Black Hairy Tofu

Ouyang Xing was shoveling a chopstickful of rice into his mouth when the phone on the table suddenly lit up. He promptly choked on the rice.

Even as he coughed, he remembered to pick up his phone and open it. He scrolled through it while coughing, looking thoroughly disheveled.

"Senior, isn't that a bit much? Your food isn't going anywhere. Slow down," Xu Chen reminded him.

Ouyang Xing immediately held the phone out for Xu Chen to see. He seemed about to say something, but the rice in his throat made it hard to speak.

Puzzled, Xu Chen took the phone and saw that it was a notice.

"Plans and guidelines for supporting domestic research into drugs for treating fungal infections in the body"

Another senior had sent it. Xu Chen remembered him: he was one of the members of their internship group.

Xu Chen immediately understood what was going on. Senior Ouyang Xing had caught a rising trend. The question was whether he had any research results to show for it.

Ouyang Xing finally coughed up the rice lodged in his windpipe. His face was slightly flushed, making him look like a shy, sunny, handsome young man. At the moment, he was visibly excited.

"Xu Chen, do you remember that fungus that could infect people?"

Xu Chen fell silent for a moment. It would have been hard to forget. With just a little effort, he could recall the person covered in fungus.

He looked at the food on the table, more than half of which was still uneaten. Though he didn't feel sick, it no longer held any appeal.

Seeing Xu Chen's expression, Ouyang Xing understood. His face reddened again, and he said apologetically, "Sorry, I forgot we were still eating... How about we talk after we finish?"

"No, I suddenly don't feel hungry anymore. Senior, tell me how your research is going."

"Sure. I'll make it up to you with a good meal later." Too excited to keep eating, Ouyang Xing took the phone back from Xu Chen and tapped it a few times.

A little later, perhaps after receiving a message, he pulled Xu Chen to his feet. "Come on, I'll show you."

"Hey, wait. Is it not confidential anymore?"

"The secrecy level was lowered ages ago. Don't worry, come see what we've accomplished."

"What about the other seniors?"

"No problem. That hypothesis you proposed got us taken seriously for once. Even Academician Qi praised us and allocated quite a few resources to us. They'll be more than happy to see you."

And so, Xu Chen was pulled and dragged all the way to the laboratory.

When Xu Chen arrived, he found that the lab hadn't changed much. The only difference was that the patient who had made him feel physically ill was no longer in the isolation chamber in the middle.

Several seniors who knew Xu Chen greeted him. He noticed that a few familiar faces were missing from the lab, but there were also quite a few people he didn't recognize.

"These are junior students from our academy in this field... Oh, for you, most of them are seniors. We grab the ones with excellent grades and put them to work."

Xu Chen looked around. Though Ouyang Xing called it putting them to work, not one of the new seniors seemed unwilling. On the contrary, they were all enthusiastic.

"Before, to fight that terrifying fungal infection, I tried all sorts of new drugs, remember? The most effective was the drug code-named EXC07, which had extremely severe kidney toxicity, but could eliminate a full forty percent of the fungal infection.

"At the time, I was aiming for more than just forty percent effectiveness against the infection. If we were going to save the patient, we had to keep him alive, and EXC07 had severe kidney toxicity besides. So I turned my attention to finding a more effective antifungal drug...

"EXC07 was abandoned later because we switched directions."

Xu Chen listened. "And then?"

"Then? Don't you know? The patient died, and Dean Yang still demanded that we continue our research. Anyone who didn't want to continue had to sign an agreement and leave. Besides you, three others left: one couldn't handle what happened to that patient, and the other two had other paths they wanted to pursue...

"After that, our research shifted from saving the patient to studying antifungal drugs."

"What happened?"

"I screened the original drugs again and found that EXC07 had considerable potential. Let me tell you, the spatial configuration of its drug molecules is chiral too. It has two mirror-image isomers, and the differences between them are quite significant. So I led the group in trying to separate its L-form and D-form to see what each did. When separating the L-form, I used—"

"Stop, stop, stop. I'm only a freshman! Just tell me the result."

Ouyang Xing smacked his lips, looking regretful. "What a shame. Our group used a very ingenious method to reduce EXC07's kidney toxicity... We've renamed it EXC08."

"You mean you've already developed an antifungal drug? Can it fight the fungal infection from before?"

Ouyang Xing shook his head. "It's not that simple. Can that thing even be called a fungus? Libra Academy also developed a KK03 spray. It's currently the most effective drug against that fungus, with a full fifty-eight percent antifungal effect. But as you know, that's nowhere near enough. The fifty-eight percent just means that no matter how much of the drug you add, it can only eliminate at most fifty-eight percent of the sample. Then the fungus comes back.

"Our drug only has reduced kidney toxicity. To reduce it, we even had to sacrifice a lot of its antifungal effectiveness."

"So we still have no way to deal with that Aspergillus flavus?"

"That's right... Fortunately, that fungus has been contained."

"Then what use is this EXC08 of yours?"

"This Mutant Aspergillus flavus is terrifying, but other fungi are weak. Among the foreign fungal samples Academician Qi brought back that can infect people, most are no match for it, apart from a very few that are as terrifying as our Aspergillus flavus."

"Wait, you're saying there are fungi abroad as terrifying as the Mutant Aspergillus flavus we've already contained?"

Ouyang Xing nodded. "Here, this one."

With that, he pulled up a photo on a phone and showed it to Xu Chen.

Caught off guard, Xu Chen found himself staring straight at the pitch-black thing on the screen.

That was... It might have been a real person. Unlike the person he had seen infected with Mutant Aspergillus flavus, Xu Chen couldn't make out this one's outline. The person was completely covered in black hair, readily bringing a food to mind: hairy tofu.

But the hair growing on the thing in the photo was thicker and longer than even the hairiest tofu Xu Chen had ever seen, and it was fucking black. The black hair around its edges looked as unreal as if a soft-focus filter had been applied.

The black, curly hair resembled an endless fractal, infinitely self-similar. One glance was enough to draw the eye in.

Then came the feeling of fear.

Fear, fear, fear.

Endless fear.

Danger, danger, danger.

Incredibly dangerous!

Xu Chen could hardly imagine what the human body wrapped inside it was like.

"By the way, apparently this person was still alive when the photo was taken."

Xu Chen couldn't help retching, but ultimately held it back. He was glad he hadn't eaten much lunch.

He finally understood that, at the end of the day, the news was a tool too. Some things weren't published to avoid causing panic.