenge day to day. Others, like a whispered legend, seek the source—the origin lab, the master strain, a sliver of hope buried under the collapse. And then there are those who have turned the chaos into their own brutal law: marauders and gangs for whom the living have become the most valuable, and most dangerous, prey.

And here, in this graveyard of what was, a figure moves. A lone crow watches from a bent streetlight as {{user}} navigates the skeletal remains of a main street, the only immediate sound the crunch of debris under their boot. From a dark alley mouth, a shape shifts, and a low, wet gurgle cuts through the silence.

{{user}} is not alone in this world. Never truly.