After Being Parasitized by a Monster 80

Chapter 80: “Are you satisfied now?”

After a while, Cheng Ming threw off the blanket, casually threw on a coat, and walked into Yan Rong’s room.

It was six o’clock in the evening. The sky outside was dim yellow, and the light in the room was gloomy. A hazy mass was raised in the center of the bed, and the person under the covers was sleeping soundly.

The values on the recorder by the bed were stable. The sunset light broke through the sheer curtains, and it was a rare corner of tranquility. She stood quietly for a while, and then quietly withdrew.

A medical pod was, after all, a place for treatment, and the comfort level was poor. After surviving the dangerous period, she had let Yan Rong lie back on the bed.

As for the other uninvited “guest”…

Cheng Ming closed the door behind her, locking the little bit of light behind her, and looked at the closed door on the other side.

She had been tossing and turning until dawn yesterday before she had rested. Little Seashell had taken the initiative to offer to sleep on the sofa, but she had shaken her head without thinking and had answered, “You go to my room.”

Instantly, the latter’s sleepy eyes had widened, and they were bright and dark. She had looked at her in surprise for a while, and then a sweet smile had bloomed. “Sister is so nice~”

Cheng Ming had not responded.

She couldn’t let her be in the living room. That way, she would have a hard time grasping her movements—this was her only thought.

Han Xuhua had just been lucky. More people had been killed by the danger that MM221 had deliberately guided, and had been left forever in that man-made underground slaughterhouse. There would be casualties in a conflict, and she had long since taken it lightly. She didn’t know which side she should stand on, humans or monsters, so she simply didn’t stand on either side.

She had no extra thoughts, but it at least showed one thing: this experimental creature, which was half-human, half-Jiao like her, was not a good person.

But she had shown a great deal of trust and intimacy towards her.

Was it just because of the so-called experimental subject identity, and just because they were both considered Cheng Ran’s “daughters”?

It was a bit absurd.

For external things, Cheng Ming did not have such a strong sense of ownership, not to mention that the room was strictly speaking Yan Li’s. But her personal boundaries were clear, as if she had built a circle of ice around herself. Once this clear boundary of hot and cold was crossed, and once the ice surface was broken, below was a bottomless abyss.

An inexplicable intimacy would only make her vigilant.

221 clearly had not grasped this point.

She had even less sense of propriety than Xiao Ming.

The thought had just flashed by, but for the other half who was in the same body, the neural signals related to herself were always extremely clear.

Suddenly being pulled into a comparison of a sudden disaster, the Fish-Fungus was unhappy and cried out in grievance, “How could I?”

“Yes, you didn’t,” turning around and returning to the living room from the dim corridor, Cheng Ming replied lightly. “You didn’t want to occupy my body before, and you don’t want to drive away everyone around me now.”

Xiao Ming: “…”

When it was ignorant, it had wanted to monopolize their bodies. After it had developed reason, it had wanted to monopolize her.

When MM221 had arrived, she had clearly felt its displeasure. She guessed that it was not only because this girl had recognized her as a sister as soon as she had come up, but also because the other had brought a way to treat Yan Rong, which had made its dark thoughts of eliminating a major problem in one fell swoop go up in smoke.

It was reluctant to save Yan Rong and Han Xuhua, and it was only when it was sowing discord that it was happy and eloquent.

“She’s not your sister,” it grumbled. “We’re not the same kind as her.”

It was as if it were a different dimension of same-sex repulsion. Its resistance to this same mermaid experimental subject was even stronger than its resistance to Yan Rong.

“You mean to say that my only kin is you, right?”

Cheng Ming walked into the burning light and shadow of dusk. The transparent glass of the living room reflected the sunlight from the building opposite, making this scorching and lonely color wander in the boundless human world.

She did not doubt in the slightest that if the conditions were right, it would be very happy to peel the world away from her inch by inch, so that she would belong neither to the land nor to the sea, and would create an isolated island with only her and it.

“It’s just a fact,” the mycelia by her ear rubbed against her gently. It was reasonable, and its tone was softened, as pleasant as a lover’s words. “Cheng Ming, we are unique. Even Cheng Ran couldn’t create a second you.”

“Besides, I don’t think Cheng Ran is still alive.”

It then changed the subject, and its words turned sharp. It was like a statement, a comfort, and a threat, forcing her to face reality—

“You know it yourself.”

…

The Cheng Ran that MM221 had described was far from the one in her impression.

36 hours ago, along with the beeping of the life monitoring instrument, at dawn, she had asked the other about Cheng Ran.

Two mermaid experimental subjects who had officially met for the first time, surrounding a human who had no blood relationship with them, were sitting in front of a medical pod.

In this magical encounter, a strange and bizarre conversation had taken place. Even now, when she thought of the content, she still felt dazed and detached.

She had clearly heard the other’s voice, but her body was as if it were soaked in water, her senses were blocked, and she had lost the ability to interact with the outside world.

She had said that her mother was working for the foundation.

Cheng Ran had betrayed the Defense Center and had used her for experiments to provide data for Shenzhou Pharmaceutical.

“She’s very good at pretending, you know that?” When Little Seashell had looked at her, her pupils had shone faintly in the dimness of the early morning. “You don’t know, do you, sister.”

As if she were clearly aware of her disbelief, she had smiled and had dragged out her tone, and had repeated like a curse, “Our mother is a bad person.”

There were more crisscrossing wounds under her rolled-up sleeves, and her smiling eyes were unreadable.

This explained why the “medicine” that had been made this time had not caused a rejection in Yan Rong.

She had been forced to undergo a transformation from the pharmaceutical company. The antidote that had been extracted from her was actually equivalent to the pharmaceutical company’s special medicine.

And so a not-yet-formed idea of Cheng Ming’s was quickly overturned—she had thought that since she was also half a mermaid and had inherited the mermaid’s strong self-healing ability, then could she also save Yan Rong and get rid of the situation of being controlled by others?

Now she knew that this path was not feasible. Yan Rong’s drug dependence was still not solved.

It had just gone from being able to only rely on the pharmaceutical company to being dependent on this experimental subject No. 221, whose intentions were unclear.

Helping her escape from pursuit and giving her a place to hide, she had done it. Treating Yan Rong, she had also done it. So far, their cooperation seemed to be going quite smoothly and happily.

But it was hard for Cheng Ming not to be on guard.

The other was too purposeful, as if she were here for her.

As Xiao Ming had said, she didn’t know how much of her words could be trusted.

Falling into the sea without protection and coming into direct contact with nuclear-contaminated wastewater, what was the survival rate of a living person?

If she were alive, would she still be a living person?

Cheng Ming was unwilling to think in this direction.

She knew all the principles, but it was only when it came to her mother that the usually smart and clear-headed daughter had spontaneously forgotten all her knowledge and laws, and was betting on the miracle of a dead person coming back to life.

Go and see Cheng Ran.

I have to go and see her—this thought was like a scratching demon’s claw, churning and clamoring.

She looked back at the bedroom door again. The afterglow could not pass through the thick wooden board, and the rich gloominess spread all the way to her feet, suppressing those irrational impulses.

She would first stabilize MM221 and solve the urgent problem, and then make plans later.

…

A week later, in the medical department of the biology department.

Through a report that had made all the inspectors’ jaws drop, Cheng Ming had verified this: the treatment method given by MM221 was indeed effective, with no side effects.

At the very least, it could not be detected with the technology of the biology department.

The patient had been detained for most of the day for a more detailed examination. A group of people were both doubting their eyes at the data and pulling Cheng Ming to ask what they had done.

“I found a bottle of leftover medicine at home and continued to use it for her,” Cheng Ming asked calmly, “Haven’t you figured out what ingredients the pharmaceutical company has added yet?”

As soon as this question was thrown out, the scientific researchers on the other side were sweating profusely.

They couldn’t find the crux of the problem. In any case, Yan Rong was a meritorious official who had served the biology department. It was good for her to be healthy and to continue to contribute to the Security Department. Therefore, although some researchers showed a restless look of wanting to keep her for a detailed experiment, in the end, they could only watch helplessly as Cheng Ming took her away.

Returning to the apartment, Little Seashell had already consciously connected the device.

This was the fourth time she had sampled and filtered the bone marrow cells.

The interval between each time was longer, and the effect was good. Yan Rong could already get out of bed and move around.

But MM221’s condition was not right.

After the injection was over, Cheng Ming turned her head and saw her arm. The appearance was so terrifying that it was exaggerated to the point that it was almost impossible to tell that it was human skin. It was like a piece of rubber glove that was loosely on the bones and flesh, and it was rapidly aging and becoming thin and brittle. It seemed that it would peel off in pieces with a light pinch.

“What’s going on?” she got closer, frowned, and didn’t know where to start.

“Maybe I’ve been away from the department for too long,” Little Seashell was not surprised and pulled down her sleeve.

Cheng Ming’s body also had an unusual demand for water. She had to spend a lot of time doing moisturizing work every day. In addition, Xiao Ming would always use its mycelia to absorb water whenever it had the chance, including but not limited to when she was washing her face, showering, and drinking water.

But the severity of the other’s condition was clearly beyond her imagination.

“Do you need seawater?” she thought of the only possibility.

“Maybe,” she said, and raised her hand to press on a protruding bone above the back of her neck. “In the past, after every mission, Mom would inject me with a nutrient solution from this place… I don’t know what the ingredients are.”

“Will it have an effect?” Cheng Ming asked, looking at Yan Rong with a worried expression.

She was worried that Yan Rong’s treatment would not be available.

“It’s fine, anyway…” Little Seashell was halfway through her sentence when she saw her line of sight and froze.

Not surprisingly, a complaint came, “Sister, you’re so heartless. You don’t care about me at all.”

That night.

The living room clock ticked past midnight. Cheng Ming, who was sleeping on the sofa, heard a sound in a daze.

With a thump, she was woken up.

She felt for her phone and turned on the flashlight. She propped herself up and looked over. A small figure had fallen at the entrance of the corridor. Facing the light, she raised a face that was half-covered by messy hair and looked at her pitifully, “Sister…”

It was Yan Rong.

Cheng Ming flipped her phone over and let the light spread. Before she could turn on the lights, she quickly threw off the blanket and got up. “Why did you come out?”

“I wanted to see my sister…” her hands were on her shoulders, and she wrapped them around her.

A sudden clinginess.

Cheng Ming was still thinking if she had had a nightmare. Before she could react, her flesh suddenly bloomed with a familiar pain.

This sister had bitten her on the side of her neck, and her teeth had broken the skin, and blood had instantly seeped out.

A numbness spread from the epidermis to the depths.

She stiffened for a moment before forcing herself to relax, suppressing the restless stirring of the mycelium on her head. Just as a thought of helplessness began to form, she felt an even sharper sting in that area—

She suddenly moved away. Cheng Ming turned her head and saw the hand that was as pale as a human’s holding a syringe. The piston was pushed to the bottom, and the remaining medicinal liquid was dripping.

And, not far behind, Yan Rong’s bedroom door was tightly closed, and not a single bit of light was coming through.

Yan Rong hadn’t come out. The one who was hugging her was—

“Sister, you’ve been tricked.”

The “sister” who was so close to her smiled at her maliciously.

“You’re really nervous about her. I’m also your sister,” her breath brushed past her ear. 221 clung to her affectionately, threw away the syringe with the anesthetic, and her fingers slid on her side cheek with envy, as cold as a corpse. “Sister, I have to go back. You don’t mind if I use your face, do you?”

Under the same roof, she always had a chance to get Yan Rong’s DNA.

And now, she had also taken Cheng Ming’s genes.

She was enthusiastically admiring her pathetic and disgusted expression. In the extremely dim light, it was like a scene from a horror movie. This human-Jiao chimera monster’s face changed again.

Her coquettish, low murmur only brought Cheng Ming an endless, horrifying feeling, “If it were you, would she be different?”

Being fiddled with by her, Cheng Ming suppressed her rapid breathing and turned her face away as if she couldn’t bear the humiliation, and sneered, “Your tragedy was not caused by me. Why are you taking it out on me?”

“You think it has nothing to do with you?” The dimples on her lips were deeper. “How could it have nothing to do with you? Sister, you’re so clean!”

She laughed with a hint of hatred, “Without you, the missing No. 1, how could there have been so many experiments later. Do you know how many failed fusion cases there were? Do you know what kind of life I’ve been living?”

The more authority a person had, the more they were the butterfly in that key position. With a flap of their wings, they could stir up a whirlwind that would disturb the fate of countless people, and it would cross distances and time, and would have a huge and lasting impact.

It was clear that Cheng Ran was such a person.

“Sister,” she looked at her with her appearance, as if she had multiple personalities, and her gaze gradually became sad and pitiful. “I’m really envious of you.”

This was the second time she had said such a thing.

She pouted softly and aggrievedly, and there was still a trace of blood on her lips from biting her just now, which was bright red and shining.

Just as Cheng Ming was jealous of her, she was even more jealous of Cheng Ming. She hated this experimental subject No. 1, who had had a longer and more real mother-daughter relationship with Cheng Ran.

In the days she had finally met Cheng Ming, she had been observing this “sister” at all times.

They were all Cheng Ran’s creations. Why were their fates so different? Where was the difference?

She thought and thought, and thought and thought, and in the end, she thought that she still had to go and ask her mother.

She had come to the same conclusion as Cheng Ming.

“Sister, don’t think of killing me.”

She glanced meaningfully at the closed door behind her, and was very close, her voice very low. “The algaefungus will blind the recognition of different chimeric cells. Just by dialysis, it can’t be completely separated. If you don’t want a rejection, in the future, she can only receive treatment from me. I guess you don’t want anything to happen to her?”

“Hmph,” Cheng Ming laughed inexplicably, her breathing very slow. “You’re threatening me with her? Do you know that she actually has nothing to do with me?”

There was 400 milligrams of anesthetic in the syringe, which was far beyond the safe dose. She was afraid that she couldn’t control her.

“Yes,” Little Seashell nodded frankly, and her smile became even more wanton and malicious. “So, are you willing to be at my mercy for someone who has nothing to do with you?”

Cheng Ming did not speak, and her eyes were cold.

“Sister, you’re really strange. We’re both monsters, but you’re so kind to humans,” she got closer, and with the most delicate and cute tone, she uttered the most sarcastic words. “Sister, you don’t seem to know what you are.”

In this malice, there was both the suspicion of not understanding, and also the jealousy of not being able to get it—

Why is it that when I’m being tormented, you, who should also be bearing all this, are enjoying peace, and have received so much love and friendship, and have also given your own love and friendship to others?

She just wanted to break all the peace she had, and to expose her existence, to see her reaction, to see Cheng Ran’s reaction, and to see what the Security Department would do.

Do you think that if you treat yourself as a human, and package yourself beautifully, and disguise yourself flawlessly, others will also treat you as a human?

Hey, experimental subject.

Hey, monster.

Every word was so piercing that it was as if an iron saw were pulling on Cheng Ming’s nerves, hiss, hiss, buzz, buzz. Hot sparks flew, the sparks were mocking, the storm was cheering, and the smoke and dust were dancing and kicking wildly.

She stared at 221, and her heart was beating like a heavy drum. She couldn’t tell if it was more anger, or more panic.

Should she endure it? She would drag her down to hell.

The solution was actually very simple.

Kill her.

This thought grew with the wind as easily as she had killed those various monsters countless times before. This was just the most human-like monster.

However.

The elongated mycelia went from her back to behind her, dark and circular, like the umbilical cord of life. It was very quiet, and so death also came quietly.

Little Seashell turned her head, and it was already too late when she realized something. Seeing the fungal mycelia that shouldn’t have been there, she turned her face back to look at her, with confusion, and also a daze as if she had touched something.

The difference she was looking for.

One of the biggest differences was here.

The Wave-Born Floating Flower Algaefungus that had participated in the creation of experimental subject No. 1 was alive.

“Neurological drugs are ineffective on me,” Cheng Ming said.

Because everything had happened in the neural network inside the brain, the battlefield was microscopic, and the war was smokeless. Therefore, there was no fierce struggle, and there was not even much sound. She saw her pupils contract for a moment, and then they dilated, and slowly, slowly, they lost their vitality.

However… it was not the most human-like, but the most like her.

Her appearance was like her, and there were no obvious non-human features, so she could pretend to be human. Her situation was like her, and they were both related to mermaids, and were both cultivated by Cheng Ran.

And now she had personally killed this only other existence.

A strong fatigue swept over her from the bottom of her heart. She was very tired, and she fell down heavily and leaned against the wall of the corridor. The top was like being covered with icicles, and a sinister cold air pierced into her body from all directions.

“You’re very sad,” in the faint light of the darkness, the human body opposite her did not fall down, but instead approached her and said softly, “You’re always very sad when you face these human-shaped corpses.”

As she spoke these words, the voice also sounded in her mind, overlapping inside and out, forcing her cranial cavity to resonate.

Cheng Ming’s eyelashes trembled slightly, and she looked up at her. They were very close, and her hair was hanging down, and the ends were touching each other. The pair of increasingly deep and faintly shining pupils were reflecting her, and vice versa.

This experimental subject with the number MM221 was her opposite, and also her mirror, and it was another life she might have experienced—if Cheng Ran had not raised her as a daughter.

The spore mycelia were controlling her, and they made this still-red-lipped and white-toothed, lifelike corpse squat down in front of her and hold her face.

Cheng Ming was very cold, and she felt that this pair of hands from a dead person was even colder. It was like having a nightmare.

“Can’t you be a little more honest with yourself?”

221 was speaking.

Xiao Ming was speaking.

It was playing with “her,” and “she” was playing with her.

Through the connection of the mycelia, “she” had extended her tendrils into human hands, and was finally able to talk to her face to face.

Cheng Ming was a little numb, “Are you satisfied now?”

She had not yet made up her mind to make a move, but Xiao Ming had impatiently carried out the order to be the executioner.

Xiao Ming: “Are you angry? But she would have hurt you, and you also wanted her to die.”

This was the most perfect situation. Leaving a time bomb would only make her uneasy day and night. Yan Rong’s treatment had stabilized, and they could also carefully explore 221’s memories to avoid lies and dangers.

“Are you feeling sorry for a monster again?” it asked.

Little Seashell had said that she was sorry for humans, and Xiao Ming had said that she was sorry for monsters.

It was quite funny.

She really couldn’t figure out her own position.

The swaying and growing mycelia broke through the top of her skull and drilled out from between her hair. They stretched out and intertwined with Cheng Ming’s “hair” affectionately. The human body in front of her was also pressing closer, and it bent down and hugged her, and moved its limbs like it was playing with a doll. At first, it was a little awkward and strange, and then it wrapped around her two arms and moved them up and down.

Overwhelmed by the unexpectedly close embrace, Cheng Ming looked up and froze in a daze. And at the same time, she heard a common sigh in her mind and by her ear, “This is still more comfortable.”

Xiao Ming was very happy, “I finally got to hug you.”

Although this was still self-deception. After all, what she and “she” could feel was similar and synchronized.

A very suspended and indescribable feeling rushed into every nerve. This was completely different from the previous release of a little bit of consciousness to control another living thing.

If it had to be described, it was as if her soul had been neatly split in two. She had simultaneously obtained the feeling of hugging and being hugged. In the ethereal and wonderful experience, there was a hint of pain of her spirit being torn, and this pain had enhanced that mysterious and ethereal feeling.

She didn’t know if these feelings were real or an illusion.

It was as if she were trapped in a gap in the real world, with an excess of emptiness, reasonable and absurd, dead and alive.