Chapter 61: “I didn’t want to do this.”
“Sister, wait—”
She lifted the lid, and hot white steam floated out. Cheng Ming held the lid in her hand and looked up in confusion, waiting for her to continue.
Yan Rong sat upright in her wheelchair and looked at her obediently, “Sister, don’t drink too fast. See if there’s anything that needs to be improved. I’ll adjust the recipe tomorrow.”
“Alright,” she smiled and took a careful sip.
The overall taste was milky, with a sweet and thick texture. She could taste red bean paste, fermented glutinous rice wine, and some fine particles, like dried fruit and lotus seed fragments.
“What else did you add?” she asked.
“It’s a secret,” Yan Rong smiled, her eyes curving. “If my sister likes it, you can only drink it here in the future.”
Under her gaze, Cheng Ming drank until the bottom was visible, and there was no special reaction.
“It tastes good. It would be better if you put less sugar,” she finally gave a pertinent suggestion.
Before handing back the soup tureen, she even turned the container upside down to prove that she had not faked it, and asked with a smile, “Is that okay, Rongrong?”
…
Yan Rong went out with the porcelain tureen and slid into the kitchen.
The position of the kitchen utensils and cabinets had been lowered to accommodate her. She raised her hand and pushed the utensils onto the stove, but she forgot to put her hand down and was in a daze, rubbing the pattern on the outer wall of the porcelain tureen.
After about ten minutes, she turned back again and headed towards the bedroom in the inner room.
…
After finally sending Yan Rong away, Cheng Ming made the bed and sat down against the pillow. She was actually not feeling very well.
“Your body temperature is higher,” Xiao Ming said. “Are you having a fever?”
She raised her hand to test the temperature of her cheek. Her face was a little red, and the mycelia also stuck to her side cheek, which was cool and comfortable.
“Wine…” Cheng Ming was a little dizzy and thought about the reason. “There’s fermented rice wine in the soup.”
A lack of aldehyde dehydrogenase, and the accumulated acetaldehyde after ingesting alcohol was difficult to metabolize, leading to vasodilation, which was the so-called “flushing.”
Of course, this was not the only reason.
As Xiao Ming began to learn and search for keywords, she suddenly pressed her phone with her backhand, threw it aside, and stood up to look at the door.
Outside the door, like a lingering ghost, Yan Rong had come again.
The door had been opened at some point. This time, she had not made a sound and was staring at the room without a word.
The strand of mycelia that had been playing with her phone had retracted to its normal length before Cheng Ming had turned around.
“Rongrong…” she took a deep breath. “Is there anything else?”
The person outside the door looked at her and, only after hearing this sentence, did she seem to have thawed from her stone statue state and slowly drove in. “Sister, are you feeling uncomfortable anywhere?”
It was not so much that she was looking for an answer, but that she was coming with a predetermined answer to match the loopholes. From the moment she had decided to make a move, she had already defined the other in her heart.
“It’s a little…” Cheng Ming said with a smiling reproach. “You put too much fermented rice wine.”
In her memory, she had not seen the two sisters drink, and their alcohol tolerance was an unknown. It was not wrong for her to say this.
There were still two or three meters between them. Yan Rong also had a smiling expression and slowly approached, maintaining eye contact with her.
The curve of Cheng Ming’s facial features clearly did not change, but the corners of her mouth slowly became indifferent from a soft relaxation.
“Rongrong…” Finally, she called her softly, with a sigh.
Thump!
With a loud bang, Yan Rong’s wheelchair was overturned. Before she could fall to the ground, a black tide suddenly gathered, and the dense mycelia wove into a carpet-like net that wrapped around her, pressing, trapping, and imprisoning her from all directions.
It didn’t use much force, but it was enough to make her unable to move and lose the ability to resist.
She couldn’t reach the smooth floor, nor could she reach the solid wood door behind her. She could only grab the polyurethane tire to barely borrow some strength. She looked up and saw the unknown species with her sister’s appearance and her sister’s voice, but these things that were growing from its head were definitely not something a normal human should have, and it was approaching her step by step—
“Sorry, I didn’t want to do this.”
Even a healthy person, even Yan Li, could not have changed anything here, unless she had a machine gun or a heavy cannon… not to mention that Yan Rong’s body was very weak.
She was trapped in the fragments of the wheelchair, under the power of a non-human. There was no escape, no way to avoid it.
Like a butterfly that had fallen into a spider’s web, a moth that had flown into a candle flame, she struggled in a sorry state, but it was just a futile effort before death.
“I really want to be your sister and take good care of you… you would be very happy if you didn’t know the truth. Why can’t you just pretend to the end?”
She asked her this question, her eyes deep. The filamentous things that were floating like hair around her were like the servants of a ghost, making her image have a magnificent divinity in addition to its terror.
She also seemed to be talking to another self.
Why did she have to find out the truth?
What was worth it?
And so Yan Rong looked up at her, pale, and gave a corresponding answer, “A false peace built on the bones of a loved one is not happiness.”
She was panting, and her hair was messy, but her eyes were still curved with a smile.
As she spoke, the moment she saw Cheng Ming approach, she suddenly struggled and stretched out her hand. She felt for something from the side of the overturned wheelchair, and click, with a barely audible sound, like a spring that had been compressed to the extreme and had suddenly started, a black shadow flew towards her at an extremely fast speed.
The mycelia formed a net and blocked the first syringe that was coming at her. Cheng Ming suddenly took a step back and avoided the other small bottle. The glass was thrown to the ground and shattered into pieces with a thump.
The yellowish-brown liquid splashed out and stained the nearby mycelia, which curled up as if they had been burned.
But every strand of mycelia was a living cell, and the toxin would spread along the connections between the cells.
Without any hesitation, that patch of mycelia suicidally initiated a death program and broke apart. The survivors quickly contracted and moved away from the dangerous area.
It was like pouring a ladle of boiling water on a dense ant colony. The dead were dead, and the scattered were scattered, leaving a blank space full of corpses.
Yan Rong finally showed a look of annoyance.
She clutched the control panel with a flashing blue light under the storage bag, and pursed her lips tightly in humiliation and anger.
A wheelchair could not have this function, at least not in Yan Li’s memory. It could only have been modified by the other.
“You’re quite capable,” Cheng Ming tilted her head with interest and looked at this girl who had been staying at home all this time.
She had thought that the other was a professional who lived off her sister, but she had not expected that she had skills beyond her imagination.
She carefully searched her whole body with her mycelia and, after confirming that there were no more dangerous items or dangerous buttons, the black tendrils wrapped even tighter, firmly holding her hands and feet.
In Yan Rong’s vivid expression of wanting to bite her, Cheng Ming slowly walked up and, as always, bent her knees and squatted down, speaking to her at eye level:
“I can kill you, or to be simpler, I can parasitize you. This way, not only will it not affect my disguise as Yan Li, but it will also save me the trouble of you. But I didn’t. Why do you think that is?”
She leisurely picked up a strand of mycelia and brought it close to the other’s ear, it was unclear if it was a threat or a tease.
Yan Rong’s face turned pale. She didn’t want to look at her and turned her head away impatiently, and scoffed, “Because you’re kind?”
To be honest, now that she was no longer pretending to be well-behaved and clever, her expressions were much more vivid than usual.
“You could say that,” Cheng Ming said with a light laugh. “It’s just that I took her identity and promised her that I would take care of you for her.”
Hearing this, Yan Rong turned her face back to look at her, and her smile disappeared.
“What on earth are you?” she asked.
“It seems you know about this kind of technology. I wonder if you can find my information?” Cheng Ming raised her hand and covered her face, adjusted back to her original appearance, and in the other’s widened, round eyes, she introduced herself, “Employee ID 7086, formerly of the mycology group of the Biological Research Institute. I was promoted to deputy researcher in June of this year, and was determined to have died in a tsunami in July…”
She looked at her tied hands and felt that although this sister looked weak and harmless, she couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t do anything else. So she just pulled on her sleeve, which had a tear in it, and shook it a few times, as a friendly handshake—
“My name is Cheng Ming.”
“Your sister saved me in an incident where a parasite had infiltrated the research institute. It was on December 12th of last year. You should also be able to… oh, this is not easy to check. The confidentiality authority should be quite high. In short, I am very grateful to her and don’t want to hurt you.”
Half true and half false, she had revealed her identity and experience.
The false part was that because she had been tortured for four days, her feelings for Yan Li were quite complicated, and there was no pure gratitude.
It was clear that Yan Rong also suspected this, “Your way of being grateful is to kill her and then disguise yourself as her?”
“Wrong, I didn’t kill her,” Cheng Ming said seriously. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save her, but I have to admit that it was fortunate that she was about to die, so I had the opportunity to replace her.”
In Yan Rong’s suddenly rapid breathing, she lowered her voice and said persuasively, “Do you think her death was natural?”
Cheng Ming paused for a moment, found that there was some ambiguity, and rephrased her words. “Hmm, you could say that. Your sister was unlucky to have been caught in a tsunami… but the accident on July 8th was probably not entirely natural.”
This was something she had confirmed during her time back at the Defense Center as Yan Li. The Security Department’s vigilance against monsters had reached the point of being paranoid.
“July, 8th?”
Yan Rong repeated in a daze, as if her cranial nerves were overloaded and could not effectively input information.
“She worked in the Security Department. Did she mention these things to you? Do you know… that the monsters in the ocean might have formed an organization?”
“I am not one of those monsters in the ocean. I, too, have lost a very important person, and I want to use your sister’s identity to find the truth.”
Cheng Ming changed the subject, “Aren’t you willing to let your sister die in such an unclear way?”
Yan Rong lowered her head, and her scattered hair covered her eyes, as if she were in deep thought.
After a moment, she looked up, “Cheng Ran?”
Hearing these two words, Cheng Ming was stunned for a moment.
Yan Rong spoke again, and said word for word, “The very important person to you is the first-level researcher Cheng Ran who disappeared six years ago? Are you her experimental subject?”
Cheng Ming: “…”
Hiss.
She took a sharp breath in her heart.
How could this little girl who never went out know more than the team leader?
“I guessed right,” Yan Rong looked at her and nodded thoughtfully. “Actually, I just randomly picked a researcher who I had an impression of and who had the same surname as you to bluff you.”
Cheng Ming: “…”
“Alright.”
Seeing her precocious appearance, although the scene was not appropriate, she couldn’t help but be possessed by Yan Li and stroked her sister’s head. “Now, you also have my secrets, so can you let go of your excessive vigilance and probing and reach a cooperation with me?”
She had been so sudden that the mycelia had not reacted, and Yan Rong had not reacted either.
Before she could dodge, her slender fingers had already sunk into Yan Rong’s fluffy short hair, tousling it firmly.
“I think—” Yan Rong pursed her pale lips, looked at her who was standing domineeringly in the fragments, and then at herself who was trapped in the mycelia, weak and helpless, and asked, “shouldn’t you let me go first?”
This unequal conversation mode, was it really seeking cooperation and not coercion?
As soon as her voice fell, the mycelia scattered as she wished.
And so, the person who had been properly supported in the center fell heavily to the ground with a thud. The parts of the wheelchair were blown away, and she instantly curled up in pain.
Cheng Ming was stunned for a second.
A second later, she quickly went forward to help her, wanting to carry her from the ground to the bed, but as soon as she touched Yan Rong, she flinched and trembled with tears in her eyes. “Wait, wait, sister—” she choked for a moment and still called out like this. “Sister, help me…”
Cheng Ming looked down and saw a syringe stuck in her thigh. The needle was embedded, and it was shaking with her trembling.
Yan Rong did not dare to move. She watched her reach out to hold it, preparing to pull it out for her, and reminded her in a low voice, “It’s a neurotoxin inside, the kind that can kill with a single drop…”
Cheng Ming’s hand trembled, and she almost stuck it back in.
