Chapter 180 The Nameless Corpse (5)
This time, the white fog was thicker than ever before, engulfing the entire coastline almost in the blink of an eye.
The once visible, fluorescent blue sea was instantly blocked out, plunging the world into chaos, and even the sound of the waves crashing suddenly became distant.
Shu Ningmiao subconsciously tightened her fingers, firmly grasping Shu Changyan's hand. The fog was so thick that even though he was right next to her, she couldn't see his face clearly through the fog.
The smell of blood seemed amplified in the thick fog.
Shu Changyan had already drawn his sword and was holding it in his hand, using the other hand to shield her slightly behind him.
Deep within the thick fog, a blurry white outline slowly emerged, seemingly floating in mid-air not far from the ground, its posture eerie.
When Shu Ningmiao's gaze caught its outline, it still seemed very far away.
However, when she subconsciously looked down, she saw that white hair, like a spider web, was silently falling from her raised palm.
Before they knew it, the pale monster had silently hovered directly above them, its white hair cascading down and covering its thin, withered arms.
The humanoid face, covered with countless vertical pupils, opened simultaneously, all eyes locking onto Shu Changyan and Shu Ningmiao behind him.
Shu Ning's palms were instantly chilled. Could it be Lan Xi?
This thought was violently assaulting her reason.
She examined the completely distorted face, trying to find even the slightest resemblance to the doll-like face in the portrait.
Shu Changyan pushed his sword forward slightly, his blue eyes fixed on the white monster, and probed in a deep voice: "Lanxi?"
It did not respond to his probing, but slowly raised its arm, bending the joint in the opposite direction, and hung above their heads in a strange motion.
It wasn't an attack; her premonition, accumulated from countless battles, had already made the judgment for her.
This action... is very strange.
Gentle, sad.
It felt like a caress.
Thick fog swirled around it, but it didn't launch any attack. Instead, it sadly covered its face with its arms and let out a howl that was beyond words.
Hoarse, high-pitched, deep, soft... countless sounds overlapped, mixed, and twisted together, as if drilling directly into her mind.
Not far away, Xiao Jiang and Lian Naqi covered their ears in pain, their faces turning deathly pale, while the brother and sister in the very center felt nothing at all.
Shu Ningmiao called out to the polluted entity several more times, confirming that it did not respond to the name and was simply immersed in its own sorrowful, silent world.
This is truly a corrupted entity that has lost its humanity and reason; it has no ability to communicate, and she cannot get the answers she wants from it.
what to do?
Shu Ningmiao closed her eyes, then opened them again, and suddenly gripped Shu Changyan's sword-wielding arm tightly. Her voice was resolute and exceptionally clear, piercing through the thick fog.
"Shu Changyan, kill it!"
The voice was so cold and sharp that everyone around heard it. Even Xiao Jiang and Lian Naqi suddenly looked surprised and stared in disbelief in the direction from which the voice came.
Shu Changyan had no doubts about this. Almost the instant Shu Ningmiao finished speaking, he flicked his wrist, and the sword blade broke through the stagnant air, pointing directly at the pale and deformed head.
The sword's edge was sharp and fierce, carrying a merciless killing intent.
Just as the sword tip was about to touch that forehead covered with vertical pupils—
"Enough!"
The door to the house behind them was suddenly kicked open, and the old fisherman rushed out of the mist, arms outstretched, and lunged straight at them: "Don't kill it! It's Lanxi!"
Shu Changyan's wrist sank, and the sword tip slid down, failing to pierce the contaminated body at all.
Shu Ningmiao's calm gaze swept over him, and the fishermen realized that if they really wanted to harm it, they wouldn't have waited for it to slowly run over.
"It's gone mad. It has no consciousness or memory. Asking it won't help; it's not itself anymore."
The fisherman was in tears, his voice like heavy stones hitting the ground, as if he were about to pour out the secrets he had buried for half his life.
—The latter part he concealed from them.
On that day, the fishermen saw Lanxi again on the beach.
Lanxi said to him, "...I was wrong."
He has been wrong all along.
After Chisato Misaki's death, he dedicated his life to researching and solving the Manla disease.
Lanxi said that he felt ashamed of Weisheng Qianheng's death, but the fishermen did not understand what that meant at first.
He tried many methods but could not decipher the true source of Manla disease. Manla disease seemed to be closely related to Pandora, but he could not find a direct and effective way to combat it from Pandora itself.
Therefore, after the incident at the experimental base in Pingyi, Lanxi focused his research on how to keep Manra patients alive, rather than continuing his futile research on Pandora.
One wrong step leads to another.
Faced with stagnant research, he began to put into practice an absurd and crazy idea: to modify patients' genes with drugs, giving them the resilience to fight death.
The only source of the potion was Lanxi himself.
“He’s a superhuman just like you.” The fisherman hesitated, but then said, “His superhuman ability is… ‘immortality’.”
Immortality
These two words exploded in Shu Ningmiao's mind like a thunderclap.
She instantly understood his guilt towards Wei Shengqianheng, who died in the prime of his life, while he still had endless life ahead of him.
This is the remorse of a fortunate person for their misfortune.
He first targeted animals, then humans, transferring the endlessly proliferating cells in their bodies into the bodies of Manla disease patients through injection.
This crazy method has indeed extended the lives of Manla patients to some extent.
These infected people will no longer die from Manla disease, but their lives are still being invisibly drained away, their bodies are still irreversibly decaying, and their reason is still being lost little by little in pain.
In the end, without exception, all of these test subjects became contaminated.
Throughout his long, immortal life, he traveled the world, hoping to find a way to improve the situation and salvage the out-of-control state.
Thirty years ago, a long-deceased friend found him.
Wei Shengqianheng told him an unbearable truth, a cruel secret about the planet.
At this point, the fisherman stopped, as if there were sheer cliffs ahead of him, a place of no return.
Aside from Wei Shengqianheng and Lanxi, the only human who knows this secret is this ordinary old fisherman in Pingyi.
Wei Shengqianheng told him the truth about Manla disease.
This is interest that needs to be deferred.
The year Pandora was discovered is known as the first year of the New Era of the End Star.
A year before Pandora was discovered, the planet's coal and oil resources had become so scarce that they could no longer support the large population, and everyone on the planet was fighting for resources.
Driven by the survivors' extreme thirst for life.
The will of the planet—the "string"—gently responded to them.
The gift of the gods was opened in Phineas.
This was the beginning of salvation, and also the source of all subsequent disasters and chaos.
Everything in the world is constant; the vast energy provided by Pandora did not appear out of thin air, but was extracted from the future.
The future of everyone's life.
From the moment Pandora was unearthed, every bit of energy consumed in its burning process will, at some point in the future, burn away someone's life like fire.
This is the string.
The essence of a string is time.
There is no possibility of saving him in the future, and there is no cure for Manla disease.
Without Pandora, humanity cannot survive on this resource-depleted planet; but using Pandora would mean burning away the future of all humanity.
Manla disease is not a disease. Pandora, after being used, produces liquid waste that will eventually turn into black pus flowing from the organs of every Manla disease patient.
After merging with Pandora, Wei Sheng Qian Heng finally understood this.
He merged with Pandora and became Manra disease itself.
But Lanxi didn't understand and couldn't accept it.
The answer he had been seeking for three hundred years, the foundation of reason he firmly believed in, had already become riddled with holes after unintentionally creating a pollutant.
Now, faced with this irreversible answer, everything has been utterly shattered.
“His manuscripts filled with writing and his notebooks filled with drawings were all torn up, thrown away, or thrown into the sea by himself.” The fisherman also raised his rough hands and wiped his face: “All that he learned and studied in his life was destroyed by himself. Later… he seemed not to recognize me anymore. When I brought him food, he would look at me like a stranger. Sometimes he would suddenly grab my hand with frightening strength, say my name, or someone else’s name, and say sorry… After a while, he would shrink into a ball and hide in a corner, not responding no matter how I called him.”
Then, just as mentioned before, Lanxi disappeared.
The genius who once wrote "Philosophia" on the base of the research center was driven mad by the truth and became an empty shell devoid of reason.
Lanxi has become a pollutant.
The fishermen knew that the grotesquely large pollutant was him.
Even if it was just an empty shell driven mad by something, to him it was still the learned and all-knowing Lanxi.
He got married, had children, and lived with his wife for many years. In the end, he couldn't help but share this secret with her, which almost broke him. She died of depression in middle age. His children didn't understand him at all, and he didn't dare to tell her again.
He was left alone here, year after year, day after day, waiting for a body that would never respond.
The only sound in the air was the tireless roar of the waves, while the white pollutants cried out, oblivious to their conversation.
Shu Ningmiao suddenly spoke up: "He's not crazy."
All eyes instantly focused on her, but she kept her eyes glued to the white contaminant, her mind racing faster than ever before.
The contaminant in front of us did not exhibit any Pandora reaction, meaning that its original superpowers had disappeared.
"Immortality" sounds like a concept similar to Zhao's supernatural ability. To achieve true immortality, one must at least isolate oneself from all factors that lead to death, such as disease and aging...
Only if the superpower of "immortality" disappears can Lanxi regress into a state of contamination.
He became a contaminated body about thirty years ago.
At the same time he became a contaminant, the far north of the planet began to be covered by an insulating crystal—scientifically known as diatomite.
The nature of the stone is very similar to the essence of his supernatural abilities.
Both refer to "isolation".
One isolates death, the other isolates Pandora.
The Foundation Stone was a product of his abandonment of immortality. He was not insane; he sacrificed his own life to create the only thing on this planet capable of suppressing Pandora.
As a crystal that isolates Pandora, it has suppressed Pandora inside the planet, and also suppressed the micro-organisms that have been integrated with Pandora for so many years.
More than 20 years ago, a research couple suffering from Manra disease discovered the truth and decided to use their own child as an experiment to create a child who, like the Stone, would be isolated from Pandora and supernatural powers.
Therefore, Shu Changyan would feel a strange sense of familiarity with the pollutant he had only seen once, because they were of the same origin.
Therefore, Pinhes' large-scale mining of the stone would directly lead to the weakening of the suppression and the outbreak of Manla disease.
The weaker the suppression of the foundation stone, the more intense Pandora's effect, and the less restrained the power of the micro-elemental balance.
So... Wei Sheng Qian Heng suddenly reshaped his body at this moment and launched an attack on her and on this world!
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