Chapter 201-I Clean Up Garbage in a Wasteland World
Chapter 201 Eternal Pharma Foundation (VII)
What they'd poured out earlier was from bottle A—cockroach Ootheca.
Dr. Fu didn't dare open any more bottles. His spiritual value was too low. Zhu Ning couldn't watch anymore—she was afraid this little doctor would literally get scared to death today.
Zhu Ning twisted open bottle B herself. She was brave and mentally prepared. Same setup as Dr. Fu—a sheet of white paper beneath.
She tilted the bottle. Several white granules rolled out. Not Ootheca—normal white pills.
Zhu Ning asked: "What's in these?"
Dr. Fu didn't dare look closely. His spiritual value was too depleted—even normal pills looked like cockroach eggs to him now.
"No idea. Can't determine composition without instruments." Dr. Fu wasn't a human spectrometer.
Zhu Ning: "So Drug A is cockroach eggs that induce hallucinations, and Drug B is some unknown pill that eliminates hallucinations."
Dr. Fu nodded. "Not necessarily eliminates. Might just make you unable to see them."
Zhu Ning fell silent for a moment. This was an entire operation chain. The Eternal Pharma Foundation attracted Defectives. At the Foundation events, they selected suitable prey. Under the guise of experiments, targets were moved into the hotel.
An ordinary person told they could stay in a luxury hotel for free—even if they didn't agree immediately, they'd at least stay to observe the situation.
Afterward, they were lured into cooperating as test subjects. Just like the hotpot restaurant owner—desperate, with nothing to lose. Defectives were dying anyway. Might as well try.
The hotel had internal surveillance to monitor every move of the test subjects.
The Defectives thought they'd found a lifeline. In reality, they'd become lab rats.
Zhu Ning: "So they really were being fed cockroach eggs?"
The people taking the drugs didn't notice anything wrong?
Facing Zhu Ning's doubt, Dr. Fu shook his head. "I can't tell if this is contamination-zone exaggeration or reality."
Zhu Ning recalled the Cockroach-Humans. These people had likely all been Defectives once.
But why?
What was the benefit of turning people into cockroaches?
The Huang Yaruo experiment had researched whether contaminants and humans could form a parent-child bond.
What about these? What were they researching?
Through her God's Eye View, Zhu Ning could still see the Cockroach-Humans in the corridor. A swarm of cockroaches in motion was quite a spectacle—like a black tide.
"This place is strange," Zhu Ning felt her back prickle—as if cockroaches were crawling on her. She always trusted her instincts. "We didn't come here as exterminators. We're looking for the truth behind the Divine Descent. Surely a god isn't going to descend into a cockroach?"
Creating this many Cockroach-Humans had to serve some other purpose. Zhu Ning couldn't imagine the final boss being a cockroach.
Not that it wouldn't be imposing enough—it would just be... absurd.
"We've encountered at least two types of bizarre things in this hotel. First: the Cockroach-Humans. Visible, tangible—those things outside the door." Zhu Ning gestured toward the door. Rustling was still audible from next door. "Second: the things in the conference room and elevator. Only visible between blinks—you see them when your eyes open, they vanish when you close them. And with each blink, they get closer."
"But they have range limitations," Xu Meng added.
"Right," Zhu Ning said. "Confined to the conference room and elevator. Gone once you leave. So what are those?"
Zhu Ning had entered the conference room, sat in the wrong seat, and been grabbed by a pair of arms.
Those things could physically affect a person, yet couldn't be seen normally—only through the act of blinking.
Xu Meng mused: "Similar to the hallucinations described in the medication logs."
Xu Meng had skimmed Zhu Ning's log too. Placed side by side—written by two different people—both repeatedly noted: "I blinked and the thing vanished. Must be a hallucination."
What was the connection between the Cockroach-Humans and these entities?
Zhu Ning handed both logs to Dr. Fu. "Any thoughts from reading these?"
Dr. Fu steadied himself. Zhu Ning and Xu Meng had each found a medication log. Xu Meng's had similar content—drug-induced hallucinations with varying details, likely individual differences.
Dr. Fu scanned rapidly: "If there are surveillance cameras, the researchers monitoring them would write third-party reports."
"Researchers observe and document behavior while having subjects write first-person medication logs. It's meant for cross-referencing."
Zhu Ning asked: "Cross-referencing what? Hallucination content?"
Dr. Fu shook his head. "Unclear. I don't have their specific experimental protocols."
Dr. Fu couldn't draw conclusions without sufficient evidence.
"The logs center on hallucinations. Both subjects faithfully recorded hallucination content—proving that is the focus," Xu Meng said suddenly. "Why would they research hallucinations?"
Eternal Pharma's research subject seemed to be human hallucinations.
What use was that?
Dr. Fu paused, then said carefully: "Generally speaking, if it's not mental contamination, ordinary people hallucinate due to abnormal neurotransmitter secretion or temporal lobe dysfunction."
He rephrased: "Let me use a rough analogy. Most people can distinguish reality from imagination, right?"
Xu Meng didn't nod. In the past she might have given a definitive yes—but she'd been contaminated inside Bao Ruiming's Consciousness Cloud. The boundary between hallucination and reality had become extremely blurred for her.
She'd seen Cheng Mofei transformed into a snail-person. She wasn't sure she counted as normal.
In this contamination-riddled world, every human sense was becoming unreliable.
Dr. Fu didn't notice Xu Meng's discomfort. He raised his right hand. "Imagine there's a door in our brains. You're a normal person—you know some things are imaginary, because this door functions properly. When you open it, you know what's behind is fantasy; what's outside is reality."
"Some people like to daydream—zoning out in class, fantasizing while waiting for the bus. Writers love constructing worlds in their heads. This is very common. If you want to enter your imaginary world, you open the door and walk in. If you want to return to reality, you open the door and walk out."
As he spoke, Dr. Fu's hand mimicked the motion. His right hand acted like a real door, opening and closing.
"For some psychiatric patients, this door's mechanism has broken. They've lost the boundary between imagination and reality. What they see as real isn't what we see. They believe their fantasy world is reality—which is why outsiders think they've gone mad, that they're hallucinating."
Zhu Ning had never heard this explanation before. As a child visiting her grandmother's village, there'd been a famous madman who always wore red, dancing and gesticulating wildly.
Once, Zhu Ning saw him crouching on a field ridge, holding a handful of pebbles. She'd been young and curious, so she went over and asked what he was doing.
Zhu Ning still remembered his answer. He'd turned his head, flashing two rows of yellowed teeth, and giggled: "I'm watching a movie."
Zhu Ning was just a child then. Children couldn't recognize madmen as easily as adults. She'd earnestly replied: "What movie are you watching?"
The madman described the plot—something about a woman in red who'd drowned in a pond. "All bloated! All swollen!"
Then he'd flown into a rage, screaming that Zhu Ning was interrupting his movie, and attacked her.
Looking back now, it was probably exactly what Dr. Fu described—the door in his mind had malfunctioned. He couldn't distinguish reality from fantasy.
Zhu Ning caught herself drifting to memories of her past life. They didn't feel so distant. She refocused—she was in a contamination zone.
On the table sat two drugs. The pod-shaped Ootheca looked ready to hatch tiny cockroaches at any moment. The imprisoned Cockroach-Human in the bedroom kept struggling, hissing against its cage.
Not to mention the swarm outside that they had no idea how to eliminate.
All three felt this contamination zone was deeply abnormal. A brief silence fell.
Zhu Ning had been listening and thinking simultaneously. She'd disconnected screen-sharing with Dr. Fu earlier, so her display was now split in two—one panel showing the internal camera, pointed at her own face.
While thinking, Zhu Ning's gaze suddenly caught on the helmet's internal camera. A selfie angle.
But selfie cameras and mirrors were fundamentally different. Electronic imaging made everything feel unreal.
Zhu Ning looked at herself in the lens. She blinked unconsciously.
When humans blink, they usually don't notice—compared to raising an arm, blinking is such a minuscule action, and humans blink so many thousands of times daily.
If every single blink demanded conscious attention, a person would be exhausted by noon.
Only by deliberately stopping and focusing all attention on blinking did you become aware of the action.
Zhu Ning enlarged the camera feed until only her own eyes filled the screen. Before this mission, she'd never paid attention to blinking.
In the conference room she'd fought to keep from blinking—her eyeballs were already threaded with red veins.
This time she blinked deliberately. Her screen faithfully recorded the movement. Nothing abnormal appeared.
Blinking—the process was remarkably similar to a camera shutter.
When photographing, the shutter emits a faint click. There's a romantic saying that photography captures a moment in time.
Eyelashes sweeping down. Lids touching briefly. Like a shutter rapidly opening and closing. Like a door being pushed open for just an instant.
A... door.
A door?
Zhu Ning frowned. "What if what they're researching isn't hallucinations—but the door you just described?"
"What if—" Zhu Ning voiced her hypothesis, completely unaware of Dr. Fu's face draining of color. Almost talking to herself: "What if what's behind that door could be brought into the real world in the form of a contaminant?"
Dr. Fu's brow knotted tight at her words. He even forgot to clean the vomit inside his helmet.
In that instant, he thought of what he'd seen outside the conference room—watching Zhu Ning's mission footage, seeing that figure suddenly turn its head.
That figure seemed branded onto his retina—as if it had already passed through his eyes and burrowed into his brain.
Dr. Fu's right hand began trembling involuntarily. This was the most terrifying hypothesis he'd ever heard.
"Is—" Dr. Fu's face went whiter than when the Cockroach-Human had tackled him. "Is that possible?"
If something like that could be achieved—what was Eternal Pharma actually doing?
What were they trying to bring into reality?
Zhu Ning: "Just a wild guess. I don't know."
She wasn't some deranged researcher. Honestly, the contamination levels in this wasteland world kept exceeding her comprehension. Nothing was impossible.
Dr. Fu shook his head: "No evidence."
He believed in evidence. This was too outlandish. Without more proof, he couldn't commit to any conclusion.
Besides—what did any of this have to do with the Cockroach-Humans? Why cockroaches specifically?
Zhu Ning and Dr. Fu had different approaches. Zhu Ning threw out wild guesses; Dr. Fu was rigorous.
"Forget whether it's possible for now," Xu Meng said. "If someone was monitoring, there must be a lab here."
They'd found the test subjects. Could the laboratory be far?
Zhu Ning had visited the ant nest before—once an Eternal Pharma experimental base. Each compartment was designed for researcher observation.
This hotel was the same. If every hotel room was a petri dish, the researchers had to be nearby.
Entering a contamination zone typically meant undergoing a contamination process. An ordinary Defective would come in, attend the lecture in the conference room, then check into the hotel.
What came after?
Where did successful test subjects go? How were failures disposed of?
They'd explored less than half the hotel at most.
Zhu Ning had suspected from the start that something lay beneath the hotel. "Chu Ling and Cao Wei were supposed to search underground. Have you been in contact?"
Xu Meng and Dr. Fu both shook their heads. Between the conference room contamination and fleeing from Cockroach-Humans, they hadn't spared a thought for the other team.
Zhu Ning opened the public channel: "Hello? Chu Ling? Cao Wei?"
She called twice. No response.
Zhu Ning's heart sank. An unpleasant suspicion surfaced. Their avatars on screen were grayed out—signal outside reception range.
How was that possible? Wasn't Prometheus supposed to guarantee communication within contamination zones?
Zhu Ning: "Prometheus?"
Normally, she'd hear: [I'm here.]
Like those home AI assistants from Zhu Ning's era—call its name, get an "I'm here, I'm here."
But this time Zhu Ning received only crackling static—as if something was trying to communicate with her but was being blocked out.
Xu Meng: "Signal's cut?"
Dr. Fu's voice was more panicked: "Since when? How is that possible?"
Prometheus should theoretically be able to enter any contamination zone. He'd never heard of a disconnection during a Human-Machine Interface Device mission.
They'd speculated that Prometheus was a beyond-S-Level contaminant. If disconnected, it meant even he couldn't reach this place.
Zhu Ning looked at her helmet's internal display. She hadn't noticed before—but now she could see clearly. The blue ring on her right temple was blinking erratically, like a broken signal light.
The Human-Machine Interface Device had failed.
Comments
Post a Comment