The Record of Unusual Creatures - Chapter 713

Chapter 713: The Situation on This Planet

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Hao Ren fiddled with the “personal computer” on the table for a moment and figured out its basic operation. It was similar to a laptop, but its keyboard’s function and system’s architecture were very different. If not for his inbuilt translation plug-in and vast experience, it may have taken him a lot longer to suss things out.

He opened many programs by mistake before he thought he finally found a browser-like feature. And to his surprise, the “computer” was actually connected to the Internet!

“I have no idea how this world maintains its Internet.” Hao Ren stared at the screen as it slowly refreshed its text. He muttered, “Is someone actually coming to this place to collect the Internet fee?”

The MDT could see the computer screen through Hao Ren’s eyes, so it began to gab, “The service provider crew rolling in an armored car with a light machine gun coming to repair your optical cables: don’t you think that’s strange?”

“If you have so much time, why don’t you help me come up with a few keywords?” Hao Ren rubbed his fingers. “It’s so much easier to get information from this thing than from the locals.”

The MDT casually said, “Natural, first-generation Evolved, second-generation Evolved, the war, the world’s situation—these should be enough.”

Hao Ren clumsily searched them up using the unfamiliar computer. Now he had all the information he wanted before him.

The global war had been raging on for three generations.

Humans of that world called the planet, Zorm, which meant Earth in the Surface World. However, for differentiation purposes, the transliteration of local language was applied. The last peaceful period of Planet Zorm ended more than 60 years ago.

Some old people used to refer to that period as the Garden Era. It was a peaceful and prosperous world back then and probably the last glimmer of glory in human history. During that era, humankind ushered in an explosive development of science and technology. The emergence of two technologies was seen as a panacea to all problems and hidden dangers on the planet: One was the reliable nanotechnology, which originated from the national consortium in the northern hemisphere. Scientists believed that the newly-emerging Nanomachine Swarm would solve all problems including environmental pollution, human diseases, natural transformation, and even spearhead extra-terrestrial colonization; the other technology was the evolutionary biochemical plug-in, a mechanical device that could completely coexist with biological tissues in the human body. The mechanical device could even grow synchronously with the host’s congenital organs, relying on cell energy for life-long operation.

The original intention of the Nanomachine Swarm development was to solve environmental and medical problems. Scientists had hoped that these cutting-edge robots could be used to decompose pollutants and treat damage in the human body. Biochemical plug-ins were the basis for the forward transformation of human bodies. With the aid of modern medicine, the human race had overcome the natural law of survival of the fittest. Evolution had long been stagnant. Science and technology had progressed tremendously, while the human body seemed primitive. Scientists believed that biochemical plug-ins would bring humanity to the forefront of evolution again. The ultimate form of the plug-in was to become part of the human body to fundamentally change the human form of life.

Undoubtedly, during the last peaceful period of Zorm, the entire world began to immerse itself in euphoria and self-confidence. Although there were cautious conservatives who questioned the new technologies, the cheers of people around the world had quickly overwhelmed the voice of this minority.

As the technology matured, the Evolved officially emerged. They were the new type of humans with various kinds of implanted plug-ins. Devices such as nerve-enhanced strands, auxiliary memory chips, and neuro-computer interface enabled them to acquire capabilities that ordinary humans had never seen before. The new humans were known as the Modified, but due to the biological and evolutionary nature of the plug-ins with the hosts, the first humans who received plug-in transplants described themselves as the Evolved.

Like in many stories, the purebred Naturals and the Evolved were in conflict since the beginning. The Evolved who had an innate advantage occupied the living space of the Naturals. So, the Naturals with their large population and control of social resources put harsh restrictions on the Evolved. However, such conflict was foreseen from the very start. Sociologists and scientists had believed that this was a normal “labor pain of social changes”. Hence, human society carried on living as usual.

It was not until 65 years later that disaster broke out in the northern hemisphere and triggered the war, which raged on until the present. There was no more prosperity on Zorm at that point.

The disaster certainly caught Hao Ren’s interest. But there were many contradictions. War had destroyed the truth of 65 years ago. All parties in the war recorded and publicized their own version of history, which worked to their advantage. In the end, Hao Ren only figured out a few clues: The causes of the war were manifold, and included food pollution, financial crisis, as well as a riot of the Evolved. The fatal, direct cause was the out-of-control accident of the Nanomachine Swarm.

Sixty-five years ago, the largest Nanomachine Swarm command center in the northern hemisphere was attacked. Three giant computers called Masters shut down. The shutdown led directly to the loss of control over the sea of Nanomachine Swarm surrounding the command center. An unknown reason had caused the failure of the safety mechanism in the fleet. The micro robots, which were originally used to decompose inorganic waste and purify water, had flowed to surrounding cities and dissolved the three largest cities in the world at that time—including the capital of a country.

The 65-year war started against this backdrop. It had been very confusing since the beginning.

The investigation results of the incident were sealed in history. But, there were many rumors on the Internet. It was said that there was tangible evidence to prove that the Evolved radicals initiated the attack. They used the special brain chip function of the Evolved to gain direct control of some of the Nanomachine Swarm. The purpose was to release the runaway Nanomachine Swarm to massacre the Naturals. After destroying the Naturals’ demographic and social advantages, they used the Nanomachine Swarm to build a nation of new humans across the ruins. However, the Evolved who started the attack had all died from brain overload in the Masters’ room, because the computing power required to control the fleet was too high. Other rumors spoke of a certain country in the southern hemisphere or an extremist religious group that initiated the attack… In short, there were many kinds of theories but only one conclusion: The loss of control of the Nanomachine Swarm destroyed the balance of powers in the northern hemisphere, resulting in a large number of second-tier countries taking advantage of the situation to exert their influence. As a result, the conflict between the Naturals and the Evolved intensified. With subsequent series of events, the war spread out everywhere in an uncontrollable manner.

No one thought the war would have lasted for 65 years. It almost destroyed the natural order of the planet. A deformed human civilization on its last legs still lived on, but its original form had long been destroyed.

After learning the cause and current situation of the planet, Hao Ren began to delve into details on the Evolved. And he finally figured out what happened to the first and second-generation Evolved.

The difference between the two generations of Evolved was not the literal “generational gap”, but rather in the transformation techniques that they each used. The technological basis of the Evolved was their biochemical plug-ins. Early biochemical plug-ins could only be used on mature individuals. Implantation surgery usually occurred after the age of 14, or even later, at 18 years of age. Therefore, the degree of transformation was limited, usually involving topical limb strengthening, and the obvious surgical marks were visible on the body. The socket on the back of Nolan’s neck was an example. Because this transformation technique was more primitive, people adopting this transformation were called the first-generation Evolved.

There were still new first-generation Evolved today. They were usually mercenaries who had to get enhancements in order to survive on the battlefield or repair fatal disabilities in their bodies.

The second-generation Evolved were humans who used more advanced implantation techniques. They emerged after the outbreak of the war. They were a “high-tech achievement” the extremist Evolved developed after they came into power. Unlike the first generation, these people were transformed when they were still embryos.

Human beings seemingly assumed the role of the Creator. They developed a “mechanical core” with “genetic information” and implanted the bean-sized mechanical cores into human embryos. New-borns were cyborgs. The enhanced strands grown in the core of the mechanical system would grow alongside the human body. The process was so harmonious as if the mechanical system was part of the human body.

These people were the second-generation Evolved.

Hao Ren looked at the blonde girl, lying quietly on the bed. He thought of the cables in her body, which seemed alien but were completely integrated with her flesh and blood.

“You are now a second-generation Evolved.” Hao Ren poked the MDT’s face (tentative version). “Because there are no mechanical plug-ins on me, I look like a purebred Natural to the locals. No wonder they were so surprised to see us together. We are an unlikely couple.”

“Actually, the level of your body enhancement is higher than anyone else here,” the MDT muttered. “Yet, I’m still stuck in a lifeless, tattered shell with a goddamn hole!”

Hao Ren rolled his eyes. “Please respect the deceased and stop complaining. The death of the girl is already tragic enough, and you’re now occupying her body…”

The MDT yelled, “Then should I try it on you?”

Hao Ren was speechless.

Chapter 714: After the Collapse of Civilisation

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

After the collapse of civilisation, humans turned into wild beasts draped in armour and weaponry. The old world order was no more. Humans returned to a dog-eat-dog era under the disguise of modern technology and wisdom. The human civilisation on the planet of Zorm was in constant tribal warfare; tens of thousands of city-states, warlords, independent kingdoms, predatory regiments, and government-in-exiles had torn the world apart. They spent 6,000 years developing from the Bronze Age to the Nano Era, but it took them only 60 years to disintegrate. Human civilisation had no tomorrow.

Hao Ren found that he was now in the northern hemisphere of the planet, one of the major areas where war first broke out. A few hundred kilometres away from there, the Nanomachine Swarm had gone out of control and turned the area into what was known as the Grey River. No one knew exactly how the catastrophe of the Nanomachine Swarm ended. But in this wilderness, the scars left behind by the horrific machines remained. When Hao Ren arrived in the vehicle, he noticed that the wilderness was full of corrosion marks and weird crystal pits.

This was not a wilderness but a melted city.

Several factions of human attacking each other at the beginning of the war. The Evolved had formed a new human legion while the Natural was split into several large countries. As the war raged on, more factions continued to form and regroup. The world order was completely unsustainable. It became a chaotic fight. Now the second-generation Evolved had split into many legions and states. The extremist Naturals could barely hold on their grip in the old country. Sandwiched among them were the more moderate Naturals and the first-generation Evolved minority. Most of these humans were mercenaries and free agents. True civilian organisations had disappeared ten years ago. Today’s civilians were merely ancillary products of the Great Legion. Anyone with a weapon was a soldier.

Hao Ren checked some of the branches of the Natural. He found that these Naturals had further split into subcategories. Because biochemical plugins were so convenient, and the physical weakness of purebred Naturals was too obvious that many Naturals had chosen to implant biochemical plugins in themselves though in a smaller scale. The only difference between them and the Evolved was that they absolutely would not meddle with their brain nerves. This ‘brain purity’ was the only difference between the Naturals and Evolved today. The Naturals had many branches such as the reformist school, pure blood school, fusion school, and neutral school categorised by the degree of their body transformation, but they still belonged to the same camp.

Hao Ren was deemed a purebred natural because there was no biochemical plug-in detected in him.

“It’s a total mess…” Hao Ren shook his head. His head spun reading the information. “The Natural, Evolved, world war, and Nano disasters… more like it was a man-made disaster.”

“But you can’t rule out the ‘Guardians played a hand here,” the MDT said in his mind. “There is no record of subterranean tentacles, so the involvement of the First Born is small. Considering that most of the incidents were the chain reaction of the problems within human society, I tend to think that some brain monster was lurking on the planet.”

Hao Ren pinched his chin and fell into deep thought. “Was it a moderate like the giant… or a completely mutated lunatic?”

“Either way is possible. A sane giant could also attack the mortal races. After all, the pain of losing their mother would cause them losing their rational mind,” the MDT cautioned, “because we don’t know the state of mind of the guardian. I suggest keeping it low profile for the time being. We must determine the planet’s coordinates and set up a defensive position in the orbit, and then we draw out the enemies and take them out. What do you think?”

The MDT made the recommendations based on experience in Holletta. It was a normal countermeasure. Somehow, Hao Ren felt that there was something more than meets the eye. It was not that he had any evidence but his mere gut feeling.

He thought for a moment. He then typing a new set of keywords in the search bar: God of Creation, Goddess, Origin of Life, and Religious Legends.

The information that the keywords brought up all pointed to the pre-war era. No one cared about the ancient religious system after the war. The newly emerging religions were all extremist organisations full of whimsy. Humans on this planet no longer had time for things like ‘origin of life.’

“… About the religious stories of the origin of life; many terms that are consistent with the goddess and the seeding of life theory,” Hao Ren frowned. “I’m almost certain that the Goddess created the ecosystem! Religions still existed until the war broke out!”

“Until the war broke out? Sixty-five years ago?” the MDT was surprised. “The planet escaped the ecological extinction ten thousand years ago?”

The religious stories resembling the Goddess of Creation meant that the planet’s ecosystem had the bloodline of the Goddess. The existence of the Goddess’ bloodline meant that after the deicide, the mad guardians would unleash their wrath on this planet. Yet, the planet was still developing prosperously until sixty-five years ago… Could have the guardians missed this place?

“It’s also possible that it survived the first wave of attacks just like Holletta,” Hao Ren shook his head. Finding no further worthwhile information, he switched off the computer. “But anyway, since this the Goddess had sown on this planet… the First Born must be hiding underground.”

The MDT said, its voice a pitch higher, “Next we got to find the tentacle monster!”

“You sound very excited.”

“I’m bored to death in this body, desperately needing some action and explosions, the MDT groaned.

“Still not getting used to it?” Hao Ren turned to the bed. He bent over to check the body of the MDT, but the latter still looked like a corpse of a girl. “Is it so difficult to change your sensory mode? Can’t you adapt to the senses of humankind?”

“You make it sounds like very easy,” the MDT was still bitchy, a stark contrast to the pitiable body. “Put your brain into the stomach of a slime. Try to adapt and see what happen?”

Hao Ren thought for a moment. He could not do that but he knew someone had done that before. Nangong Wuyue and Ayesha had once turned into a slime trampoline to let Y’lisabet play with it.

He shook the funny picture off his mind. Swiping the blonde hair away from the dead girl’s forehead, he said, “Oh, you look so much better in this body. She’s pretty…”

The MDT warned, “What you want to do? I warn you, respect the deceased! The body’s soul is essentially a PDA now. If you want to do that, at least let me get out first…”

Hao Ren felt like wanting to give the MDT a slap. “Are you freaking out of your mind? I just want to clean up your face!”

The MDT shut up. Hao Ren reached into the dimensional pocket for a paper towel. He then carefully cleaned the blond girl’s face that was stained with dirt and bloody hair. He did not know how the girl died, nor he know how to make sense of this strange situation. But he believed that thing happened for a reason. At least the MDT was stuck in it, he had to take care of the body.

“But there is a problem; the body will rot,” the MDT sensed what was in Hao Ren’s mind. “When nature takes its place, you will find yourself getting an extreme ‘taste’ in the next few days. People will think you are a perverted necrophile instead of a pathetic necrophile earlier. You will eventually evolve into a pure pervert…”

Hao Ren did not want to argue about that. “Didn’t Nolan say she will send a ‘doctor’? I guess she is sending an embalmer. Think about it: You’re in the body, not me. Who would more likely get an extreme taste for the next couple of days?”

“So what? I’m just a PDA. I don’t think the same way as you do.”

Hao Ren: “…”

In any case, this was definitely the single oddest situation since he took up the job.

Chapter 715: “Doctor”

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

The mad, wretched man—that was what Nolan’s men began to call the stranger, who was holding on to a woman’s body. Although Hao Ren had only been there for less than two hours, he was already famous in the base. He had no idea who made the story up, and which big mouth spread it out, but he managed to attract stares for all the wrong reasons.

However, Hao Ren did not have time for this. He was busy studying the MDT-possessed body. This is not what your dirty mind is thinking of course. He wanted to know how this second-generation of the Evolved ended up becoming the carrier for the MDT. The Plane of Dreams was a real world; everything that happened in there had to follow the laws of nature. Since the MDT’s awareness could leech off the corpse, the corpse and the MDT’s consciousness had to have some kind of compatibility.

Finding out this compatibility would probably allow the MDT to restore its sensory ability.

Hao Ren cautiously took the cloth that he used as bandage off the blonde. The fatal through-and through wound on the abdomen was still gross. The blood had dried up, the silver and white, half-fresh half-machine cables that grew with the body was clear visible. Hao Ren had tried not to look at other part of the body. Anyway, considering the scary wound, he did not have much appetite for other thing.

The MDT still had not recovered its sensory ability, but it had an audio-visual sharing with Hao Ren. It was now seeing through Hao Ren’s eyes its current appearance. Even a machine that had a problematic worldview found the experience novel and interesting.

“I guess the chip in the second generation Evolved’s brain works with her artificial nerves,” Hao Ren put on his glove and carefully examined the broken tubes. “The operating mode of these parts should be closer to the machine. Your consciousness may survive in them.”

“I think you are a pervert,” the MDT scolded Hao Ren for his eyes were darting across the girl’s body. “You’re essentially molesting her; sadomasochistic… your hand is in my stomach!”

“If you’re helping, just shut up,” Hao Ren muttered. But in the eyes of the others, he seemed to be talking to himself. “Look at these tubes. They really grow with the body—the ultimate form of mechanical devices, as if they are biological…”

The MDT began to make frivolous comments. “Do you think my titties are too small? Hey, the nipples are black, aren’t they? I don’t like black. Is there any chance to help change them to blue ones?”

“Get the hell out of here! Who is the pervert here?” How Hao Ren wished he could whack the freaking PDA. “And they’re not your titties!”

“For now, they are! And you dare to say that you didn’t see it? Stop denying. We’re sharing the same pair of eyes. I even know how fast you blink.”

“I can’t believe that I have such a PDA…” Hao Ren said haplessly. “I have just reconnected a few broken lines. Do you feel anything?”

“I feel nothing. I don’t know how human feels. I think I need to remind you; this body is already dead. Can’t you see that there is not a single electrical signal in the cables? The biological and mechanical parts of this body have ceased to function. Connecting the dead cables together would make no difference.”

Hao Ren sighed. “I know that in theory a dead body wouldn’t carry soul. But let’s call a spade a spade; aren’t you in her body right now? And the undead like zombie moves? This shows that dead body can also move.”

“The undead has its own special energy circulation. Their blood vessels no longer pulsate, but they have other circulation and metabolism, such as magical powers or alchemical drugs. So, in a broad sense, the undead’s body is still ‘alive’,” the MDT sounded serious this time. “But the physical condition of the body in front of you is different. She is completely dead. She has stopped working. At least I can see through your eyes. There is no activity in the body…”

“Right, I just tested the signals on these lines. They are broken. I really can’t explain where you are living in her now.” Hao Ren sighed and got to his feet. “So let’s go back to the starting point and scan again. This time I’ll check the brain, maybe there is a chip that is using the remaining cellular energy to keep it working but just off-line—”

But before Hao Ren finished his sentence, someone knocked on the door. He looked up and saw a dark-skinned, middle-aged woman was standing outside, staring in.

“The door is not closed,” the middle-aged woman said.

Hao Ren quickly took his hand out of the MDT’s stomach (which sounds strange) and suddenly realised that he had been talking to the MDT for a while, not only in his mind but also out of his mouth. He rubbed his hands and said, “You hear everything?”

“Just the last few sentences,” the middle-aged woman said. She reached into her pocket, took out a cheap ciggy, put it into her mouth, lit up and took a few shots. “But I’m not interested in what you said. I’m a doctor. Nolan asked me to handle a … to see your girlfriend.”

Hao Ren scratched his head. “I’m not crazy. I just talked to it a little.”

The MDT did not seem to shut up yet. “Do you think chatting with a dead body is not mad?”

“Shut up,” Hao Ren shouted in his mind.

The middle-aged woman looked at him with a strange sympathy. She had already heard about this man from Nolan, just as other mercenaries who had made up a perception of him—she thought that Hao Ren was just a poor guy who did not want to accept the tragic death of his spouse and thus became crazy. She did not say much but picked up a small black box next to her feet and walked into the room. “Do you mind if I interrupt your solitude for a moment? I need to give your girlfriend a jab.”

Hao Ren said with a hapless face. “Just do whatever you like but please don’t say she’s my girlfriend, could you?”

The ‘doctor’ had nothing in common with what Hao Ren had imagined in his mind. She did not wear a white coat, nor did she bring any medical apparatus. She even had cigarettes in her mouth. She was wearing the same grey and black combat suit as the other mercenaries. She had a stone face that looked like she had gone through a lot of hardship. She looked like a through-and through soldier except that she did not carry any weapon. No one would have a second thought she was as good as other soldiers if she took up a gun. Hao Ren watched as the woman removed a silvery, pistol-like vacuum syringe from her black suitcase. He asked, “Does doctors here all dress up like this?”

“You doubt my qualifications?” The woman took out a metal tube from the small compartment in the box and stuffed it into the vacuum syringe. “Well, I admit that I don’t have a practicing license. After all, the last professional licensing agency in the world was closed more than 20 years ago. But I have handled more than hundreds of wounded people, which is more important than having a licence.”

As she spoke, she pressed the vacuum syringe against the neck of the MDT and injected something into the body. Hao Ren looked on. He did not know why she gave a corpse an injection. He even suspected that the ‘doctor’ that Nolan sent was playing along with his ‘schizophrenia’. “What did you give her?”

“Nanomachine Swarm,” the ‘doctor’ said. “The simplest model. They will guarantee that the body will not rot within a month, but will exhaust their energy after a month… Oops! Nolan told not to mention ‘rot’ in front of you…”

Hao Ren twisted his mouth and said, “It’s fine… But then, isn’t Nanomachine Swarm a very dangerous thing?”

He remembered the information he had previously seen on the Internet. But at that time, he did not have time to read about the fate of nanotechnology after the accident. He thought that the technology had been sealed.

“In the eyes of ultra-conservative Naturals, probably all thing high-tech deserve to die, right?” The doctor shot Hao Ren a glance. “But without Nanomachine Swarm, 99% of people in the world will die of hunger and suffocation. Do you think there are still lands that can grow vegetation? Where do you think the oxygen you breathe comes from? You should be grateful to the Nanomachine Swarm, at least they feed humans.”

Chapter 716: Medical Technology

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

The uncontrollable rampage of the Nanomachine Swarm was one of the triggers that led to the collapse of the planet’s civilisation. The Nanomachine Swarm was indeed a taboo technology,but nothing stayed unchanged in this world. Something that triggered war in the past had become the last lifeline humans could depend in the present. Global war had destroyed the original production system and pushed the planet’s ecology to the verge of extinction, and as more and more people became involved in the war, the original agricultural as well as industrial models could no longer support humankind’s survival needs. Hence, they restarted the Nanomachine Swarm. They made a series of better-than-nothing security improvements and made the Nanomachine Swarm the cornerstone of human survival. The Nanomachine Swarm provided food, air as well as medicine, and it was the basis of industrialisation. Ninety percent of human beings in this world depended on the Nanomachine Swarm for survival.

Scientists who once invented the Nanomachine Swarm finally achieved their long-cherished wish: the fleet reshaped the entire society, took on all the work from the environment to the industry, and became the planet’s new lifeline—but only after the collapse of civilisation.

“You don’t need any clever technologies to be a doctor in this place,” the middle-aged woman said, looking through a small window on the syringe to check if the Nanomachine Swarm was working. “We only need to know how to use syringe and perform amputation. If these two measures don’t work, then the only choice would be to resign to fate. But I’m guessing that the city that you were living in was better? I’ve heard that the ultra-conservative Naturals occupy the last few natural environment in the world. Does your food came from the ground?”

Hao Ren did not want to answer her question directly. “I have left the place. I don’t feel like talking about things over there.”

“I don’t know when you’ll start regretting your decision,” the ‘doctor’ shook her head and put away her tools. “Maybe you have never regretted. Oh yeah, would you like a shot? Free of charge. It’s not that I can meet people like you every day in this era.”

Hao Ren was stunned. “A shot? I’m not injured…”

“Tranquiliser,” the ‘doctor’ pointed to her own head. “You may need it.”

Hao Ren forced a smile. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m not mad… really.”

The ‘doctor’ shook her head, threw the cigarette butt on the ground, and stamped it off with her foot. Before leaving, he bent over and casually examined the girl’s wound. But quickly she was wide-eyed. “Did someone give her Nano-fleet injection a few hours ago?”

Hao Ren had no clue what why she said so. “What happened?”

“The wound has no signs of decomposing,” the ‘doctor’ said, pointing at the wound on the girl’s abdomen. “Didn’t you see? The Nano-fleet I just injected can only maintain her current physical condition. But judging from the condition of the wound, the tissues have stopped deteriorating a few hours ago.”

Hao Ren did not understand what she meant. But he quickly came to his senses and asked, “You mean her body has never decomposed?”

“Something’s not right… it’s like time has stood still,” the ‘doctor’ did not address Hao Ren’s question. She bent down again and carefully examined the condition of flesh around the wound. “Looks like it’s done even better than the best Nanomachine Swarm could do. Where did you give her the injection and why did you not say it before?”

Hao Ren had never known the girl’s body never deteriorated, but if he so said he would draw suspicion to himself. So he tried to sway the conversation. “Would they be a problem since you gave her another jab just now?”

The ‘doctor’ shook her head. “The medical Nanomachine Swarm would intelligently adjust to the condition. There’s no danger of conflict or poisoning. Just that it wasted one precious dose. It’s an anti-… it’s rarely used.”

Hao Ren did not seem to understand what she said. But he thanked the ‘doctor’ anyway. The ‘doctor’ waved her hand listlessly. “I’m just doing my job. Oh yeah, by the way, I leave you some bandage, you can wrap her wound up yourself—it’s not appropriate to expose her wound like that. I need to go back and sleep now.”

She threw a pack of soft tool kit to Hao Ren, and was all yawning as she left, without a hint of professionalism of a medical practitioner. After the doctor left, the MDT spoke again. “It feels creepy…what has she done to the body?”

Hao Ren looked at the girl in bed sideways. “Didn’t you just say that you don’t think like us do and don’t care about this body? Now what? Scared?”

Hao Ren opened the tool kit given by the ‘doctor’. Inside the package were thick, transparent films like that of a food wrap instead of the kind of bandage he had imagined. He glanced at the MDT, thinking that it was not appropriate to leave the wound just like that. But he was at a loss. “How am I supposed to use this ‘film’?”

The MDT said, “Maybe you can try to apply it on my stomach like a duct tape…”

“What if it doesn’t stick?”

“Just add some glue.”

Hao Ren was now doubtless that the MDT truly thought differently from human beings.

Fortunately, the film was simpler to use than he had expected. After studying the instruction on the packaging, Hao Ren treated the wound, and then peeled off the protective layer of the film and directly applied it on the wound in MDT’s belly. A moment later, the transparent layer wriggled and blended in with the skin as if it was a part of the skin in just a few seconds. The wound healed perfectly.

Those not in the know would not know that inside the abdomen was still a mess.

“If used on a living person, this thing would make use of cellular energy to metabolise itself and slowly guide the normal skin cells to replace the artificial colloids in the epidermis. It will completely turn into normal skin within two days. But if it were used in corpses, it was only an aesthetic procedure,” Hao Ren patted the belly of the MDT. “Good stuff for treating external injury. It’s a pity that it was born out of the war.”

“Get you hand off me, pervert! Dress me up, you necrophilia! It would be sexual assault if you do that after the wound heals…”

“My foot!”

“You’d better think what to do next,” the MDT wisely steered away from the conversation before Hao Ren lost control of himself. “We can’t stay in this world forever. Don’t forget that we come here through the dream. You’re almost time to wake up—Lily is expecting you for dinner.”

Hao Ren did not forget that he entered the Plane of Dreams through his dream, not the hibernation pod. He had limited time. He turned and looked around the small room, thinking that it would raise suspicion if he and the MDT were to get out from this dimension just like that. Scratching his jaw in thought, he then said, “We should try our best to maintain our presence before the mercenaries, but at the same time, we need to find reasonable excuses to leave the base. I don’t know if we can come and go freely here. But in theory, these organised mercenaries should be more cautious. If we come in and out of the base too frequently, they would treat us as spies.”

“It’s not ‘us’, it’s you,” the MDT said, sounding indifferently as if it did not concern it at all. “I’m just a corpse. Isn’t Ulyanov next door? You can go over, say hello, and then make up some excuses, such telling him that it’s the time of the month again, you need to get out for a stroll. Then you disappear for the whole day…”

Hao Ren felt like whacking the MDT. But facing with a girl—and a dead one, he could only groan inwardly and walk toward the door. “Wait here. I have job to do.”

Ulyanov’s room was just next door.

The whole barracks were assembled using grey boxes on alloy frame with internal partitions dividing the grey box into two rows of room with corridor in the middle. It looked clean and tidy for mercenary standard. The door of Ulyanov’s room door had a UFO graffiti that looked like a child’s work on it. It was hard to miss.

Hao Ren knocked on the door a couple of time. It was only after a while that a coarse and low voice replied, “Come in. The door is not locked.”

Hao Ren pushed the door open and went in. “Ulyanov, let me ask you something… holy shit!”

Ulyanov looked up. “My face looks scary, isn’t it?”