Volume 15 Gray Fog Forest Chapter 774 Second Recording
There was a minute-long silence and the recording ended.
After listening to the recording, Ke Lan fell into deep thought, and Mo Jue seemed to want to say something, but seeing Ke Lan's expression, he could only swallow the words that were already in his throat.
Judging from the conversation between Heruni and other officers and soldiers on the ship, they should have been eroded by the "forbidden knowledge". As they studied and analyzed this knowledge, the degree of erosion continued to deepen, and finally...
The progress of erosion varies from person to person. For example, Jack Garcia, who stayed behind on the battleship, was a person with relatively weak resistance. After just a few glances at people who had mutated due to erosion, he himself mutated as well. Then, the "progress bar" soared all the way and was about to reach the limit of over-erosion.
The captain of the Shaojiang modified frigate, Hruni Yang, was obviously a man with extraordinary resistance. Just as the ambiguous voice said - Hruni was the one who had been exposed to the most "forbidden knowledge", but he was the one who was least affected by the erosion and it took him a full year to turn into a wreck.
But there was one question that puzzled Ke Lan: neither Heruni Yang nor the other battleship crew members were symbiotes and could not understand the writing of the Alpha civilization... So what on earth did they find in the Gray Mist Forest that caused such severe corrosion to all of them?
What is that "desperate reality" they mentioned, "something that is enough to destroy the order of human society and the Ark overnight"?
Is this the secret that Mo Jue's father has been pursuing?
Ke Lan felt that he knew enough "forbidden knowledge". According to the Undead Crew, his own erosion had reached a very dangerous level. But even so, his body still showed no obvious signs of mutation... And the people on the "Shaojiang Kai" frigate were undoubtedly more eroded than Ke Lan.
Ke Lan took a deep breath, said nothing in the end, and silently clicked on the second recording file.
"Recording file 01001026, recording time: unknown."
"Captain! Little Jack is dying!" A sudden shout was heard, followed by the high-frequency tapping sound of boots on the metal floor.
From the sound of footsteps, it can be determined that there are three people. They are walking very fast. One of them has a staggering pace and his breathing seems unstable .
The three of them walked quickly for about two minutes, passing through four automatic hatches, and finally stopped in a place filled with "beeping" sounds.
Ke Lan knew that this place should be the medical room on the "Shaojiang Modified" ship. Those instruments that kept making "beeping" sounds were used to monitor the vital signs of the wounded and sick.
"Doctor Liu, how is little Jack doing?" Heruni asked as soon as he came up.
"Look for yourself." This was a female voice that sounded somewhat mature. According to the crew list of the "Shaojiang modified" frigate in the archives, there were a total of eight military doctors on board, and only one of them was a female named Liu Yi. She should have been 37 years old when the "Shaojiang modified" frigate crashed. She had the rank of major and held a Class B medical license, which made her a rare senior talent in the fleet.
Generally, doctors of this level would not go to the front line. It would be the best that a ship's military doctor could get a Class C license, and a Class B physician is qualified to be the director of a department in a hospital in the rear. Sending such an elite to a frigate as a military doctor is inevitably a bit of a waste of talent.
However, this also shows from the side how much importance the undead crew took this mission back then.
Accompanied by the peculiar friction sound of the blackout window rising, Ke Lan heard someone gasp.
"How could it become like this?" The voice that called out to Hruni at the beginning whispered, "Obviously... when I came to see him this morning, he could still barely talk to me... Now, why is it that now..."
"It's... no longer in human form." The vague voice that appeared in the first recording continued, "I know this 'virus' can cause the human body to mutate, but in little Jack... the mutation speed seems to be particularly fast."
These conversations made Ke Lan, who could only listen to the recordings but not see the images, feel itchy. He directly pressed the pause button and asked the AI of the central control computer: "The recording equipment on the Shaojiang modified frigate can't only record audio, right? What about the video? What about the photos? What about the holographic image clips like the previous combat records? Could it be that all these things are damaged and nothing is left?"
"The data was not destroyed, but was deleted manually," the AI replied.
“Who deleted it?!”
"Captain of this ship is Heruni Yang." said the AI. Although the AI of the "Shaojiang Kai" determined that Heruni Yang had been "contaminated", the AI would not lock Heruni's authority on its own initiative if it did not receive a response after sending a report to the superior command organization. Even if Heruni had turned into a monster, he still had control over the "Shaojiang Kai" frigate.
There is only one situation in which the AI would disobey the captain's orders on its own will without receiving instructions from a higher-level authority - Khruni orders the Shaojiang Kai frigate to attack troops, buildings or facilities identified as friendly.
In that case, Hruni will be identified as a "mutineer" by the AI. Not only will all control rights be taken away from him, but the AI will also use the ship's security measures to restrict the freedom of Hruni and others. This restricted state will not be lifted until the fleet commander or the Ark issues the final processing instructions.
As for the fact that Heruni Yang deleted all the photos and video files after the battleship crashed... this is completely within the normal power of the captain and will not be judged as "rebellion" by the AI at all.
The purpose of Hruni doing this was obviously to prevent people who later entered the Gray Mist Forest and found the wreckage of the "Shaojiang Kai" battleship from directly contacting the "forbidden knowledge"... But he did not delete all the records, but instead left these recording files...
Is this a warning from him?
Ke Lan pressed the "Continue Play" button.
"This mutation rate cannot be explained by biology or medicine. It's not just Garcia's mutation, it's the same for all of us." Liu Yi's words revealed a sense of powerlessness. "In the past six hours, Jack Garcia didn't take any food. I only gave him the minimum amount of water and electrolytes... But now, look at that huge growth... If the main components of this thing are protein and fat, then not to mention that biology and medicine can't explain this situation... Even the law of conservation of matter in a narrow sense is broken."
"From the perspective of volume... this thing is at least three times the size of Jack's original body..." the unclear voice said, "Even if the filling inside is all water... all the water in Jack's body combined wouldn't have this much. These augmentations seem to have appeared out of thin air..."
"Could it be that it is moisture absorbed from the surrounding environment?" Heruni asked in a deep voice.
"This ward is completely closed. I strictly control the amount of water supplied to Garcia... In six hours, I gave him a total of 1,500 milliliters of electrolyte solution through intravenous drip. During this period, he urinated twice, with a total of 502 milliliters. All the urine was collected into a special container through a catheter, and he had no way of touching it." Liu Yi said.
"No... I mean, in the environment, after all, there is moisture in the air," said Hruni.
"The humidity in the ward has not changed at all compared to six hours ago." Liu Yi retorted, "Excuse me, Captain, if you want to interpret the changes in Garcia's body in a scientific way, I'm afraid you will be disappointed."
"Science... Compared to Alpha Civilization, our human science is just like a child playing house, childish and ridiculous. These things can definitely be explained by science, but this science is not the science of human civilization." Heruni said, and suddenly sighed, "What I am most worried about now... is time."
"Captain, your physical condition is still very optimistic... at least better than ours. Conservatively speaking, it will take at least two to three years for your body to deteriorate to the level that Garcia is in now." Liu Yi said.
She estimated that if Heruni could not receive "effective treatment", he could hold on for two to three years, but in fact, Heruni only lasted one year before he turned into an eroded corpse. As to whether Liu Yi's estimate was wrong, or Heruni later discovered something that caused the erosion process to suddenly accelerate, Ke Lan could not find the answer to this question yet.
"No, I'm not talking about the time I have left, but about humanity." Hruni emphasized, "Those people above clearly know all this, but they just want to cover up the facts... They only pursue temporary stability, but never consider what will happen in the future."
“Isn’t this normal? Those people in the United Parliament Group now are just a group of politicians chasing after interests. Even if they can be re-elected, their term of office will only be a few decades at most…When that day really comes, let alone themselves, even their descendants will probably be reduced to ashes. There is a proverb in the old era that is used to describe this attitude, which is ‘After I die, I don’t care about the flood’…These people only care about their own support rate during their term of office, and they dare not face any risks.” The unclear voice spoke a long paragraph in one breath, and then gasped violently. It was obvious that this was very strenuous for him.
From this passage, Ke Lan could be sure of one thing, that at least Heruni and the others did not know about the existence of the undead crew. They had always thought that this mission was assigned to them by the United Parliament Group, and the people who wanted to cover up those secrets and the truth were also the members of the United Parliament Group.
Just as Ke Lan was waiting for Heruni's response, a loud "bang" was heard suddenly, scaring Mo Jue who was standing beside him so much that he pulled out the pistol from his waist and looked around nervously.
"It's the voice in the recording." Ke Lan said to her, while making a gesture to keep quiet.
It seemed that something unexpected had happened at that time. Ke Lan couldn't help but prick up her ears to capture every detail in the recording as much as possible.
“Bang! Bang!”
There were two more loud noises. Judging from the timbre, these should be the unique dull sounds of flesh hitting tempered glass... This made Ke Lan suddenly think of the "Jack Garcia" who was locked in the closed ward.
His degree of erosion should be the most serious among the crew members, that is, the one who stopped his vital activities after only forty-one hours - judging from the current movement, he should have been completely transformed into the monster called "Erosion Corpse".
Then there was the sound of metal colliding and bolts being pulled, and then Liu Yi shouted loudly: "Don't shoot! The observation window of the closed ward is very thick and all bulletproof glass. You can't shoot through it, and it can't escape from inside!"
"He...what's his current condition?" a young-sounding male voice asked, his voice trembling a little. "Doctor Liu... weren't Garcia's vital signs very weak before? You said he could die of organ failure at any time...but why did he suddenly jump up from the bed now...Is this the legendary last gasp?"
"I don't know." Liu Yi's answer was brief. "But all of you step back and don't provoke it. I'll try to inject a sedative into it first to see if I can calm it down."
During their conversation, the "bang bang" sound of glass hitting never stopped, and instead tended to become more intense.
In the dozens of seconds that followed, no one spoke, only the increasingly frequent banging sounds and the sound of fingers tapping on the keyboard.
Ke Lan waited until the forty-fifth second before Liu Yi's voice rang out again: "It's no use. I tried all the sedatives on the ship, and the dosage has been increased to ten times the maximum value that the current surface area can withstand, but the medicine has no effect on it at all..."
"The glass of the observation window is about to be broken by it..." Heruni said slowly.
