The Fallen Merman Chapter 8

Published at 5th of August 2022 01:27:01 PM

The library was less than 50 meters away from the Science and Technology Museum, but there was no cover in the middle. The fact that No Survivors chose to drive over meant that someone on that team had a tactical understanding. Lu Yan’s snipes were too clumsy, it was inevitable that the other team underestimated them.

After several failed shots, Lu Yan lost two-thirds of his blood bar by the opponent’s alpha named En Ke, so he had to hide under the railing to replenish with recovery serum. The recovery serum contained the same red liquid as the blood tube on the chest. To replenish the blood, the needle needed to be inserted into the blood tube’s rubber mouth. But it couldn’t be injected all at once due to air pressure. It took at least 20 seconds to fully finish the recovery injection.

Within just a dozen seconds of injecting the recovery serum, No Survivors’ silver Toyota had already arrived halfway. The interior design of the Science and Technology Museum where Bai Chunian stood now was empty, with few barriers and a single staircase, only suitable for selecting positions and setting up guns. Once attacked by the enemy team, it would be difficult to retreat.

“Captain, can I borrow your M25?” Bai Chunian lazily got up and patted the dirt from his team uniform.

Lu Yan wasn’t very willing. The alpha looked unreliable, what could he do if the gun was given to him?

“Geez, here it is.” Lu Yan took off his sniper rifle and tossed it to Bai Chunian. “Don’t you dare show your head, they have guns pointed all over this window.”

Bai Chunian caught it, lightly climbed onto the glass guardrail, made a snipe shot out of the window without a scope, and immediately retreated back.

The left front wheel of the speeding silver Toyota was punctured on its tire and drifted out of control for more than ten meters. Taking advantage of the brief few seconds, Bai Chunian pulled the bolt on the bullet and probed out of the window again. His muzzle aimed at the driver’s eyebrow, and he immediately retreated back again after shooting.

The broadcast immediately announced:

[Casually Playing] Bai Chunian killed [No Survivors] En Ke

“Their driver’s gone. This team is crippled. Go downstairs and give them a kill.”

Lu Yan was stunned for a long time while listening to the kill announcement over the city.

“Rimbaud, follow me. Upas Tree, take Rabbit.” Bai Chunian took the lead down the stairs. Bi Lanxing picked up Lu Yan with his left hand and went over the window. Dark vines grew out of his five fingers, crawled across the glass on the side wall of the Science and Technology Museum, and intertwined into a zipline seat, taking the both of them down quickly.

Rimbaud didn’t completely rely on Bai Chunian to move. His fishtail continued to discharge, and he jumped forward with the help of electromagnetic absorption on various conductive objects. Bai Chunian walked into the elevator and stretched out his hands to catch Rimbaud. Full of high-voltage electricity, the elevator smoothly descended to the ground at high speed in an electromagnetic levitation state.

No Survivors was trapped on all sides. They had just finished a fight with two other teams in the library, so none of them were at their best state at the moment. The impact of the drift and rollover made the remaining three dizzy. They never thought that the main force in the team would be sniped off early in the competition. They rushed to fight despite barely being able to fight back.

Bi Lanxing tied the remaining three team members with vines, allowing Lu Yan to easily take over. The kill number on Lu Yan’s chest suddenly jumped from “2” to “5.”

Bai Chunian squatted down to check the player named En Ke who he shot in the head. En Ke was a gila woodpecker alpha. The number of kills on the chest of his armed suit was only “2”, but the number of kills on the chest of a great tit alpha in the same team was “10”, and the number of kills on the chest of the other two players were “0”. Obviously, this team was also a three-guard team, with three people giving heads to the great tit alpha, and the one named En Ke was also an expert.

Bai Chunian cut open En Ke’s uniform and found that he had a bird tattoo on his chest with a red pattern on the bird’s neck.

The symbol of the terrorist organization, “Red-Throated Bird.”

Previously, Bai Chunian had never thought that a terrorist organization would mix into this kind of examination. He wondered what their purpose was. If it was said that they were here for money, it’d make sense, after all, assisting in the ATWL exam was an extremely expensive deal. But compared with drug trafficking, smuggling, and human trafficking, being an exam helper was a little strenuous, and the risk of having their identity revealed was high.

At present, he couldn’t figure out what they wanted. He chose not to think too much about it for the time being, as he picked off the anti-detonators from No Survivors team’s dead bodies, except for a few that had automatically fallen off and were already scrapped since an hour had passed. The 12 anti-detonators were divided into three, four of which were about to run out of time. Added the one each already on their belts, each of them had four hours of safe time.

They searched the bodies and the fixed ammunition box and obtained three recovery serums, PVS-4 night vision scope, a number of various types of ammunition belts, and a set of wireless communicators. 

Bai Chunian asked, “What did you get?”

Bi Lanxing, “Uzi submachine gun.”

Lu Yan, “Desert Eagle, 10 rounds of ammunition.”

Rimbaud held a python revolver in his hand, loading it with bullets one by one.

Bai Chunian, “Megaphone.”

Lu Yan, “???”

Bai Chunian raised the megaphone and said to the corpses of the No Survivors team, “Next time, come up with a more auspicious team name, brothers.”

The first task in Lu Yan’s mission book was to hand over information to the archive room administrator in area D on the third floor of the library. But when the group entered the third floor D area, they found that all the documents in the archives were scattered haphazardly on the floor and A4 paper materials were thrown all over the floor. The whole room was mind-numbingly chaotic.

The archive administrator squatted on the ground sweating, collecting the documents. Lu Yan tried to hand over the information, but the administrator scolded him angrily.

“I’m so busy, can’t you see? There’s a big mess.”

Lu Yan’s violent temper caught fire in an instant. As he was about to start swearing, Bi Lanxing covered his mouth and pulled him to his side.

“We still have a lot of time, so let’s help him organize the files first.”

Bai Chunian found a place to sit down and slack off. He picked up a pile of “File A” in disorder on the ground and browsed through it while sorting.

File A consisted of records regarding an outbreak of a virus that targeted humans in the early 17th century, the Hurricane Virus.

The symptoms resembled the combination of Ebola hemorrhagic fever and rabies, sweeping the world as quickly and violently as a hurricane.

At that time, medical practitioners discovered that wild bdelloid rotifers could be treated and made into vaccines, which could enhance the rapid formation of Hurricane virus antibodies in humans to treat and prevent this terrible virus.

The lucky ones who managed to survive the Hurricane virus thought the disaster was over. Until November 1793, when a neurosurgeon in Aphid City claimed to have developed a bulge on the back of his neck that looked like half a pigeon’s egg, which he called “some kind of gland” in an interview.

Subsequently, a large number of citizens said that “glands” also appeared on the back of their necks, but these didn’t affect their lives. Therefore, no serious panic occurred at that time.

People thought the glands were nothing more than an after-effect of the Hurricane vaccination. However, they discovered a terrifying fact that glands also appeared in the napes of newborn babies, which showed that it could actually be inherited.

Major authoritative medical organizations had begun intensive research. It was found that the normal state of human cells didn’t have the reverse transcription process, while the serum containing bdelloid rotifer component promoted the cellular reverse transcription process, thus allowing the insertion of DNA molecules produced by viral RNA molecules into the long strand of the genome of human germ cells.

Due to the gene-stealing and mutation-prone characteristics of bdelloid rotifers, each human gland randomly contained DNA from different organisms. With hundreds of years of evolution, the gland had fully matured, expressing different biological properties based on the DNA in the nucleus, and even mutating into special glands that gave humans different biological differentiation capabilities.

In the summer of 1896, a young magician from Europe performed a floating trick at an opera to great fanfare. At that time, some people dismissed him as “nothing but a deceptive trick” and went to the stage with the intention of disgracing the magician. However, the magician instead spread a pair of feathered wings and flew up to the theater ceiling.

It wasn’t until the early 1900s that researchers realized that the magician might’ve been the first human ever to have the characteristics of gland awakening in history. It was speculated that his gland awakening type was a hummingbird, with the ability to fly and float in the air, and at that time he had differentiated to M2-grade.

Glands were more similar to a parasitic virus, co-existing reciprocally with humans, and even humans couldn’t get rid of them.

Honestly speaking, Bai Chunian hadn’t given much thought to how glands came to be. He didn’t remember anything from his childhood. When he realized that he was a white lion alpha, he was already a white lion alpha. It was really good enough that someone was willing to go back to their roots to investigate the mysteries of human body anatomy and physiology.

After sorting out the documents, Bai Chunian picked up another cluttered pile of scrap paper, placed them in the middle of the table, and sorted them by page number.

The things recorded in “File B” were much more interesting than the previous stack of obscure genetic reports. It was like an observational report of an experimental reproduction process.

Special Ops Weapon 1513 Breeding Diary: In contrast to SpecOps[1] Weapon 1513’s amazing aggression, he seems uninterested or somewhat shy about bonding with an omega. Because he hasn’t yet reached the mating age, SpecOps Weapon 1513 is unwilling to bond with the omega we’ve prepared even though we have injected a lot of aphrodisiac pheromones into the observation box.

We finally found another omega. He’s so cute. I swear his appearance has broken through the Creator’s aesthetic limit… Oh, thank heavens! SpecOps Weapon 1513 likes him. He slowly approached and hugged the cute omega from behind, but alas, it was only a hug, hopefully, something will happen tomorrow.

Oh my god, what do I see? SpecOps Weapon 1513 is sleeping with our omega in his arms. Look at their sweetness. I think we’re about to get a little baby who will have armor piercing attacks like SpecOps Weapon 1513 soon… Our reproduction technology is still too backward, one day we’ll be able to achieve what we want by only relying on gene editing and cloning technology.

……

Bai Chunian was familiar with this process. There had been long periods in the past when he had been exhausted after enduring a full day of cruel drug trials and physical performance tests. He was then returned to the warmth of his observation box, laid next to Rimbaud, and fell asleep smelling his scent.

At the beginning, the researchers asked him to caress and hug Rimbaud. Bai Chunian, who had always resisted orders and had very poor obedience, didn’t raise any objections to this matter and tried to hold Rimbaud in his arms. Later, going back to sleep with Rimbaud in the observation box every night after training became the only thing Bai Chunian looked forward to every day.

After browsing File B, he still wished to continue, and searched for File C on the ground,  wanting to know what other records he might see.

After searching for a long time, he found half of the remains of File C from Rimbaud’s mouth.

Lu Yan and Bi Lanxing sweated while cleaning up the archive room and received the intelligence chip from the administrator. The four sat together and opened their mission books to decide where to go next.

Lu Yan completed a task. A star lit up on his mission book, as did for Bi Lanxing.

Bai Chunian looked at Rimbaud’s mission book.

Three stars?

Random Task 1: Organizing File A has been completed.

Random Task 2: Organizing File B has been completed.

Random task 3: Destruction of File C has been completed.

Such luck.

Maybe this merman was a koi.

Chapter end