After Being Parasitized by a Monster 16

Chapter 16: Are you up for it… or should I just do it?

“Alright.”

With those two words, the two monsters finally reached an agreement and ended their conversation.

The fungus opposite them politely made way first. Strands of “hair” like iron wire worms emerging from water drilled out from the top of the host’s head and slid down the helmet.

Cheng Ming saw her own hair growing longer and longer. Xiao Ming slowly approached.

It was preparing to transfer.

Her throat was choked, as if she were in a bottomless abyss, unable to feel her heartbeat or breath, only endless regret and anxiety. Emotions, like an invading storm, overwhelmed her. She regretted not having more defensive measures on her… How could she trust a monster?

It was too late to say all this. She had to seize the moment the parasite completely detached from her to escape.

The difficulty was, firstly, this body was severely injured, and the new body opposite her was still armed. Secondly, the other fungal monster was still watching her covetously—

She glanced to the side, and her fears came true.

The “iron wire worms” had not yet completely left the old body, but were already sliding towards her.

After all the cells had “crawled” out of the brain cavity, they gathered into a clump on the human’s shoulder. Amidst the damp, fishy smell, they writhed and reassembled into a long, filamentous chain, stretching out towards her out of thin air, even thinner than a strand of hair, almost invisible as it floated in mid-air.

But out of a biological instinct of alertness, she knew it was approaching her. It was also waiting for the moment Xiao Ming detached to try to drill into her body.

Just as MF204 was about to touch her mouth and nose, the strand of silk suddenly disappeared—no, it was pulled back.

A hint of coolness brushed past her cheek. The broken mycelia swept across her face, like a light, weightless touch of a spring catkin. It didn’t feel like much.

But the psychological impact was far greater than a heavy hammer blow.

Xiao Ming ignored the empty new body and instead directly coiled its tendrils around the moss-like fungus. Its movements were like a hungry animal pouncing on fodder, but far cleaner and more thorough than an animal’s chewing and gnawing.

The two clumps of filaments merged like ink into ink, and after a few seconds, they were completely integrated, indistinguishable from each other.

A silent scream rippled out. High-intensity mechanical waves, like a file, extended into her ear canals and scraped against her skull. Blood instantly gushed from Cheng Ming’s nose, and her throat was filled with a fishy taste.

It all happened too fast.

She was like being pressed, entangled, and imprisoned by an invisible ghost, unable to move from beginning to end. And right before her eyes, it mercilessly killed the ally that was said to be taking it to a beautiful, free life.

“Yes, I like her body very much, so I don’t want to change.”

This sentence, word by word, was also like the malicious whisper of a ghost, cold, contemptuous, revealing a teasing insolence and a lofty divinity.

Cheng Ming regained feeling in her limbs and collapsed to the ground. All the blood vessels and meridians in her body seemed to be twisting and turning wantonly, with waves of tinnitus, dizziness, and a dull ache everywhere. She pressed one hand to her abdomen and touched her mouth and nose with the other, suspecting that she was bleeding from all seven orifices.

The living corpse, whose nervous system had stopped functioning after losing the mycelia, finally fell down, face down, with a dull thud.

The well-fed mycelia slowly returned, circling around her, either spreading on the floor and her clothes, or finding gaps and squeezing in to stick to her injured flesh, recycling the blood cells without wasting a single drop.

Xiao Ming asked, “How are you?”

Her own voice echoed in her ears.

“Ugh…” Mentally exhausted and tormented by the sound waves, Cheng Ming saw stars and vomited dryly on the floor, but couldn’t bring anything up. Her wounds were burning, and her internal organs were spasming and contracting.

She couldn’t speak. She forced herself up with her elbows and staggered to the bathroom, leaning against the wall. She took out the dissecting instruments stored in the cabinet under the sink, and without looking closely, she grabbed a handful, the knives, needles, and forceps clattering together.

The shrapnel embedded in her flesh was preventing it from healing. The top priority was to pick it out as soon as possible.

Fortunately, she had installed a full-length mirror in the bathroom. She sat slumped against the wall, bit the hem of her inner shirt, and forced herself to perform surgery on herself.

Large beads of sweat seeped from her forehead, slid down her eyebrows, and were quickly absorbed by the nearby hair, preventing it from affecting her vision.

Her hands were shaking violently, and her vision was wavering and scattered.

“Are you up for it…” Xiao Ming was in much better spirits than her and volunteered, “or should I just do it?”

Cheng Ming’s entire focus was on the tip of the scalpel in her hand. It was a long time before she belatedly received its question and understood what it meant.

And because of this, she did not immediately realize that it had not spoken, but had directly transmitted the information into her brain.

She didn’t have enough strength to refuse, but a weak whimper rolled in her throat, and she gritted her teeth, refusing to nod. Her vision was unclear, which was not conducive to precise positioning, and there was a large area of necrotic tissue that had been burned and contaminated. She simply gave up trying to find it and cut directly. The pain made her drenched in sweat, as if she had just crawled out of the water.

Clink. The last blood-stained bullet head embedded deep inside was picked out and fell to the tiled floor with a crisp sound. The hand that had been tightly gripping the instrument finally relaxed, its fingertips pale, and it almost instantly lost its strength.

“Why are you being so stubborn,” in her last second of consciousness, she seemed to hear it mutter.

In the reflection of the flat mirror, after the disheveled woman’s eyes drooped powerlessly, they slowly opened again.

Her fingers twitched slightly, as if she were reacquainting herself with her limbs. She raised her hand, pushed aside a corner of her shirt, and pressed on the pale, translucent skin on her upper waist.

The torn flesh on her abdomen healed and grew at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Looking at the host who had fainted from weakness, this Fish-Fungus monster sighed like a human, its voice as light as a dream, “Sigh…”

It took her silence as tacit consent.

So it moved its hands and feet, climbed up, and considerately tidied up this body.

It went out and busied itself for a while, then came back, stood under the showerhead with its clothes on, and simply rinsed itself, letting the hot water wash away the dirt other than the blood. Then, it walked into the bedroom, soaking wet, found a set of pajamas, closed its eyes, stripped, threw, and put them on, and finally, collapsed onto the bed—

—anyway, it was a marine creature, and it didn’t feel that there was anything wrong with being soaking wet.

It even felt that the environment tonight was particularly comfortable.

It pulled up the covers and whispered to itself, “Good night.”

…

When Cheng Ming woke up again, it was not yet dawn.

The prolonged alarm, mixed with the faint clamor from the direction of the coast and the occasional sweeping red light, still hung in the air.

The Defense Center was still on high alert.

She was woken up by Xiao Ming. A familiar scene, a familiar process, fusion and evolution, the body’s energy was completely consumed, and she felt as if she was just one step away from starving to death in bed.

The effect of symbiosis was reflected here. As the Fish-Fungus grew, she also benefited. The shotgun had a low velocity and easily caused large-area blind track wounds. Not to mention the danger of excessive blood loss, her muscles and even internal organs were damaged. In addition, she had been rough when removing the shrapnel. Such severe damage had actually healed completely in just a few hours.

The injured area no longer hurt, but her hands and feet were weak, and she almost couldn’t get up.

The parasite inside her was even more anxious than her, repeatedly urging her to inject the nutrient supplement.

After bumping into two or three obstacles and knocking over four or five items, when Cheng Ming finally held a nutrient supplement from the bedside table drawer and aimed the needle at her wrist, her hand was shaking so much that it looked like she was about to slit her wrist, not inject herself.

She couldn’t even aim for the vein. It was the parasite that helped her, its mycelia wrapping around her elbow a few times to steady it.

One was not enough, so she injected a second one.

The drug took effect quickly. Cheng Ming leaned against the foot of the bed and sat on the cold floor. Just as she had recovered a little, she looked at the mess in the room and felt that the nutrients she had just absorbed into her tissue cells were quickly consumed.

She covered her forehead, lowered her head and closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

Her clothes were inexplicably soaked, and she was in no mood to care. Her heart was cold, and her body was even colder.

With the threat of death gone, she had to think carefully about how to deal with the aftermath. Everything else could be put aside for now. The one brought in by the fungal monster parasite was definitely a member of the Security Department. How was she going to explain this?

Moreover, the other side was probably also urgently looking for someone… It was almost dawn, and she didn’t know when the evacuation would end. She didn’t have much time left, and she had to race against time to come up with a countermeasure.

“What are you worried about?” Xiao Ming suddenly spoke.

“…”

Cheng Ming didn’t speak and got up to walk to the living room.

Although the result was unexpected, the events of tonight were undoubtedly caused by it. Or rather, in the past few days, all the dangers and crises she had encountered were caused by it. Otherwise, she could have been a low-key scientific researcher in the research institute who didn’t care about the outside world and focused on experiments. Her only worry would have been how to quickly get promoted to researcher… instead of being crushed by the two mountains of it and the Security Department.

She didn’t know why it had ultimately chosen to stay with her, but she was too exhausted to ask.

Who knew? Monsters were so capricious, coming and going as they pleased, always beyond her control.

There were marks on the pink and white walls and the solid wood door panels where the pellets had grazed, and some fragments were embedded inside. Cheng Ming frowned and forced herself to look away, not thinking about how to deal with these marks later, but focusing on the important matters first.

She stepped out of the door and looked towards the side of the living room closest to her, where the intruder controlled by the fungus had last stayed—

At a glance, her heart stopped.

It was empty, with nothing there. Not to mention a fully armed special investigator.