"Is all of this real?"
As that concentrated burst of high-energy white light exploded within the cramped medical room, crushing steel, medicine, and flesh into a devastating shockwave, a trace of absurd self-doubt flickered in the depths of Ren Yi's consciousness.
At this moment, he was hovering in the corner of the room in a translucent state, like a ghostly mist.
The scorching air from the explosion roared through every inch of the space, shredding heavy medical instruments like paper and pushing Ren Yi's body back several meters.
He nimbly folded his form in the air, using a twisted load-bearing steel pillar as cover to silently neutralize the kinetic impact that would have shattered a mortal's bones.
He was uninjured. To his current self, a physical explosion of this level was nothing more than a slightly violent gust of wind.
Ren Yi silently watched the smoke-filled center of the explosion.
His abilities no longer relied on "eyes."
During the previous experiments on B-050, the medical staff of the Sky Eye Organization had employed world-leading brain-computer interface technology, dream adjustment protocols, and even expensive consciousness stream capturers, yet none could penetrate the Cognitive Fog Ren Yi had established.
In comparison, the delivery boy B-406's mechanical eye was no different from a cheap piece of glass; it certainly couldn't break through this effect.
So, until the moment of his death, B-406 never realized that the Anomaly designated as B-013-A had long since escaped the sealed chamber.
It was suspended three feet above his head, quietly watching the death match between these discarded pawns.
"But..."
Ren Yi's perception tentacles were locked onto the floor.
In the deep crater left by the explosion, the smoke gradually cleared, revealing a total mess.
There were no longer any intact human forms there, only two charred, shattered masses of organic fragments that had once belonged to two different humans.
Amidst the ruins that should have been deathly silent, a faint, grating creak suddenly echoed.
Those two masses of flesh, nearly reduced to charcoal by the blast, actually began to move slowly.
They were twitching, writhing and crawling with their remaining broken limbs, searching for any point of support to try and prop up that pile of rotten meat.
The sight B-406 saw before his death wasn't entirely an illusion.
Ren Yi's illusion was indeed enough to distort visual and auditory signals, but he had not interfered with the sense of touch.
The weight of being tackled by a frenzied corpse, the pain of flesh being torn by teeth, the gush of warm blood—those sensations were all real.
Aside from deliberately hiding his own figure, most of the bloody scenes that occurred in this room were a true reflection of this world.
He watched with his own eyes as B-050, after having his lung crushed and his waist pierced by a high-energy pistol, still stood up like a tireless puppet.
Moving with actions that completely defied biomechanics, he charged at B-406, and the two wrestled like wild beasts amidst the flames of the explosion.
Though it sounds like a long time, in the dimension of reality, it had all occurred in a mere instant.
So, what were these things?
Zombies?
When Ren Yi first saw B-050 stand up in that twisted posture, the first word that popped into his mind was that creature from literary fantasy.
The reason he was certain it was a "corpse" was because before B-050 stood up, Ren Yi had clearly felt the Seed he had planted in that body completely dissipate.
He had just braced himself when the "corpse" lunged at the distant B-406.
But now, the situation was spiraling further out of control.
The flesh on the ground was surging.
No.
More accurately, it was dying, rotting, and decomposing.
Then, using the organic energy produced by that decomposition, it began to serve as nutrients to grow, nourish, and even bond together.
The resulting reconstructed body structure was clearly imprecise, its mechanical balance a total disaster.
As a result, the flesh continuously snapped already carbonized bones as it writhed, kneading different tissues together like playdough.
It was attempting to construct a brand-new, more survival-efficient limb system.
It was... evolving.
On the ground, the limb fragments that originally belonged to B-050 and B-406 had long since merged into one.
But it was obvious that this wasn't just B-050's problem alone.
Every sprout of flesh and every broken tendon on the ground was moving autonomously. They seemed to possess a collective consciousness, each actively seeking out the broken surfaces of others to cluster together.
It wasn't the previously mutated B-050 unilaterally devouring the other; it was two piles of dead meat conspiring to reorganize.
Thus, these two men had already been "infected" by some unknown entity long before they died.
It was just that the symptoms only appeared after death.
While they were still alive, still plotting against each other for the Doctor's orders, still harboring human ambitions or fears, this infection was already lurking deep within every one of their cells.
They had continued to live, act, and complete trivial tasks.
They simply didn't know that as soon as the shell of a "human" was broken, as soon as the heart stopped beating...
They would completely "come back to life" in another form.
So, what exactly had infected them? What did they have in common?
At the very least, there had to be a medium.
The answer was already obvious.
A bizarre silence fell over the medical room, broken only by the occasional squelching sounds and the cracking of bones as the flesh on the ground compressed itself.
But Ren Yi heard a sound.
The sound was faint at first, like the wind from afar, but it quickly became heavy and rhythmic.
Crash, crash.
It was the sound of heavy objects slapping against a shoreline. It was the sound of waves surging on a midnight beach.
This sound wasn't traveling through the air of this room; instead, it echoed directly within another part of Ren Yi's perception.
At the bottom of the land ship, inside the massive, dark chamber.
At some point, for some unknown reason, S-099 had begun to expand frantically from its original state of occupying two-thirds of the area until it nearly overflowed the entire chamber.
Creak—Bang!
The alloy let out an overburdened groan after being subjected to some extreme load.
It was "High Tide."
Rate on N.U.
