After Being Parasitized by a Monster 49

Chapter 49: Are you my respected teacher, or my enemy?

“What’s happening?”

Different places, the same time, many people were asking the same question.

Han Xuhua ran forward with her team leader, her earpiece filled with her own panting.

Many people who passed by were also running.

They jumped into the car, and before they could even sit down, the steel beast under them slid out.

Thump! Caught off guard, Han Xuhua’s head and the car had an intimate collision. A chorus of wails came from her ears—the other teammates had also been hit.

“I don’t know!” Yan Li was experienced. She had grabbed the handrail as soon as she got in the car. She lowered her head to receive the information and said quickly, “There’s a magnetic field riot. Marine creatures are swarming to the shore. The cause is yet to be investigated.”

It was supposed to be a time for a good sleep, but now, up, down, far, and near, there were lights, noise, orderly chaos, and clueless busyness everywhere.

Mutated creatures didn’t pick a time to cause trouble.

The giant dragon that was coiled on the coast, the Defense Center, was forced to wake up from its deep dream.

The Security Department was mobilized, and the research institute was also in a not-so-optimistic situation.

The signal was suddenly abnormal, and many data transmissions were interrupted. The staff on duty were desperately trying to save it. Many people received temporary overtime instructions and rushed to their workstations without even putting on their clothes and shoes properly.

The sirens in and out of the building were blaring, and the electronic bracelets on their wrists were beeping. Every time they passed a laboratory, the instruments and equipment were all sounding alarms as if they were participating in a grand chorus.

The space was filled with a sharp, intertwined reverberation.

Rumble.

In the depths of the level four experimental area, the multiple access control systems of laboratory 40 were opened at the same time.

The abandoned place, which was as quiet as a cemetery, finally received the sounds of the outside world again.

Swish. All the lights in the room went out.

The power was suddenly cut.

The multiple layers of tempered glass made the light faint and scattered. Through the corridor, dozens of meters away, a blurry figure walked in with a flashlight.

The power outage was most likely her doing.

In the data storage room, the person curled up on the ground slowly raised her head and looked out the window.

…

Jiang Dexin was very anxious.

She had arrived earlier than the first batch of people. The moment she saw the message, she realized that something was wrong—

Cheng Ming had entered laboratory 40.

Her authority was higher. To prevent leaving more records, she had directly put the area in an emergency state, destroyed the power system, and prevented the signal from being transmitted.

On her way to the laboratory, she had been constantly dialing the same number, but she didn’t know if it was due to the magnetic storm interference, but there was only a busy tone.

The experimental area was very large. After passing the last gate, Jiang Dexin stood in the center and looked around. The flashlight in her hand drew a three-meter radius, a drop in the bucket.

Just as she was anxiously wondering where to start looking, click, the door of the cubicle at the end opened.

Cheng Ming walked out by herself and stood under the glass display case.

She had long since torn off her heavy protective suit and thrown it in a corner. She was wearing very thin clothes, just a white lab coat over her shirt, like a wandering soul.

“Teacher Jiang,” she tilted her head and stared at her, asking, “do you know who I am?”

Her voice was very low, but it still startled Jiang Dexin.

She turned to look, and the mermaid corpse was hanging behind Cheng Ming, one in front of the other, one high and one low, overlapping in a scattered manner.

In the dim light, this scene was so strange. The corpse seemed to have raised its eyes along with Cheng Ming’s movements, and four eyes were staring at her at the same time.

The living and the dead, the boundary was so blurred.

Jiang Dexin did not walk any further, but stood still and gripped the light stick.

“Do you know what my relationship is with this place?”

Cheng Ming walked towards her.

This was her birthplace, and the long, narrow, and dark passage was like an umbilical cord under her feet.

“And do you know how my mother died?”

Passing through this ruin that should have been buried long ago, the background boards on both sides of the long corridor were like tombstones, and she was a vengeful ghost, slowly approaching.

For the last question, she had walked in front of her.

“You, you know?” Jiang Dexin’s throat rolled with difficulty, and the light in her hand was shaking uncontrollably as she spoke.

Oh, what an unoriginal reaction.

Cheng Ming looked at her with a blank expression.

It was not so much indifference as it was an empty numbness.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t expect… I’m sorry…” her voice became more and more hoarse.

But as she confessed everything, the matter seemed to have exceeded her imagination—

“I’m sorry about your mother. I didn’t mean to harm her… I didn’t expect to bring her a fatal disaster…”

“What?” The expression on Cheng Ming’s face finally changed again, and her tone rose strangely and ethereally.

Buzz.

A slight tremor came from under her feet, a disturbance from somewhere, as if many people were running.

Jiang Dexin suddenly came to her senses, quickly grabbed her arm, and pulled her out. “This is not the time to talk about this. Get out quickly! Who showed you the way? You shouldn’t have come here! You’ll be targeted by them!”

“What did you say? Who are they?” Cheng Ming pulled her back, refusing to leave. The faint light in her pupils was as if it had been quenched with fire, and the blue light was piercingly dark. “Explain it clearly!”

“That project—the people from the foundation didn’t have good intentions. The project they organized couldn’t see the light of day. People had disappeared a long time ago… When they came to me, my career had just started. I didn’t dare to refuse, so I had to introduce your mother instead… But I didn’t expect it to have been so long…”

Jiang Dexin supported her shoulders, it was unclear if she was trying to give her some support, or to draw some strength from her. “I shouldn’t have thrown the danger to her, and I shouldn’t have instigated her to abandon you, which led to you being attacked on the coast… Xiao Cheng, forgive your teacher, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

She was speaking incoherently, and the logic was not clear. Cheng Ming’s mind was in a mess.

There was only one thing that was clear.

Was she the culprit, the beginning of everything? Did she also have a part in her mother’s death?

A late confession was a mockery, an insult, and a provocation to the victim.

“Teacher—” she followed her wrist, touched her shoulder, and finally gripped her collar tightly. Her lips trembled, and her hands trembled even more. The intense hatred was about to swallow her and turn her into a heartless devil.

Are you my respected teacher, or my enemy?

“I’ll explain it to you in detail when we get out… Cheng Ming, let’s go first!” Jiang Dexin anxiously twisted her. “Get out quickly. It’s chaotic outside now, no one will find out…”

“Don’t touch me!” Cheng Ming forcefully pushed her away.

Her emotions were already on the verge of a precarious collapse. This push was completely out of control, and smack, Jiang Dexin was thrown back heavily. The lighting equipment fell from her hand, and the glass tube shattered all over the floor.

She hit the wall behind her, and thump, she hit a hard corner of the display board. She raised her hand to cover her forehead, and just two seconds later, blood gushed out.

Cheng Ming was stunned.

The broken crystals reflected a dazzling colorful light. The person lying on the ground tried to stand up again, but her limbs were out of control as if she were drunk, and she failed helplessly.

Jiang Dexin looked up, her gaze losing focus. The eyes she looked at her with were very much like Cheng Ran’s in her memory.

It was also such a dying gaze, and she was also looking at her so sadly.

She moved her blood-stained fingers and tremblingly pointed outside.

Go.

Cheng Ming understood what she meant. A huge fear and guilt invaded her, driving her almost mad.

“Teacher… Teacher Jiang…” she called out hoarsely and dryly, and stiffly bent down.

The front line was dangerous. All the simple medical and emergency rescue measures she had learned when she first joined seemed to be temporarily blank, and she was at a loss.

Her soul was split in two. One half was shouting and crying, saying, save her quickly. The other half was looking down from above, saying, what does it have to do with her.

After killing her parents, was she going to cut off this connection with the third person who was important in her life with her own hands?

In just one night, she seemed to have gotten a lot of information, a lot of truth, and had also lost too much in an instant.

Buzz. Another strong tremor came from under her feet. The entire building was shaking, and Cheng Ming almost hit the wall.

Her shoulder was in sharp pain. She looked up in a daze, her attention redistributed. The urgent alarm sound came in, and after being compressed and folded several times by the outer corridor, it was as heavy as the roar of a giant beast’s heart.

And she was in the belly of this giant beast. If she didn’t leave now, she would be completely digested.

No matter what the reason was, it was all reminding her of the same thing—there was no time.

“Cheng Ming, go!” Xiao Ming urged. “Calm down!”

Calm down… what is calm?

Large teardrops rolled out of her eyes, but her expression was flat, as if she had lost the ability to feel emotions.

“Get lost,” she replied.

What are you.

Are you my lover, or my enemy.

Or are you just my wishful thinking, self-deception.

Cheng Ming took a step forward, and her body suddenly tilted back, as if she were about to lose her balance.

But before she could fall, her knees lifted and drove her legs, like a fish wagging its tail. With an extremely strange and light posture, she steadied her feet.

The mycelia floated up lightly. “She” glanced at the person who was almost unconscious by the wall. The dark tendrils flashed by and quickly swept through the pool of blood, taking away a drop of blood.

Xiao Ming had taken control of her body and rushed out of the laboratory, as agile as a fish in the sea, and plunged into the vast darkness without looking back.

…

Five minutes later, on the floor of laboratory 40, the person whose life was unknown slowly woke up.

Jiang Dexin was slumped against the wall. She opened her eyes and dazedly saw the phone that had fallen by her side, its screen lit up, and the signal was full.

She picked it up and, with a trembling hand, dialed the last number she had called. She asked, “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”

Leaving this laboratory, leaving so much data, full of mistakes, waiting for Cheng Ming to check…

“Group leader…” after calling out this title, she paused, panted heavily, and smiled bitterly. “Are you still the Group Leader Chu I know?”

There was only a crackling sound of static on the other end of the phone, as if the call had not been successfully connected.

But she knew she was listening.

Chu Lanying, once the head of the mycology research team, and now the liaison for the foundation’s project funding for the research institute. At that time, she was just a deputy researcher under her. After Cheng Ran’s accident, the other was promoted to a high level, and Jiang Dexin could no longer turn a blind eye to her friend’s accident. She took the initiative to fight for it and took her place as the head of the research group.

She still remembered what the other had said on the day of the handover—

“Are you sure you want to get involved in this mess?”

Her low voice, her mysterious smile, in the middle of the night many years later, would often make her break out in a cold sweat.

The Biological Research Institute was not so pure. If you just wanted to do research and contribute to the fate of mankind, being an ordinary researcher was enough. Further up, it involved greater power, and you would inevitably be swept along.

It was easier said than done to be alone.

She had always thought that she wanted to protect Cheng Ming, but she had, either actively or passively, step by step, led her old friend’s daughter down an irreversible path.

“Jiang Dexin.”

The other finally spoke, but it was not to answer her question.

The voice in the static was low, but it still had that elegant and unique charm—

“You’ve already let down Cheng Ran. Are you going to let down her daughter too?”