The story
The number of people on the bus can indeed only be counted as one and a half.
Because in that tattered car, I saw the driver, Lao Zhao, still slumped there, but his body was infinitely stretched out and flat.
He really became a living shirt, bulging underneath the bright red skin, with some remaining roots and blood vessels crawling inside, constantly turning outward and turning a mottled red.
The young man put the driver on.
The limbs and torsos scattered in the carriage were crowded together in Lao Zhao's skin and hid, leaving only the oversized head, stuck to the driver Lao Zhao's neck, constantly screaming and muttering to him.
How ridiculous! He was still directing the driver to drive. The almost scrapped bus was slowly crawling forward on the main road. Things like hair began to crawl out of the wheels and crawled into the mud on both sides of the road.
Because it was filled with the weight of one and a half people, the cab was filled and overflowed. The bright red color dripped out of the window and was rushed up by the fog. The shriveled insect eggs were attached to it, and began to become plump and crystal clear with a flutter.
A cruel but strict food chain was unfolding in front of me in an extremely deformed state: the young greens and banyan trees were parasitizing the human body, the bright red burns were parasitizing and devouring the banyan trees, and the mist and insect eggs were sucking the bright red.
"They are only afraid of heat and light."
Xu You said, "The results of our experiments show that high temperature and bright light seem to mean that food is scarce and not suitable for hatching, so they will go back into hibernation."
Dormant? Isn't that the same as being destroyed?
I felt a chill run down my spine, a bit incredulous. "Won't the number of eggs decrease? Didn't the flares shatter and melt them all?"
"I hope so."
Xu You said, "But, do you see the dust covering the entire town? It wasn't this serious when we first fell a week ago."
"Volcanic ash, gray snow, insects that were blasted into pieces... and this fog. In the end, everything will turn into this dust, covering all the buildings and furniture layer by layer. Then, new insect eggs will emerge from nowhere."
I followed Xu You's wheelchair and looked at the buildings along the street in the fog.
At first glance, I realized that the styles of those buildings were very different.
Unlike this bar, many buildings that were vaguely visible in the fog looked older, some of them were built with huge stones and yellow mud, and the doors were made of brass that would not melt. Moreover, the layout of the entire foundation was very strange, as if no consideration was given to lighting and access, and the houses were almost crowded together.
This time, a guy with a tired look on his face introduced them to me. According to him, these houses were not originally in this town.
As the place where the Zhang family gathered to exchange clues about ghost stories, the town was very empty at first, and there was not much infrastructure. There was only a main road leading to the depths of the snow-capped mountains for driving, a platform for parking and maintenance according to the specifications of a railway station, and several residential buildings on both sides for temporary rest.
Even this bar was set up as a large kitchen, lacking all the basic entertainment equipment. It can barely cook and serve two cans of beer.
However, just a week ago, a group of guys who arrived first with food and logistical supplies discovered that some strange and inexplicable changes seemed to have taken place at this annual gathering venue.
At first, the fog in the early morning became heavier and took a long time to dissipate. The condensed dew in the air was a little blue, and the whole town seemed to be much cooler.
Later, when someone got up at night, they found that the shadows cast by the buildings on the street seemed to have widened, and when they looked up, they found some old houses of different styles. But when they called the guys on duty to check, those houses disappeared again, like a mirage.
During this process, they sent some feedback reminder messages to the outside world, but the communication signal began to deteriorate intermittently, and even the messages sent were garbled, and the phone calls were almost unresolved.
Then, those members of the Zhang family who were supposed to arrive a week later actually arrived early one after another, and claimed that they had received a message urging them to arrive as soon as possible.
Later, those buildings appeared more frequently and looked clearer and more real.
"It's like... a reef suddenly appearing on the seabed." said the guy, obviously also a little frightened and confused.
He spread out a large map for me, which was the original distribution map of the town's buildings. It was smeared over and marked with different colors and numbers, noting the old houses that emerged and were discovered one after another.
The time it took for the fog to dissipate became longer and longer as houses appeared, and it became colder.
In just a few days, most of the participants arrived, and one night later, heavy snow suddenly fell from the sky.
Once it snowed, the roads were blocked and all buildings, new or old, were covered in an endless expanse of white, erasing all differences. The thick snow piled up, and if people stepped on it, the snow would reach up to their thighs, soaking half of the person.
At first, these active Zhang family members divided the work of sweeping the snow, but as soon as they started, they found something wrong.
"The snow is hot. It's not called snow, but more like lumps of stuff that are squeezed together by high-temperature steam and high pressure." The waiter said, and someone handed over an acrylic box, which seemed to have been used by a young member of the Zhang family to store figurines.
I saw a small piece of snow preserved in the box and a pair of tweezers also sealed in plastic, with only a part sticking out of the box for easy operation. The joints were hot-sticked with wax and were very sticky.
The guy held the box, holding both sides firmly, then handed me the tweezers and motioned for me to be gentler.
I took a deep breath and had a bad feeling. I moved the tweezers and carefully picked up a little bit of the stuff.
In an instant, the snow began to vibrate violently, making a sharp buzzing sound.
The guy held the box down with his thumb and thumb to prevent it from moving, and asked me to continue looking. The tweezers tightened, and the small piece of snow broke off, giving me goose bumps all over my body.
He was right. This so-called snow was pressed together by some huge force and was very solid and firm.
In addition to the ash, there were worms wriggling inside, and they were laying eggs. Near the center, the eggs were the size of a fingertip, while those on the outer edge gradually shrank and were so small that they were almost like skin flakes, and were difficult to distinguish with the naked eye in the ash.
After showing it to me, the guy put the box away and covered it completely with a black cloth. The box screamed for about five minutes before it slowly stopped. During this process, the fog outside the glass door of the bar kept surging, but it seemed that the source of the sound could not be found. It just surged back and forth, and finally returned to calm.
I didn't dare to breathe as I saw the guy put the box away and came back. I inadvertently noticed that his palms were red. I couldn't tell whether they were burned or frozen. They were so red that the skin was almost peeling off.
"Your hand..." My face turned pale.
He looked at me to make sure I understood the message, then looked at Xu You.
"Speak, it's okay."
Xu You laughed and scolded, "Aren't you a bunch of bastards who are not convinced and shout every day that you want to see a consultant? This ancestor is it."
The guy was stunned, his eyes lit up, he looked me up and down, and his expression became much more lively.
"I thought he was some second-generation recruit. I said he wasted so many of our bullets..." He coughed dryly, and immediately dragged a dusty chair to me. He wiped it with his sleeves twice, and said with some joy: "My brother, you have seen him, the counselor. You call him Jingjing. He boasted for half a month after returning from the camp, saying that he would be called that from now on. Now he gets angry if anyone calls him by his full name."
After taking the time to exchange these words, the guy seemed to let down his guard. He pondered for a moment and said seriously:
"Counselor, how do you feel about your aberration?"
I was startled, thinking that you just said that I was fine and recovering, could it be that you were just trying to comfort me? But I subconsciously looked down and saw that except for the wound, the cut part, the rest was covered by the heavy protective clothing, and I couldn't see anything.
"The eversion is still there, but your body's perception will return to normal first. You will feel normal first, and then your body will follow your will to make corrections."
The guy sounded like he was talking about something related to psychology. I thought for a moment and said, "Is this considered a wish come true?"
"Yes, but you need to be firm in your identity. Some people with amputated limbs will still have the illusion from time to time that their limbs are still there and can even be directed to move. If placed in the radiation contamination of the moving rat, such amputated limbs may really grow back after the illusion."
"But if one loses an accurate anchor point for one's own judgment and cognition, it is very likely that this person will have the same arm or leg all over his body, and the rest of his body parts and organs will have been transformed and disappeared."
However, the guy sounded a little scared, saying that even so, he could still survive.
“—Here, no matter what you look like, you won’t die. Even if you’re blown into eighteen pieces, you can still crawl on the ground.”
Xu You suddenly said, somewhat sarcastically: "The Mouse is very generous to its worshippers. Anyone who comes to its shrine can obtain "eternal life". And its definition of human is also very broad. Almost anyone with an eye and a buttock can be considered a human."
He pointed at the bus that was still squirming outside and said, "A ghost like me is considered a human. The one and a half on the bus are considered human. Even those man-eating creatures in the fog seem to be considered human."
These words were so dark that I shuddered and suddenly realized:
"They sent you here for treatment before?"
No wonder Xu You's deformity was so severe, and he was hanging on to his last breath completely by the rules of the sentry box. I wonder what kind of power could have allowed him to recover alive.
"Originally, you had to hike deep into the snowy mountains and soak in the pond in front of the Mouse Palace to achieve this effect."
The team doctor also said that the main raw material they used to make artificial amniotic fluid came from the underground palace pool.
The rest of the guys went into the mountains to attend the party, only Xu You was recuperating from his injury, and had been soaking in the pool of water. If it weren't for the sudden fog, they, along with the female team doctor, would have planned to go into the mountains.
I have experienced the effect of that thing in the pit. It was able to wake me up from bleeding profusely when I was on the verge of death. When I learned this secret, I couldn't help but feel complicated.
"——So, when the heavy snow blocked the road into the mountain, we were all very surprised."
The guy changed the subject and said, "After all, the rat-moving underground palace in our mountain is just a failed imitation of a semi-finished product. As a rule of thumb, as long as you don't enter the underground palace, there's no big problem wandering around outside. And the road to the underground palace is always open, without any obstacles."
However, a heavy snowfall, the emergence of unknown buildings, as well as the dust and insect eggs in the snow, these unprecedented things suddenly broke the original balance.
The Moving Rat Palace seemed to have taken back the rights of the people in the town to go there for "worship" all at once.
At the same time, on the second day of the snowfall, an extremely terrible earthquake occurred.
Hot, humid, and sulfur-smelling air surged out from the cracks in the ground, instantly melting the snow on the surface of the town and the main roads. With the high temperature and moisture, the fog became more diffuse.
——The eggs are released from the melting snow.
"We were attacked." The guy said sadly, "Many people woke up suddenly in pain while sleeping, with blood holes all over their bodies, but they were not dead. The fog rolled into our room, and dense insect eggs covered us. Then, people would live like this until they were completely covered by those things and transformed into new fog and insect eggs."
"The leader is right. Those... are indeed human beings."
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