Volume 11: Memetic Crisis Chapter 557 Living Armor
Ke Lan felt a bone-chilling chill running from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.
He thought the other party was just talking nonsense, but he didn't expect that what the other party said was true...
Ke Lan originally had a royal flush in his hand, but when he needed to use it, he turned over the cards and found that they had become "three of a kind".
Is it because his cognition has been distorted by "memes"? No, His power is far above "memes". "Memes" cannot interfere with the "Holy Word", just like the sacrificial ceremony cannot be interrupted.
That could only mean one thing - that "great god" was unwilling to lend his power to himself at this time.
Ke Lan hadn't even said the purpose and the price yet.
I don’t know why... Although the result is fatal, Ke Lan suddenly felt relieved... It was as if it would be a better thing if the "god" didn't respond to him.
The energy shield had become so transparent that it was almost imperceptible to the naked eye. The micro-fan that cooled the shield generator went on strike after making a hysterical buzzing sound... In a space with a temperature of more than one hundred degrees below zero, the air pump and metal heat pipes of the entire cooling device were actually melted, and bright red liquid metal overflowed from the gaps in the armor.
I have to say that the people in the equipment department spent a lot of money on this set of armor. If it was replaced with an ordinary small shield generator on the market, it would have exploded by now.
The shield generators manufactured by the Alpha Civilization were also divided into several grades. The one that Layton installed in his mechanical arm could only be considered a mid-to-low-grade shield generator. The top-level shield generator, even if it was a small one, was already priced on par with a battleship-class shield generator .
It was this price difference of dozens or even hundreds of times that bought Ke Lan just a few seconds.
Paying hundreds of times the price to buy these few seconds of time is not cost-effective at all...but if these few seconds can become the key to a battle, then no matter how expensive this thing is, it is worth it.
If the "Holy Word" can work, Ke Lan is indeed able to reverse the entire situation in these few seconds... But the premise is that this thing has to work! !
Just as the clone said, the "great god" might be watching here. Ke Lan is his chess piece on the chessboard, and the "Seraphim" formed after the fusion of the clone and Yinglong Egg is also a chess piece on the chessboard... When playing chess with the left hand and the right hand, the chess player will naturally not favor either side.
But is it true that He does not favor any side on the chessboard?
If there is no favoritism, then why can't Ke Lan interrupt the fusion ceremony of the clone and Yinglong Egg? !
"At least... I shouldn't be allowed to die here like this..." Ke Lan murmured.
As soon as he finished speaking, the roof of the hall exploded, and a beam of light that was countless times more condensed than the energy shield fell from the sky and directly enveloped the "Seraphim"!
The wings of the Seraph were retracted, and at the same time, the energy shield on Ke Lan disappeared.
"......???!" Ke Lan was stunned. He looked up and saw that the entire underground ice storage from the first to the fifth floor had been blown through. He could even see the dome above the West Second District...
"What... is going on?" Ke Lan looked at the pillar of light that imprisoned the "Seraphim" with some disbelief - he thought it was the power from the "Great God", but when he looked closely, he found that this pillar of light seemed to be formed after the energy shield was converged.
Is this... support from the Undead Crew?
They removed the energy shield covering the entire contaminated area and blasted it into the underground ice storage, trapping the "Seraph"!
"Hiss...hiss..." A burst of electric sound was heard in the communication channel - along with the disappearance of the large shield, the wireless communication channel that was originally unusable also returned to normal.
"Schroeder? Schroeder...Lin Qiming? What on earth is going on? Did you shut down the energy shield outside?"
However, the one who responded to Ke Lan was not Schroeder and Lin Qiming, but a strange voice.
The voice was very young, younger than Schroeder, Lin Qiming...even younger than Ke Lan, and sounded like a recent adult at most.
"Can you hear me? Lucky guy."
"Who are you?" Ke Lan asked subconsciously.
"You can call me 'Pan'."
"Pan?" Ke Lan's heart moved, and a male image with goat horns and hooves appeared in his mind. "You are... the Undead Crew, the fifteenth seat, 'Devil'?"
"Bingo!" Pan said happily. His personality seemed completely different from the other members of the Undead Crew. He was really like a big boy who had just grown up. "You're very smart. You guessed it right away. I thought you would spend more time."
"Besides the people in the Crisis Management Department, the only ones who can access this communication channel are you Undead Crew." Ke Lan said, "If possible, can you tell me what's going on?"
"As you can see." Pan's tone was very cheerful. "The crew didn't want the candidate for the 'Pope' to die in the underground ice storage, so they decided to provide you with a little help... It just so happened that there was a breakthrough in the interference device of the shield generator some time ago, so we decided to use this opportunity to test this new weapon."
The new weapon Pan mentioned was naturally the "energy shield" after it was gathered. If it weren't for the six wings of the Seraph trying their best to resist the ever-shrinking light curtain , the entire energy shield should have been transformed into a thin and solid beam of light.
It can be an unbreakable shield, and it can also become an indestructible spear.
"Are you going to kill it this way?"
"No... the energy shield alone cannot kill the Seraph. Its power comes from cognition. As long as it firmly believes that its energy will never be exhausted, it can continue to fight against this beam of light, or even tear it apart. As for us, the power of the energy shield has been stretched to its limit. In this state, the beam of light can only last for five minutes at most."
"Power comes from cognition... Do you mean 'meme'? If it firmly believes that it is invincible, then it is really invincible, right?" Ke Lan glanced at the "Seraphim" shrouded in the beam of light, "Isn't this cheat a bit outrageous?"
"There are limits to cognition ," Pan explained patiently to Ke Lan. "From a human perspective, the existence of 'memes' is indeed like an unreasonable plug-in. But if you expand your horizons, you will find that even plug-ins must abide by the rules... I think you should understand that writing a game plug-in is not something you can do by just typing a few lines of code."
"So...how do we kill this thing?" Ke Lan asked.
In five minutes, he had neither the time nor the interest to study "memes" or power cognition or the like. He just wanted to know how to get rid of this monster... He didn't know if the undead crew had any tricks up their sleeves, but if he wanted to get out of the underground ice storage alive, he had to kill the "Seraph".
"You have to do it." Pan said with a smile. Ke Lan could imagine him shrugging his shoulders with a relaxed look on his face. "Although the main body of the 'meme' has occurred many times, its origin has not changed - you can think of it as the two of you having the same 'source code'... Although the 'meme' is harmful and difficult to describe in words, it cannot work on you."
"It can't work on me? But I was almost killed by it just now."
"That's because your own strength is too weak. In terms of strength alone, you are even worse than the blind man you just drove away." Pan said.
"So what? Are you planning to perform a complete set of body strengthening surgery on me in these five minutes, or just airdrop a Gundam down for me?" Ke Lan asked back.
"I can give you the most direct 'power'..." Pan suddenly lowered his voice, "Hehe... What do you think? Doesn't this sound like the words that demons in myths and legends often use to seduce humans?"
"If there is a way to kill this guy, then don't waste your words." Ke Lan said, "One and a half minutes have passed. According to the time you said, this guy will break free in three and a half minutes."
"It's being deployed... Oh, and please step back a few steps to be careful not to hit your feet."
Ke Lan immediately stepped back several meters. Before he could ask what the other party had dropped, a metal barrel suddenly fell from the sky and hit him in front of him with a loud "bang".
"...Are you planning to smash me to death?" Ke Lan looked at the metal barrel. The barrel was no more than half a meter high and about thirty centimeters in diameter...If there was a weapon inside, then wouldn't the weapon be a little too small?
Even Asano Akira's sword couldn't fit into this metal barrel.
"Didn't I tell you to take two steps back? Can you blame me for this?" Pan complained, "Okay, open the presents quickly!"
"What... is in here?" Ke Lan took a step forward and found a biometric lock on the top of the metal barrel. He immediately pressed his palm on the scanning board, but suddenly felt a slight tingling sensation at the tip of his index finger, as if he had been stung by a small insect.
He raised his palm and saw a drop of his blood being "sucked" into the scanning board. Then, the two rows of red warning lights on both sides of the biometric lock suddenly turned green, and a hidden gap appeared in the middle of the barrel.
A lot of steaming yellowish viscous liquid flowed out from the gap. Before it reached the ground, it was frozen halfway and turned into an amber-like substance.
Ke Lan quickly recognized that what was flowing out of the metal barrel was the LCL liquid commonly used in medical life support cabins.
It is also commonly known as the "water of life".
This liquid is very similar to the amniotic fluid in the uterus. It can provide oxygen and nutrients to organisms immersed in it. Under the action of specific electric current, it can even reshape the missing limbs of the organism. It is hailed as "the greatest invention in the biomedical field of the new era", without a doubt.
Why is there LCL liquid in the metal barrel? Is there a living thing in it?
"It's a set of armor, a set of 'living armor' from the Alpha civilization." Pan replied.
"Living armor? ...Alive?" Ke Lan's movements stopped instantly, and he subconsciously wanted to pull his hand back and stay as far away from the things in the metal barrel as possible.
"It has 'activity' in the biological sense, but it is not an independent 'organism'. You can think of it as a xenograft organ that can be transplanted into the human body."
Transplanting foreign organs into the human body? This was not the first time Ke Lan had heard of this. In the wilderness, many crazy exiles would choose to transplant organs or limbs of indigenous creatures into their own bodies in order to gain powerful strength. However, the success rate of this kind of crazy transplant surgery was extremely low. Only less than half of the people could walk off the operating table alive, and among these less than half of the people, more than 90% would die of infection and rejection within just a few days.
Among one hundred people who receive xenotransplants, only one can survive for more than three months. But this lucky person will suffer from lifelong pain and torture. Whether it is worthwhile to exchange this price for a not-so-powerful power is a question that only those who have undergone the operation know.
It goes without saying that the research institute must have done some research on xenotransplantation, but the results are probably not very successful... Compared to the already very mature cyborg prosthetics technology, the organs of indigenous creatures are really not safe or stable at all.
"So, if I want to gain power, I have to transplant this 'living armor'... onto my body?" Ke Lan asked.
"What else?" Faintly, Ke Lan seemed to hear Pan chuckle, like the laughter of a devil seeing a human who couldn't resist temptation. "But I have to remind you that the process of wearing this living armor may not be very comfortable... Moreover, it will have an irreversible effect on your body... As for what the final result of this effect will be, I can't say for sure."
"The process of putting on this living armor may not be very comfortable... I'm afraid it will be very painful?" Ke Lan sighed, "As for the irreversible effects... what do they specifically mean?"
"It's hard to say. We have done several live experiments, but those 'volunteers' were too ordinary. No one could be successfully transplanted... So we don't know what will happen after you put it on." Pan paused, "Perhaps, you will turn into a monster."
"...Can I choose not to wear it?"
"Yes, you have every right to refuse." Pan Lili said, "But this is the only support we can provide you."
"If I refuse, do you have any other way to deal with the Seraph?"
"There's a backup plan."
"What is it?"
"Just launch the core module of the Ark along with the Earth's gene bank into space and start the second round of 'Great Drift'... I believe there must be a third planet in this universe that is suitable for human habitation." Pan's tone was very relaxed. If you ignore the content of his words, you can't tell that his plan is to abandon the Ark and the tens of millions of people on it.
"Running away, huh?"
"Yes, 'memes' are too unreasonable. With the existing means of mankind, there is no way to deal with them. Since we can't defeat them, of course we can only choose to run away and preserve the fire."
