201 Yongsheng Pharmaceutical Foundation (VII)

◎Prove that there must be a laboratory here◎

What was just poured out was bottle A, which contained cockroach egg cases.

Doctor Fu didn't dare to open the medicine bottle this time. His mental state was too low. Zhu Ning couldn't bear to watch it, fearing that the young doctor would be scared to death here today.

Zhu Ning unscrewed the bottle of medicine B. She was brave and well prepared, just like Dr. Fu, with a piece of white paper under it.

After the medicine bottle was tilted, some white particles rolled out. They were either egg sacs or normal white tablets.

Zhu Ning asked: "What is this ingredient?"

Doctor Fu didn't dare to look closely. His mental state was too low and he thought normal pills were cockroach eggs.

"I don't know. It can't be detected without equipment." Doctor Fu is not a humanoid detector.

Zhu Ning: "So drug A is cockroach eggs, which can cause hallucinations, and drug B is some unknown pill that can eliminate hallucinations."

Doctor Fu nodded. "It doesn't necessarily mean it's gone. It might mean you can't see it."

Zhu Ning was silent for a while. This was an industrial chain. The Yongsheng Pharmaceutical Foundation attracted defective products and looked for suitable prey in the foundation, letting them stay in the hotel under the pretext of doing experiments.

When ordinary people learn that they have the opportunity to stay in a luxury hotel for free, even if they don’t agree immediately, they will stay there first and wait and see how things go.

Afterwards, they use the excuse of becoming experimental subjects to attract people to cooperate with the experiment, just like the owner of a hot pot restaurant, because he is at the end of his rope, and the defective products will not live long anyway, and will die sooner or later, so he might as well give it a try.

There are surveillance cameras inside the hotel that can monitor the test subjects' every move.

People thought defective products were their lifeline, but in reality they just became guinea pigs.

Zhu Ning: "So they really eat cockroach eggs?"

Is there nothing unusual about the person taking the medicine?

In response to Zhu Ning's question, Dr. Fu shook his head and said, "I don't know if this is an exaggeration of the polluted area or if it's true."

Zhu Ning thought back to those cockroach people and thought that these people might have been defective products before.

But why?

What good would it do to turn people into cockroaches?

Huang Yaruo's experiment was to study whether pollutants and humans could establish a mother-child relationship.

What about these? What are they studying?

Zhu Ning could even see the cockroach people in the corridor from a God's perspective. The movement of a group of cockroaches was extremely spectacular, like a black tide.

"It's so strange here," Zhu Ning said, feeling a little creepy on her back, as if cockroaches were crawling on her. She always trusted her intuition and said, "We're not here as an exterminator. We're here to find out the truth about God's descent. God can't descend on cockroaches, right?"

There must be other intentions behind bringing out so many cockroach people. Zhu Ning found it hard to imagine that the final boss was a cockroach.

It's not that it's not cool enough, it's just... a little funny.

"We encountered at least two strange things in the hotel. One was the cockroach man, which you can see and touch, and that's the one outside the door."

Zhu Ning pointed outside the door. He could still hear rustling sounds from next door. He continued, "There's another type of thing that appears in conference rooms and elevators. It's defined by the blink of an eye. You can see it when you blink, and it disappears when you close your eyes. As you blink more frequently, it gets closer and closer to you."

"But there are scope limitations," Xu Meng added.

"Yes," Zhu Ning said, "It's only limited to the conference room and the elevator. It's gone once you get out. What are these?"

Zhu Ning entered the meeting room, sat in the wrong seat, and was hugged by a pair of arms.

Those things will have a real impact on people, but they cannot be seen with the eyes for a while and must be detected through the act of blinking.

Xu Meng pondered and said, "It's somewhat similar to the hallucinations recorded in the medication record book."

Xu Meng glanced through the book Zhu Ning had found. The two books were placed together. It was clear that they were recorded by two people, but they mentioned several times, "I blinked and that thing disappeared. It must be an illusion."

What is the connection between cockroach people and these things?

Zhu Ning handed both notebooks to Doctor Fu and asked, "Do you have any clues about this?"

Doctor Fu calmed himself down. Zhu Ning and Xu Meng each found their own medication record books. The contents of Xu Meng's book were similar. Both of them had hallucinations caused by taking the medicine. The contents of the hallucinations were different, which should be individual differences.

Doctor Fu quickly read through the documents. "If there are surveillance cameras, the researcher in charge will write a third-party report."

"The researchers observed and recorded their actions, and also had the subjects write down their medication records from their personal perspective, probably for cross-comparison."

Zhu Ning asked, "Comparing what? The content of the hallucination?"

Doctor Fu shook his head. "I don't know. I don't have the specific details of their experiment."

It is impossible for Dr. Fu to draw a conclusion without sufficient clues.

"The core of the notebook is hallucinations. Both of them faithfully record the contents of hallucinations, proving that the key point is the content of hallucinations." Xu Meng suddenly asked, "Why study hallucinations?"

The research topic of Yongsheng Pharmaceutical seems to be human illusion.

Is it any use?

Doctor Fu paused and said cautiously, "Generally speaking, if it's not mental pollution, the cause of hallucinations in ordinary people may be abnormal neurotransmitter secretion or temporal lobe lesions in the brain."

Dr. Fu changed his approach at this point, saying, "Let me give you an analogy that might not be quite right. Most people can distinguish between reality and imagination, right?"

Xu Meng did not nod. In the past she might have given a positive answer, but she had been contaminated in Bao Ruiming's consciousness cloud, and the boundary between illusion and reality was very vague.

She saw Cheng Mofei turned into a snail man and was not sure if she was a normal person.

In this polluted world, human senses are failing.

Dr. Fu didn't notice Xu Meng's anomaly. He raised his right hand and said, "Imagine there's a door in our brain. If you're a normal person, you know some things are just imaginary because your door is functioning normally. When you open the door, you know what's behind it is an illusion, and what's outside is reality."

"Some people like to daydream. They daydream when they're distracted in class or bored waiting for the bus. Writers, for example, like to imagine their own worlds in their heads. This is very common. If you want to enter your own imaginary world, you can open the door and walk in. If you want to return to reality, you can open the door and walk out."

As Dr. Fu spoke, his palm coordinated with the movements, and his right hand was like a real door, opening and closing.

"For some mentally ill patients, the mechanism of this door fails, so they lose the boundary between imagination and reality. The reality they see is different from what we see, and they think the fantasy world is reality. That's why we outsiders think this person is mentally ill, crazy, and has hallucinations."

This was the first time Zhu Ning heard such a statement. When she was a child, she went to her grandmother's house. There was a very famous madman in the village who always wore red clothes and danced.

Zhu Ning once saw him squatting on the edge of a field with a handful of stones in his hand. She was young at the time and curiously went over to ask him what he was doing.

Zhu Ning still remembers his response. He turned his head, revealing two rows of black and yellow teeth, and chuckled, "I'm watching a movie."

Zhu Ning was a child at the time, and children are not as likely to recognize a madman as adults. He even approached the child seriously and asked, "What movie did you watch?"

The madman told the story of a movie about a woman in red who drowned in a pond. "She was completely soaked and rotten!"

As he spoke, he began to go crazy, cursing Zhu Ning for disturbing him while watching the movie, and stood up to beat her.

Now that I think about it, it's probably just as Dr. Fu said, the door in this person's brain is broken and he can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

Zhu Ning thought about the things in her previous life, and always felt that they were not so far away from her. She came to her senses and remembered that she was in the polluted area.

There are two kinds of medicine on the table now. The bean-pod-shaped cockroach egg cases seem to be able to hatch young cockroaches at any time and anywhere. The cockroach people imprisoned in the house have been struggling, making a "shaha" sound.

Not to mention there's a swarm of cockroaches outside the door that I don't know how to get rid of.

The three of them found this polluted area strange and fell into a brief silence.

Zhu Ning listened and thought at the same time. She had just turned off the screen sharing with Dr. Fu, so her screen was now divided into two parts. One part was the internal camera, which was aimed at herself.

When Zhu Ning was thinking, his eyes suddenly paused and glanced at the camera inside the helmet, which was a selfie angle.

But there is a fundamental difference between a selfie camera and looking in the mirror. Electronic imaging makes everything seem unreal.

Zhu Ning looked at himself in the camera and blinked unconsciously.

When humans blink, they often don't realize it because the movement of blinking is too small compared to raising an arm, and people need to blink too many times a day.

If every time you blink is noticed, you will be exhausted in a day.

Therefore, you will only become aware of the blinking action when you deliberately stop and focus all your attention on it.

Zhu Ning enlarged the camera so that only his eyes were visible on the entire screen. Before this mission, Zhu Ning had never paid attention to blinking.

Just now in the conference room, she had been trying hard not to blink, and there were already red bloodshot eyes.

This time she blinked on her own initiative, and her screen was just a normal screen, faithfully recording her movements, and she didn't see anything she shouldn't have seen.

Blinking is actually a process very similar to the shutter of a camera.

When taking a photo, the shutter will make a subtle beeping sound. There is a romantic saying that photography is to stop time.

At this moment, the eyelashes swept across and the eyelids moved up and down, like a shutter opening and closing quickly, or like a door being briefly pushed open.

A door...

A door?

Zhu Ning frowned and suddenly asked, "Do you think it's possible that what they're studying isn't illusions, but the... door you mentioned?"

“What if…” Zhu Ning stated his hypothesis, completely unaware that Dr. Fu’s expression was becoming increasingly grim. He seemed to be talking to himself: “What if the things behind this door could be brought into the real world in the form of pollutants?”

When Dr. Fu heard this, he frowned and forgot to clean the vomit in his helmet.

At that moment, he thought of what happened just now at the door of the conference room. He was watching Zhu Ning's mission video and saw a figure suddenly turn around.

The man seemed to be imprinted on his retina, as if he had penetrated through his eyes and into his brain.

Doctor Fu's right hand began to tremble unconsciously. It was the first time he heard such a horrifying speculation.

"This..." Doctor Fu's face turned pale for a moment, more terrified than being pounced on by a cockroach man, and asked, "Is it possible?"

If this kind of thing can be done, what on earth is Yongsheng Pharmaceutical doing?

What are they going to bring into reality?

Zhu Ning: "It's just a blind guess. I don't know."

She is not a perverted researcher. To be honest, the level of pollution in the wasteland world has always been beyond her understanding. Nothing is impossible.

Doctor Fu shook his head: "There is no evidence."

He believed in the evidence. This thing was too bizarre, and he didn't dare to make a conclusion easily until more evidence came out.

Besides, what does this have to do with cockroaches? Why cockroaches?

There is a difference between Dr. Zhu Ning and Dr. Fu. Dr. Fu is more rigorous.

"Let's not worry about whether it's possible for now," Xu Meng said. "If someone is monitoring it, it proves there must be a laboratory here."

The experimental subject has been found, is the laboratory far away?

Zhu Ning had been to Yixue before. Yixue was once the experimental base of Yongsheng Pharmaceutical. Every grid was convenient for researchers to observe.

The same is true for this hotel; if every hotel room is considered a petri dish, then researchers are definitely nearby.

They generally go through a contamination process when entering a contaminated area. An ordinary defective product comes in, goes to a conference room to attend a speech, and then checks into a hotel.

What comes after this?

Where did the successful experiments go? And what happened to the failed ones?

At most, they had explored less than half of the hotel.

When Zhu Ning came in, he had guessed that there might be something underground in the hotel, so he asked, "Chu Ling and Cao Wei are in charge of searching the underground. Have you contacted each other?"

Xu Meng and Doctor Fu both shook their heads. As soon as they came in, they first experienced the pollution of the conference room and were chased by cockroaches. They didn't care at all about what the other team was doing.

Zhu Ning opened the public channel: "Hello? Chu Ling? Cao Wei?"

She called twice but heard no response.

Zhu Ning's heart sank, and a bad guess came to his mind. The avatars of Chu Ling and Cao Wei on the screen were both gray, and the signal was out of reception range.

How is that possible? Didn't Prometheus guarantee internal communication within the contaminated area?

Zhu Ning asked, "Prometheus?"

Normally, she would hear a voice: [I'm here.]

It’s just like Zhu Ning’s previous home smart robot. When you call its name, it will respond with “I’m here, I’m here.”

But this time, Zhu Ning only heard a crackling sound of electricity, as if someone was trying to communicate with her but was blocked.

Xu Meng: "The signal is disconnected?"

Doctor Fu's voice was even more panicked. "When? How is it possible?"

Dr. Fu's three perspectives were destroyed. Prometheus was supposed to be able to enter any contaminated area, and he had never heard of it being disconnected while performing a mission with it.

They had speculated that Prometheus was a super S-level pollutant. If it was disconnected, it would prove that even it could not set foot in this place.

Zhu Ning looked at the screen inside the helmet. She hadn't noticed it before, but now she saw clearly that the blue halo on her right sunglass was flashing, like a broken signal light.

The human-machine joint device actually failed.

The author has something to say:

The term "door in the brain" was coined by a psychiatrist. I have a relative who suffers from schizophrenia. The doctor used a very popular explanation to help his family understand his condition. I will use it here. I don't know if this statement is rigorous, but it is acceptable in the wasteland world, because we live in a world of mental pollution!