Failed conversion
Are there water marks moving on the dome again?
I had no answer, because "Wang Ping" was still looking at me and making a sound: "Hey? What's going on here?"
Yes, I am not mentally ill, and there is no error in my description: Wang Ping turned his face upwards, looking up at the dome in fascination; but at the same time, his eyes were still looking at me, and the opening and closing of his mouth were clearly visible.
Like a building block with incorrect coloring, his facial features were divided, so that a part of the three-dimensional color block remained on the back of his head which had been turned, and it still performed the function of an organ.
My first thought was that those hairs seemed unfamiliar to the human body. I wondered if a person couldn't survive with them and that they would be recognized as abnormal at a glance.
The clicking sound in his abdomen was still going on, and it was gradually becoming more rapid and anxious.
Then came the second thought: What were those hairs looking for? They chose to abandon us and focus on attacking Wang Ping. Didn’t they get what they wanted?
"Really?"
It seemed like someone was calling me softly and worriedly in my ear, but I was a little dazed and didn't answer. I really couldn't understand it.
I asked myself: Does this matter have anything to do with the water dripping from my body?
“——Of course!”
Then there was a scream, and strangely, I saw that everything around me turned around, and Wang Ping, who was looking up at the sky, was also turned upside down.
When Wang Ping's shoes appeared in my field of vision, I reacted half a beat late. It was not the world that was spinning, but I myself had fallen to the ground.
Because of my current posture, I inadvertently looked up. To my dismay, there was nothing on the dome this time.
The dizzy feeling similar to hypoglycemia lingered. I shook my head vigorously and took a deep breath before I recovered from the sudden heart palpitations. I turned around and lay on the ground, starting to retch.
But now I don’t even have abdominal organs, and the only action I have that is mostly symbolic is retching. While vomiting until tears come out, I have to realize that I don’t have this function at all.
Xu Ping wanted to help me, but I waved my hands and asked her to stay away from me.
Wang Ping's shoes were only about two fingers away from me. I suppressed the dizziness and stood up shakily, but I still couldn't straighten my back. I gritted my teeth and reached out to grab his arm.
I have to be honest and say that I feel very sorry for him. A stranger who had just shown me kindness, and then died because of my abnormality, is what I fear the most.
But my rationality also said coldly that my abnormal dizziness and loss of composure just now were mostly not caused by emotional shock, but by strong fear and shock, which directly triggered the animal instinct to escape without thinking. In addition, my body did show extreme weakness.
I was almost shaking all over, sweating profusely, and the clothes on my back soon stuck to my body, making me very uncomfortable. The white sand that I applied as a desiccant quickly absorbed the sweat, and some of it clung to my skin, making it very stuffy.
Perhaps sensing the presence of moisture nearby, the hair on Wang Ping's body began to hiss and twist again, as if trying to break free from his body and get out, but it was stuck and unable to get away.
"...Really?"
"It's okay. It feels like... it feels like the prophet has suddenly pulled out the umbilical cord between us. I'm suddenly deprived of oxygen and my power is cut off."
I tried to use a joking tone, but my heart sank and my smile seemed very forced and fake.
I can be sure that ninety percent of the intense fear and weakness I just felt came from the prophet.
If something really went wrong with the prophet, the pseudo-man, as an organ that cannot exist independently, would not be able to escape. I had been mentally prepared for this, but the bad news seemed to come too quickly.
On the other hand, as misfortunes never come singly, Wang Ping continued to shrink while standing stiffly.
Like an untimely sprout in a drought, or some kind of failed transformation after trial and error, his abdomen kept emitting low, muffled sips. I saw several similar yet different states appearing on his body at the same time.
The skin around his abdomen was covered with yellow round spots, his belly was swollen like a bucket, and his limbs were shrunken and becoming thin and dry.
The hairs moved slower and slower, and gradually began to shrink, becoming dry and messy, and slowly drooping. At first glance, they looked like the natural fur of some ape-like creature, and it was impossible to tell that they originally existed independently.
From this perspective, all the features below Wang Ping's back and abdomen have become almost the same as those of a mandrill.
But he did not grow the webbed feet that impressed me so much, nor did he secrete any mucus outside his skin. The changes in his entire head and face at this time made him look more like the group of yellow rash figures in the mine cart being digested by the transparent water.
I had a very strange feeling, as if I was back in elementary school, when the teacher was teaching us about the metamorphosis of frogs and took out many pictures as examples.
However, not all tadpoles can successfully shed their tails and grow healthy limbs. The transitions between different stages sometimes do not go smoothly, and all kinds of "monsters" that make us scream with fear will emerge.
Wang Ping is now the frog that failed in metamorphosis, a frozen specimen.
What made me feel cold was that he didn't seem to be transforming from a human being into another species, but instead became a piece of flesh and blood, being directed by confused instructions and transforming into several similar but different organs at the same time, but all of them failed in the end.
I remembered that Sanyi seemed to have said that they once caught a mandrill, and found in experiments that if the mandrill was out of water for too long, it would suffocate, and the spots would first fade, and the yellow hair on its body would also fall off severely. My thought at the time was that the fur and mucus probably acted as some kind of respiratory organ.
At the time, this sentence seemed to be just a curious topic of conversation, but now I finally understand its true meaning.
Sanyi and the people playing hide-and-seek probably didn't realize that they were brushing past danger.
I flipped Wang Ping's forearm left and right, and sure enough, it was covered with tiny holes, just like those shriveled broken limbs that had been weathered for a long time.
As I moved, all the hair that had been gradually wilting fell off with a crackling sound.
I swept them away with my feet, and this time the feeling was completely different. It was more like stepping on something that had already dried up and been discarded, and the skin had shed. Therefore, there was no aggression and no reaction at all.
Xu Ping had been repeatedly told by me to stand further away, but now he moved closer out of concern: "Are they...dead?"
"It should be said... they seem to have completed their parasitism and changed their form." I took a deep breath. "Pingping, do you still remember fish lice?"
She reacted very quickly and her face changed immediately.
I'm talking about a very common parasite in life. Fish lice eat the tongue of a fish, then live in the fish's mouth, replacing it as the fish's new tongue and getting nutrients from the host.
This is also my understanding of these "hairs".
It's just a guess, but it still needs to be verified. I looked at Wang Ping, who was standing still, and I really had no way of verifying anything.
He still maintained the posture that seemed like he was gazing at the moon, his whole body was confused and frozen.
I felt a sense of sadness and irony.
The first thing that came to my mind was the sweat and tears that could flow out of this pseudo-human body.
Sweat and tears, like the digestive system and teeth that are never used, have no practical functional significance for a pseudo-person. They are just a kind of embellishment to the false personality.
I shook my head, trying to stop myself from thinking too deeply about this somewhat pessimistic topic.
I couldn't bring myself to kill Wang Ping, so I went to the garbage dump to find a piece of his limb. I managed to dig out a half-rusted fruit knife from the garbage, and I made up my mind to cut the limb.
I won't mention the terrible touch and scene here. It took me quite a while to slowly cut a long cut in the broken arm.
Just to tell you the result: the inside of the broken arm was hollowed out by clumps of dry hair, like honeycomb briquettes.
The long hairs had penetrated into the muscles, and were distributed in a very regular pattern like another set of blood vessels and nerves. I tried to pull the hairs out, but they had barbed scales on them, and they got stuck after penetrating too deep.
In comparison, I was lucky that just a small strand of hair got into my ear canal and I realized something was wrong before it went deeper.
It is said that the unknown is the most terrifying, but now that I know the specific structure of this thing, thinking back to the moment when its hair scales were not fully opened and just scraped across my ear canal, it makes my hair stand on end.
And I noticed that the tips of some of the hairs seemed to have melted and grown together with the muscles of the broken arm. When viewed through the skin, the color of the grown together parts was darker, forming yellow spots.
What Sanyi said about the spots on the mandrills' bodies fading because they have been out of water for too long is probably because after the hairs have dried up, they can no longer control the actions of the host, and the joints where they grow together have dried up and loosened, falling off from the joints, causing the spots to fade.
The part of the fur hanging outside the mandrill's body looks so ordinary and normal. It is probably because the main body of the hair is all concentrated on the mandrill, and the exposed part is just the shed skin that remained outside the body when it was parasitic at the beginning, and it has not completely detached from the end of the hair.
Wang Ping has not started the transformation yet, perhaps because the mine is always dry.
What gave the hairs the wrong information might be the dripping water on my body, the transparent water clumps melted in the mine cart, or the water marks that the little yellow rash people were looking for. Or maybe, all of them played a role.
The failure of his transformation at this moment was most likely because there was still no water around and the mandrills could not survive out of water for a long time.
Judging from the almost excited behavior of these hairs at the beginning, they must need a lot of water to complete the first step of parasitism, which is why they almost drained Wang Ping of water before our eyes.
So the biggest difference between me and him is not just how much moisture is on my body, but more importantly, whether I have come into contact with those hairs before and have been inadvertently chosen to attach and enter the incubation period.
Just as the true face of the mandrill was becoming clearer in my mind, Pingping asked me a question:
"When will Wang Ping get into trouble?"
Meeting her serious eyes, I knew this was equally important to her.
I couldn't lie to her, so I thought about it and said carefully, "I understand what you mean. I think Wang Ping chose to take us away from the mine in the middle of the night out of pure kindness, not wanting to wake us up... but at the same time, he may have been in trouble."
Pingping was silent for a moment and nodded slightly.
I'm not just trying to comfort her out of thin air, nor am I trying to shirk responsibility for myself. I really think so.
Although these hairs are very aggressive, from what I have experienced, it does not seem to be a quick or hasty process for them to initiate the attack and finally decide to parasitize.
In other words, under the protection of Wang Ping's thick protective clothing, it would have taken a long time for these hairs to reach such a terrifying depth. It may have taken a day or two, but it was not exposed to us.
As the host, Wang Ping may not have noticed that he was parasitized. Apart from the unexpected fact that the sound of the movement was infinitely amplified after crawling into the ear canal, I had no idea when those hairs hid on our bodies, which shows that they are actually quite hidden under normal circumstances, or at least they will remain silent and lurking before a fatal attack.
The mandrills in the Stone Forest seem to have the habit of collecting and cleaning up domestic garbage and broken limbs. I think this is a way for them to keep the mines clean.
Applicable to Wang Ping, I have a joke that may be a bit cruel and sad: Wang Ping led us out of the mine, and perhaps he was most likely influenced by the hairs, and was fulfilling the duty of a mandrill to transport the "corpses" to the tent camp for burial and drying.
Yes, no matter how you put it, the body of the pseudo-human is classified as a corpse.
The moment Pingping and I fell asleep, the pseudo-human body lost its external personality traits and was indeed no different from a corpse.
This is also the method the boss tried and almost succeeded in escaping from the mine: making himself identified as an object or a dead object, and being taken out by other living people.
As a miner here, Wang Ping had no better way than to treat him as a dead object and take him out of the mine.
It's just that this method comes too late and the test of success comes too untimely.
Wait, I suddenly discovered a fatal problem, and my heart sank in an instant.
If the mandrills were transformed from people like Wang Ping, and were the ones that were successfully transformed, then the mandrills that attacked me in the stone forest and the underwater mines... could it be that most of them were transformed from former mountain dwellers?
But, if that's the case, is it possible that the so-called "passage where the mountain people can avoid the entry and exit of mandrills" that I imagined does not exist at all?
I turned around suddenly and looked at Pingping who still knew nothing, and thought: Wang Ping is dead, and now the other mountain people have disappeared, so who can take us, especially Pingping, away from here?
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