After Being Parasiticized By A Monster - Chapter 24

Chapter 24: “Have you been watching something weird behind my back?”

Security Department Building.

In the Security Office monitoring room, a staff member on the night shift yawned, cradling a hot coffee as she sat down at her station. She typed on the keyboard, performing the routine task of reviewing the surveillance footage logs.

When she scrolled to the video of a frozen morgue, she jolted, suddenly sitting upright and wide awake.

She quickly scrolled back, rubbed her eyes vigorously, looked, was still uncertain, and looked again.

Finally, she grabbed the phone and dialed.

“Team Leader Yan! The body you brought in yesterday is gone.”

“…” The person on the other end responded a second later, “What?”

It was a redundant question, as if she suspected the monitoring administrator hadn’t fully woken up.

The monitor repeated, “It’s gone!”

She stared intently at the video, moving the mouse to zoom in on one corner.

The footage showed the body, which had been lying flat on the dissection table, suddenly moving.

Like the resurrected dead in a horror movie, it eerily extended a pale hand, pulled open the zipper of the body bag, slowly sat up, and then got off the table.

Perhaps due to the atrophy of muscle cells after death, its limbs were stiff. With an uncoordinated posture, it climbed onto the windowsill and, in a suicidal fashion, flipped outward.

This thirteen-story building belonged to the biological experiment zone, and the ground below was solid concrete.

The black-and-white monitoring footage was like a silent film, yet you could almost hear the sound of a heavy object hitting the ground—thud!

The body, which had already been pronounced dead, disappeared into the invisible night.

…

Huang Chengcheng was attacked in the morning. Before that, she hadn’t been targeted by the Hydra, and afterward, she was under the strict protection and surveillance of the Security Department… So, the only possibility was that the Hydra had seized the opportunity to gather relevant information at the time of the injury.

But could a mutated organism perfectly simulate a human body?

What was the logic behind that?

Cheng Ming began to doubt her knowledge base. She spent several nights catching up on information in the database, even sending a message to Qu Ying, asking if she had the ability to change faces… She wasn’t consciously treating her friend as an experimental subject.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t received a reply yet.

She felt that when it came to changing body shape, mollusks should be more reliable than cnidarians.

But even if the appearance could be disguised, replicating the body proportions one-to-one… did this truly comply with biological principles?

And why did it seek her out, yet do her absolutely no harm?

Cheng Ming sat at her workstation, flipping through electronic documents about detailed descriptions and the latest research reports on Cnidaria. The more she read, the more confused she became.

“I thought you would contact the Security Department,” Little Ming said.

The break room was enclosed and quiet, so its voice came as a sudden intrusion.

Her train of thought was broken. She looked up, perplexed. “Are you tired of living?”

If this news got out, and the Security Department decided to collect physiological data from all members, who could guarantee that it wouldn’t be discovered?

Besides, the monster hadn’t attacked her even when it had the perfect chance on the night it showed up. This suggested that its malice towards her was low. So, while she was alert, there was no urgent need to panic. After the initial shock and fear faded, what remained was more confusion.

“It’s just a little thought.” In a hidden corner invisible to the human eye, the parasite was active in her brain, her muscle pathways, her internal organs, and her fingertips, meticulously observing her every action and choice—

“Cheng Ming, what kind of person are you?”

It asked such a question.

It was solemn, yet full of incongruity and strangeness.

“What do you mean?” Cheng Ming paused.

“You’re a bit strange… You don’t allow me to interfere with others, you didn’t let me parasitize ‘Huang Chengcheng.’ You seem fundamentally kind. Now a monster is wearing a human shell, potentially moving freely here, potentially destroying the institute, potentially harming your species… Reporting to the Security Department is the optimal solution, yet you haven’t done it.”

Cheng Ming frowned tightly.

“What exactly are you trying to say?” A strange sense of annoyance flared up. She sneered, “You’re strange, too. You talk as if you have humanity.”

“Just curious,” Little Ming said.

It often borrowed her eyes to observe the outside world, but now it had retracted its gaze, turning inward to examine the body it inhabited, and the owner of that body.

Silence filled the room, broken only by breathing.

There was a standing makeup mirror on the table, and Cheng Ming saw her own eyes.

Intensely dark, the color provided by the iris, like a lake rich with water grass—clear and transparent above, but harboring unknown life below. Another pair of eyes perfectly overlapped, quietly staring at her.

“Then what kind of person do you think I am?” She grew calm, her voice dropping to a surprisingly light, almost eerie whisper.

“You are very skilled at pretense,” the fish-fungus clearly didn’t understand tact. “In reality, you don’t care about their lives. You just want to become the person Cheng Ran wanted you to be—correction, you just want to become the person you think Cheng Ran wanted you to be.”

Each word was more grating than the last.

Humans need to be tactful; it didn’t. It didn’t even have a reason to provoke Cheng Ming; it was merely stating the facts as it saw them. This kind of brutal honesty was sharper than any blade.

But the resulting sting might not have been caused by the blade itself.

There was already a wound there, stitched up and whitewashed, and she had gotten used to ignoring it, gradually convincing even herself that it was flawless. Until it was brutally torn open, laid bare under the harsh white light, exposing all the mess within.

The first entity to tear her open so clearly was, surprisingly, this parasite.

“Are you saying this to prove you’re good at thinking? Do you need me to praise you?”

Cheng Ming showed signs of being truly angered. Her facial features softened, her eyes were expressionless and cold. She returned the previous sarcasm to it.

They faced each other through the reflection. The longer they looked, the stranger the person in the mirror became.

The silver surface seemed to become a tunnel. A monster with bared claws would tear through the skin, rip open the heart and liver, and crawl out.

And that monster, who knew if it was the parasite or herself.

After a long time, Little Ming spoke again. “Your expression is terrifying right now, do you know that?”

“Tsk.” Cheng Ming laughed. “You understand me so well. Do you know what I’m thinking right now?”

“You want to kill me… or at least hit me,” it stated bluntly. “You wanted to anyway.”

Cheng Ming leaned back, the curve of her mouth lessening.

“You’re right. But it’s nothing. Humans are organisms, and organism populations always need selfish genes,” she admitted its analysis. “That’s why education, discipline, and law all exist.”

“These things don’t naturally exist in nature.”

“Yes, but you’re living dependent on a human, and I’m living dependent on human society,” Cheng Ming stared unblinkingly. “Does demeaning me give you pleasure?”

She was initially angry, but now she found it interesting. A parasite that only knew how to urge her to find food when hungry suddenly began to think, pondering complex issues just like a human.

As she was influenced by it, she was also influencing it.

Little Ming explained, “I am expressing my joy.”

“Joy about what?”

“Joy that you are like me,” it said the words so easily, as naturally as a friend discussing the weather. “Joy that only I know that you are like me.”

Strip away the external, hypocritical things, and we are no different.

And there will never be a third person to understand the commonality between you and me.

I am elated because of this.

That was its thought.

Sudden, pure, and unrestrained. It thought it, so it said it.

“…” Cheng Ming instinctively opened her mouth.

She seemed to want to deny something or ask a question, but eventually, she slowly pressed her lips together.

A silence fell.

In the ten-square-meter space, a strange, subtle atmosphere seemed to flow silently, like the sticky humidity of the plum rain season, quietly saturating every inch of air.

A few seconds later, she carefully chose her words and asked, “Have you been watching something weird behind my back?”

Little Ming countered, “Why do you say that?”

Cheng Ming’s verdict was: “It sounds a little disgusting.”

It was too abnormal. She had goosebumps on her arm.

Little Ming: “…”

…

At 8:30 PM, the remaining work was finally finished.

Cheng Ming was packing up, ready to leave, when Jiang Dexin suddenly arrived.

A knock on the door startled her.

Looking at her professor who pushed the door open, Cheng Ming was bewildered.

It wasn’t for any other reason… She had just sent the documents over. Was she being asked to redo the work already?

“I knew you hadn’t left yet,” Jiang Dexin put on a strict, critical expression and patted her shoulder. “Little Cheng, don’t overdo it. When it’s time to get off work, go get off work. When it’s time to rest, go rest.”

“Huh?” Cheng Ming was stunned.

She was slightly exasperated after realizing what was happening.

Could staying two extra nights be that easily caught?

Professor Jiang said with exasperation, “Do you remember that your last fungal infection was because you stayed up until two or three in the morning like this? Lack of sleep weakens your immune system. In our line of work, your body is your capital!”

“I know,” Cheng Ming obediently admitted her fault, feeling like she was back in her student days, with nothing to do but nod. The only difference was that she stubbornly defended herself with a sentence, “It wasn’t that late! Twelve o’clock at most…”

“The surveillance caught you! The Security Station people thought there was a thief and called me to verify. It was you.” Jiang Dexin was amused by her stubbornness and patted her shoulder harder. “The Level 3 alert hasn’t been lifted. You’re too brave. At least think about safety.”

Hearing the word “surveillance,” Cheng Ming’s heart skipped a beat, and she was stunned. She had indeed gone down to the sub-level two storage room to feed Little Ming during this time. She wondered what detail she had overlooked.

Her thoughts drifted, and she continued to nod distractedly.

After nearly ten minutes of nagging, Jiang Dexin finally let her go.

Watching Cheng Ming’s figure heading downstairs, her head bowed in thought, Jiang Dexin sighed with concern, shook her head, and took the elevator going up.

Stepping into the car, her expression became slightly more serious, and she made a phone call.

“Hello, I need to request the deletion of the surveillance footage from floor 114 between 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM this week.”

The elevators inside the institute were equipped with signal boosters, so communication was uninterrupted.

“Hello, what is the clearance level for this instruction?”

“The clearance of a Research Team Leader is not enough?” Jiang Dexin smiled and asked in return, her tone gentle.

“I apologize, Team Leader Jiang,” the staff member on the other end said awkwardly. “This…”

“Then use the clearance of the 299th floor.”

After hanging up the phone, the veteran researcher who had worked at the biological institute for over twenty years sighed again, staring at the gray phone screen.

She recalled the woman’s words, “Don’t be too restrictive” and “Don’t spoil her too much”… This balance was truly difficult to grasp.

And it wasn’t the first or second time the other party had given contradictory instructions.

She seemed to place great importance on Cheng Ming, intending to cultivate her, yet she also seemed very wary of her.

Cheng Ming’s original intent was to join the Animal Team. Jiang Dexin understood why—Cheng Ran was once the team leader for animal research. She was still brooding over the accident five years ago and couldn’t accept that her parents had simply vanished.

Jiang Dexin had considered intervening, partly out of friendship with Cheng Ran, wanting to look out for Cheng Ming, and partly because she genuinely wanted to train a suitable successor.

But before she could act, the 299th floor gave instructions first.

She was told to recruit Cheng Ming into the Fungi Team and keep her close.

“Don’t be too restrictive,” so Jiang Dexin had turned a blind eye to many of Cheng Ming’s small actions. When she discovered the girl occasionally sneaking into the institute building late at night, she also proactively managed the situation, destroying the inadvertently recorded surveillance footage for her, even though she didn’t know exactly what the girl was trying to do.

The lower floors were easy.

But this time, it involved the hundredth floor and required a higher clearance level.

What she didn’t quite understand was the second part of the instruction—”If it affects the experiment’s progress, you don’t need to protect her.”

What kind of situation would allow a research assistant to affect the experiment’s progress?

The elevator was about to reach its destination. She thought for a moment and dialed the number at the very top of her contacts list.

The prolonged busy signal rang several times. The elevator door had already opened.

She raised her hand and pressed the close button, standing in the newly sealed metal space until the call connected.

“Madam Chu,” Jiang Dexin spoke very politely. “I need your clearance to approve an instruction.”

“What has she done now?”

As if she had expected it, the voice on the other end was elegant and intellectual, with a unique, seasoned charm, and a very light tone.

Jiang Dexin’s expression showed a hint of helplessness. She was concise: “She entered the Cultivation Room outside of work hours.”

…

Leaving the building, Cheng Ming walked toward the shuttle stop.

The deterrent effect of the Level 3 alert was strong. There were basically no people along the way, only scattered transport vehicles still busy.

The color of the streetlights had changed, too. She had glanced at them—they had installed special filters to change the light waves. The Security Department had gone to great lengths to make it impossible for the transparent organisms to hide and to end the unrest as quickly as possible.

After the heavy snow, the weather turned cold. The generally mild coastal area finally felt the chill of winter.

She tucked her hands into her pockets, walking and thinking.

Jiang Dexin’s words were still ringing in her ears. As the cold night wind blew, her mind gradually cleared.

That’s not right.

Impossible…

How could she have been caught on surveillance at two or three in the morning?

Even on the night she sneaked down to the storage room, she had left before one o’clock.

Fine threads of wind seeped from the gaps between the tall buildings. The night seemed even colder. The insulation provided by the fungal threads was clearly insufficient, and the cold air seeped through her skin and into her head.

She should have stepped onto the shuttle, but she suddenly stopped.

Little Ming urged her in her mind, but her ear canals felt waterlogged, and the nerve center processing external stimuli seemed frozen. She couldn’t process any other information for a moment.

So, the reality was that during that time slot, someone else was moving around the institute.

And that person—or rather, that “thing” that might not even be a person—looked like her?