Chapter 33-I Clean Up Garbage in a Wasteland World
Chapter 33: The House That Hunts People-6
"Professor Chu, someone has entered Experiment Subject No. 777."
In a certain laboratory, an entire wall was covered with monitoring data. The usually stable data suddenly fluctuated today, producing an exaggerated peak that formed a sharp red jagged line on the large screen.
The man called Professor Chu was very young, looking only in his twenties. He wore a white lab coat and gold-rimmed glasses. His features were deep, but the temperament he exuded was somewhat gloomy.
"Abnormal energy fluctuation." A researcher typed on the keyboard with both hands and said, "Someone really went in."
By "went in," he didn't mean entering the exterior; someone had walked into the true interior.
The researcher asked, "Someone from the Sanitation Center?"
Another researcher replied, "Impossible. The Center has been undergoing internal rectification under Xuan Qing's leadership recently. There aren't many missions."
The Sanitation Center was reshuffling internally. Most Cleaners and Demon Hunters were in concentrated training. Those who failed the assessment could not accept missions. The mission volume of the entire Sanitation Center had dropped sharply within a week.
The Sanitation Center hadn't bothered with this house for so many years; it was impossible for them to suddenly come to purify it.
Moreover, they knew the list of all Sanitation Center missions for the next three days, and this experimental subject was definitely not on the recent mission list.
"Could it be... it?" the researcher asked.
Professor Chu fell silent. He didn't speak for a long time. Prometheus? What was it planning to do?
He asked, "Where is Experiment Subject No. 777 right now?"
"Rome City, Building 22, 13th Floor," the other person answered. "It's a residential area with a high occupancy rate and dense population."
This meant they couldn't use thermal weapons to bulldoze it. If it were in the wilderness, they could have simply blockaded it from the outside.
But in a densely populated residential area, trying to solve this quietly while bypassing the Public Security Bureau and the Sanitation Center was almost impossible to achieve.
"What should we do?" the researcher asked.
Experiment Subject No. 777 had existed for fifteen years. They didn't want to abandon their years of painstaking effort.
Its experimental data was very precious. They had been monitoring the growth data of Experiment Subject No. 777.
As a Contaminant, it could achieve owner-recognition tracking, and it was currently growing slowly, even learning to hunt autonomously, which was extremely rare.
If it were purified by someone at this time, their years of effort would be wasted. The main issue was not knowing who had entered, making it impossible to negotiate in advance to cut losses.
It was too late to send someone over now. The Green Door recognized its owner; outsiders couldn't open it.
There were only two outcomes for an intruder entering the Green Door: First, purify the Green Door. Second, be assimilated by the Green Door.
Usually, it was the second outcome, so there wasn't much need to worry.
Researcher: "Let's just ignore it, like last time."
Professor Chu was silent for a moment before making a decision. "Send someone to wait outside. Kill the intruder if there's a chance."
The researcher agreed, thinking Professor Chu was being overly cautious.
Although Experiment Subject No. 777 was only rated as a Grade C Contaminated Area, due to its overly bizarre internal structure, no one had ever returned alive.
...
Public Security Bureau, Detention Room.
The light in the detention room was dim. The light bulb overhead was flickering; every time it went out, the room plunged into total darkness. Ding Chaojie gripped the bars tightly. He could feel someone pressing tightly against his back. He didn't dare to breathe loudly. He was the only person in the entire detention room.
Ding Chaojie slowly turned his head. Sure enough, a green door was right behind him, pressing against him.
The Green Door seemed to appear out of thin air. Normally, a door should open on a wall, but now the Green Door was floating in the air. The air at the edge of the door frame seemed to condense into a transparent wall. The Green Door had already opened a crack, filled with black lines inside, twitching slightly under Ding Chaojie's gaze.
"I beg you," Ding Chaojie said. "I didn't mean to."
"Can you please stop coming for me?"
"I'll kowtow to you. I didn't mean to kill you. It was an accident, an accident."
Ding Chaojie kept pleading in a low voice, but the main door of the Green Door slowly pulled open.
Crack—
Ding Chaojie froze. One of the fingers gripping the bars loosened. Someone was prying his hand open!
His finger was in excruciating pain. Fingers are linked to the heart. The hand being pried open twisted and deformed. Ding Chaojie's eyeballs trembled with pain. "Please! Don't come over! Ah!"
But the Green Door ignored him completely. With a crack, a second finger was forcibly pried open, no matter how hard he pulled.
Crack, crack, crack! All ten fingers were forced open.
Ding Chaojie suddenly felt his right leg go heavy, as if a hand had grabbed his ankle.
Public Security Bureau detention room surveillance video. The monitoring screen, originally clear, was gradually covered by layers of static snow. The person in charge of watching the monitor had been dozing off; he didn't see the situation inside the detention room.
In the video surveillance, the snow increased. Ding Chaojie’s struggling figure was faintly visible. Ding Chaojie was originally holding the bars, but suddenly, it seemed as if someone invisibly pried his hands open, snapping his fingers backward one by one.
His face was full of pain, shouting and screaming continuously, but he was like a marionette, unable to control his limbs at all. Every movement he made violated his own will.
Then Ding Chaojie took a step back with his right foot, retreating step by step, backward, until one foot stepped into the Green Door.
The surveillance video flickered constantly, the snow getting thicker and thicker, blurring the video completely.
Bang—
The Green Door closed, and Ding Chaojie disappeared from the detention room, as if he had never been there.
...
Zhu Ning's foot landed.
She had seen many corpses; this tactile sensation was definitely correct. That was a body. Did she just step right into a crime scene?
She felt like an NPC in a game who got stuck due to a bug, only able to move backward, not forward.
Since it had come to this, and there was no way back anyway, having a female ghost behind her was better than facing a void room.
Zhu Ning took another step back. This time, she completely entered the space behind her.
Zhu Ning stumbled and held onto the wall to stand firm. Beneath her feet was a highly decomposed male corpse. His back looked like it had been sliced open by a knife, with something drilling out of the body.
It looked a lot like a Contaminant from a failed mutation.
He maintained a prone position, his fingers curled and tightly gripping the edge of the baseboard. Bloodstains scratched by fingers remained at the foot of the wall, as if he had tried every possible way to escape before dying.
Zhu Ning had drilled out from the back of the TV wall. Her first reaction after entering the other dimension from such a tricky angle was to touch the wall again.
Her palm couldn't pass through again. The wall in front of her had become a solid wall. One could only enter but not exit?
The house was abnormally damp and cold. The helmet panel showed it was only sixteen degrees.
This space was equally quiet. No one spoke, only the slight noise made by Zhu Ning.
Out of caution, Zhu Ning didn't turn her head after entering the alternate dimension. Instead, she took another step back, carefully moving her foot off the corpse.
Suddenly, her whole body went stiff. Something seemed to be moving on the back of her neck.
Although the Sanitation Center's uniform covered all of a person's skin, to avoid danger, the uniform's membrane could transmit tactile sensations to the skin, making it very sensitive.
Now Zhu Ning felt a slight itch on the back of her neck, as if... a clump of hair had fallen on her back.
Drip—drop—
A drop of water fell onto the helmet, making a muffled sound. Because it was overly quiet, the sound of this water drop was very obvious. She raised her head silently.
And then she met a pale face. A woman was hanging upside down from the ceiling.
She was wearing a red dress, her limbs sprawling on the ceiling, and her long hair hung down, landing right on Zhu Ning's shoulder.
Drip—drop—
The woman's pale face was wet, moisture constantly seeping from her pores, like a corpse that had been soaked at the bottom of a well overnight.
It took Zhu Ning a moment to summarize exactly what she was seeing.
The woman's limbs were spread out, as if some suction force was gripping the ceiling, and on her back, she carried a giant... snail shell?
The entire snail shell was pale yellow, even featuring a beautiful black spiral line. Looking closely, the snail shell grew out from the spine on her back.
Snail... human? Was this a Contaminant?
No wonder there was no sound; snails don't make noise.
Zhu Ning took a rough glance with her peripheral vision. The layout of the alternate dimension was exactly the same as Huang Yaruo's home, but much older.
The furniture was covered with a thick layer of dust. There was rotting food and withered flowers on the dining table. The walls were covered with mold and moss. The contrast between the two spaces was overly intense. The previous house was tidy, comfortable, and cozy, while this room exuded the rotting stench of death. To use a metaphor, this house seemed dead; what Zhu Ning saw was the corpse of the house.
There were a total of six wriggling Snail-Humans in the living room. Some wore suits, some wore sportswear, and one wore pale pink pajamas. One could even deduce who they were before from their attire.
As soon as Zhu Ning entered, these Snail-Humans seemed to possess a collective consciousness and suddenly all looked towards Zhu Ning in unison.
Snails are mollusks, so the limbs of Snail-Humans were even softer. After seeing Zhu Ning, they slowly wriggled their limbs, crawling towards her.
But the speed of snails was simply too slow. In a weird, damp house, a room full of snails with human faces was slowly crawling towards her.
For some reason, even though their movements were slow and shouldn't pose much threat, a sense of weirdness rose in her heart. This thing was even more terrifying than the pig-men.
The fish-men and pig-men she encountered before didn't have human faces. When humans saw them, the brain identified them as monsters.
But the Snail-Humans were highly anthropomorphic; they didn't look much different from humans.
Snail-Humans possessed the behavioral patterns of snails and could climb higher. Wherever they crawled, they left a long trail of slime.
The whole environment was more suitable for snails to survive; it was very damp. The house was shrouded in green plants, and a cluster of red mushrooms actually grew beside the sofa. Anyone who didn't know better would think this was a giant incubator.
This might be the true contaminated area.
Zhu Ning suddenly understood how the 2500-cubic-meter contaminated area was calculated. A home certainly wouldn't be as big as a swimming pool, but if the space of this home could unfold and extend continuously, it was entirely possible.
Zhu Ning had been to three contaminated areas. This was the first place she desperately wanted to get out of. It was really too weird, making one not want to stay a moment longer.
The clue, the clue to getting out, was on the Snail-Humans.
The remaining five Snail-Humans looked like ordinary people. There was a male Snail-Human by the TV; he stood out a bit too much.
The man had a square face and a very strong physique. If he stood up, he would definitely be 1.9 meters tall. His build didn't look like an ordinary person; he might have been engaged in some security work before turning into a Contaminant.
He seemed to be wearing a watch on his wrist, flashing a faint light.
Wait, Zhu Ning frowned. That wasn't a watch; that was a Sanitation Center Employee Wristband.
The Sanitation Center Employee Wristband was a symbol of identity, used to contact the Sanitation Center. In every sudden emergency mission, the company could also quickly contact employees. If employees were in distress or had needs, they could get support from various departments.
Even if an employee died in a contaminated area, the positioning function could display the last known location, facilitating subsequent body retrieval.
There were three types of Employee Wristbands: silver for Cleaners, black for Demon Hunters, and pure white for technical or management personnel.
Zhu Ning would absolutely not mistake it. On the Snail-Human's wrist was a black Employee Wristband.
Was he a Demon Hunter? Demon Hunters far exceeded Cleaners in both Sanity and physical fitness. Zhu Ning had deeply experienced this after being beaten in the arena for three days.
A Demon Hunter had once died here?
Author's Note: Me! I can finally start VIP chapters! Thank you for your support! Updating ten thousand words tomorrow for VIP entry! Reverse VIP starts from chapter sixteen, so everyone who has read the chapters doesn't need to buy them. The subscriptions these few days are particularly important to me. I hope everyone supports me a lot! Love you guys!
Comments
Post a Comment