"Clothes"

Seeing another version of himself with his own eyes was a pretty eerie experience.

Especially when that other self was wrapped in something like a cicada pupa, surrounded by fluid, as if he were still in a womb. Zhang Heng also noticed a fist-thick fibrous tube inserted into the back of his other self's head. That probably explained the extremely regular oval shape in the Fourth Ventricle on the CT scan.

The other end of that fibrous tube connected to a smaller cicada pupa. The thing inside was trying to break through a thin membrane within the pupa and crawl into the tube.

At this point, Zhang Heng had basically figured out the secret behind how those things replaced humans.

They did not burrow directly into their targets' heads. First, they had to find a way to replicate a human body. To them, that body was like clothing; only by putting on those clothes could they disguise themselves as humans.

No wonder they had been so inefficient and had not made a move against him after all this time.

But Zhang Heng guessed that once the thing in the small pupa crawled through the fibrous tube into the Fourth Ventricle, that would be when those things made their move against him.

And that day did not seem far off.

Zhang Heng then circled the ancient banyan-like plant again and counted the cicada pupae hanging from it. There were clearly far more small pupae, nearly a hundred of them, while there were only thirteen large pupae. That was a bad number.

Including Judas the traitor, Jesus had exactly thirteen disciples as well.

Given the vast disparity between the number of small and large pupae, it meant those things had to compete for the right to leave this place. In that regard,