Volume 9: Molten Mine Chapter 477: The Prophet's Substitute
"It seems that it is the virgin who died. He has not been replaced." The Hound nodded to the others.
However, Aya Breya did not signal her men to lay down their weapons. Instead, she took a step forward and continued to ask Ke Lan, "Why did you suddenly disappear just now? We need an explanation."
"I can't explain it clearly." Ke Lan shrugged. "The moment the Valkyrie's sniper cannon hit the tumor-like protrusion, I was teleported into a dark space without light and sound, just like being locked in a confinement room... Just when I thought it would be difficult to escape, it inexplicably let me out. As for how long I stayed in there, I can't say, because the flow of time in that space doesn't seem to be normal."
"Nineteen point five seconds. This is the time it took from your disappearance to your reappearance." Aya added, "If calculated in terms of the time in our dimension."
"Nineteen point five seconds..." Ke Lan chewed on this number over and over again. Although he couldn't be sure how much time had passed in that dark space, it was definitely not less than five minutes. In the eyes of Hound and others, he had only disappeared for less than twenty seconds.
The time in that space is not synchronized with the real world, so it makes perfect sense that the duration of the "time stop" ability can be extended to four or five seconds - the "four or five seconds" that Ke Lan felt may not even be one second in reality.
"By the way, where is the monster that Park Sangyou summoned?" Ke Lan suddenly thought of this and immediately turned around -
"It's dead, just now... after it died, you appeared immediately." Aya's voice came from behind.
Just five meters in front of Ke Lan, the capsule-shaped lifeboat fell to the ground, with its deflated tentacles drooping messily, completely losing its previous full feeling. Under its corpse, a large pool of transparent liquid oozed out and spread out, forming an irregular puddle with a diameter of several meters.
It looks like a giant slug that has been sprinkled with salt and died of dehydration.
"How...did it die? Did you kill it?" Ke Lan asked.
"...It has nothing to do with us. It...it died on its own." Aya hesitated before saying this. Obviously, she was not sure whether her judgment was correct.
"We don't know what happened either." The Hound added, "Five seconds before you came back from the 'confined space'... oh, maybe only three seconds, the monster suddenly became ill and started twitching violently. We thought it was going to use some powerful move, so we all opened fire on it, and then it died suddenly... As for whether it was killed by us or for some other reason, I can't be sure."
"It shouldn't have been killed by us. " Aya shook her head slightly. "After Ke Lan disappeared, we started attacking this monster. Our firepower never stopped, but our previous attacks didn't have any effect on it."
"Perhaps the quantitative change has led to a qualitative change?" The Hound muttered, "This guy's defense mechanism may be the same as the energy shield. Our initial ammunition hit the shield, and then when the shield's energy was consumed, it was its turn to attack the main body."
"I'm still more inclined to believe it was a natural death. The genetic sequences of many biological weapons of the Alpha civilization are extremely unstable and there's a risk of collapse at any time... In my impression, there are many biological weapons with a lifespan of only a dozen minutes. Perhaps this is one of them." Aya retorted.
"There's no point in arguing about this now. I suggest we check the monster's body. Perhaps we can make some groundbreaking discoveries." Ivan said, already impatiently taking out an electric saw.
"I second." Ke Lan raised his hand without hesitation.
…
According to the normal processing procedures, any remains of this unknown creature should be sealed up immediately and sent to the nearest research institute branch. However, the situation is special now, and everyone can only place their hopes on Ivan, an "amateur biology enthusiast."
"I've heard jokes about veterinarians treating humans, but now it's up to the same doctors who treat humans to dissect monsters. It's so damn ironic." The Hound couldn't help but complain as he watched Ivan wielding a chainsaw at the monster's corpse.
"The specimens that medical students first dissected were not humans, but animals like mice," Ivan replied calmly. "And medicine actually has a lot in common with biology, plus..."
Ivan stopped talking halfway through his words. However, everyone in the God Hunter Group knew what he didn't say.
Out of personal interest, Ivan often buys some corpses of Alpha Planet's native creatures on the black market and brings them back to the clinic for research. The source of these corpses obviously cannot be legal. Now that the people from the Security Bureau are standing next to him, Ivan naturally would not say such things in front of them.
Although they are unlikely to pursue this issue in the current situation, it is better to have less trouble than more...
The monster's tentacles were quickly cut off by the chainsaw, and Ivan dug out a broken human skeleton from the lifeboat... Park Sang-woo's flesh and blood had disappeared, but his bones had been preserved.
"It's all crushed into pieces..." The Hound sighed as he looked at the bone fragments that Ivan had picked out from a pile of jelly-like, sticky tissue with large tweezers. "Was it crushed when that thing came out of its body, or was it crushed alive in the narrow space of the lifeboat?"
"Whichever it is, it sounds painful," Layton continued.
Ke Lan did not join in their chat. Instead, he squatted on the ground, picked out those parts of the skull from hundreds of bone fragments, and pieced them together bit by bit with quick-drying glue.
It took him almost an hour to restore the skull. Although there were still many missing parts, the general outline was at least apparent.
However, the more Ke Lan looked at the skull in his hand, the more he felt something was wrong...
"Team Leader Breya, please extract the DNA from these bone fragments and compare it with the data in the archives again." Ke Lan requested.
Aya Breya did as she was told, but the result was somewhat beyond everyone's expectations - the sample extracted from the bone marrow detected the DNA of two people, one of whom was Park Sang-woo's, and the other, no matching data was found in the archives.
But what is certain is that this unknown DNA is human DNA, not the genes of some monster.
"Could it be that because of the monster, Park Sangyou's genes mutated?" Aya guessed.
"But... the deceased is not Park Sang-woo. Or rather, when he died, he was no longer Park Sang-woo." Ke Lan held up the assembled head, "This is another person."
"What?" Aya took the head as if she didn't believe it and scanned its facial bone features, but just as Ke Lan said, there was no information about this face in the archives either.
"Can we roughly restore the deceased's appearance before death through facial bones?" Ke Lan glanced at her and asked.
"Yes." Aya bit her and started typing on the virtual keyboard with both hands.
Not long after, a face completely different from Park Sang-woo appeared on the screen.
The moment he saw this face, Ke Lan's eyebrows suddenly raised, and this detail was immediately captured by Aya.
"Do you know this man?"
"I can't say that we know each other, but we have met once." Ke Lan said.
"who is he?"
"The man who founded the heretical sect... a substitute."
