Volume 1 Glacial Relics Chapter 5 Parasitism
Hearing this conclusion, everyone couldn't help but feel their scalps tingling... At this moment, Ke Lan seemed to catch a glimpse of something moving out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head quickly, and his sight happened to meet the relief on the inside of the circular gate.
Unlike the patterned relief on the outside, the relief on the inside of the gate is composed of circles of neatly arranged characters. This is the writing used by the Alpha civilization. Humans have begun to study its meaning since the first day they discovered it, but to this day, there has been no progress.
The writing of the Alpha Civilization can be described as "weird". It does not conform to any language logic known to humans today. It does not have the concept of words and sentences, and there is no sign of any connection between characters. They are like graffiti drawn by a child, without meaning or pattern...
But it can undoubtedly be read, it's just that humans have not yet found the right way to do it.
In a trance, Ke Lan felt that these characters seemed to be slowly wriggling. They broke free from the shackles of the metal and began to gradually become distorted... No, it was not just the characters themselves that were distorted, but the entire tunnel began to flip and deform. The scene in his field of vision was like a drop of thick ink falling into clear water. The turbid black mist spread out and quickly swallowed him up.
Faintly, Ke Lan seemed to see a high platform, on which was placed a huge sarcophagus. There were also a lot of Alpha characters on the sarcophagus, but the specific details could not be seen clearly.
Under the platform, there was a hellish scene—countless pieces of meat in strange shapes were entangled and squeezed together. They struggled and made sharp screams of pain. Some pieces of meat tried hard to climb up the platform, but none of them succeeded. They fell down, broke into pieces, and were quickly eaten by their own kind...
Ke Lan felt a splitting headache, he squatted on the ground holding his head - the screams of those pieces of meat didn't seem to come from the outside, but from deep in his brain. They became louder and louder, and the frequency was high enough to drive people crazy. Ke Lan felt that he was going crazy. If he held on for another second, his brain would explode and turn into part of those pieces of meat...
"Hey...are you okay?"
A big hand patted his shoulder, and suddenly, the platform disappeared, the sarcophagus disappeared, and the screaming pieces of flesh also disappeared. Ke Lan found himself back in the tunnel, and the others were looking at him with a look of surprise and doubt.
"Uh...it's okay, I was just...a little distracted." Ke Lan hesitated for a moment, but ultimately did not tell anyone about the illusion he had seen - for some reason, his subconscious kept telling him that it would be best .
Perhaps it was really just an illusion. The platform, the sarcophagus and those pieces of meat, these things soon became just a vague outline. Ke Lan wanted to recall, but found that he could not remember anything.
"You don't look like you're distracted. You were holding your head with a distorted expression and looked in pain." Ivan shook his head and said seriously.
"Could it be the sequelae of the previous head collision?" Layton asked, "Why don't you let Ivan help you check it out?"
"No, I'm fine now."
"Really?... Huh? I didn't notice before that there is a relief behind this gate! It's the text of the Alpha civilization!" The hound's expression suddenly became excited, and he walked forward quickly. Ke Lan was about to stop him, but found that the other party didn't show any abnormality at all, and had already taken out a camera from his backpack to take pictures.
Could it be that the hallucination just now had nothing to do with these words? Ke Lan glanced carefully, and then glanced again... Nothing happened. The words were just simple reliefs, without any movement or deformation, not to mention any black fog or strange hallucinations.
"Click! Click!" The Hound took dozens of photos in a row, not missing even the corners and edges - on the Ark's official recycling price list, documentary relics have always been very expensive, and even photos or rubbings can still be exchanged for a large number of credit points.
…
After taking the photos, everyone continued to walk into the passage. The passage was very long and deep, but fortunately there were no mechanisms or traps. The journey was calm and there were no forks in the road, so there was no worry about making a choice.
"You said... that advance team's, uh, I mean that corpse, or the thing that controlled the corpse, why did it come here? This passage only leads to the cave where we crashed. Does it want to escape? Escape from the ruins?" Leighton asked in a low voice.
"I don't know, but I didn't find any foreign objects during the autopsy. The thing has obviously left," Ivan replied.
"I don't think so," Ke Lan pondered for a few seconds and took over the conversation. "If that thing needs to control the corpse to move, it proves that its own movement ability is extremely limited, or it is like a parasite and cannot survive after leaving the host. This means that after leaving the corpse, it can't go too far. If it wants to escape from this relic, it will definitely not abandon the old host before finding a new host."
"A new host..." Ivan and Ke Lan looked at each other, and each saw a trace of horror in the other's eyes. Ivan stopped immediately and shouted in a low voice, "Wait a minute, everyone check your protective clothing to see if there is any damage! Don't even let go of the soles of your shoes!"
As soon as she finished speaking, Jiang Lian, who was originally at the end of the team, turned around and ran towards the gate. After running a few steps, she fell to the ground, using her hands and feet to crawl in an extremely strange and twisted posture!
She crawled very fast, and in a blink of an eye she had opened up a distance of more than 30 meters between herself and the others.
"Bang! Bang!" Deafening gunshots rang out. Ivan was seen holding a rough-looking large-caliber pistol in both hands. He fired several shots and knocked Jiang Lian to the ground!
"What are you doing?!" The hound, who hadn't reacted yet, turned around and yelled, "What the hell is going on? Why did that woman suddenly become like a dog? And why did you shoot her?!"
"Hurry! She's been infected! That thing should still be in her body!" Ivan didn't care about the hound's attitude, but quickly replaced the magazine of his pistol and ran towards Jiang Lian who was lying on the ground.
"Parasit? When?"
"Just now, when Ivan was dissecting the body, we didn't notice it." Ke Lan explained for Ivan. He also pulled out a pistol and walked up quickly.
Jiang Lian was lying face down on the ground, her limbs were still twitching slightly, and two blood holes the size of bowls on her back completely penetrated her thin body. Deep red blood was gradually spreading under her body, and it was obvious that she was dead.
"Can't you just kick your legs?" Ke Lan said with some reluctance.
"That level of parasitism will completely destroy the brain. She won't survive even if we hit her legs, and we might even get counterattacked by her... Be careful, don't get ambushed by that thing."
Several hunters formed a circle and surrounded the dying Jiang Lian in the middle.
"Is that thing still in her head?" Leighton asked uncertainly.
Ivan nodded: "It should be."
"Then let's just blow her head off? Take that damn thing with it?" As he spoke, Leighton had already raised the machine gun and aimed it at Jiang Lian's head.
"No, we must figure out what that thing is, otherwise next time we encounter it, we will still have no way to counter it." Ke Lan said.
"Ke Lan is right. I don't want to die unclearly like this woman." The Hound took out a dagger and took a step forward - at this moment, a black shadow suddenly emerged from the pool of blood, jumped up from the ground at an alarming speed, and pounced towards the Hound's face!
"Swish!" The knife flashed, and the black shadow was about to pounce on the hound's mask when it suddenly broke into two pieces, curled up into a ball, and fell on the instep of his feet.
Everyone could then see clearly that the black shadow was a kind of arthropod that they had never seen before. It looked a bit like a kind of insect called centipede on Earth in the old era, but compared to the centipede, this thing had a more slender body and no tentacles at the front of its body. Instead, it had a pair of sharp mouthparts.
"Could it be this kind of insect that controls the corpse?" Ke Lan was a little surprised. The human brain is a very sophisticated and complex organ. Let's not talk about whether this small insect has a brain. Even if it does, judging from its size, its brain capacity will not even be one ten-thousandth of that of humans. How can it control humans?
This kind of plot is not uncommon in horror movies and novels, but from a scientific point of view, this kind of thing is extremely absurd.
"This thing is not a bug, it is not a natural creature at all." Ivan had already picked up the body of the creature with tweezers and shone a flashlight on it. A familiar metallic luster flashed on it.
"Shit!" Seeing this luster, the Hound couldn't help but spit out a curse word, "It's Nino alloy! This thing is made of Nino alloy?!"
Everyone couldn't help but take a second look at Asano Akira who had just made the move. With the strength of the Nino alloy, even if Ivan had blown Jiang Lian's head off directly, the bullet wouldn't necessarily be able to hurt this thing, but this Asano Akira had actually cut it in two with ease...
"My knife is also made of this metal." As if sensing everyone's gaze, Asano Akira said calmly, holding the scabbard.
"I'm sorry, brother. I was wrong about you before . I apologize to you." The Hound's face was a little pale. He bowed slightly to Asano Akira - when the latter drew his knife just now, no one could see his movements clearly, which meant that if Asano Akira wanted to kill someone, no one present would have the chance to resist.
What's more, he is blind...
"It's okay, I don't mind...but I really want to know, what exactly is that thing?"
