Chapter 298: Infected [Part 2]
In short, the place he caught the virus was the only place where the virus substance could be found in its isolated state. The virus substance was incredibly unstable in this state, so it quickly fused with another substance in the vicinity to become the so-called “first variant virus”. After that, it would continuously stabilize itself by evolving into a “middle variant virus” and finally a “high variant virus”. Relatively speaking, a “high variant virus” was very stable compared to its initial forms, but that wasn’t necessarily the end point of its evolution, however. They wouldn’t stop evolving until they reached a final state that was compatible with the host’s cells, or until their host was dead.
There were too many types of high variant viruses to classify, so any virus that evolved past the middle point and became relatively stable was called a high variant virus.
“What are you going to do now?” Wheeze asked in a miserable while digging the earth restlessly. “I told you to stay away, but you just had to do something, you stubborn mule! Now you’re infected with the virus! Your body may be different from an ordinary person’s, but you’re not superhuman, you know. Do you fancy yourself a robot or something…”
Wheeze hadn’t stopped complaining since the revelation, and Cillin wisely chose not to respond to them. He simply watched the data on his screen in silence.
A while later, Cillin rose to his feet and started walking towards the dead robot.
“What are you doing?! Stop! Are you trying to kill yourself!” Throwing all caution to the wind, Wheeze swelled in size, bared its fangs and stood in Cillin’s path.
Cillin let out a sigh and petted Wheeze on the head. “I’m going in to see if I can find the cause and a solution to all this. Don’t you understand? I’m dead for sure if I go back the way I am now.”
Wheeze’s giant ears flicked once in hesitation. “Are you telling the truth?”
“Of course I’m telling the truth! I don’t want to die like this either.”
“Then I’m coming with you!” Wheeze said while shrinking back to its usual size. Minimizing its body helped reduce the amount of surface area that was exposed to the virus. It wasn’t much, but every little bit helps.
And so Cillin and Wheeze approached the area where the robot shut down together. Now that they knew what was going on, Wheeze applied a microscopic lens to its vision and showed it to Cillin in real time. The closer they got to that area, the more isolated virus substances they found. At this point, Cillin had no doubt that this was the origin of the Zebra Virus of this area.
They walked past the robot and continued towards the origin of the virus. The scanner he was using had already turned into a useless block of metal, further reinforcing the fact that this foreign substance seemed capable of affecting both organisms and machines. It was the definition of a supervirus.
Wheeze was crouching on top of Cillin’s shoulders. The closer they got to the origin, the harder it became for Wheeze to move even after it had assumed an organic form. It had no choice but to rely on Cillin to move around.
In fact, Cillin himself wasn’t completely immune to the halting effects of the virus. Technically, he was a half-biological, half-machine lifeform since the biochips had fused with his DNA. While he was doing better than Wheeze, what was fifty meters of travel distance felt like a fifty-kilometer obstacle course to him.
Cillin found a well-hidden basement when they arrived at their destination. Considering that this was a secluded area and a red zone, it was unsurprising that this basement was undiscovered until now. The entrance was just wide enough to fit a single person, and after sliding down into the pitch black basement Cillin put on a pair of night vision goggles.
The reason he wasn’t using a light was because he didn’t want to accidentally trigger a trap or something. Special forces were often sent to unique and dangerous locations to carry out missions, so they were taught to watch out for substances that dissolved in light. There were certain harmless substances that could turn deadly if exposed to light.
Cillin hadn’t learned this from the military, of course. He was already a proficient creator and user of such traps during his Shadow Hunter days. He was still wearing his protective suit, but it was just safer to use night vision goggles in case he needed to watch out for harmful gases or other unforeseen circumstances.
Thanks to Wheeze’s filtered vision, he could see that the virus substances in this basement were a lot denser than the ones outside. It was very possible that this was the ground zero of the Zebra Virus.
So far, it looked like the Zebra Virus might be a man-made product. If that was true, then the creator deserved to be called a genius, a genius at the level of the mad scientist who injected Cillin with the biochips, Horay Hanson.
The lab was devoid of life and untouched until Cillin’s entrance. Most of the equipment he saw were either outdated or low tech compared to the ones he saw at the RAS.
Cillin discovered the master of the lab not long after he explored the lab. It looked like the dead man had died for a very, very long time, but his body was almost untouched by rot. This was the case for any person who died after they were infected by the Zebra Virus.
The man looked like a cadaver with zebra lines on it, and Cillin guessed that he was the very first victim to be infected by the Zebra Virus and be killed by it.
The underground lab was pretty small. Cillin made a round around the lab very quickly, but didn’t find any signs of the Zebra Virus being manufactured whatsoever.
Some of the critical machines in the lab were destroyed by their owner, but it was only a loss of functionality, not data. If he wanted to, he could read some of the data from the machines.
Wheeze was unwell right now, so he couldn’t rely on it to perform as it used to. He pulled out a cylindrical instrument about the length of a finger from his pocket and waved it across the damaged machines, extracting all the data they possessed. Unfortunately, the instrument also died the second he was done extracting the data. The virus substance’s influence was so huge that it was impossible to read the information he just extracted unless he left this place.
“Are you done?” Wheeze was feeling incredibly unwell.
“I’m done. Let’s head up and see what kind of info these machines contain.” Cillin consoled Wheeze while petting its slanted ears.
There was one last place he needed to check before they leave though. It was the place where the virus substances were leaking from.
The dead owner was leaning against a lab table and holding a bat. This was the weapon the owner used to destroy his own instruments, or at least he tried to. The wreckage had happened after the owner was infected by the virus, so he couldn’t quite muster the strength to destroy the machines. Otherwise, Cillin was sure that it would’ve taken a lot more effort and time to fully restore the data.
It looked like the dead man was staring at a particular spot on the wall just before he died. After walking to the wall, tapping around for a bit and confirming that there was a hidden compartment, he slipped a blade in between the cracks and forced it open. Then, his vision turned black, and he collapsed on the floor.
“Cillin? Cillin?! What’s wrong?!” Wheeze tried to wake Cillin with its paws. It took him a long while before he finally recovered some strength. His vision had turned completely black just now, and for a moment he wasn’t able to see anything even through his night vision goggles.
Recovered, Cillin looked into the compartment he forced open and found a broken flash. As for what used to be inside the flask…
Cillin rubbed his head. He was feeling very, very unwell right now.
“Did it enter your body?” Wheeze asked with a trembling voice.
Cillin nodded. “I think so.”
Wheeze felt like crying after hearing that.
Cillin was staggering by the time he got out of the basement. It was as if all knowledge of balance had left his body all of a sudden. His cerebellum was rebelling against his thoughts, and his cerebrum was starting to display traitorous tendencies as well. Things didn’t look good, to put it mildly.
Wheeze jumped off Cillin’s shoulder after they got out of the underground lab. Maybe it was because the thing inside the flask had entered Cillin’s body, but the pressure it was feeling wasn’t nearly as oppressive as it was before.
Wheeze changed into its cyborg form, put Cillin on its back and ran all the way back to the spaceplane. It didn’t bother to go through the sterilization room or required processes since Cillin was already infected with the Zebra Virus.
Cillin injected himself with a couple medicine after returning to the spaceplane. Then, he sat in his chair and said nothing at all.
“Don’t fall asleep, Cillin! You won’t wake up once you fall asleep!” Wheeze said while walking around his chair.
“Where did you hear that from?”
“Everyone was saying that!”
“I got it. Just give me some quiet and let me rest for a while, okay?”
“You’ll wake up, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Liars will turn into feces.”
“Yep. Liars will turn into feces.”
“...” Wheeze jumped up a table and watched Cillin for a moment. Then, it ran to the spaceplane’s communicator and contacted Guan Feng.
Guan Feng was currently in yet another meeting due to an emergency report that sent waves of panic coursing throughout the RAS. Apparently, the queen of the Blazing Eagle Vogel Family, had been confirmed to have caught the Zebra Virus just three hours ago.
The RAS could delay things and shift the responsibility to someone else when the virus was just affecting the goddam eleventh star region, but that was clearly no longer the case.
The dean of the RAS sent a summon to all high level personnel in the RAS. It didn’t matter who they were, where they were or what they were doing. Everyone was to set down their responsibilities temporarily and attend this meeting, or else.
And this was why Guan Feng was attending a meeting he wanted no part of, again. Why was he even in this meeting when he knew nothing about viruses at all? And what was the point of listening to these idiots shifting the blame left and right when he could be doing something else that was actually productive? During peacetime, these scholars acted like a dip of prestige or reputation would kill them, but now when they were truly needed they were incapable of coming up with any effective solution even though a long time had passed. Professionals? More like asses.
To say that his presence here was purely cosmetic would be an understatement, and he was so tired he didn’t even bother with his usual mask of patience and geniality. He sat lazily in his chair listening to the bullshit of these so-called “professionals” and wondered what the hell was keeping his stubborn student from contacting him.
Guan Feng’s communicator suddenly let out a beep. It wasn’t a video call or a voice call. There was only one line of text running across the screen. “Mentor Guan Feng, Wheeze here. Cillin caught the Zebra Virus and fell asleep just now. He told me not to disturb him in the meantime.”
Guan Feng felt as if an explosion had taken place inside his brain. He instinctively clenched his fist and hit the table, hard.
THUMP!
The loud noise cut off the dean’s “righteous” speech like a bomb.