16 The Man-Eating Hot Pot Restaurant (V)
Yongsheng Pharmaceutical
Defective product?
Zhu Ning paused when he heard these three words. The hot pot restaurant owner was a defective product, the same kind as Zhu Ning. So he wasn't ill at all; it was time for his body to naturally decline.
Zhu Ning later looked up some information about defective products. In this world, every person undergoes a genetic screening at birth, and after the genetic screening, genetic defects will be detected.
A side effect of advanced technology is the ability to directly predict your future, and with remarkable accuracy. Genetic diseases can be diagnosed immediately after birth, and even the estimated lifespan can be determined.
Homo sapiens, robots, and clones are actually all artificially created human beings. The defective products they produce are more like operational errors on the assembly line. As long as they are mass-produced, there will definitely be some unqualified ones.
Defective products can be improved through genetic drugs, but the effect varies from person to person and cannot be guaranteed to be the same as that of normal people. Moreover, it seems that the development of genetic drugs was not mature thirty years ago.
"I don't know how much I can remember. My memory has become confused since I came in." A man's voice came from the recording.
"Xiaohui previously told me to record my memories while I'm still lucid. She's been writing in a diary every day lately. But I live with Yang Tao, so I can't write. I can only record it and put it on the toilet lid. If anyone hears it, don't call the police for me, you might not be able to leave."
Xiaohui should be the cashier, and the person recording the video may be another employee.
With a sound of yelping——
Zhu Ning pushed open the door, and behind it... was a mess, with a lot of white plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling to the ground. When he pushed the door open, a gust of wind blew, making the white plastic sheets make a crackling sound.
With a click, Zhu Ning closed the door with his backhand.
The room was very large, with two rows of shelves on both sides of the walls. The white plastic sheeting somewhat obstructed Zhu Ning's vision. People moving through the plastic sheeting would make rustling noises, exposing their position at any time.
Zhu Ning moved forward cautiously with a gun in hand while listening to the recording in his headphones.
"We were usually under the supervision of the store manager and had never seen the boss. It was only when Yang Tao asked me to help carry a giant convalescent chamber into the basement that I saw the boss. He was half paralyzed and couldn't even stand up."
"I felt it was a pity at the time that such a young boss was a defective product. Yang Tao asked me to keep it a secret and not tell anyone else, saying that if I did, it would give competitors a handle. I knew that the store's business was booming and many people were jealous, so I kept it to myself. It had nothing to do with me anyway."
Zhu Ning lifted a piece of plastic sheet, and against the backdrop of this thing, it seemed as if there were ghosts moving around in the room.
"But that day, I was resting alone in the staff dormitory, and I saw a figure standing in front of me in a half-awake state."
"I woke up with a start. It was my boss. He was standing at the head of my bed, staring at me. How can I describe the look in his eyes? It was like he was looking at a piece of meat."
"As soon as I woke up, I called out to him, but he didn't respond at all and just walked away slowly. I stared at him for a long time before I realized, 'Wasn't he paralyzed? Why was he standing up?' Later, I found out that he seemed to be... doing some kind of experiment."
Snap——
Zhu Ning's boots crushed something—a glass bottle. Zhu Ning picked up the discarded medicine bottle. On the broken bottle were four words: Yongsheng Pharmaceutical.
There is more than one bottle of medicine in the room. This should be a medicine storage room.
With a loud bang——
Zhu Ning carefully lifted the plastic sheet. The shelves were densely packed with medicines, including injections, medicines in glass bottles, and even a set of scalpels.
Attached to it was a pink card with a smiling face on it: Welcome to participate in Yongsheng Pharmaceutical's free experimental project.
The man's voice, mixed with electricity, continued to emanate from the headphones: "Things were getting more and more wrong. The meat in the kitchen was getting weirder, the smell in the hot pot restaurant was getting worse, and my spirits were getting worse every day. My memory was very confused, until one day -"
His voice stopped and he spoke with tears in his eyes, "Xiaohui is missing."
"I suggested going to Xiaohui, but Yang Tao didn't care at all. He immediately wrote a new recruitment notice, looking for new employees. Not only cashiers, but also many chefs and waiters. But this store doesn't need so many employees at all."
"They were like, like my reserve. I had this feeling that if I died, someone would be able to take my place."
Bang--
Zhu Ning turned around and hit something on his back.
In the darkness, a three-meter-tall object stood within the room, part of it pressed against Zhu Ning's back. Shrouded in layers of plastic sheeting, the massive object looked down upon her like a monster.
Zhu Ning's back hair stood up, and she turned around suddenly, instinctively wanting to shoot immediately. But her mind suppressed it, and she pointed the muzzle of the gun at the giant, her fingertips pressing the trigger.
The monster looked down at him, its thick black shadow cast on the ceiling, as if the entire room was its territory.
Don't do anything rash in the contaminated area.
"I wanted to call the police and quit, but I always felt like everyone was watching me: Yang Tao, the other employees, even the diners. They were watching me all the time. If I moved, they would kill me. I couldn't even sleep well."
"The boss is getting better and better. He's energetic every day, like a normal person. But the healthier he gets, the more scared I am. I feel like he's no longer human. Today he said he wants to close the store and focus on his treatment. He also said the cost of closing the store can be distributed among us employees as dividends."
"When I heard about the amount of money, I hesitated and thought I should get the money first before leaving."
"Later, the store closed, but customers still came late every night. The store manager asked us to serve them well because they were our VIP customers."
His voice grew lower and shakier. "Something's starting to happen with the guests. I saw one guest stick his index finger into the hot pot the other day and it got burned, but he kept smiling."
"I'm starting to wonder what the guests are eating. Am I an accomplice? Did I... kill them?"
"I'm a murderer?"
"Wang Ming!" someone called him in the recording. "Where have you been hiding? Yang Tao is looking for you."
Then the man's panicked breathing was heard, and then the recording stopped abruptly.
bite--
System prompt: [Spirit value decreased by 5]
Recordings are a form of pollution. After listening to them, my mental state began to destabilize. The pollution concentration in recordings is much higher than in diaries. An ordinary person listening to them would likely be brain-dead. She clicked off the recording and deleted the entire folder.
It turned out that the employee who was recording the video was called Wang Ming, and he seemed to have encountered the same problem as Xiaohui.
Zhu Ning had been facing the giant monster for a while, and the other side remained motionless. She was affected by mental pollution and had a preconceived notion that the thing in front of her might not be a monster at all.
Covered in plastic, people will scare themselves. Humanity's greatest fear is the fear of the unknown; imagined fear can kill you.
She gritted her teeth and quickly tore off the last piece of plastic sheet, revealing what was behind it.
Sure enough, it was not a monster, but a... large incubator?
The three-meter-tall incubator, shaped like a test tube, was completely transparent. The glass had been violently smashed, and the contents were gone. What had been inside? Where is it now?
Wang Ming's recording is two minutes long.
Zhu Ning had already formed a rough guess based on the cashier's diary. The owner of Hao Zai Lai Hotpot Restaurant was a defective product. He had participated in Yongsheng Pharmaceutical's free experimental program, but the experiment had clearly failed.
Zhu Ning guessed that he might have become a pollutant, and employees Xiaohui and Wang Ming had both suffered varying degrees of mental pollution.
The pig-headed man Yang Tao may have listened to his boss for money at first, but later it seemed that his condition was more like that of being parasitized by contaminated spores.
But this guess isn't entirely accurate, as Xiaohui and Wang Ming are both mentally contaminated, making their words less credible. Furthermore, many things remain unexplained. While hiring so many employees might be an explanation, what about the subsequent bounty?
Is the reward for the heart, liver, spleen, lungs and mutant genes for experiments?
The bell inside the hot pot restaurant continued to ring, having lasted for at least six minutes. The pollution concentration was increasing, and Zhu Ning had to hurry.
If the system says there is a survivor here, this unlucky survivor may be brain dead.
Zhu Ning carefully checked the culture chamber to make sure that everything inside had been taken away.
There is a light source behind the incubator, which casts the shadow of the incubator onto the ceiling, creating the illusion that there are monsters here.
This thing is used to confuse people. It is not on the same level as the rotten flesh fingers and tentacles in the trash can that Zhu Ning had seen before. It looks like something a child would make while playing house.
The light source comes from a palm-sized hole at the back of the incubator. Someone had dug a hole here to look into the basement.
Who did it?
Through the hole in the ground, you can peek into the basement, which is filled with warm orange light. Zhu Ning squinted his eyes to get used to the light.
The Pig-Headed Man and other employees gathered in the basement, kneeling in an orderly manner.
The pig-headed man knelt at the front, the waiter knelt behind him, and the customer, who was supposed to be God, knelt at the back row, all in an orderly fashion, like a... WiFi graphic.
The smallest WiFi point is a hospital bed.
Zhu Ning didn't even know what to call the thing lying on the bed. A mass of rotting flesh in the shape of a human lay on the bed, its body constantly wriggling, each piece of flesh seemingly growing.
The rotten flesh continued to wriggle and slowly overflowed from the bed. At this rate of growth, it might fill the entire hot pot restaurant.
If I guessed correctly, the person lying on the hospital bed should be the boss. The pig-headed man led the employees to kneel in front of him and chanted something, as if praying to God.
The pig-headed man knelt respectfully and took out a knife.
What's this? Internal strife?
With a swish, the pig-headed man aimed his knife at the person on the hospital bed and cut off a piece of flesh. The flesh was still squirming after leaving the body.
The employee behind him took it respectfully with a black plastic bag. Every time a piece of meat was cut, the employee and the customer behind him would smile with satisfaction.
Zhu Ning: “…”
So where did that strange meat come from? Is this owner a little too great? He single-handedly supports an internet-famous hot pot restaurant.
Now that we have a clear understanding of the situation, we need to get out of the contaminated area as soon as possible. Zhu Ning was about to get up when he heard a snapping sound.
She was very familiar with this sound. Someone loaded a gun, and a gun stretched out from the darkness and pointed at the back of Zhu Ning's head.
Sure enough, there was another person in this room.
The author has something to say:
Thank you to the little angels who voted for me or provided me with nutrient solution between 2022-08-05 13:55:37 and 2022-08-06 10:34:51~
Thanks to the little angel who irrigated the nutrient solution: 11 bottles of cat from Bu Zhuangjia;
Thank you very much for your support. I will continue to work hard!
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