Volume 4: Shadows Under the Neon Lights Chapter 214 Arasaka Tower
Ten minutes later.
Ke Lan and Victoria had passed through the residential area and arrived just below the Arasaka Tower.
During this process, they did not encounter any enemies - neither the rebels of the "Ranger" Company nor the radioactive monsters that were generated in batches appeared. The entire residential area seemed to be completely undefended.
"Do you smell it..." Ke Lan said in a deep voice, "Such a strong... rotten smell."
"My sense of smell...is damaged." Victoria shook her head. "But according to the thermal...hiss...image camera, the entire Arasaka Tower's...hiss...inner wall...seems to be covered with a layer of...high-heat material..."
She paused and continued, "This tower... is like... hiss... some kind of living creature..."
"You mean this Arasaka Tower is alive?" Ke Lan looked at Victoria in surprise, and then focused her attention on the tall tower in front of her - but, from the outside, there was nothing unusual at all.
"Save me... Save me..." The strange voice sounded in Ke Lan's ears again, each time clearer than the last. Ke Lan was basically certain that the source of the voice was on the top floor of Arasaka Tower, the place where the strong light had just been emitted.
"Get ready..." Victoria made a gesture to Ke Lan, then walked forward and kicked open the door of Arasaka Tower!
Ke Lan only took a glance into the open door and knew where the foul smell came from.
The entire interior of the Arasaka Tower is covered with a layer of rotten flesh-like biological tissue. Vaguely, you can see blood vessel-like structures underneath these tissues. They are wriggling and constantly pumping some unknown liquid to the top of the tower.
"This tower... is really alive..."
Ke Lan and Victoria still had some explosives on them, but it was absolutely impossible to blow down the entire Arasaka Tower with such explosives. Even blowing a big hole in the alloy structure of the tower was a bit difficult.
If this tower was built on the wasteland, Victoria would only need to place a laser beacon and wait for the fleet's missiles... but this tower is located inside the Ark... and, right below the East 9th District is one of the Ark's four main power reactors. If the missiles did not affect the main power reactor, then everything would be fine. But if the main power reactor exploded, the death toll would have to be counted in tens of thousands when counting the number of deaths afterwards.
"These tissues... could they be part of that 'creature'?" Ke Lan untied the plastic holster from his waist and threw it in tentatively... However, when the plastic holster fell on the rotten meat, nothing happened.
"This thing looks a lot like a blood-sucking bacterial blanket. I think it's better not to step on it rashly..." Before Ke Lan could finish her words, Victoria raised her hand and fired at the rotten flesh on the ground. The bullet made several large holes in the rotten flesh, and smelly pus and blood immediately gushed out, but still nothing happened.
"There's no time... to waste..." Victoria said as she strode into the antechamber of the first floor of Arasaka Tower.
The decoration of the lobby on the first floor of Arasaka Tower can be said to be extremely luxurious. The floor is made entirely of water-polished marble that is as smooth as white jade. Four red lacquered wooden pillars, each as thick as three people's arms, stand on both sides of the entrance. There are also Japanese-style decorative carvings on the pillars. The hollow space inside the pillars is designed as a display cabinet, which contains samurai swords with gorgeous scabbards... But now, these priceless decorations have been covered by rotten flesh, with only a small part exposed outside.
In the corner of the front hall, there was a kneeling female corpse in a business suit and skirt. More than half of the corpse was wrapped in rotten flesh... But what made Ke Lan feel strange was that the rotten flesh did not cause any damage to the corpse. Even the clothes worn by the corpse were still intact.
"These things seem to have no interest in human flesh and blood..." This discovery made Ke Lan feel relieved at first, but then made him nervous again - combined with previous speculations, could it be that the "nutrients" they were pursuing were really the seeds of erosion cultivated with human flesh as a "container"?
Ke Lan tried to cut off a piece of rotten meat with a knife, but in less than three seconds, the rotten meat on the tip of the knife "melted"... Pus and blood dripped onto the ground and were quickly absorbed by these tissues.
"The rotten flesh tissue cannot survive without the main body, and will dissolve quickly..." Ke Lan silently noted it in her heart, then took out a few test papers from her small bag and dipped a little pus and blood on the tip of the knife.
"The pH value tends to be neutral... non-corrosive... no biological toxicity has been found... and the Geiger counter didn't sound, which means it is not radioactive..." He was shocked to find that, apart from looking disgusting and smelling bad, the rotten meat was actually harmless to the human body - of course, this conclusion was limited to the basic tests he was currently conducting. As for whether it was really completely harmless, more sophisticated analytical instruments would be needed.
"The elevator...hiss...it's still usable..." Victoria's voice came from the other end of the lobby. Ke Lan turned around and saw that she had violently dismantled the elevator door. A wire extended from her prosthesis, passed through the touch screen used to control the elevator, and connected to the circuit board at the back.
"Shall we just go up directly like this?" Ke Lan said hesitantly... Having said that, he still quickly walked into the elevator car.
"Or...you want to...hiss...take the stairs?"
"Then let's take the elevator..." Ke Lan looked around, "At least there aren't those...disgusting things in the elevator."
The elevator ascended very quickly, and in less than twenty seconds, it had reached the 29th floor - there were still four floors to the top floor, the 33rd floor, and this elevator could not go to these last four floors. If one wanted to go up, one had to either change to the core elevator located in the main office of the consortium's board of directors, or take the stairs.
"I suddenly realized that we seem to have missed a very important clue." Ke Lan walked out of the elevator and said to Victoria while keeping an eye on the surroundings.
"What is it...hiss...?"
"At the pub, all the victims' brain tissues were taken away, but we still haven't figured out where these brain tissues went."
Ke Lan originally thought that Arasaka Ryo might be an accident, but then he thought about it and realized that he had shot himself with a pistol against his temple, and his brain tissue had been completely destroyed... In other words, what the heretical sect needed was an intact human brain...
Leviathan's "holy relics" plus the flesh and blood of the Corrosion Seed plus a large amount of human brain tissue...
What exactly happened on the top floor of Arasaka Tower?
