Eat, throw knives, eat, and then sleep. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

  That has been my life since I got the generator. It might sound boring, but I have to be satisfied that I can survive with just this.

  Having just cup ramen and egg as a diet sounds unhealthy, but it's not like I have a choice. They are the only food available for me.

  I don't really want to leave my room until my dimension hopping's duration reaches an hour. Survival is my priority.

  Talking about my dimension hopping, I can now stay in an empty alternate dimension for 3 minutes. It's quite slow because I barely kill anyone from my random knife throws. Though I think I'm making good progress from doing that for a week.

  I'm also getting more kills every day. Just yesterday, I added thirty seconds to the duration of my dimension hopping!

  So I have to keep this up!

  I've also recently done some light exercise. I don't have anything to distract myself. The internet is down, and I can't really play offline games from my phone because I fear the noise might attract monsters to my side. I can just mute the sound, but the only things I can play with that are idle games, and doing that doesn't really interest me.

  This is also a good thing. I just checked, and it seems like the total amount of mana within my body doesn't correlate with my strength. It only affects the duration of my dimension hopping. Which means killing monsters doesn't necessarily make me physically strong.

  Even if I can jump to alternate dimensions, I still need a lot of stamina to take advantage of it. So exercising will help me in the long run.

  Whenever I got bored, I'd go and peek out of the window, looking for any interesting thing happening below and taking pictures of it with my phone. With the zoom function of my phone, I can just look at stuff below and glean some hints about the state of this city.

  Throughout this week, I can see some changes in the landscape of this city. Most of the stuff I discovered through my occasional peeking terrified me!

  One example is those piles of browns and mountains of red around the roads. I identified their grotesque appearance after zooming on them with my phone's camera.

  The red mountains piled up on the street were actually flesh piles from unknown sources. They were interconnected to each other, despite the impossibility of it. Organs, guts, and other muscles and sinews from different species, both human and animal, were mixed together like a caricature, and they pulsed as if they were alive. It made me sick!

  The brown piles were much more horrifying. If the flesh pile were an impossible blood and flesh abomination, then the brown piles were a collection of dried-up husks of corpses. Humans, animals—it doesn't matter. They were simply piled up like unfilled balloons. Their entire appearance was wrinkled, lacking anything, even bones on their skin. They lacked eyes, they lacked teeth, and they even lacked anything other than hollow skins.

  Beneath that mountain of dried-up corpses, I occasionally see some sort of entity hidden within it. There were some sort of long appendages sticking out of the gaps from those husks, and I didn't want to check anymore in fear that I might attract whatever was on those husks' pile.

  The entities on the street are more terrifying. There were the occasional shambling corpses I dubbed as normal zombies. They usually have full body parts, their scleras the only visible part of their eyes, and their bodies were either incredibly pale or rotting and smeared with blood. Occasionally there were those who lacked other limbs and body parts, though they still moved, stiffly but shambling without purpose.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Other than those normal zombies, there were weird flesh monsters I saw, like those muscular zombies who I estimated to surpass two meters in height, and their entire width covering half of the road. Unlike the normal zombies, these large muscular zombies moved faster, and if my assumption is correct, they might be strong enough to break through all of my blockades if they ever reached my room.

  There were other flesh abominations lurking on the street. Like those long, slithering lizard-like monsters whose bodies were made entirely of flesh and easily spanned an entire meter. Thankfully they couldn't scale walls, though they were so incredibly fast that they looked like blurs on my phone screen before they stopped like statues, usually standing on shaded parts of the city.

  There were also some quadrupedal flesh monsters, at least the size of the dogs, running around in groups and passing through the hordes of zombies scattered around the streets. There were also hordes of zombies gathering around those flesh mountains, seemingly protecting it as they surrounded it and never left it when I continued observing them for hours.

  Basically, the entire street was a hellish landscape!

  The other buildings also looked abandoned. Those whose windows were shattered don't look like it, though. Even when I haven't focused on checking them out with my phone's camera, I noticed something moving around there. I don't know if they are survivors or not, but I am going to take note of that anyway if I ever decide to leave my room.

  That notion seems quite impossible because I am definitely not going outside when a lot of those monsters lurk on the streets!

  I checked, and I saw that these flesh mountains and husk piles were everywhere in the city. It would be impossible to leave this entire city with my feet alone, even with my power. I don't even know if there are any places out there that don't have these hordes of monsters!

  So my plan doesn't change. I'll stay in my room and keep grinding mana. I'll keep doing that until I can at least stay in the alternate dimension for an hour!

  Another week has passed.

  I keep throwing knives outside my window and killing up more and more monsters. Throughout this week, I managed to accumulate enough mana that I can stay in an alternate dimension for 6 minutes now!

  It's still quite short, but I think it is enough time for me to find a safe place to hide if I get cornered.

  But that's not the issue right now!

  There's a problem outside. It's not like it immediately affects my stay in this room, but I think it is still important to make plans when I still have time.

  Outside, those flesh mountains are spreading. Flesh piles become larger, while newer ones form around the street. I also realized that these flesh mountains are producing more of those zombies, and depending on their size, they can produce more zombies and other variants like those muscular ones and those animal-like flesh abominations.

  If this continues, those flesh mountains will reach me!

  I need to find a way to prevent that!

  I'll have to protect my sanctuary!

  But how?

  I look at anything I have. I still have a lot of knives, phones, power lamps, water bottles, ramen cups, eggs, and a lot of miscellaneous stuff. I also have those plastic bottles full of generator oil.

  "... Hmm..."

  Let's see. Throwing knives won't do anything. My generator won't also do a thing. It doesn't fit the opening on my window. None of my stuff will really solve my problems here... Wait!

  Oil is flammable, right?

  Usually in zombie apocalypse stories, fire is one of the weaknesses for these walking corpses. I have a lot of oil; I just need a fire starter!

  But wait... Throwing PET bottles won't necessarily spread the fire around those monsters. It doesn't break reliably, so the spread of the oil wouldn't be as spread out as possible. I need a glass bottle!

  Other than that, I need some disposable fabrics to act as a fuse. I don't know the exact principle, but I think I can make a makeshift Molotov cocktail with my limited knowledge!

  I just have to make sure that it won't burn in my hand when I start igniting its fuse and throwing it. Generator oil is combustible, so I think it is a great material for a Molotov.

  I have a lot of clothes here. I can also make more with my dimension hopping. The only thing left is the glass bottle.

  "... It seems like I have to leave my room again..."

  It can't be helped. For the sake of my safety, I'll just have to risk it!