MASG chapter 141

 

“Xia Yu! Xia Yu! I’m here!”

Mi Dou stumbles in and almost faints from fright the moment he enters the room. This was the most shocking day of his life—sneaking into Yukun City, entering this building, Mo An waking Xia Yu in five minutes, cutting off the main power, and then the electronic corruption zone appearing immediately afterward. He staggered to the A-zone operating room and saw blood everywhere as soon as he came in.

The medical surgery pod was like a blood-filled ship!

He had just been in the cultivation room, which no one else could enter. Now, Xia Yu was inside the pod, and no one else could enter. They couldn’t enter the pod, and there were several layers of glass between them. Mi Dou felt like a cruel, cold-blooded surgeon, witnessing Xia Yu being cut open, yet powerless to help.

“Xia Yu, how are you? Xia Yu! Xia Yu! Hang in there!” Mi Dou pounded hard on the glass. “Ling Shi! Ling Shi, can you hear me?”

The bracelet was inside the surgery pod, and Mi Dou wasn’t sure if it could hear him. Even if Ling Shi could hear him, its voice might not be able to transmit out—the bracelet’s sound was far too faint.

Then, the screen of the bracelet, which was soaking in a pool of blood, flickered and lit up, sending out uplifting news.

Ling Shi and Jingwei could hear him! Mi Dou examined Xia Yu’s body through the glass, thinking of countermeasures. “Xia Yu may have already passed out. He can endure the pain of the surgery, but he might not be able to endure the blood loss. Ling Shi, adjust the angle of the surgery pod so that his head and feet are raised up. This will let more blood flow to his core organs. As long as his spine and core organs can self-heal, he can regenerate blood!”

Ling Shi adjusted the pod’s angle according to the instructions. The semi-liquid carrier beneath Xia Yu formed a hollow shape. Blood from his head and feet began flowing back. Xia Yu squinted, feeling piercing sensations in his side.

Through the semi-transparent, blood-stained glass, he looked at his companion. Mi Dou was shouting wildly, his voice broken and intermittent. Xia Yu guessed that the piercing sensation must be Ling Shi controlling the machine to inject him with all kinds of hormones—and the one doing the remote “voice control” must be Doudou.

After they were separated at sea, Doudou had really grown up… Xia Yu’s whole body was cold, but his heart felt warm. He couldn’t tell if the warmth was from his body’s self-healing or something else.

“Ling Shi, take Yehuai away.” After finally gathering enough strength, Xia Yu gave the order.

With all his vital organs exposed, he didn’t dare breathe deeply. His lung lobes expanded and contracted right before his eyes, providing him with enough oxygen. The mechanical arm had already taken away that disgusting-looking insect, removing it from the surgery pod.

It was only then that Mi Dou noticed an insect on the other side of the glass wall.

It was Yehuai! A thought flashed through his mind. It had to be this one. They had followed Yehuai’s adult form, pupa, and larva all the way here and found the eggs. Nuwa had placed the eggs inside Xia Yu’s body, and they had already hatched. A synthetic human body nurturing another species—no matter how many experiments Mi Dou had conducted, he could never have imagined such contempt for life.

The larva was not at all obedient. It struggled with all its might, trying to escape the metal restraints. The metal claws tightened repeatedly, giving it no chance.

Xia Yu pressed one hand against the glass, remembering the terrifying experience of being torn apart when he was a child. Everything he had experienced shaped who he was now. He had the ability to heal himself again—no one could kill him.

In the corridor not far away, another jellyfish-type synthetic human in a sleep pod began to glow, emitting a blue light similar to Xia Yu’s.

“She’s awake!” Lao Gui immediately knocked on the pod lid.

The opaque lid had turned fully transparent a few minutes earlier. Xia Xiaoxiao lay in the middle of the liquid. She floated, her skin deathly pale—one might say she looked like someone who had been soaking in medicine for years. As the pod moved, more and more bubbles gathered around her mouth and nose.

Her eyes, so similar to Xia Yu’s, slowly opened.

The trembling of her eyelids shattered the bubbles. She took a deep breath of the liquid and followed the same steps as Xia Yu after waking up: choking and coughing.

Silver Fang only began to dismantle the lid violently after Xia Xiaoxiao opened her eyes. Under the crushing force of the mechanical arm, the lid stood no chance and was torn off by nearly half.

“Ah…” Xia Xiaoxiao gasped in terror.

Silver Fang froze. Wasn’t she Xia Yu’s twin sister? Why did she look so young?

Xia Yu was in her twenties, so she should be too. Yet, in terms of her height, build, and facial development, she didn’t look like an adult woman at all. Instead, she looked like a young girl going through puberty. With no time to think further, Silver Fang put down the gun, and the mechanical arm went into the liquid to pull out the needles, freeing Xia Xiaoxiao.

“Ah…” Xia Xiaoxiao’s face finally surfaced completely, and her whole body trembled. She had just woken up, and her consciousness seemed to be half dreaming and half awake.

Silver Fang “salvaged” her from the damaged pod and found that she was as thin as Xia Yu had been as a child.

But they looked very similar—really similar. Only after they grew up could one tell the difference between the male and female. During early childhood, when gender features are ambiguous, no one would be able to tell who was who, let alone whether they were a boy or a girl. Silver Fang pulled the needles out of her legs and feet. Then, following Talos’s orders, she clumsily tried to remove the needle from Xia Xiaoxiao’s temple.

At that exact moment, Xia Xiaoxiao opened her eyes fully. Her eyes were like a pool of seawater in the eye sockets, only darker than Xia Yu’s.

Silver Fang froze again. She was too thin.

Bang!

An explosion went off in the corridor. The vibration and noise hit at the same time, frightening Mi Dou in the medical room. He was shaken so badly that he could barely stand, maintaining his balance only by holding onto the glass wall. That sound… it came from the research lab! Could the electronic corruption have erupted? Damn it! Mo An! Mi Dou rushed into the corridor to look, and this single glance almost made him faint on the spot.

Where was the corridor outside?
Outside, it had completely collapsed!

Half of the building was blown away, collapsing at an unstoppable speed. Solid concrete walls turned to powder, and straight steel frameworks twisted into bent yarn as if a tornado had swept through, cleanly chopping off that side. Without a moment to spare, Mi Dou ran to the shattered edge and yelled, “Silver Fang! Lao Gui! Mo An! Talos!”

“We’re here!” Talos and Lao Gui were hanging against the wall, with Mo An as well, all of them tightly gripping Talos’s fixed ropes.

“Where’s Silver Fang? Where’s Silver Fang?” Mi Dou shouted.

“Silver Fang, he…” Mo An pointed toward the dust layer behind them. “He was dragged down by the sleep pod! I’ll go look!”

“Don’t move! None of you move!” Mi Dou waved his arms frantically. “The structure is unstable. Don’t move for now! Nobody move!”

Half of the building remained standing, while the other half swayed as if in the wind. It had been crushed by a giant hand and thrown into the air. Silver Fang rolled down like a boulder from a mountaintop, with his metal edges colliding and grinding violently against external objects.

Luckily, Xia Xiaoxiao had already been pulled away from the sleep pod by Silver Fang at the final critical moment.

Silver Fang wasn’t too uncomfortable with the feeling of weightlessness. Ever since he began body modifications, his human senses had been leaving him one by one. Surrounded by dust and metal fragments, he felt as if they were snowflakes—snowflakes that never melted all year round.

The snowflakes from that year still hadn’t let him go.

Taking a deep breath, Silver Fang adjusted his limbs mid-fall, maximizing agility and control. While humans couldn’t control their bodies in free fall, his metal frame curled tightly, holding Xia Xiaoxiao close.

The explosion roared on like endless gunfire. Metal and steel rained down, striking his body, leaving dents but unable to pierce his flesh. They plunged straight from the top floor into the depths, swallowed by dust.

He couldn’t tell how many seconds had passed. Silver Fang felt that it had been very short.

When they finally fell into the water, the timing function in Silver Fang’s body seemed to be reborn and started working again. The passage of time suddenly became concrete. Although they had only been in the water for three seconds, Silver Fang was too heavy and had already sunk five or six meters down.

This time, Silver Fang did not hesitate.

He straightened his legs and activated the underwater propulsion program.

Ever since he fell into the sea last time, Yan Xia had been thinking of ways to help him modify tools and parts. This time, nothing would block his way—he would definitely succeed.

Definitely, definitely save her.

His body began to accelerate, charging toward the surface at an inhuman speed. Rubble kept falling into the water, smashing down like breaking ice and trying to send them to their doom. Silver Fang swam upward against the falling debris, sometimes taking hits head-on before rerouting and continuing in the same direction.

This time, he would definitely save her!

The instant he broke through the surface of the water, he lifted Xia Xiaoxiao into his arms. Xia Xiaoxiao, who had just awakened, fell unconscious once more. Her physical strength was already poor. How could she withstand the fall and then the plunge into the water? Silver Fang held her without any sense of weight. He found a stable wall amid the ruins and set her down.

“Live! You have to live!”

He pressed firmly on Xia Xiaoxiao’s chest, forcing out the water she had inhaled in the sleep pod and the water she had choked on. She was like a piece of paper—he was afraid of crushing her, yet he had to use all his strength.

Once, twice, three times… Silver Fang no longer knew whom he was saving. He only knew that he was racing against death.

“Puh…” Finally, Xia Xiaoxiao coughed up a mouthful of water, followed by another. Silver Fang immediately stopped pressing down on her, adjusted her head position, and waited until her breathing stabilized and she could open her eyes again.

Silver Fang had never been very expressive. The half of his face that remained didn’t allow for many either, but now he showed a clear smile.

“Haha…” Silver Fang’s shoulders trembled uncontrollably—it was impossible to tell whether he was laughing or crying. He had finally won once. All these years of modifications had not been in vain. How could he not win? For the past thirty years, Silver Fang had constantly replayed and recalled that day in his dreams. He wondered whether he could have saved his younger sister if he had done things differently.

He had rehearsed a rescue countless times in his mind, and this time he succeeded. During these precise and orderly rescue operations, Nuwa ultimately faltered. Its replay speed was countless times faster than that of humans, but it didn’t understand that humans would replay something for a lifetime because of “regret.”

A tear flowed from Silver Fang’s one remaining eye. This year’s heavy snow would finally let him go.

Xia Yu felt his self-healing process. He reached toward his ribs—the bones had grown back, but were still cartilage. He listened to Mi Dou shout outside and watched a group of little white cats run around. His last clear memory was being carried out of the surgery pod by Mo An.

Before losing consciousness, Xia Yu pointed at the insect. Then, his head tilted, and he lost all awareness.

The flesh mass clinging to Mi Dou lunged toward Xia Yu. It used its developed mycelia to support Xia Yu’s organs and diaphragm, becoming a substitute for his skin.

At that moment, a large ship was sailing rapidly across the calm sea, bound for Yukun City.

“Did they really go?” Xi Ban asked uneasily. “Why do I feel so unsettled?”

“I’m not very calm either, so we need to hurry and pick them up,” said Meng Qingqing. After finally finding Xi Ban, only 107 remained to be found.