Lin Xi woke up.
Although the moment he woke up, he felt absolutely terrible.
Liquid, or rather, mucus... was enveloping him, while soft tubes tightly bound his body. He was almost suffocating, and his body was incredibly weak and unable to move. Lin Xi's first thought was that the hibernation pod had malfunctioned. He felt as if he were about to be melted and swallowed by the mucus, and after a brief moment of consciousness, he seemed about to fall back into a dark slumber.
Lin Xi instinctively opened his mouth and let out a silent cry of pain, but as soon as his lips moved, a large amount of foul-smelling liquid rushed into his throat. A series of bubbles immediately rose from Lin Xi's mouth. He closed his eyes and struggled, waving his arms, trying to reach the emergency call button inside the hibernation pod. However, in his desperate struggle, what he touched was not the hard synthetic inner wall, but…
Instead, it is a thick, soft membrane that seems to faintly carry warmth.
Things seem to be getting a little off...
Lin Xi felt extremely panicked.
The only saving grace was that those membranes weren't indestructible. After a frantic struggle, Lin Xi finally managed to tear a gash in the surface of that fleshy membrane.
This was Lin Xi's lifeline. He didn't care about anything else. He first stretched out one of his hands, and then his shoulder and head.
Finally, through his efforts, he was squeezed out of the flesh membrane, enveloped in a large mass of sticky liquid.
He fell to the ground, his face hitting the hard, wet floor.
"Cough cough cough..."
The air outside was slightly cool, and Lin Xi got goosebumps. He couldn't stop coughing and started shivering.
He felt like a newborn baby, overwhelmed by an unprecedented weakness that left him confused and terrified.
“This is a member of the Apollo… Lin Xi Drake… Is anyone there? Cough cough cough… I need help…”
Lin Xi, panting, shouted to those around her.
After he opened his mouth, he found that his voice had become even hoarser than before, to the point that every word he uttered sounded like the cry of some animal rather than a human voice.
Perhaps that's why? There was only silence around him, and no one responded.
Lin Xi coughed up several clumps of mucus from his lungs with great effort, and it took him a long time to finally gather some strength. He braced himself on his elbows and struggled to straighten up, looking around at himself.
After taking in her surroundings, for a moment, Lin Xi almost thought she was still dreaming.
His last memory was...
Bryce was standing next to him the instant he stepped into the sleep pod on the Apollo.
"We're about to jump. By the time you wake up, we'll probably be almost back on Earth. Enjoy your sweet dream while you can, buddy."
Lin Xi, it seems, is joking with Bryce.
"God, you must be really enjoying this time without me. I can see the joy on your face..."
He then lay down, letting the cushioning gel slowly envelop him, followed by the gradually brightening green light from outside the hibernation pod, and his vision rapidly blurring under the effects of the drug…
Theoretically speaking, Lin Xi should have been in the hibernation pod after waking up.
But look at everything around you now. Even if he doesn't know where he is, Lin Xi can be sure of one thing—this is definitely not the Sun God.
Lin Xi was located inside a cave.
The cave's interior was roughly circular, its surface riddled with grooves, its texture indiscernible, as if carved out with a sharp tool. Beside his feet, where he had just struggled to escape, lay a thick, soft membrane of indistinct material. Now, due to the loss of fluids and contents, this membrane drooped, limp and huddled together. The air inside the cave was damp, filled with a faint, sweet, and fishy smell… a smell that reminded Lin Xi of his childhood, when he and his father would destroy termite mounds in the backyard, the stench emanating from those winding, crisscrossing mounds.
Lin Xi sniffed; he was feeling worse and worse.
"What exactly is this...?"
He pressed his temples hard, trying to figure out what had happened to him.
However, when he recalled the past, only some horrifying images flashed through his mind. Lin Xi suddenly shivered, feeling as if his body still remembered some terrible things, but his brain was refusing to recall them.
Lin Xi took a deep breath and said, "Calm down, buddy, you need to calm down. You can do it—"
He kept talking to himself.
It was at this moment that he suddenly realized something was wrong with him. Yes, it was a cave, so it was very dark, but Lin Xi found that he could see everything around him so clearly even in such darkness.
Lin Xi slowly raised his hands, staring blankly at them.
Those hands hardly resembled his arms anymore; they were pale, slender, and the skin was so thin it was almost translucent. Lin Xi could even clearly see the crisscrossing veins and arteries beneath the skin.
As Lin Xi slowly lowered her gaze along her elbow, her breathing became increasingly rapid.
"This is a dream, this is a dream, this must be a nightmare..."
Lin Xi murmured to himself, slowly shaking his head and bracing his hands on the ground, trying to avoid what he was seeing.
Although his chest and waist were human-shaped, his lower body suddenly transformed into... an insect-like abdominal stalk. These non-human organs connected to a spider-like, swollen, and rounded abdomen with thick, sharp, and slender limbs that protruded from both sides of his body.
Lin Xi subconsciously moved his legs, but the next second, what he saw raised and trembling in his vision was that disgusting insect limb.
"No, this isn't real, this isn't..."
What he saw with his own eyes finally made Lin Xi scream uncontrollably. He braced himself on the ground, frantically trying to escape from the monstrous half-body, but, naturally, he couldn't escape.
Because that is his own body.
"Click—"
It was as if something, something in his mind, had been completely shattered—Lin Xi's rationality.
His emotions completely spiraled out of control in an instant. He grabbed a thick steel bar, which had been lying crookedly under the limp mass of flesh.
Although the metal surface had become slippery due to the sludge, the broken edge still looked sharp enough.
Without hesitation, Lin Xi gripped the steel bar and stabbed it heavily into his worm-like body.
He felt a sharp pain, then his hand trembled, and the steel bar fell heavily to the ground, without even a scratch on his body.
"What's going on? There's no one here! What's happening? What did you do to me?!"
Lin Xi threw the steel bar on the ground and tried to hide in a corner of the cave, attempting to escape this terrible and insane reality. However, he had only just approached the edge of the cave when he was met with countless monster corpses piled up haphazardly.
Lin Xi's eyes widened suddenly. On the monster's empty, pale skull, one could still vaguely see some traces of humanity, but the rest of its body had been completely deformed, transforming into another kind of... creature.
Lin Xi felt like he was going crazy. He didn't know what had happened. No matter how hard he tried to recall, all he could remember was the slowly closing hibernation pod canopy and Bryce standing next to his hibernation pod. But in that brief moment, Lin Xi seemed to see another scene—Bryce was inside a small spaceship, his dearest brother looking at him in terror, then opening his mouth to shout something.
"Ugh..." Lin Xi suddenly clutched his head, and in the excruciating pain, he whimpered and collapsed to the ground.
Just then, a grayish-white shadow suddenly flashed past the corner of his eye.
In the pitch-black environment, this grayish-white shadow stood out conspicuously.
"Who is it?!"
Lin Xi, who was already on the verge of being overwhelmed by confusion, fear, and terror, suddenly tensed up. Terrified, he scrambled over, grabbed the steel bar he had previously discarded, and then, trembling, raised it to the shadow he had seen earlier.
"Who is it? Show yourself..."
Lin Xi called out again.
After a long time, something slowly appeared in a corner of the cave.
That was the most terrifying thing Lin Xi had ever seen in her life.
He saw a monster, a white, enormous, repulsive monster with an insect-like body and a deformed face.
That's something that only appears in the scariest movies, and now, it's right in front of Lin Xi.
The monster emerged from the shadows step by step, every inch of its skin as if it had been dead for a long time, devoid of color and exuding an aura of death.
Two feather-like tentacles stood atop his head, and his scarlet eyes were compound eyes. Every move he made exuded an indescribable sense of disgust and terror.
Even more terrifying, right before Lin Xi's eyes, the monster suddenly opened its mouth, revealing its incredibly ferocious aura.
Then Lin Xi heard a voice.
"Lin Xi..."
That is the language of humankind, the call of humankind.
Those are human names.
That was his own name.
Lin Xi let out a short, low cry. He couldn't control himself and suddenly reached out, stabbing the broken steel bar into the monster.
Everything seemed like an instinctive action. He then jumped up, attempting to kill the monster directly, but his body no longer felt like it belonged to him.
He had just stood up when he immediately fell down.
In the last instant before Lin Xi lost consciousness, what he saw... was that white monster suddenly lunging towards him.
...
Danger!
Lin Xi is in danger!
He's calling for help!
He was terrified!
I must protect him, I must get to his side immediately...
Just as Lin Xi was trembling with fear because of the existence of that white monster, hundreds of kilometers away on a cliff in a truly dark and vast cave...
A gigantic, grotesque alien creature opened its eyes in an instant.
Those scarlet eyes seemed to stain every creature it saw with blood.
The icy aura swept across the entire area like a gust of wind the moment it awoke, causing all the creatures in the area to tremble, shrink back, and dare not move an inch.
This is a long-awaited rest for Xavier.
It slowly moved its body and crawled out from the mountain of debris beside it.
Its intuition was screaming from within its body—Lin Xi was in danger.
Its instincts as a queen insect are constantly driving it to Lin Xi's side to protect him.
However, in the instant Xavier regained consciousness, it saw everything around it clearly. Then, the cold reality brought it back to its senses.
It is no longer Lin Xi's king insect...
Because Lin Xi has completely abandoned it.
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