Parasitismus-Eve

Kapitel 21

On the outermost edge of this flat black hole, a candle flame illuminates the place, revealing a hand.

These are the hands of a dead man, all flesh and skin gone, only bones remaining. Faintly, one can still see a corner of the sleeve.

Xu Xu had retreated to Sun Jing's side, all the courage she had shown when she rushed into the secret chamber gone. After all, she had seen a creature whose head had turned to white bones yet could still move; what if the skeletal hand before her suddenly started moving too?

The slowly closing entrance shut completely at that moment, then made a few soft "click-click-click" sounds. Hearing this sound, Sun Jing shuddered and turned around abruptly to the winch, causing the candle flame to flicker and almost go out.

Xu Xu's attention was entirely focused on the skeleton's hand, and when Sun Jing moved beside her, she couldn't help but exclaim in surprise.

Sun Jing gripped the winch and tried several times, but to no avail. He turned around, his face looking somewhat frightening in the flickering candlelight. "We were too careless. It seems we're trapped."

"Is it locked?"

"Hmm, now I know what the round hole next to it is for—it's for inserting a key." Sun Jing said, taking two steps up the stairs and punching the sliding panel blocking the entrance above his head a few times.

“It’s a steel plate.” He shook his head and jumped down.

Xu Xu, however, calmed down and said, "Let's see what's going on inside. This basement was converted from a damp-proof layer, and the floor and waterproofing panels on the ceiling are so rotten that I could step into a hole with my high heels. I don't believe he could seal the ceiling with steel plates. You brought a flashlight, right?"

Sun Jing's vest had four pockets. He took out two small flashlights, one for himself and one for Xu Xu, turned them on, and shone them behind the skeletal hand.

This is a skeleton dressed in gray cloth, lying face down on the ground. One hand is stretched forward, and the other hand is stretched out horizontally, gripping the ground like a claw.

"Where are his feet?" Xu Xu asked in a low voice.

The beam of Sun Jing's flashlight slowly merged with the light, focusing on the lower half of the skeleton's body. His black trousers were flat and stuck to the ground; not only were there no shoes, but even the foot bones that should have been there were missing.

Where did his feet go? Could he be disabled? Sun Jing suppressed his doubts and shone his flashlight beam further inside.

The inside was lower than where they were standing, but it wasn't dug very deep; the total height was no more than 1.2 meters. People could only sit inside; they had to squat or crawl to move, and even bending over to walk was very difficult.

The underground hall was oval-shaped, and in the center of the hall was a crescent-shaped brick structure more than half a meter high. Sun Jing didn't know what to call it—a low platform?

Around the hall, it can be seen that the original layout consisted of about ten brick-built, doorless rooms on each side, facing each other in a crescent shape, guarding the crescent-shaped platform in the center. The reason for describing it as the original layout is that this underground hall looks as if it has been hit by a major storm; about 30% of the brick walls of the rooms are damaged, and broken bricks are scattered everywhere.

The small room was basically empty, and with just a rough shone of the flashlight, it was clear that there was more than one corpse in front of them.

Shouldn't this be a place where the experimenters secretly gather? What exactly happened here?

“Look, this person is still wearing arm sleeves,” Xu Xu said, pointing to the dead body in front of him. “People only wore these things in the early 1980s.”

“Maybe even earlier,” Sun Jing said, reaching out to turn the skeleton over.

His body rolled over, but his head fell off and rolled to one side. He was wearing a Zhongshan suit, with a Chairman Mao badge pinned to his left breast.

"Do you know which era people used to wear this on their chest?" Sun Jing asked Xu Xu.

"'Cultural Revolution'."

"It was during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. To be precise, it started in 1966, and was most prevalent in 1967, 1968, and 1969. Back then, everyone, regardless of age or gender, would do this when going out. It became less common in the later stages of the Cultural Revolution. Guess what I'm thinking of?"

"1969".

"Yes. Those secret agents returned the skull to Ouyang Wenlan, it seems there's something going on within the experimental group..."

At this point, Sun Jing suddenly stopped talking.

There is sound.

Footsteps.

The two held their breath, listening to the source of the faint footsteps.

It was above, but not directly above; it felt like someone was walking in another room. In such an underground space, vibrations from the floor overhead could travel very far.

There was only one person. Could it be the person who sent the text message? Sun Jing and Xu Xu exchanged a glance, neither daring to speak, waiting for the situation to unfold.

When Half-Ear entered number fourteen, the door on the left was wide open, so he went in first.

Years ago, during a rock blasting operation, his right earlobe was sliced off by flying sharp rocks, but now he is the most experienced explosives loader in the engineering team.

The four buildings to be bombed today are located at opposite ends of the alley, and each building has the same architectural layout. He determined the location of the explosive charge himself, so he knew exactly where to drill the hole and went straight there.

When he reached the four characters "Heaven rewards diligence," he paused for a moment, then tore the paper off. Behind the paper were four neat rows of sixteen loading holes.

"Who's so bored?" Half-Ear muttered under his breath, not giving it much thought, and began loading explosives and detonators. Today's job was simple; the building wasn't big, and there wasn't much explosives to load, mainly on the first floor, so it wouldn't take much time. Once the calculated supporting walls were blown up, the entire building would collapse under its own weight.

The underground hall was very quiet. The footsteps above had stopped, but the person was still there, and there were occasional slight vibrations; I wondered what he was doing.

Two beams of flashlight crisscrossed and moved back and forth, wandering through various corners of the underground hall. The other two dead bodies were not far from the crescent-shaped platform, lying on the ground in a tangled embrace, their condition unclear.

"I have a bad feeling," Xu Xu whispered in Sun Jing's ear. She was referring to the person above.

"What ideas do you have? Should we shout and yell to let him know there are people down there?"

Xu Xu fell silent, unsure of the situation above. Perhaps they could only wait quietly.

Footsteps sounded again, this time fading into the distance.

The two breathed a sigh of relief, turned their flashlight beams back from the depths of the hall, and focused their attention once again on the lower limbs of the skeleton in front of them.

The space before him, 1.2 meters high and 30 square meters in size, was a breeding ground for many mysterious lairs. To uncover its secrets, one had to go inside. Sun Jing crouched down and began to move in, but after only a few steps, he found it too inconvenient and decided to crawl in on all fours. He stopped beside the lower half of the skeleton, touched the dead man's trouser leg, but couldn't feel any leg bones. Xu Xu then crawled in as well.

Sun Jing put the flashlight aside, grabbed the left leg of the skull's trousers, and yanked it. The fabric felt strange to the touch; it was far more decayed than the Zhongshan suit. Before he could even apply any force, the fabric crumbled where his fingers were. He grabbed it several times, and soon the trousers below the knee were gone, leaving nothing inside.

As they continued pulling upwards, Sun Jing suddenly gasped and let out a half-shout, quickly covering her mouth with the back of her hand.

The deceased wasn't without lower limbs; rather, his lower limbs were extremely small. So small that from his thigh bone to his shin bone and even his foot, they were less than a meter long.

One and a half feet.

“No, he wasn’t like this before,” Xu Xu suddenly said.

Sun Jing immediately realized that if this person had a congenital deformity, how could he be wearing a normal person's trousers?

He then pulled down the other trouser leg, revealing two similarly small legs. He carefully examined the bone structure with a flashlight and found them to be perfectly intact; aside from size, they were no different from a normal person's legs. This would be impossible in a person with deformities, indicating a necessary skeletal deformity.

"Could it be that it was caused by external forces?" Sun Jing said in a low voice. "It became like this in such a short time. Did he die because of this?"

Xu Xu reached out to touch the leg bone, but withdrew her hand halfway through.

"I'll do it."

As Sun Jing spoke, he first flicked the flashlight handle to separate the bones, then reached out and picked up his left shinbone, which was about the length of his middle finger. He weighed it in his hand and then threw it back on the ground. The sound of the bone hitting the ground was like that of metal.

"It weighs about the same as a normal leg bone," Sun Jing said.

He slowly opened his mouth, but didn't say anything; instead, he shivered.

At that moment, the eerie atmosphere that lingered in the surrounding darkness engulfed the two of them like a tidal wave.

A serious childhood illness, the inheritance of oracle bone studies, and the deaths of his ancestors—these are certainly extraordinary events that are difficult for ordinary people to imagine, but Sun Jing only recently began to piece together the clues, making an indirect discovery. Yet, in the space where the two now find themselves, an unbelievable scene unfolds before their eyes, delivering an irresistible shock. And this corpse is only the beginning.

How long did it take for this person's lower limbs to become like this—ten minutes, one minute, or even one second? The bones were compressed, but what about the skin and flesh attached to them? Was his immediate cause of death massive bleeding, gushing out from the fractured lower and upper body?

The answer to this question is now clear. Sun Jing had already felt it when he pulled down his pants; the entire pair was soaked in blood, but he hadn't noticed it immediately because of the pants' original color and the dim lighting. Now, shining a flashlight on the ground, he could see a large patch of dried brown blood.

Also, was he attacked suddenly? What is his mysterious power? Did he retaliate?

I reached into the pockets of my Zhongshan suit, but there was nothing there; the trouser pockets were empty too.

“Remember not to touch me with this hand,” Xu Xu said.

Sun Jing smiled; she actually remembered all this, showing that her mental state had become even more resilient after surviving a crisis. Thinking this, he relaxed a bit. In a confined environment, their emotions easily influenced each other, even if they pretended to be relaxed; otherwise, bearing the invisible pressure here would slow their reactions when faced with unexpected events.

Although the events that led to everything may have occurred nearly forty years ago, given how incredible things are, they cannot be judged by common sense. Perhaps danger still lurks forty years from now. Besides, there's the sender; Sun Jing believes he will inevitably appear suddenly at some point.

"Go inside and take a look, be careful of the loose stones on the ground," Sun Jing said.

"I should have worn elbow and knee pads." Xu Xu shone her flashlight on Sun Jing's backside, feeling that she must look quite pathetic if someone was watching her from behind. She suddenly turned the flashlight back and shone it behind her, but there was nothing there.

"Don't scare yourself." Sun Jing noticed her little movements.

Beside the crescent-shaped platform, among the two people embracing the dead, one was a woman.

The reason this was so easy to spot was that most of her body was now a skeleton, but she still had a pair of hands.

She was thrown to the ground, her posture somewhat ambiguous, but her hands were gripping the enemy's back tightly, veins bulging on the back of her hands, tearing large holes in the man's Zhongshan suit and shirt, possibly even digging into his back muscles. But now, even the strongest back muscles had long since turned to dust.

These hands are slender and beautiful. Sun Jing extended her index finger and pressed it against the area where the veins were prominent; it was cool and elastic.

The entire hand seemed to be attached to a living person's body, but at the wrist, the flesh was clearly beginning to rot, and a few centimeters above that was just bone.

Sun Jing observed the boundary between healthy and decaying skin, then shone a flashlight on her upper arm bone to examine it closely. He ran his finger across the bone and smelled it.

"If you dare stick your tongue out and lick it, I'll break off all ties with you when we get out of here," Xu Xu said, unable to stand it any longer.

“You need to learn to respect my profession,” Sun Jing said. However, he didn't stick out his tongue.

What does your major tell you?

Sun Jing pointed to the area near the elbow on her upper arm bone and said, "From here on, the rate of decay slows down dramatically. This shows that the cells in her palms and most of her forearms possess astonishing vitality, even after death. Look, even the wrists that have begun to decompose don't have maggots."

Upon hearing the word "maggots," Xu Xu let out a disgusted "Ugh."

"Judging from the age of these hands, they're only around twenty. But I guess the actual age of the hands' owner is much older, because the activation of cells keeps the hands in optimal condition. This must be the ability the experiment gave her, but unfortunately, it's not very useful except for slowing down the decay."

"Who said that? This is the ability that all women desire most. If you could have that all over your body..." Xu Xu began to fantasize.

Sun Jing couldn't help but laugh: "If she joined the experiment around the same time as my great-grandfather, and if these people did indeed die in 1969, then it took her more than 30 years to rejuvenate her forearm."

“She’s no more than thirty-five,” Xu Xu said. “If a woman in her fifties or sixties had hands like that, she would definitely wear gloves when she goes out. In this environment where she might have to climb, do you think she would take off her gloves first?”

“Perhaps it’s necessary for the ritual.” Sun Jing didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t thought of that. “Anyway, they’re already dead. Let’s see how they died.”

Their attention had been completely drawn to the hands. Now, turning to the cause of death, their first thought was that there were no obvious fatal wounds, and their second thought was that the two people seemed to be hugging too tightly. So tightly that the thickness of the two people stacked together looked like only one and a half people.

Those still-fresh hands had already torn the clothes off the man who was pressing down on her. Sun Jing simply ripped off the clothes on his back, and through the gap in his ribs, the cause of death immediately appeared before their eyes.

The clothes of the deceased couple were torn to shreds, and their ribs were intertwined. Sun Jing and Xu Xu couldn't fathom how this could have happened. The bones weren't broken or shattered before piercing each other's bodies; rather, they remained intact, embedded in each other's chest cavities. A closer look with a flashlight revealed several ribs fused to the sternum, like conjoined twins.

"What kind of ability is this...? Symbiosis, no, it should be symbiosis of death," Xu Xu murmured.

“They never get to choose the abilities that come their way,” Sun Jing said. The scene before him was terrifying and disgusting; he didn’t want to look any longer, much less speculate about the process by which the two independent individuals had intertwined.

Like Sun Jing, Xu Xu quickly shifted her gaze from the tangled bones to the crescent-shaped platform beside her. Layout-wise, this was the center of the underground hall; its shape must have its significance.

But after Sun Jing climbed up to the edge of the platform in a few quick movements, took a quick look, and then let out a "heh".

What's the point? This platform wasn't originally crescent-shaped at all.

A thin layer of foundation remains, clinging tightly to the concave surface of the crescent moon. This foundation, together with the crescent moon, forms a complete circle. It was clearly a circular platform built of red bricks, but a large portion had been "eaten" away by something, leaving an extremely smooth, even flat, cut surface. On the platform was a bronze disc, now only a small crescent-shaped portion remained.

"What method can be used to cut it like this? And what about the cut-off part?" Xu Xu asked.

"Like the three dead men before, do you think there will be an answer to this kind of question?" Sun Jing tapped the bronze plate lightly with his fingers, making a dull sound. This thing was fixed in place.

Xu Xu noticed his eyes were narrowed, as if they were half-closed, and asked, "What are you thinking about?"