Volume 15 Gray Fog Forest Chapter 785: The Second Corpse
Just as Thirty-Three was frantically thinking about the next battle strategy, a big hole suddenly exploded on one side of the corridor with a loud bang, and the human figure wrapped in gray mist was immediately knocked to the ground - it struggled to get up, but it couldn't lift its body even one centimeter.
It was as if there was an invisible big hand pressing down on it.
Before the smoke from the explosion began to dissipate, an equally invisible barrier had already pushed away the smoke and debris on the ground, and a familiar figure walked into the corridor from the hole created by the explosion.
"Huh... Ke Lan, you came really quickly..." Sanshisan couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief, "It seems that the place you were teleported to should be quite close to here."
"Teleport?" Ke Lan was stunned for a moment and looked at Thirty-Three with some confusion.
"Weren't you teleported to some other place? Anyway, I was teleported to this place the moment I stepped into the gray fog." Sanshisan also looked puzzled. "This should be the interior of another battleship, the 'Genoa'."
"I know this is the Genoa, but you shouldn't have been teleported." Ke Lan reacted quickly and told Sanshisan about the memory tampering and "sleepwalking".
"It seems that I walked into this battleship by myself..." Sanshisan rubbed his face vigorously. "So, among the missing people, I am the first one you found?"
"Well, if you don't count Mo Jue." Ke Lan nodded, "I have no idea where the others went. After I checked the data stored in the central control computer of the Shaojiang Modified, I decided to go to the other crashed warship to check it out. I happened to see you fighting with this thing."
"What about the others? Where are you going to find them?"
"It's not practical for me to look for them... If they regain consciousness, they will probably choose to head towards the core area..." Ke Lan said.
"This place is still more than ten kilometers away from the core area... But you are right. If you go looking for them now, not only will you not be able to find them, you might even get lost. It would be better for us to set the same location as the final goal, and then it all depends on our own abilities."
"There is one more thing. At first I thought the sleepwalking time was the same as Mo Jue's, two hours. But six hours have passed since we got separated, and you should have just woken up, right?"
"Yes, that's right." Thirty-three nodded. "Except for the deleted memory... I was in the smoking room when I woke up, walked into the corridor and met this guy. It should have been no more than twenty minutes."
"It seems that the duration of sleepwalking for each person should not be fixed, so it is even more impossible to determine how far they will walk while sleepwalking...tsk." Ke Lan clicked his tongue, and the expression between his brows couldn't help but become a little irritated.
There are so many strange phenomena happening in this forest that even the S-level ruins cannot compare to this place.
“By the way, where is Mo Jue?” Thirty-three asked.
"Here." Ke Lan pulled the safety rope in his hand and pulled a single life capsule into the corridor.
"What's wrong with her?"
"She has been contaminated by 'forbidden knowledge'... This kind of thing can only be spread through cognition. Her body has undergone some mutations. In order to prevent the mutation from getting worse or spreading to other people, I think it would be better to find a container to contain her."
"Tsk... cognition is pollution. This guy just said the same thing." Thirty-three pointed at the humanoid figure who was pinned to the ground by the force of space and could not move.
"This guy...was he once a member of the 'Genoa'?"
"Yes, and it can understand Chinese and speak it. I had a brief exchange with it, but we started fighting over a disagreement... If you hadn't suddenly rushed in, I would have been thinking about how to escape."
After hearing Sanshisan say that he had communicated with the humanoid, Ke Lan couldn't help but become nervous. He stared at Sanshisan for a long time, and only breathed a sigh of relief after discovering that the other party's body showed no signs of mutation .
"What's wrong with you?" Sanshisan felt a little scared by Ke Lan's gaze and couldn't help asking.
"Seeing that you are not as unlucky as Mo Jue..." Ke Lan said, "You should know what 'cognition is pollution' means, right?"
"Could it be that just by listening to a few words from this guy, my body will mutate? This...isn't this too exaggerated?"
"It's not an exaggeration at all. You're just lucky that you didn't mutate." Ke Lan patted Sanshisan's shoulder. "This thing varies from person to person. Some people have weak resistance and may turn into monsters after hearing just a few words--"
As Ke Lan spoke, he subconsciously glanced at the single lifeboat next to him.
"Huh... so it seems my resistance is pretty strong?"
"You might as well say that you are lucky." Ke Lan sighed, "But no matter what, to be on the safe side, you should stop communicating with this guy. Leave the rest to me."
"By the way, this guy said a few words to me before the fight just now. I wrote them down." Sanshisan said, repeating to Ke Lan the words that the human figure had said to him.
“Tsk…”
After listening to Sanshisan's retelling, Ke Lan pinched his chin and fell into deep thought.
The situation of the "Genoa" high-speed support ship and the "Shaojiang modified" frigate was actually very different - judging from the combat video, the main reason for the crash of the "Shaojiang modified" was that the small tactical nuclear bomb detonated by Hruni and his men inside the ship caused irreparable damage to the hull, causing the entire warship to lose power... and the "Genoa" crashed directly to the ground due to the helmsman's operational error.
To put it more strictly, the "Shaojiang modified" frigate can actually be considered to have made a "forced landing", while the "Genoa" was a true "comet hitting the earth", having a head-on collision with the ground.
From the AI of the central control computer of "Shaojiang Modified", Ke Lan learned that in fact "Shaojiang Modified" did not crash directly into the ground. The helmsman really deserves the name of "God Helmsman" - when the battleship lost power due to the internal nuclear bomb explosion, he still managed to control the overall balance of the ship, allowing the entire "Shaojiang Modified" frigate to glide for nearly four kilometers in the tree canopy, relying on the obstruction of the tree canopy to alleviate the inertia of falling to the greatest extent.
If it weren't for the extreme operation of this god helmsman, there would definitely not be so many people on the "Shaojiang Modified" frigate who would have survived the crash of the warship.
The "Genoa" was completely different... From the crew member who was stabbed to the core by the air supply pipe, we can know that after the battleship "landed", there would probably be few survivors on the entire battleship.
Apart from anything else, the terrifying G-force during the fall and the shock wave that spread throughout the entire battleship in an instant when it hit the ground were enough to kill most of the people on board.
Even if they don't die, they will fall into a coma due to congestion in the brain... If the life-support devices on the ship cannot be repaired in time, coma is actually no different from death.
Therefore, even if there are survivors on the "Genoa", their number would not be large, and they definitely would not be able to conduct in-depth exploration of the Gray Mist Forest like Heruni and his team did.
Moreover, the humanoid figure wrapped in gray fog should have been dead when the battleship crashed... It was impossible for it to have the chance to run to the forest to be "eroded"... What on earth allowed it to be "resurrected" and obtain those "forbidden knowledge"?
Or in other words, it is precisely because of the acquisition of "forbidden knowledge" that it can be "resurrected"?
This question is like asking whether the chicken or the egg came first. It is impossible to reach an accurate conclusion based on simple logical reasoning.
"What do you mean? You should be able to understand what this guy means, right?" Sanshisan waited for a long time and saw that Ke Lan didn't say anything, so he just took the initiative to ask.
Ke Lan nodded silently.
"Then tell me—" Thirty-three stopped talking halfway, "Wait, you're not telling me that you're worried that I'll mutate? What's that... 'cognition is pollution'?"
"Yes. There are too many secrets involved, all of which can be summarized into the category of 'forbidden knowledge'. Even though you have nothing to do now, if I tell you those things, you might become like it in an instant." Ke Lan said, pointing to the human figure pressed to the ground by the force of space.
"Tsk...Okay, I get it. But why are you fine? Are you the legendary 'Chosen One'? The protagonist in movies and novels?" Sanshisan complained in a joking tone.
"I am an 'object' created by the Undead Crew." Ke Lan showed a helpless smile, "Although I have always believed that I am a human, the facts are in front of me, and I have to admit that I am indeed different from you."
"Old Dog said that as long as you consider yourself a human being, you are still a human being even if you turn into a pile of rotten meat. Don't think too much." Thirty-three said in a deep voice.
"Don't worry, I won't dwell on this issue. But I can tell you one thing, I'm most likely an 'experimental subject' created by the Undead Crew to deal with this kind of incident, so I have a much higher resistance to this kind of 'pollution' and 'erosion' than ordinary people."
"I see." Thirty-three nodded. "What should we do next? Interrogate this guy? You don't have to keep looking at me. I know I won't peek or eavesdrop. I'll wait outside. When you're done with the interrogation, just come out and find me."
After saying this, Thirty-three walked out of the big hole that Ke Lan had blown open, and dragged the lifeboat containing Mo Jue out as well.
"Next, it's time to get down to business." Ke Lan said to himself, and slowly walked to the side of the human figure.
This guy, should it be considered a "Corpse"? The people of the Undead Crew said that the situations after a "super-eclipse" are different, which means that "Corpse" also has different forms, so it is completely understandable that this guy's appearance and abilities are so different from Heruni.
"Zeluo, can you remove the gray fog covering this guy? I'm quite curious about what its true appearance looks like."
As soon as Ke Lan finished speaking, the gray fog on the human figure was peeled off, revealing its body that had been hidden under the "fog armor".
This is a lean, mummy-like human body, with dry skin tightly attached to the body. There is no hair and no proliferative tissue. The only differences from human mummies are two: first, it is "alive"; second, where its skin is broken, what is exposed is not dark red flesh or other subcutaneous tissue, but a black, asphalt-like gelatinous substance.
Judging from the distribution of these gelatinous substances, the muscles in this "corpse" should have all been replaced by this thing, and the function of this thing should be the same as that of human muscles.
Ke Lan took out a dagger and gently poked the black gelatinous substance. He found that the substance was extremely strong. With Ke Lan's ninth-level enhanced strength, he used nearly 80% of his strength to make the tip of the dagger penetrate a small part.
The strength of this thing is far superior to the "Type I high-strength synthetic rubber" that the research institute took 20 years to develop.
The latter is a buffer material used between armor alloy layers, but the material itself is as strong as the alloy. It can be said to be the "rubber-like" synthetic material with the highest physical strength that human civilization can currently mass-produce.
"The Corruption Skeleton that Heruni transformed into was very weak, and this Corruption Skeleton should be classified as a 'combat type'." Ke Lan analyzed them one by one in his mind, "As for the gray fog covering the surface of the body, it should have two functions. The defensive function is only one of them. The most important function is probably to cover its current appearance so that Thirty-three cannot see its true appearance... Thirty-three also said just now that this guy did not have any hostility at the beginning, and he kept warning Thirty-three not to touch those 'forbidden knowledge'."
The true appearance of this corpse is also part of the "forbidden knowledge".
"You can understand what I say, right ?" Ke Lan pulled out the dagger, tapped the opponent's shoulder with the blade, and then relaxed the spatial force that was suppressing it a little.
The corpse immediately turned its head and stared at Ke Lan with its cloudy eyes that were so cloudy that one couldn't even distinguish the whites of the eyes, corneas, and pupils... It stared at him for more than ten seconds before speaking with some difficulty: "This... This is impossible... The degree of your pollution... is far greater than mine... Why... Why can you still maintain... this appearance?!"
Its tone was filled with confusion and shock... and a hint of panic.
