A Man in the Bed

Inside an ordinary residential building in Jiaonan City, Xia Kingdom, a messy blanket hung off the side of a five-foot-wide double bed, half of it dragging across the floor.

On the bed, a young man was frantically tearing at his clothes. The extreme pain had twisted his originally delicate features beyond recognition.

"No! Don't!" Amid low growls, thin red tendrils of flesh emerged from the young man's now-naked body.

The tendrils thrashed chaotically through the air. Moments later, as if they had received some command, they entwined with one another and burrowed toward the man's side.

Within seconds, a fist-sized red fleshy tumor appeared beside him. As time passed, more and more tendrils emerged from his body, while the tumor steadily grew larger. In just a few dozen minutes, it had grown to the same size as the young man.

Once the tumor had reached the man's size, it stopped growing and began to pulse like a heart.

By then, the man seemed unable to feel pain anymore. His breathing gradually steadied, and his flailing hands fell to his sides. Beside him, the humanoid fleshy tumor slowly writhed, as though something was about to burst out from within.

Time rewound to one month earlier.

"Mr. Tang, forgive my bluntness, but no similar case to your illness has ever been found anywhere in the world. Every cell in your body seems to have undergone a mutation. They are frantically consuming the energy within your body. If this continues, your body will not be able to withstand it and—"

"I'm very sorry! There's nothing we can do." Before an ordinary desk, a middle-aged doctor in a white coat looked at the examination report in his hands and spoke regretfully to the man before him.

The young man's face was waxy yellow. There was not a trace of fat left on it, and his deeply sunken eyes made him look like a skeleton wrapped in skin.

Anyone who saw him would have assumed he did not have long to live. No one would have imagined that just over ten days ago, he had been a 170-pound, five-foot-nine fat man.

There was no life left in his eyes, only endless despair and helplessness.

His name was Tang Shizhe. He was an utterly ordinary sophomore college student who had only recently celebrated his twentieth birthday. But who could have expected that, from the day of his birthday onward, his weight would begin to plummet? At first, he had been delighted. The weight that had refused to budge no matter how desperately he tried to lose it was finally coming off.

But a few days later, his excitement had vanished completely, replaced by endless terror. It felt as if there were a bottomless pit deep inside his body, devouring his flesh and blood. His weight was dropping uncontrollably at a terrifying pace, with no sign of stopping.

Even an idiot would know this was abnormal! Extremely abnormal!

He had gathered his courage and gone to a major provincial hospital for a full-body examination. The result—

Knowing his days were numbered, Tang Shizhe left the hospital like a walking corpse. He did not know how he got home, nor did he care about anything that happened along the way. The doctor's words were the only thing echoing in his mind.

The doctor's regretful, helpless, pitying gaze remained vividly etched in his memory. He could not believe that he was going to die of illness at such a young age.

When he was eighteen, his parents had left home on a long journey. Yet they never returned. All he received was notice of their deaths and compensation from the insurance company. His parents had died in an accident.

He recalled his father's somewhat sallow complexion before they had left. Could his illness be hereditary? Had his parents' accident merely been a way to secure insurance money for him?

But he no longer had the energy to think carefully about what might be hidden behind it all. His life was already hanging by a thread.

As one of the only two remaining descendants of the Tang Family within five generations, he seemed to have no one to confide in. His distant cousin, meanwhile, was far away in Kyoto and rarely kept in touch with him.

He did not want to add to the worries of his cousin, who was struggling to make a life for herself in Kyoto. After he was gone, it would be better to leave her the house his parents had left behind as an inheritance—his only remaining family.

The final payment on this house had been covered by the compensation money. After paying it off, there had been little compensation left. He had only managed to scrape together enough money for college through part-time jobs.

His life had already been hard enough. Why did heaven still have to toy with him like this? He had never done anything bad in his entire life!

Tang Shizhe looked longingly at the home filled with warm memories, his heart full of reluctance.

After writing his will, Tang Shizhe began frantically ordering all kinds of food online. He ordered dozens of portions of everything he had once been too reluctant to eat. Since he was about to die anyway, he might as well enjoy himself before the end. After his shopping spree, he had nearly spent all his savings.

Once all the food had been delivered, Tang Shizhe began the final stretch of his homebound life.

As time passed, although he kept eating and everything he ate was high-calorie junk food, his body did not regain even a bit of weight. Instead, he became even thinner.

However, on the thirtieth day, something unexpected happened. After Tang Shizhe ate the chocolate in his hand, he suddenly felt dizzy.

Having not looked in a mirror for half a month, he had not noticed that his weight had already returned to around 120 pounds!

In a daze, Tang Shizhe got up and returned to the bedroom, then heavily threw himself onto the bed.

As a wave of drowsiness washed over him, Tang Shizhe felt his entire body relax. Perhaps this was the last consciousness he would ever possess. Maybe once he fell asleep, he would never wake up again, and his life would end with an imperfect full stop.

"Ow, ow, ow." The instant Tang Shizhe regained consciousness, he felt stinging pain coming from all over his body.

But then he realized something was wrong. Hadn't he already lost consciousness? By all rights, he should have been dead. He had even vaguely felt his life flashing before his eyes!

With disbelief, Tang Shizhe opened his blurry eyes. After wiping the crust from the corners of his eyes with his somewhat numb hands, his gaze froze on the left side of the bed.

A completely naked man!

A completely naked man was lying beside him!!!!

A chill rose from the soles of Tang Shizhe's feet, and goosebumps instantly covered his entire body. He hurriedly looked down at himself.

Naked! He was naked too! All his clothes had been shredded into pieces and scattered across the bedsheets! There were even traces of blood on the sheets.

No! His expression suddenly froze. The man lying beside him seemed strangely familiar!

He carefully examined the man's face, and his mouth fell open in shock. This man looked exactly like him, as if they had been carved from the same mold. Even the pinprick-sized mole on his chin was identical!

"Holy shit!" Tang Shizhe jerked back, clutching the blanket as he retreated to the foot of the bed. His mind was a mess, and he had no idea what had happened.

But soon, he sensed something in his mind—a point of light seemingly located in the direction of that man. He could even make contact with the point of light in his mind.

This scene, which defied all common sense, made him wonder if he was dreaming.

When his consciousness touched the point of light, he vaguely sensed what he could do to it.

"What the hell is this?" Tang Shizhe tried to touch the point of light with his mind.

Suddenly, boundless stabbing pain erupted from the depths of his brain. The information implanted into his mind while he had been unconscious burst forth all at once.

This information contained countless memory fragments and some material composed of unknown writing.

When he tried to read some of those memory fragments, Tang Shizhe felt as if he had entered the world contained within the memories.

It was an endless darkness.

Suddenly, a faint light appeared before "Tang Shizhe," and his "body" began rushing toward it uncontrollably.

A moment later, his vision opened up, and an azure planet appeared before him.

As his body drew closer and closer to the planet, his vision became enveloped in red light.

The memory fragment ended there. Immediately afterward, Tang Shizhe felt himself lying in a pile of scorched earth.

A young man dressed like an ancient scholar curiously approached, seemingly intending to pick him up.

In an instant, terror appeared on the scholar's face as countless flesh buds burrowed into his body through his hand.

The memory fragment broke off again. When Tang Shizhe came back to himself, he had become a baby held in the arms of a young man. On close inspection, the man bore some resemblance to the scholar.

Judging from the surrounding furnishings and the man's clothing, the time period was likely sometime in the 1990s.

"Honey, what do you think we should name this child?" A pale young woman on a hospital bed not far away gently asked the man holding the baby.

"Let's call him Tang Shizhe!" The man revealed a smile full of fatherly love.

"Father..." Tang Shizhe murmured in disbelief. But because he was only inside a memory, he could not interact with anyone in the scene.

Yet through these memory fragments, he had already gained a rough understanding of what had happened.

Without question, an alien life-form had descended upon Earth an unknown number of years ago and had been accidentally found by his ancestor.

Then his ancestor had been parasitized by or merged with that creature? The creature's bloodline had thus been passed down through his family to the present day.

At the same time, the information carried by these Alien Genes allowed Tang Shizhe to understand why he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

That alien creature had been severely injured at the time. Although merging with his ancestor had saved its life, its injuries had been too severe for it to absorb energy on its own, leaving it unable to repair itself. The information carried by the Alien Genes, along with the creature's own abilities, had remained dormant ever since.

It was not until the Xia Kingdom's reform and opening-up, after centuries of lying dormant, that the Alien Bloodline hidden in the genes of Tang Family men finally began to awaken and tried to activate itself.

By the time Tang Shizhe turned twenty, his body had accumulated enough energy, and the Alien Genes within him decisively chose to activate.

But because Blue Star's technology was too primitive, it had been completely unable to detect the Alien Genes hidden within Tang Shizhe's bloodline!