Aftermath

The morning light at the horizon tore through the dark curtain of night. After a night of chaos, the order of civilized society had regained the upper hand. Most of the city's buildings stood silent, and the crisscrossing streets had lost their usual bustle. Only smart cars remained quietly parked on deserted roads.

Before long, this prosperous coastal city would face an attack from Jelly creatures in the ocean. The residents had been guided into underground shelters the previous night and would gradually be transferred farther inland.

Inside a closed-off high school, a squad of armed police wearing Third-Generation Exoskeletons inspected a student dormitory covered in bloodstains. After conducting a preliminary examination of the dried blood, a member in white outer armor reached a conclusion:

"We've confirmed the targets. There are blood traces from only five people here. The remaining one should be the student who turned into a monster. He killed all the others in a very short time."

They were tracing the origins and investigating the initial attack sites of these monsters, hoping to find what they had in common. After nearly ten hours of emergency research since last night, Googol Tech had discovered the source of these monsters: they had all transformed from ordinary humans.

There was an organ in their cervical vertebrae that ordinary people did not possess. It was an unknown creature with the consciousness of a newborn infant. This creature had formed a symbiosis with humans, its brain and spinal nervous system completely connected to theirs, while the human body underwent Anomalous changes in the process.

During the experiments, they had tried to sever the connection between humans and these unknown creatures. However, during the symbiosis process, their brains had formed a connection similar to that between the left and right hemispheres of a human brain. They shared nearly everything, from motor functions to memories. Once this close connection was severed, both linked consciousnesses lost control over the body at the same time, and their mutated bodies suffered organ failure within a short period.

Even when the severed nervous systems were reconnected, the two damaged brains had completely lost their original ability to coexist symbiotically. Their memories and conscious thoughts had suffered irreversible damage the moment the connection was broken.

Dozens of monsters whose neural links had been severed became unconscious walking corpses. Even if they did not die from organ failure, they became creatures without even the most basic appetite, no different from people in a vegetative state.

Googol Tech's conclusion was that the symbiosis between these unknown creatures and humans was irreversible. At least with their current technological level, separating the neural connection between the two was like cutting a human brain in half and would cause irreversible damage to the human brain.

Fortunately, detecting these unknown creatures was not difficult. Their immature self-awareness was exactly like that of newborn infants. These little creatures hid near human cervical vertebrae, and X-ray images could easily reveal how they differed from ordinary people.

From last night until now, Googol Tech had screened more than a hundred million people entering underground shelters across the region. They had discovered more than a million humans fused with Symbiotes. Although the individuals who had mutated and lost their minds accounted for only around one in ten thousand of them, they were still uncontrollable ticking bombs. No one knew whether these humans living in symbiosis with unknown creatures would suddenly attack others at any moment.

Amid last night's chaos, more than a thousand humans who had lost their minds and become beasts caused tens of thousands of casualties in major cities throughout the Hong Alliance. Now, armed police units in every major city were investigating the identities of these mutants, while Googol Tech hoped to find common traits among them.

After recording all the information, the small armed police squad turned and left the dormitory building. The empty dormitory bathed in the morning sunlight. Without the students' usual noise, it seemed somewhat serene. In that tiny room, only large swathes of blood remained to tell later visitors what had once happened there.

After they left, a black-and-white cat slipped into the empty dormitory building. It nimbly climbed the stairs to that room, its pale green eyes reflecting the entire grisly scene.

It leaped over the dried bloodstains and reached a wardrobe. Using its tail to tug open a drawer, it found the mutated student's daily belongings inside. After rummaging through them with its paws, it found an old photograph that was quite rare in this era. It showed a dark-skinned, plain-looking boy and a white-haired old woman. The student who had mutated wore a sunny smile as he looked at the camera.

The corners of the photo were curled from being frequently kneaded by its owner. Deep scratches had been carved into the back with fingernails, forming a short line of words: I hate it here.

The cat bit one corner of the photograph and carried it away in its mouth, swishing its tail as it left the dormitory. The morning sun cast a small shadow behind it. The last visitor to this place had also departed.

Inside a massive air-raid shelter, hundreds of thousands of people had spent a restless night. Compared to the spacious, comfortable homes aboveground, the accommodations here were narrow as tiny capsules. The fear of truly facing war had left many unable to sleep, and they had spent the entire night in anxious dread.

Compared to ordinary civilians who had merely been frightened, those fused with Symbiotes were far less fortunate. Several hundred people had been isolated in a separate area, while soldiers wearing exoskeletons rotated shifts every two hours.

These exoskeletons, with their bulging muscles and metallic gleam, always reminded people of humanoid robots and put considerable pressure on them.

Capsule rooms were arranged and stacked layer upon layer like a beehive. In one such room, an isolated young man pulled back the curtains and secretly looked outside through the glass.

He had not slept all night. He felt no drowsiness now; instead, he was extremely agitated, with countless conspiracy theories flashing through his mind. Those who had been isolated might soon be secretly executed!

"I have to get out. I have to get out!"

He kept repeating the words under his breath, as if encouraging himself. The blood in his body began to flow faster, and bulging veins became clearly visible on his arms. Without realizing it, his strength grew greater and greater.

Just as he was about to force open the door and rush out, a gun barrel extended from one corner of the capsule room. Several tranquilizer rounds struck the young man. His agitated consciousness gradually blurred, and he swayed before collapsing to the ground with a thud and losing consciousness.

A guarding soldier came over, opened the door, and hoisted the unconscious young man onto his shoulder. He brought him to a laboratory within the air-raid shelter, where several Googol Tech researchers were conducting various experiments and tests on these symbiotic humans showing obvious emotional changes.

People fused with unknown creatures looked no different from ordinary humans under normal circumstances. But when their emotions fluctuated violently, their heart rates and blood circulation accelerated, their energy consumption increased, and their physical strength grew dramatically. Sometimes this was accompanied by atavistic changes in certain body parts, as residual genetic fragments belonging to ancient animals were activated by enzymes released by the unknown creatures.

Looking at the entire process, the amygdala in the limbic system had the closest connection with these creatures. During brain activity, substances that affected emotions—dopamine, adrenaline, endorphins, hormones, and so on—would stimulate the unknown creature's biological activity when they changed drastically, causing it to release large quantities of special enzymes and chemicals that altered human gene expression.

After the man was injected with large doses of sedatives and the disordered hormones in his body were regulated, the grotesquely bulging veins on his arms gradually returned to normal. Although the Hong Alliance could not safely remove the Symbiotes, it could still suppress these people's physical mutations.

However, these changes in gene expression were irreversible. The messenger RNA and other essential tools for synthesizing proteins in the man's body had already been altered by that unknown creature. His cellular composition had become vastly different from that of ordinary humans.

Even though he had not yet lost his mind, he was already vastly different from ordinary humans, inside and out. As time passed, this change would continue to deepen.

That unknown creature would likely rewrite some of his base pairs and inject entirely new genetic fragments into him. Some of the genetic fragments possessed by the monsters who had lost their minds were completely different from those of ordinary life on Earth.

This calm was only temporary. As long as these people could regain consciousness and continue thinking, their bodies would keep changing. Their appearance and abilities would become increasingly different from those of other humans. This difference was far greater than differences in skin color or sex. They would become an entirely separate new intelligent species.

The staff naturally understood this as well. But such enormous questions involving all humanity could be left to the important people to consider. They only needed to guard their own little patch of ground.

Southern Region, at the southernmost port of the continent, Ai Liyuan descended from a transport ship with a baby boy in his arms, protected by a group of soldiers. He looked up at the rising sun on the horizon and felt as though a lifetime had passed. Too much had happened over the past year. When he first set foot on that island in the sea, he had never imagined that this journey would change his life so greatly.

After riding in an armored vehicle back to an Underground Base on the outskirts of the city, he followed two soldiers through winding metal corridors to a conference room. Sitting behind the door and waiting for him was Wang Fantian.

More than a year had passed. Wang Fantian stared at the old academician before him, who held an infant and looked even younger than he did, and for a moment, he did not know how to begin.

When selecting researchers to travel to the island for the immortality experiment, he had recommended this expert in biological genetics. Although there had been no selfish motive involved, it had indeed dragged the academician into the vortex of events. Now he faced multiple criminal charges and might even face imprisonment.

Li Heng, at the center of the incident, was also a friend of his own child. If he had chosen the same uncompromising approach as Mi Yue back then, perhaps none of this would have happened.

After a long silence, he said, "I'm sorry. You've suffered greatly."

Ai Liyuan shook his head. Looking at the baby boy in his arms, he smiled and said:

"I should be thanking you. Li Heng brought my son from the depths of my memories into reality. This has been my lifelong obsession. For this child, I did not hesitate to betray my own principles."

"I made mistakes. I recklessly toyed with human lives. I created the Jelly creatures with my own hands. They will bring endless calamity to human society. I am willing to accept all judgment."

"But this child—I can guarantee that he is a pure human. He truly is the son from my memories. I hope he can live well."

Wang Fantian nodded. "I'll do everything I can."

Ai Liyuan, the baby boy, the hundreds of soldiers on the island, the lifeforms with only brains inside the cultivation tanks, even that Orange Cat and that Ocellaris Clownfish—every living thing in that base needed to undergo detailed examination by Googol Tech. This was no longer something any one person could decide.