"Yang Qi," Sun Hang suddenly looked up, "is there any record of Chimera Seventeen's meme frequency in the database?"
"There is..." Yang Qi nodded. "Tianfu City recovered the remains Chimera Seventeen shed. The residual memes within those remains had completely dissipated, but they were recorded... However, those meme fragments are incomplete. They aren't whole enough..."
"Compare Chimera Seventeen's meme fragments with this thing's meme." Sun Hang said. "Now. Immediately. Right away."
"I'm connecting to the core mainframe at Tianfu City's Anomaly Research Institute. The comparison may take a few minutes." Yang Qi replied as she tapped away at the keyboard. "Do you suspect this thing is related to Chimera Seventeen?"
"Don't you think they look alike?" Sun Hang pointed at the thing attached to the anomalous corpse's brain tissue. "This thing and Chimera Seventeen's symbiotic offspring—the little spiders we saw in the footage... They're almost identical."
"Identical?" Yang Qi froze for a moment. "Now that you mention it... the shape does look a little like a spider. The style is just a bit too abstract."
Sun Hang did not stop what he was doing. He dissected the entire anomalous corpse—apart from the foreign object attached to its brain tissue, the corpse was utterly unremarkable. Even the meme it had been infected with was an extremely common type of fragmented residual meme.
In academic circles, these meme fragments were generally called "scraps." Much like DNA fragments shattered by intense radiation, things infected by these meme fragments rarely underwent complete anomalization into anomalies... They either became anomalous corpses or were destroyed during the anomalization process.
But in the eyes of Taotie, an "anomaly gourmand," there was a more vivid term for this sort of thing.
"Offal."
Suppressing his nausea, Sun Hang absorbed the anomalous corpse's meme. As expected, the memories "stored" within