[Unknown Location]
“Urgh—!”
Accompanied by violent vomiting, countless parasites mixed with viscous stomach acid poured onto the ground.
The bugs were only a few millimeters long, hard to spot without close inspection. Their transparent, thread-like bodies coiled like mosquito incense coils, occasionally wriggling.
Some bugs splashed onto the girl’s pale, bare feet, but they hadn’t fully developed and lacked sharp mouthparts to burrow through skin. They could only twist futilely and powerlessly.
The girl appeared to be around eleven or twelve years old. Her beautiful, ethereal snow-blue soft hair was soaked with sweat and mucus, clinging tightly to her scalp, giving her a disheveled look with a pitiable beauty.
But her pupils were hazy and deep, shrouded in a thin mist. Far from the collapse of lost hope, they showed no trace of human emotion at all.
She raised her small hand, wiped her mouth, then picked up a cup of saline solution and took a sip to replenish her lost electrolytes before inducing more vomiting.
Xixi Sacharia.
The girl turned her head to glance at the corpse on the makeshift operating table. She wasn’t frightened by the dark purple bruises covering the skin or the exposed mushy fat and soft tissue. Instead, she bowed solemnly and said in a soft, melodious voice:
“Thank you.”
Relying on broad-spectrum antiparasitic drugs only suppressed the parasites in her body—a temporary fix. Once the effects wore off, the bugs regained vitality and gradually developed resistance, shortening her lucid intervals until she lost consciousness entirely.
Most people would be on the verge of breakdown in such a situation, but for Xixi, the drugs merely bought time.
As her investigation deepened, she named those parasitized “infectees” and classified infection stages.
She discovered that in the third stage of infection, the bugs entered the brain—not to devour or hollow it out, but to remodel it somehow.
At that point, the skull, originally as hard as quartz, softened into a membrane, losing all protective function. It could even be torn open easily, with the scalp and skull resembling two layers of skin, while the spine dissolved into a tofu-like mass.
In the living room, several tables formed a makeshift operating table. Xixi used surgical scissors to cut open the leathery skull of a corpse. The interior was remarkably clean because, in the fourth stage after brain remodeling, the bugs collectively burrowed out of the body to serve as building materials.
After opening the skull, the corpse’s brain was preserved intact, its cortical folds grayish-white and smooth, without a single sign of gnawing.
On either side of the brain mass curled a row of shrimp-whisker-like arthropods extending from the brain matter, swaying lightly and softly in the cerebrospinal fluid.
A tough chitinous layer wrapped the section from the brainstem to the spinal cord, extending deeper into the spinal canal.
Xixi grasped the corpse’s brain with both hands and gently pulled it outward, slowly drawing it out. It grew longer and longer until an entire tree-root-like bundle of forked spinal nerves emerged—over a meter long!
The nerve fibers, covered in connective tissue and chitin, resembled an unusually soft eel. It even writhed like a living thing, coiling around the girl’s fair wrist and arm.
Witnessing this, Xixi realized this wasn’t parasitism for survival or reproduction, but a deliberate utilization and transformation of the biological resource called “humans.” These parasites weren’t part of the wild ecosystem; they were biological tools manipulated by some will. After plundering most nutrients, they remodeled the human brain into a “Brain Worm,” then collectively abandoned the remaining husk, linking together to build a Hive.
Xixi hypothesized that the parasites’ collective behavior was controlled by pheromones, so traces must remain in the infectee’s bodily fluids—likely highest in the cerebrospinal fluid.
After intravenously injecting 2cc of cerebrospinal fluid from a fourth-stage infectee, she felt the bugs inside her stir and desperately crawl outward.
Next came drinking water to induce vomiting, accelerating the process.
Once she’d expelled the parasites from her body, she seemed temporarily safe, but she knew it was far from over.
The top priority was finding uncontaminated food and water. As for why not flee… the city boundaries were shrouded in white mist. Crossing it only looped back to the city from another direction.
Clearly, some extraordinary force had severed all of Rift City from the real world, turning it into an inescapable island.
Moreover, the city’s powerhouses seemed isolated by spatial forces in different locations. Apart from confirming Smedley was under control, Xixi hadn’t encountered another transcendent.
At that moment, rustling sounds came from outside the door.
The girl’s figure fluttered as she darted behind the bathroom wall.
The first to enter was a monstrous bug resembling a giant phage. Spoke-like arthropods formed its base, supporting a cylindrical body. The swollen head was studded with numerous red protrusions—its eyeballs. The clumps of sticky, ball-like particles on its surface weren’t eggs but power cell clusters, generating bioelectric scanning rays.
Xixi named it the “Observer,” while the several brightly colored, centipede-like bugs were “Crawlers.”
The Observer moved slowly but could emit a thirty-degree conical infrared scan from its eyes.
The Crawlers exceeded five meters in length, with segmented backplates that could rear up to ninety degrees. They had oral palps, jaw legs, and capturing limbs aplenty.
They were extremely fast, with hundreds of needle-like legs like countless snakes or nematodes—enough to make one’s scalp tingle. Sticky too, they scuttled across floors, walls, and ceilings with ease.
Both types dwarfed humans in size. An ordinary person had no chance to fight back or flee—they’d be pinned and clamped by capturing limbs in an instant.
Xixi held her breath. Insects could detect carbon dioxide levels in the air. Fortunately, the bug squad’s goal wasn’t house-to-house searching but recovering Brain Worms from corpses.
At the door, a flat, elongated “Carrier” with ventral feet waited in position.
A Crawler used its dexterous oral palps to tear open the corpse’s leathery skull. Then, two soft, bizarre licking-sucking mouthparts sliced in, enveloped the remodeled brain, and gently extracted it, transferring it to the Carrier’s back. The Brain Worm adhered to mucus secreted from its back, secured by burr-like soft hooks. It could only futilely lash its tail of bundled spinal nerves.
Just then, a Crawler swept left and right as it entered the bathroom—and the girl stood mere inches away!
She was at her breath-holding limit. Even exhaling a tiny puff of CO2-rich air would alert it!
In her line of sight, the vividly grotesque monster reared up over two meters tall! Countless slender, soft legs undulated in waves, propelling its body forward—chilling to the spine!
Its triangular head bore rough compound eyes of black granules like blackberries or mulberries. Slender, sharp oral palps writhed around bizarre disc-like lips, like a beast crawled from hell!
But the girl pushed off with her toes, lunging forward instead of retreating!
Her soft little body stretched out as if elongated, closing the distance in one step—like a spirit cat pouncing!
In the next instant, her tender white fingers locked onto the monster’s thick throat. Terrifying force erupted like iron pliers, clamping it tight!
Though such creatures likely breathed through dorsal spiracles, Xixi’s goal was merely suppression and restraint.
In that moment, the Neural Fiber on her forehead stiffened straight. Its tip pierced the bug’s sub-throat nerve ganglion like a needle, injecting neural currents. Strands of electric signals raced reverse along the nerve cords to the brain!
This “Neural Fiber” was an artificial bundled nerve fiber, implanted and linked to her brain. With her powerful mental abilities, she seized control of the Crawler’s body in an instant.
It was a common tool, like a data cable, frequently used in human biotech.
Xixi’s was a cutting-edge lab model—super-powered with transcendent traits.
Amid fine whirring sounds, the dense array of soft long legs curled inward, wrapping around her like a spider spinning silk around prey. It enfolded her small body in an embrace. Then, soft oral palps methodically stripped away her clothes, exposing her flawless nude form—skin delicately tender, pale to the point of illness, waist slender and supple, legs extraordinarily long, small feet soft and enticing, neatly trimmed nails glowing faint peach-pink like petals.
Xixi drew a small knife, pried open an abdominal plate, and burrowed into the Crawler’s body cavity. She was immersed in ink-green insect blood, slick muscle fibers, connective tissues, and organ clumps enveloping her from all sides… If reversed, it would be a horrific hellscape of the bug’s long tendrils piercing her skull to control her brain and burrow into her little belly.
