Volume 15 Gray Fog Forest Chapter 775: The Corroded Mo Jue
Although Liu Yi said that it was impossible for Shi Hai to escape from the closed ward, within two seconds after Heruni finished speaking, there was a sound of glass breaking, followed by deafening gunshots...
The recording is over.
The contents of the following recordings were similar. Every once in a while, someone’s erosion level would suddenly reach a limit, turning into a corpse, and then being "dealt with" by Heruni and others.
Some people choose to commit suicide before they turn into monsters... For example, Dr. Liu Yi, when her physical condition began to deteriorate rapidly, she put the pistol into her mouth without hesitation, put the muzzle against her upper jaw, and pulled the trigger directly.
Her last words before she committed suicide were, "This mutation is not a disease. Medicine can do nothing about it. I can't even alleviate the pain of the 'patients'. All the collected data is meaningless..."
Then there was a dull gunshot, and the sound of a bullet piercing through flesh and brain matter, tearing open the skull.
Although there was no image in front of Ke Lan, he could still imagine the scene... dots of red and white objects splashed onto the ceiling, and the body that had been mutated beyond human form due to erosion fell to the ground with a bang, and the still warm blood quickly spread along the floor...
…
Besides Heruni, the last person to become an eroded corpse was Lao Zuo. When he was about to break through the critical point of erosion, he used his only glimmer of reason to ask Heruni to help him break free...
After helping Lao Zuo fulfill his "wish", Hruni's physical condition has become less optimistic. According to his own description, many parts of his body have undergone pathological changes. He can feel that his physical strength and power have increased a lot compared to before, but he often has blurred consciousness...
He often has nightmares, and the content of his dreams is always the vast starry sky.
Logically speaking, the starry sky should give people a feeling of beauty, mystery, and shocking... No matter what language and rhetoric people use to describe it, it should not be terrifying. But in Hruni's autobiography, the feeling that the starry sky gave him was real horror.
As time went by, Heruni was conscious less and less, and he often fell into a coma without warning... Moreover, he developed very serious symptoms of sleepwalking. He looked at himself wandering around in the surveillance video and always felt that he was not a human being, but a zombie or something like that.
Between half asleep and half awake, Heruni often heard a voice whispering to him... At first, he couldn't understand what those strange syllables meant, but as his body mutated more and more, he gradually began to understand the language.
It was at this moment that he was surprised to find that the voice that had been whispering in his ears and in his mind was speaking the language of the Alpha civilization.
What surprised him even more was that, without realizing it, he had mastered this language that the research institute had spent decades on but had not been able to decipher even a single letter or syllable.
However, what made Ke Lan a little depressed was that in the recording, Heruni did not mention a word about the content of these whispers.
Of course, it is also possible that he mentioned it, but later deleted this part of the recording... These whispers narrated in the Alpha language also belong to the category of "forbidden knowledge". Even if they are only narrated in the recording, they will increase the degree of erosion of the listener.
"I feel that the starry sky seems to be calling me..." Heruni murmured in the recording. At this time, his tone of voice has changed a lot from before. Ke Lan estimated that Heruni's vocal cords and other organs were affected by the body's mutation, which means that the day when Heruni transforms into a corpse is not far away.
As expected, in the next recording file, after a few minutes of silence at the beginning, a sigh that sounded a bit strange was heard: "I think... I don't have much time left. Before I completely turn into that kind of monster, it will be impossible for me to return to the Ark and return to the world of human civilization... Hehe... But even if I go back, I will be silenced by the people above..."
He paused, and continued, "Perhaps I should be like Dr. Liu and give myself a quick death before I completely lose my consciousness as a human being... But I am unwilling to do so.
"I think I should leave something behind... If someone finds the wreckage of this battleship in the future, I should tell them the truth to prevent them from repeating our mistakes..."
Then, there was a more than ten-second-long electric current noise. Before Ke Lan could ask, the military AI had already answered: "The data of this recording is not damaged. All of this was edited out by Heruni Yang himself."
"No, I can't do that. If I tell these things to those who come after me, even if they do nothing, they will become the same as us... This thing is a virus, a virus that can be transmitted through cognition. Only by closing your eyes, plugging your ears, and keeping silent... can you have a chance to survive.
"I don't know if forgetting those things can alleviate this symptom, but I simply can't forget them... As soon as I close my eyes, those things will come back like a nightmare. They haunt me all the time... If only... there was a device on this ship that was invented by the research institute... that can erase memory... That would be great.
"Perhaps, Lao Zuo and the others are right... These things cannot be made public... Humans simply have no right to fight against them...
“If even they failed, how can we possibly do it?
"My wakefulness time is getting shorter and shorter every day. I see myself in the video like a ghost, wandering around the battleship aimlessly... I don't know what I should do, and I don't know what the voice wants me to do...
" The whispering in my head is getting louder and louder... This voice seems to come from the starry sky. It seems... It seems to want me to merge with the starry sky... How... How is this possible?
"I can't resist that power. I can only rely on external objects... I used the few moments of clarity to reinforce the battleship's confinement room. I will lock myself in this room until my end comes."
The recording ended here, and the AI of the Shaojiang frigate told Ke Lan that since then, Hruni had been locking himself in the confinement room. The walls and doors of the confinement room were reinforced with armor plates from abandoned mechas. After locking himself in, Hruni used thermite he brought with him to weld the door shut, completely transforming the confinement room into an unopenable cage.
Heruni tied himself to the floor with chains and restraints... He did not prepare any food or drinking water. In his words, his severely mutated body could no longer feel hunger or thirst, and he had already made up his mind to die and did not intend to continue to live.
"I don't know how long I can live... To be more precise, I don't know how much time I have left to be conscious." Heruni said at the beginning of the next recording. "According to the records of the central control computer, I can stay awake for less than two hours a day. The rest of the time, I am just mumbling to myself or trying to break free...
“The physical pain seemed to have left me, and I no longer had that strange discomfort, but instead I felt a surge of strength… I knew I was about to become a monster, like the others.
"I feel like I no longer resist the changes in my body. The deeper the changes, the weaker the pain. It also produces a strange pleasure that makes people indulge in it and let it control them... I can't remember how long I have locked myself up in here. I have broken the chains and restraints. Fortunately, this room is strong enough...
“I felt strange, not only in appearance, but also in my thought patterns, which seemed to have changed fundamentally…I was no longer afraid of the starry sky, but instead had an urge to become one with it.
"If anyone hears this recording... no matter if you are from the Ark or an exile in the wilderness, leave this place immediately. Do not stay here for any reason. Do not look through anything in the warship, and do not search for any suspicious traces... Forget everything you saw and heard... Believe me, I am trying to save you."
Hruni said this sentence with great difficulty, and he had to pause after almost every word. About five seconds after he finished speaking, a groan and the sound of flesh tearing were suddenly heard in the recording, and then the recording ended.
This is the last recording file.
"Why is it gone? What happened next? Didn't you continue recording?" Ke Lan questioned the AI.
"The rest of the recording data is damaged." There was no emotion in the AI's answer, but it was this emotionless attitude that made people feel even more annoyed.
At least when civilian AI says sorry, it will show personalized emotions that are either sincere or tactful depending on the user's current state, while the reactions of military AI are always so intuitive, just like the dialog box that pops up when a program reports an error.
Wrong is wrong, nothing is nothing, straightforward and concise.
"Fuck it." Ke Lan couldn't help but curse, "With the knife in hand, follow me and kill all the broken-chapter dogs in the world..."
"Sorry, no valid keywords were detected from your speech," the AI said.
This sentence is used by readers in online literature forums to vent their resentment towards authors who break chapters. Of course, the military AI database will not include such useless information. Facing the files on the screen that show "data damaged, unreadable", Ke Lan could only sigh and turn away.
But the moment he turned around, his body stiffened slightly, and he subconsciously put his hand on the holster at his waist.
Mo Jue, who was standing behind Ke Lan... had a small patch of transparent tentacles like slug tentacles growing on her forehead. This cluster of tiny tentacles was still wriggling on its own, but as an individual being eroded, Mo Jue herself seemed to be completely unaware.
"What's wrong? The way you look at me... is so strange..." Mo Jue also noticed the strangeness in Ke Lan's eyes, and reached out to touch his face in confusion.
It would have been fine if she hadn't touched it. A drop of mucus dripping from the tentacle fell on the back of Mo Jue's hand, making her stunned for a moment.
She raised her head and looked upward. The ceiling of the bridge was also made up of external surveillance screens, but now all she could see was thick gray fog, with visibility basically zero.
"What is this?" Mo Jue originally planned to reach out to wipe the drop of mucus on the back of her hand, but the next second she realized that this operation was very unprofessional, so she retracted her hand and took out a test tube from her waist bag.
"Did this liquid drip from above? But when I looked at the screen on the ceiling... it seemed very dry." Mo Jue put the drop of mucus into a test tube, thought for a moment, and handed the test tube to Ke Lan.
"This thing should be safe... I don't feel any discomfort on the back of my hand, and I don't have any signs of poisoning for the time being..." Mo Jue said ramblingly, "The only feeling I have now is that I'm a little thirsty... But it seems like I haven't had water for a long time, so this should be normal."
Ke Lan did not engage in conversation with Mo Jue, nor did he reach out to take the test tube. During this series of processes, he stood there, observing the latter in silence.
"You...what's wrong with you?" Mo Jue said with a guilty conscience, "Why have you been..."
Ke Lan shook her head with a complicated look in her eyes: "I'm fine, but you...you can try to reach out and touch the area on your forehead...Remember, no matter what you touch, you must stay calm."
Mo Jue's expression suddenly changed. She stood there motionless for a few seconds, then carefully stretched out her right hand and touched her forehead.
When her fingertips touched the wriggling tentacles, she quickly pulled her hand back and her face turned even paler.
"What... is that... on my head ?"
"You can see for yourself." Ke Lan said.
"Look for yourself? Oh... oh, right..." Mo Jue frantically searched in her waist bag, and many of the small equipment she carried with her fell to the ground during the search. But at this time, Mo Jue was no longer in the mood to care about such things. She just wanted to know what happened to her.
Finally, she found a mirror.
She took a deep breath and raised the mirror. Although she was mentally prepared, the mirror in her hand still fell to the ground when she saw the tentacles growing from her temples.
"I... am I possessed by something?"
These tentacles that wriggled on their own were like independent living organisms. Mo Jue's first reaction was that they were foreign parasites.
"If it's parasitic, then it's easy to deal with... I'm afraid you've been eroded."
