“He’s so bitchy and full of himself, acting like some social butterfly.”
“I, Yin Ting, am as indifferent as a chrysanthemum; my vibe leaves him miles behind.”
“I spin and jump, put on my Carslan eyeliner, and head to Dashatian...”
Jiang Kun walked along Route 13 in the eastern suburbs of Hu City, humming a song.
The song was called “No Reason to Go Straight,” sung by a recent internet sensation named Yin Runa. With her dual identity and incredibly low-class speech, she had gained a massive following in a short time.
Though the song was a bit vulgar, it was somehow addictive the more one listened to it.
Jiang Kun appeared relaxed, but his mechanical prosthetic eye was constantly switching scanning modes, alert for any unusual movement in the surroundings.
Suddenly, he stopped.
Ahead, by the side of the road, were several floodlights.
The pale light illuminated a terrifying scene.
Corpses.
Many corpses.
They were wearing protective suits, but unfortunately, the suits were torn.
The corpses were in various poses; some were slumped forward, hands still clutching their necks in vain.
Some were leaning against camera tripods, their heads lolling unnaturally to one side as if all support had been suddenly drained away.
Others were tangled together in a struggle, with some corpses still holding guns.
These corpses all had one thing in common: they were white.
It was a lifeless, ashen gray. It looked as if all moisture and vitality had been forcibly sucked out in an instant, leaving behind only a fragile, gray-white shell.
The skin of the corpses clung tightly to the bone, showing the shriveled texture of dehydrated plants.
There wasn't much blood at the scene. The facial expressions were twisted in terror, looking like rough masks that had been flash-dried after being frozen in time.
An indescribable, heavy scent permeated the air, and a hair-raising silence hung over the area.
“Did something suck out all their life force in an instant?”
Jiang Kun knelt down and extended a mechanical finger.
The protective suits they wore should have been sturdy, but now they tore easily at his light touch.
He touched the arm of one of the corpses with extreme care.
With almost no pressure, the corpse's arm snapped off like weathered plaster and hit the ground, making a sound like a dry twig breaking.
The break was smooth, with no sign of flesh or blood.
This seemingly intact corpse had long since turned to ash inside, held together only by a fragile layer of skin.
Jiang Kun lightly touched the corpse of a beetle nearby, which had also turned gray-white.
The beetle shattered at the touch, turning into a small pile of dust that was scattered by the wind.
A clean death.
His gaze swept over the scene.
Scattered filming equipment, an overturned camera, devices with recording indicator lights still glowing...
This was a filming team.
What had they encountered here?
Jiang Kun immediately walked toward the camera.
The camera didn't seem damaged. He operated it skillfully, pulling up the last recorded footage.
The screen initially showed a shaky night view of the grass, interspersed with the female host's panicked narration and chaotic voices in the background.
Jiang Kun sped up the playback.
The images flashed by until he hit pause at a certain frame.
In that frame, deep within the darkness in the distance, a... mass appeared.
It was hard to describe what it was.
It had no fixed shape, with blurred edges, like a constantly flowing and changing mass of colored light.
The color saturation was unnaturally high, yet it was covered in a hazy, frosted-glass texture. Several eerie colors mixed, separated, and remixed without any pattern.
Initially, it was only at the edge of the frame.
Jiang Kun resumed playback.
In the next frame, the mass of colored light moved.
It wasn't flying or floating; it was more like a flash that ignored spatial distance.
In an instant, it jumped from the dark background in the distance to the front of the lens, occupying the entire screen.
The speed of the shifting colors seemed to slow down, the hues becoming more viscous and intense.
In the few seconds that the colored light completely enveloped the lens, the female host in the frame began to undergo a terrifying transformation.
Her skin rapidly lost its luster, turning from vibrant to dull, then shriveling and wrinkling.
Her beautiful cheeks collapsed, her eyes became dim and cloudy, and finally solidified into two raisins.
Her mouth was open as if she wanted to scream, but before the sound could be made, she had transformed from a living being into a desiccated corpse.
The entire process was silent and terrifyingly efficient.
Jiang Kun's hair stood on end.
He stared intently at the screen, scanning the mass of colored light with his mechanical prosthetic eye.
But after looking for only a dozen seconds, he felt his head begin to throb with an inexplicable dizziness.
He immediately looked away, rubbing his pulsing temples forcefully, and quickly shut off the camera screen.
That thing seems to have mental contamination!
Watching it indirectly through a screen still causes a headache.
Jiang Kun frowned. He took the camera apart, removed the memory chip inside, and carefully tucked it into his inner pocket.
This was first-hand material from the scene and was definitely extremely valuable.
He could do nothing for the dried corpses here; he could only leave them exposed to the wilderness.
Jiang Kun's gaze fell on the nearby van. He found the car keys in the pocket of one of the corpses.
He turned the key and started the engine. Jiang Kun drove the vehicle forward.
According to the old scavenger, the object that fell from the sky should have landed nearby.
Before he had driven very far, the road, which had been relatively clear, was completely swallowed by overgrown vegetation.
The wheels rolled over the tall grass with a wet, squelching sound.
Soon, the blades of grass tightly entangled the axles and the gaps in the chassis, making it impossible for the vehicle to move an inch.
Jiang Kun had no choice but to abandon the car.
He shouldered his essential gear, and a high-frequency cutting blade extended from his mechanical arm, slicing through the obstructing grass to carve out a narrow path he could barely pass through.
The severed grass made a sizzling sound, and a thick, foul-smelling sap seeped from the cuts.
Stepping deep into the grass, his ears were filled with a rustling sound so dense it was maddening. It was the sound of countless blades of grass moving without wind, rubbing and tangling against each other.
Occasionally, the sound of insects chirping would ring out.
Jiang Kun felt like an insect that had rashly blundered into the stomach of a giant beast, surrounded on all sides by hostile living things.
The tension of being watched and the possibility of an attack at any moment kept his nerves on edge.
Hiss... hiss...
A strange sound came from deep within the grass about three meters ahead to his left.
Jiang Kun didn't hesitate for a second. His two mechanical legs pushed off, and he leaped three meters straight into the air!
Mid-air, he twisted his torso, and a gun barrel emerged from his left mechanical limb, precisely locking onto the direction of the strange noise.
In the grass, there was a shadow that blended perfectly with the environment.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Three shots rang out. The bullets tore through the grass and burrowed into flesh.
Jiang Kun landed lightly, and with a swing of his cutting blade, he pushed aside the flattened grass.
A creature resembling a scorpion lay there. It was nearly two meters long, its head blown apart by the bullets, with a murky liquid seeping from its dark green carapace.
But what caught Jiang Kun's eye was its midsection.
There, where the insect's legs should have been, were actually human arms!
The skin on the arms was also dark green, the fingers twisted and the nails sharp, jutting out from the scorpion's body like the products of a grotesque graft.
“Holy hell, it's a scorpion spirit!” Jiang Kun felt a surge of nausea.
He immediately took a few steps back, away from the dead scorpion. He didn't want any close contact with such an ugly thing.
Suppressing the revulsion in his heart, he quickened his pace, swinging his cutting blade and moving forward with even greater vigilance.
The terrain began to rise slowly, and the surrounding vegetation gradually changed from grass to trees.
When he finally reached the top of a small hill, the sight before him made his heart sink.
The electronic map showed that the outskirts of Hu City should be a series of small hills.
But what lay before him was clearly a primeval forest that blotted out the sun!
Gigantic trees that would take two people to encircle were everywhere, their trunks covered in thick moss and vines, the air filled with a mixture of the scents of rotting wood and flowers.
“Ooh... help... help me!”
“Someone help me, I’m so scared...”
Just as Jiang Kun was observing the forest with his mechanical prosthetic eye, a faint, intermittent cry for help drifted over.
The source of the sound seemed to be deeper in the forest ahead. The tone was very strange, as if something was stuck in the throat, and as if more than one person was speaking at the same time.
Jiang Kun immediately crouched low, turned off his cutting blade, and pointed his gun toward the direction of the sound.
In a hellhole like this, a cry for help might be more dangerous than silence.
Wang Group.
In the office, Ghost had been hogging the washroom for a long time.
A very long time.
When he finally came out, he still wore a cold, aloof expression.
But Yue Shi could no longer look at him the same way.
No matter how handsome that face was, it now seemed sleazy.
Ghost sat across from Yue Shi with composure and said calmly, “I just performed multiple tests.”
“No matter which model or batch of Wang Group’s bionic mechanical member I swap in, as soon as the installation is complete, I can immediately produce a stable and clear tactile perception.”
“But other parts, including mechanical arms, mechanical legs, and so on—even if they use the highest-end technology and materials—are just efficient control tools to me. They don't produce any human sense of touch.”
“Only the mechanical member works!”
“Mhm, mhm.” Yue Shi nodded. “What about those produced by other manufacturers?”
Ghost said, “The mechanical members from Wang Group, without exception, all work.”
“But when I replace them with mechanical members from other top-tier manufacturers, also without exception, none of them work. I can't perceive any human sense of touch.”
Yue Shi leaned back in his chair, fingers interlaced over his stomach. “This phenomenon is too bizarre.”
“You are an information lifeform, possessing and controlling through information consciousness. Logically, this body should just be a puppet on a string controlled by you; it shouldn't have a subjective experience like ‘touch.’”
Ghost said, “Let me correct you. The sense of touch I feel from the Wang Group’s mechanical member isn't actually complete.”
“It doesn't hurt when I hit it hard. I only get that pleasurable feeling, you know~”
Yue Shi: “...”
He was a bit speechless.
Ghost continued, “I also took the opportunity to gather some user experience data from the internet.”
“Wang Group’s mechanical members indeed have a good reputation in the market. They have high compatibility, no rejection reactions, a long lifespan, and are almost identical to the real thing.”
“People of all ages are replacing their mechanical members. Younger people have a higher acceptance of mechanical bionic prosthetics.”
“For older people, although their acceptance is lower, many choose to replace them due to age-related functional decline.”
“The mechanical members produced by other manufacturers have many negative reviews. Wang Group’s mechanical members, on the other hand, have nothing but praise. Most users claim they’ve gained a superior experience. Moreover, the mechanical members produced by Wang Group are very affordably priced.”
Yue Shi thought for a moment, then picked up a pair of shears and disassembled a Wang Group mechanical member on the spot.
To be honest, this thing was truly realistic.
He went on to cut several more into pieces.
“And?” Ghost asked.
Yue Shi said, “The mechanical parts are standard—top-tier in the industry—but there’s nothing special about them. The key lies in these... unknown things.”
He tapped the withered, sponge-like filling inside the mechanical member.
When he first cut the mechanical member open, the sponge-like filling was plump and elastic, evenly distributed within the components, seemingly used to regulate the expansion rate.
This thing had anti-disassembly self-destruct technology. The moment Yue Shi cut open the shell, the internal filling immediately deactivated and withered, turning into something like dry wood shavings.
He then activated his Insight vision, but he couldn't even see what the sponges were; they appeared as a mass of garbled code.
Ghost’s expression turned solemn. “In other words, the mechanical part of the mechanical member is similar to a mechanical arm. Only this sponge-like filling is different, and it can even make an information being like me produce pleasurable sensations.”
Yue Shi’s expression became playful. “This isn't something that can be explained by technological development. I’m afraid the Wang Group’s mechanical member production line has a secret.”
Ghost stood up and said, “You are Wang Er now—the nominal controller of the Wang Group, holding the highest authority in all aspects.”
Yue Shi immediately understood his meaning. “You’re right. I’m the boss now. Why bother guessing when it’s simpler to just ask?”
He picked up his phone and dialed the head of the Wang Group’s core lab.
“It’s me. I need you to come to my office immediately.”
“Yes, right now. Bring the most detailed records, including the part under the non-disclosure agreement.”
Hanging up the phone, Yue Shi swiveled his chair to look out the window.
The night sky of this world was pure black, without stars or a moon.
Ghost quietly started walking toward the washroom again.
“What’s the difference between you and an addict now?” Yue Shi said cuttingly.
Ghost paused, then shrugged. “You don't understand the feeling of regaining something after losing it. If you tried it, you’d definitely be unable to stop.”
Yue Shi: “No, I wouldn't.”
“Even though I’m your subordinate, don't interfere too much in my private affairs. Just treat it as a little quirk of mine. It’s not like it’s doing any harm anyway.”
Having said that, Ghost turned and left without waiting for Yue Shi’s reaction.
Yue Shi watched his back with a puzzled expression.
The kid’s grown up and is getting a bit disobedient.
Should I just take him out, or give him another chance?
He wasn't sure what Ghost’s personality had been like when he was still in human form.
But an information lifeform should be nearly perfectly rational with extremely strong self-control.
Yet now, he couldn't wait to indulge in carnal pleasure at every moment.
Something was wrong.
This situation reminded Yue Shi of one thing.
Drugs.
Rate on N.U.
