After Being Parasiticized By A Monster - Chapter 25
Chapter 25: “Aren’t you my companion?”
Well, so much for just staying up late; she was now pulling an all-nighter.
Cheng Ming brought a blanket to her workstation and slept directly in the break room for the first half of the night.
She was startled awake by her alarm just after midnight. Her head felt like a mountain was pressing down on her neck. Groggily, she grabbed her phone. In that brief second, her mind was on a loop: “Who am I, where am I, what am I doing, do I really have to suffer like this…”
“If you keep pushing yourself like this, you might suddenly collapse,” her symbiotic partner was also awakened, uttering in a weak, listless tone.
Two consecutive days of fruitless searching had completely destroyed her biological clock.
Cheng Ming threw off the blanket and stood up. She pressed a wet wipe to her forehead, forcing herself to be alert.
There was no other way.
Looking at her shiny, pitch-black “hair” and increasingly moist skin… Since she couldn’t seek outside help, she had to investigate herself.
She could only think of one possibility.
The monster, which had impersonated Huang Chengcheng and sought her out that night, was collecting her characteristic data to facilitate its disguise. Although she couldn’t figure out how it did it—she had deliberately avoided any contact with it; how could it manage with just visual observation, without any high-tech scanning equipment?
The most unique thing about her was that she controlled the Cultivation Room access.
The monster was after the Surf-Riding Florescent Algae (Florescent Algae is used in the original text, likely a mistake for algae).
She had already thoroughly checked the Cultivation Room and found no immediate signs of disturbance. She then spent a great deal of time sifting through the enormous volume of daily system logs to find a few pieces of abnormal data.
The process of sifting through the evidence was like a factual ghost story.
She discovered “it” had already been here twice.
It was very cautious.
It spent no more than ten minutes each time and was stopped by different security checkpoints.
It was definitely a highly intelligent organism, which did not fit the characteristics of a Medium-Risk (MR) Hydra.
As it stood, it was only missing the final access password.
It would definitely come back.
Her entire career was at stake; she couldn’t afford a mistake.
Cheng Ming adjusted her mental state, brought a cup of tea into the operations room, and sat down at the computer to review the day’s Cultivation Room values, confirming everything was working normally.
To avoid unnecessary attention, she didn’t turn on the lights. The room was pitch black, illuminated only by the faint glow of the screen.
It was not easy to stay awake in the dead of night.
Fortunately, she had a parasitic entity to keep her company and alleviate the boredom.
“The main signs before sudden collapse include palpitations, chest tightness, shortness of breath, dizziness… manifested in the cardiovascular system, respiratory system, and nervous system…”
Little Ming coiled around her phone, rambling off knowledge it had clearly searched for somewhere, sounding utterly emotionless like a student reciting a lesson.
“Are you done?”
Consequently, Cheng Ming couldn’t take it after just ten minutes. She slapped away the disruptive fungal threads and told it to shut up.
The clock quietly slid past 2:30 AM.
The institute’s water and electricity were supplied 24/7. Cheng Ming got up to steep a tea bag for the second time, her mind feeling much less sharp.
She thought she was in for another night of waiting in vain.
However, when she returned with the hot cup of tea, she blinked and noticed a subtle change on the screen.
A small line of text popped up in the corner—”Facial recognition passed.”
A second line, “Fingerprint recognition passed.”
A third line, “Voice print recognition passed.”
…
The final line, “Access granted.”
She watched wide-eyed as the system automatically refreshed with a series of alerts that she would normally never witness in real-time, as if it had been infected by a virus.
The hot water in her hand seemed to lose its heat.
Her fingertips were freezing.
It was here.
…
Thud-thud.
In a secluded, long-abandoned area beneath the biological experiment zone, two hollow knocks echoed, reverberating far down the corridor.
“Team Leader—” Han Xuhua knocked and, after confirming she was in the right place, entered the designated room. “Have the instructions from above come down yet?”
The floors and walls had unremovable brown stains. Walking through, she felt the atmosphere was even more eerie and oppressive than a morgue.
The room had been rearranged—there was a table, chairs, and a reception sofa—it seemed intended to be an ordinary office but was ultimately abandoned and ended up as a storage area.
Young people, however, never lacked vitality and were good at imagining things. She didn’t think much of it. Seeing her team leader now made her excited. Any hint of strangeness was forgotten, replaced only by anticipation.
The remains of the captured mutant organism had been dissected, isolated, and stored. Who would have thought that even without the Hydra, the corpse could mutate and vanish so mysteriously?
They had thoroughly checked the morgue but found no significant breakthroughs. The main suspicion was that the Hydra had undergone budding reproduction, leaving a bud inside the body before dying to conceal its actions.
It was a new type of problem, a new hassle.
They needed further instructions from above on how to proceed.
“Yes.” Yan Li handed over a heavy helmet. “Sit down and put this on.”
Obeying orders was a basic quality of a soldier.
Han Xuhua didn’t hesitate. She took it, put it on properly, and asked, “Why aren’t the others here yet? Did you forget to send the message, Team Leader?”
Yan Li said, “They’re not needed.”
The answer was very abrupt. Han Xuhua looked up. Through the sealed visor, she realized her team leader’s eyes looked a little strange.
A chill ran down her spine. She opened her mouth to ask but her throat was blocked. Her muscles slackened. Her vocal system was out of her control, and she couldn’t speak.
Yan Li looked at her and said, “Just take a nap.”
Soon, sight, hearing, smell… all five senses were lost.
Under the effect of the hypnotic gas released by the helmet, her body went limp, sinking into the sofa chair, losing consciousness.
The door closed and did not open again.
Yan Li glanced down at her wrist. The scheduled time had passed.
A slight frown was starting to appear on her brow when a cheerful female voice approached from behind—
“Hello, you must be Team Leader Yan Li.”
Turning around, a girl who looked barely an adult stood behind her, appearing like a ghost. She smiled and extended her hand.
She was wearing a long sweater and wide-leg pants. Her collar was high up to her chin, and the pant legs reached down to her insteps. She was completely covered, showing no specific physical features.
Her wrist skin was pale and thin. Faint blue veins were clearly visible underneath, suggesting malnutrition. But looking at her face, her cheeks were full, plump, and rosy, suggesting she was very well-fed.
“MM221?” Yan Li confirmed.
“Don’t call me that, it sounds unpleasant.”
She smiled, revealing dimples at the corners of her mouth, looking utterly sweet, like a girl raised in a honey pot. Her voice was like a playful plea. “Mommy gave me a name. It’s—Little Shell.”
Based on her appearance alone, no one would guess this was another secret weapon of the Security Department.
Yan Li shook her hand.
But she remained cautious, never removing her glove.
She was a little puzzled: “Mommy?”
As she was about to withdraw her hand, she paused, noticing a small section of the girl’s arm exposed as her sleeve slightly moved up. There seemed to be fish scales on her skin.
“She’s my experimenter,” the girl called “Little Shell” said, then turned around nonchalantly and walked over to Han Xuhua.
“Is this her?” She took Han Xuhua’s hand and squeezed it.
Feeling for the vein, she skillfully drew out a syringe and pierced the skin.
After drawing a small amount of fresh bl00d, she looked up, pressed the plunger, and dropped it into her mouth.
Yan Li watched the scene unfold with no change in her expression.
But adhering to the principle of scientific inquiry, she asked, “Must it be bl00d?”
MM221 had extremely high clearance for identity confidentiality.
Not to mention Han Xuhua, a newcomer; even other team members didn’t have the clearance. Therefore, these actions could only take place while Han Xuhua was unconscious, and the real Han Xuhua would have to temporarily disappear during the subsequent mission.
The second reason was also because she was a newcomer.
On the one hand, her age and build matched. She was young and slender. Dressed, she was thin and slight, making her easy to impersonate. On the other hand, she wasn’t very familiar with the other team members, making her less likely to be exposed.
After about five or six minutes, Little Shell turned back.
Her figure seemed to have changed.
“No.”
The light overhead was dim. Her face seemed to be fusing, her features slowly adjusting. Her voice also subtly changed with each word she spoke, gradually becoming similar to Han Xuhua’s.
She smiled and said, “Any material carrying genetic information will do.”
…
Biological Institute, 113th floor.
The operations room system glaringly displayed alerts for negative pressure, liquid leakage, facility malfunction, and even abnormal health detection.
Inside the Cultivation Room, several containment boxes were cracked. One cultivation box had been completely shattered, and the culture medium was spilled all over the floor.
But because the institute’s construction materials were top-grade, the floor perfectly met the three criteria: smooth, non-slip, and non-permeable. As a result, the overflowing algae-fungus glowed, gliding gently across the floor, like a room full of overturned stars.
In this brilliant sea of stars, Cheng Ming apprehended the “little thief” who had stolen her identity and attempted to destroy the institute’s most critical essential resource.
Although she was slightly late—when she arrived, the entity was about to tamper with the culture medium supply pipe. The moment she realized its goal was to contaminate the algae-fungus, Cheng Ming quickly pressed the emergency exhaust fan button. The variable air volume system activated, and the internal pressure dropped.
The double airlock doors sealed immediately. The ventilation and purification systems were fully engaged, and the supply air dampers opened.
Machinery hummed on all sides. The Cultivation Room became a dangerous place, suitable for fungi but unsuitable for humans.
Pressure dropped by 10 Pa.
Breathing was becoming difficult.
Combined with the intense struggle just now, her bl00d oxygen was depleted. Her head was spinning, and she heard auditory hallucinations. Cheng Ming gasped for air, struggling to breathe the possibly contaminated air, her eyes fixed on the unknown organism beneath her. She felt like she was witnessing an unspeakable, terrifying scene—
She saw a familiar face.
Despite preparing herself psychologically, the reality of the moment was far more impactful than she had anticipated.
Seeing her own face on another, unfamiliar body was far more shocking than any disgusting or terrifying monster.
Furthermore, the body it had occupied and transformed was clearly near collapse. It was only managing to maintain the normal function of its upper physiological systems. The head was intact, but the lower localized tissues were already showing necrosis. A faint smell of decay hovered in the increasingly thin air.
Cheng Ming knelt on its back. She felt the bony frame was dry and sharp, but the skin and flesh were swollen, puffy, as if the abdominal cavity had already rotted into a mass of viscous fluid. A gentle poke further down might cause soft, foul-smelling internal organs to burst out.
Pressure dropped by 20 Pa.
“Why did you stop me?” It finally spoke.
It was still wearing the clothes it had stolen from her when it impersonated Huang Chengcheng. It turned its head 180 degrees, using her face and her voice. Its eyebrows were slightly furrowed, and its eyelids were slightly narrowed—an expression of confusion.
It seemed to be utterly bewildered.
But the question was so bizarre and absurd to Cheng Ming that it nearly made her laugh.
She gritted her teeth, panting, “If I don’t stop you, should I help you instead?”
Worried that she might accidentally cause it to burst, she slightly lessened the pressure.
“Aren’t I supposed to?” Now that its vocal organs were less restricted, its voice was smoother. It blinked. It even looked somewhat innocent and pitiful, gazing at her sincerely, with genuine confusion. “Aren’t you my companion?”
Companion…
Companion?
Companion again!
This time, that one sentence… Was it referring to her, or Little Ming?
Pressure dropped by 40 Pa.
Cheng Ming remained motionless, as if she had turned into a statue. Her breathing became heavier. She stared wide-eyed at it, afraid of missing any more information.
And the fungal threads, which had been off to the side, secretly scavenging the algae-fungus since the enemy was subdued, also stopped moving.
“You even gave me a bath,” the previous sentence had already exploded in her mind like a thunderclap, and now this even more bizarre sentence followed. “I remember your smell.”
What did it mean, she gave it a bath? At most, she had let it take a bath on its own…
Wait a minute.
Cheng Ming’s eyes slowly widened.
It was the transparent “sea urchin”—the planula larva, the juvenile form of the mutated Hydra—that had audaciously stolen her bathtub repeatedly?
So, it hadn’t harmed her all this time and considered her its “own kind”?
But how could a Hydra have the ability to change its form?
Under the illumination of the eerie blue fluorescence, everything was coated in a hallucinatory color. The light parts remained unclear, and the dark parts grew darker.
Cheng Ming looked at the face so close to her, the features identical to her own. Confusion and terror, like a dense web, intertwined in her heart.
Her hands were shaking.
Her whole body was trembling. The fungal threads that belatedly tried to comfort her were useless.
Little Ming was calling her, but she couldn’t hear it.
Pressure dropped by 80 Pa.
It was difficult to gasp for oxygen. Her headache worsened.
Her lungs desperately contracted and expanded in her chest, like a dying creature refusing to wither away.
The most critical thing now was not the principle behind its mimicry of humans.
She grasped something in a flash of realization.
The planula larva was transparent and could float in humid air for a long time without being discovered… The pendant was always worn close to her chest. She had discovered the secret of the red shell before bathing… To figure out the truth, she had taken leave from Jiang Dexin to go home. All that time, it had been quietly following her…
The various threads of information twisted into a long string.
Cheng Ming yanked out the pendant from beneath her collar, biting down on her words, not asking a question, but as if gnawing on the flesh of an enemy—
“Do. You. Know. This?”