Epic Mythic War in the Room

Li Qing began trying to find flaws in the other man's logic.

But he found that, in theory, there was nothing much wrong with it.

Most bacteria were Single Cells, possessing only four or five thousand short gene fragments. They were easily partially decoded and rewritten.

Because of their size, genes were like tiny building blocks in one's hand, freely assembled. They could easily perform microscopic surgeries that humans could only painstakingly carry out under a microscope—nuclear transplantation, gene injection, chromosome microdissection, and more.

It felt like the plot of a sci-fi apocalypse film, Pandora's Box thrown open.

Suppressing his shock, Li Qing half-joked:

"If this is real, and you can grant bacteria intelligence, then the bacterial civilization in this room undergoing an explosion of growth would be no less dangerous than your Zombie Virus. This is an apocalypse in evolutionary history. No wonder you isolated yourself."

Ning Guochang said, "Yes. Over the billions of years of life on Earth, evolution has been random, like buying lottery tickets—searching among tens of trillions for one random possibility. The efficiency is terrifyingly low. But they actively search for that one random number among hundreds of millions. Their rate of evolution is countless times faster than humanity's!"

"As a Zombie Lord, I can control living creatures. At present, my mental power can only control a bacterial army weighing 0.0023 grams. Any more than that, and I can't control them."

"But some time ago, I accidentally looked at Kaihui's [Awakening] microorganisms. There were at least several hundred grams of them, far beyond my control limit. They went out of control... I couldn't control them. They crawled all over this table, and it was difficult to crush them with my palm. I tried using my 0.0023-gram army to wipe them out. The two armies went to war."

"The enemy compiled bacterial gene structures, establishing flagellar warhorses in the microscopic world and developing bows, arrows, and catapults."

"The troops I controlled were all elite, but there were only 0.0023 grams of them in the end. They had at least seven hundred grams. My kingdom's entire army was wiped out. Fortunately, I reacted quickly and used Medical Alcohol to exterminate those uncontrollable things..."

Li Qing listened in astonishment. He stared at the table in front of him inside the isolation room for a long while before saying, "For their civilization, that truly was a world-ending Great Flood."

"Yes! That flood shook heaven and earth. Wherever it went, corpses lay strewn across the land!"

Ning Guochang's voice was low and hoarse. He seemed to want to relive that terrifying war and disaster, as magnificent as a myth.

"At the time, my eyes looked down upon that kingdom's battle. They called themselves the Kingdom of Valkaral and took a giant beast—a mite—as their mythic totem."

"But they were fortunately still stupid and hadn't developed much intelligence. They gathered together to launch an attack, which let me wipe them out in a single wave."

Li Qing found it interesting.

The "dimensions" of civilizations were different.

To them, were humans gods?

Perhaps.

Before bacteria, we were higher-dimensional beings of such immense size that they could not look directly upon us.

That Great Flood had caused their civilization's mass extinction.

One had to know that Earth's history had experienced five great biological mass extinctions.

The Ordovician Mass Extinction, the Devonian Mass Extinction, the Permian Mass Extinction, the Triassic Mass Extinction, and the most recent and widely known Cretaceous Mass Extinction sixty-five million years ago, which brought down the age of dinosaurs.

"Since then, I started keeping my eyes closed and wearing sunglasses, because I was afraid some other accident might happen."

Ning Guochang was deeply uneasy. He let out a long breath. "The number I can control has a limit. If more uncontrollable microbial kingdoms appear, that would be terrifying."

It had to be said, psychiatric patients had rich imaginations. This tale of bacterial civilization, this story of a creator, was quite interesting. It could even be serialized online.

But all these abnormalities might not be merely a story.

Then things were truly becoming serious.

"What about the rest?" Li Qing followed his train of thought, soothing his agitated emotions while trying to find a flaw in his logic. "After the Great Flood, there should still have been some scattered bacterial species that survived, right?"

"Yes. Not many remained. They hid, and I don't know where they ran off to, but it doesn't matter."

Ning Guochang said bluntly:

"They can't stir up any great waves anymore. Though they want to assassinate me, their god, and stage a Jing Ke's Assassination of Qin in this sterile workshop."

"Those righteous men sought revenge for their fallen kingdom. Do you know Assassin's Creed? Heroes of a dead nation rode flagellar steeds, launching ambushes everywhere, trying to attack my defensive army. They even succeeded. Using a feint to the east and an attack in the west, they broke through the patrols guarding my skin and successfully entered my body to wreak havoc. But at most, they could only damage a few individual cells. My immune system quickly killed them."

Li Qing was stunned. "So they learned from their setbacks and grew wiser. This time, they know how to use military strategy."

But truth or not, you still called this place a sterile workshop?

There were bacteria everywhere inside this place, weren't there?

Li Qing's expression grew increasingly strange as he continued, "Your whole story has been full of twists and turns. It's far more exciting than the zombie life experiences you described to me before."

Ning Guochang said, "Back then, I could still be saved. I barely managed to kill the uncontrollable microbial colony, and it hadn't yet led to the irreparable mistake before us."

"The mistake before us?" Li Qing asked.

Ning Guochang fell silent for several seconds. As though summoning immense courage, he took a deep breath. "Until three days ago! When I was bathing, I let down my guard!"

"That day, I had started to barely adapt to this trypophobia. I drank a little alcohol and watched TV for a while. By the time I came to my senses, I realized I had accidentally looked at my own body..."

"You awakened every microorganism on your body?" At that moment, Li Qing seemed to think of some terrifying ghost story. An indescribably eerie fear instantly spread through his entire body.

Even someone without medical training would know from high school biology:

The human body, inside and out, contained countless microorganisms and bacterial colonies.

Humans and microorganisms lived in symbiosis.

"Yes. I... I created another uncontrollable kingdom. This time, they were born inside my body."

Ning Guochang's voice pulled Li Qing back from his fear. Surprisingly calm, he said, "Do you know? The human body is a complex ecological kingdom. An adult human body contains roughly sixty trillion somatic cells, while the bacteria that maintain stable symbiotic relationships with the human body amount to one thousand trillion."

"Some of them awakened. They permeated every part of me, inside and out, crawling everywhere."

He extended a hand and silently stared at his cracked palm, dry as snakeskin. On that solemn face, he seemed to be carefully counting the microorganisms crawling across the pores of his skin.

"Look. They are gazing at me. My body has already become a vast kingdom!"

"And the 0.0023 grams of microbial troops my mental power can control are nowhere near enough to exterminate them."

"I tried bathing in alcohol, but it was useless. There are far, far too many of them. I can't wash out the inside of my body."

Ning Guochang sat hunched in the chair on the other side of the glass, bearing tremendous invisible pressure. His voice carried the weathered desolation of an old man in his final years.

"These creatures began building armies upon my body, creating entirely new lifeforms, all kinds of strange and grotesque shapes."

"My body is like the origin of all life in the universe, rupturing and disintegrating. They constantly pour out of me, densely packed as they carry things back and forth, building their nation."

This man had locked himself in this sealed room. Suddenly, he laughed at himself.

"Perhaps I'm about to die. When I collapse and disintegrate, it will be the moment this Pangu opens heaven and earth in this room."

Was everything real?

You hadn't lied to me. You called me here because you were truly about to die? There really was a world waiting for me to inherit?

Li Qing fell completely silent. He felt as though his entire worldview had been overturned.

It was as if he had watched a film of civilization at war. The man sitting before him in the chair, seemingly suffering from severe delusions, was a towering giant who had created an entire world civilization.

The whole isolation workshop was like a brand-new Earth, about to perish and open heaven and earth anew.

Don't argue over how a Single Cell could possess intelligence or alter its own body. Let me say it again: people from whatever major have already read so much of this stuff that they're sick of it. This is an imaginative novel, not hard science fiction, not a scientific paper.

The Golden Finger was simply that Single Cells possessed intelligence.