Hunter of Mysterious Creature-Chapter 499 - 96: Infiltrator (Part 2)

"This is going to waste quite a bit of time..." Sun Hang muttered softly to the side.

"There’s no choice, with something like this happening, everyone is on edge... If we don’t conduct comprehensive checks, I’m afraid no one can work." Song Yarong sighed and whispered to Sun Hang, "No one wants to be completely focused only for a colleague nearby to suddenly turn into a mysterious creature, right?"

"Did it just give you a shock?" Sun Hang asked.

"I was a bit startled... The main thing was it was too sudden, my brain didn’t react at all, everything went blank." Song Yarong touched the wound on her face that had already healed, "I even forgot to use my abilities."

"Train more in actual combat when you have the time... you do, after all, have a Mysterious Creature Hunter identity." Sun Hang said.

"We’ll talk about the future later... if Chimera 17 isn’t dealt with, we have no future to speak of." Song Yarong replied, "Back to the point... was that guy just now suddenly transformed?"

"Yes." Sun Hang nodded, "Until he turned into a mysterious creature, I didn’t sense his aura... Before that, he felt no different from a normal person."

"What triggered the transformation? Was there something unclean here in the testing ground, or had he been infected long ago and was just in a ’latent phase’? Or was it..."

Song Yarong lowered her voice: "Was it because of... emotions?"

Emotions leading to human transformation into mysterious creatures... it’s almost an open secret in academia now, especially after the Chen Hongjuan incident, everyone with any involvement was required to sign confidentiality agreements at Dubhe Tower’s insistence, including Song Yarong.

To prevent public panic, this cannot be disclosed... but slowly, both the Federation Government and mysterious creature research organizations everywhere have been subtly starting to research the influence of emotions on human transformations.

Most notably, Celestial City has set up numerous psychological counseling institutions, along with dozens of helplines for psychological counseling and emotional guidance—ostensibly to ensure the mental health of Celestial City’s citizens during special times and environments, but in reality, these efforts are to early detect troubling signs, while collecting data for subsequent research.

"It doesn’t seem like emotions." Sun Hang shook his head.

If this engineer transformed due to negative emotions, Sun Hang should have seen the shadow rising behind him long ago—everyone has negative emotions, but for them to be strong enough to cause transformation, the shadow of that person would become incredibly large and intense, impossible for Sun Hang to overlook.

"Could he be an infected person in the latent period?" Song Yarong frowned, "The testing ground shouldn’t have any ’unclean things’... we’ve checked this place countless times, and there are even daily drone scans..."

"My suggestion is to investigate the people this guy has recently been in contact with." Sun Hang said.

While absorbing the engineer’s transformed memetic residue, Sun Hang also absorbed the residual memories in it.

There weren’t many memories left in the meme, and they only went back forty-eight hours.

The entire day today, this engineer was busy—his work involved the PFDA propellant fuels, under the fourth group; besides interacting with people from the PFDA project group, he had no contact with any outsiders, the only time he left the research institute was to come with Sun Hang and Song Yarong’s group to test the PFDA "prototype unit 1."

The food he ate was also clean, all provided by the research establishment... if the source of infection was the food, then everyone on site would be at risk.

The memory rewound to the previous day, on this day, he took a half-day off.

The reason for asking leave was simple—the propellant fuel ratios had been finalized, simulation tests and real-machine tests completed, what remained of the PFDA project was the unresolved issues on the mecha body, his work on the propellant side was considered concluded. Using this reason, the engineer requested a half-day off to spend time with his family, whom he hadn’t seen for over a month due to high-intensity overtime work.

This engineer had a nine-year-old daughter, and was from a single-parent family; the engineer’s wife had died when the child was very young, coupled with the fact that yesterday was the little girl’s birthday, so Song Yarong had approved this "reasonable yet somewhat unreasonable" leave request.

As the memory continued to resurface, since the time gap gradually expanded, the memory fragments also began to become intermittent, fragmented, and blurred, Sun Hang could only vaguely see the engineer arranging through connections for the cafeteria to make a cake base, and then going to the storage to pick up some candles...the next scene was already at his own home.

The father and daughter together used a spoon to apply whipped cream on the cake base... inserted candles, lit them, made birthday wishes, then blew out the candles...

At the moment the candles were blown out, the whole memory picture suddenly plunged into darkness.

Sun Hang couldn’t help but shudder.

"What’s wrong with you?" Song Yarong noticed Sun Hang’s shiver and immediately asked, "You... shouldn’t feel cold, right?"

"Not cold... just now, that guy’s head? The one I kicked off, where is it?" Sun Hang asked.

"The Field Operations Department is handling it." Song Yarong replied.

"Bring me that head! Quick! Hurry!" Sun Hang said.

He suddenly realized a problem... in those fragments of memories just now, the engineer’s daughter, that nine-year-old girl... had no face all along!

A container resembling a large protein powder canister was brought over; upon opening the container, a bloody and mangled head appeared before Sun Hang—Sun Hang had kicked the neck of the mysterious creature, thus the head had not suffered much damage, and its basic structure remained intact.

"Thank goodness the head wasn’t smashed, or it would’ve been troublesome." Sun Hang thought to himself.

The mysterious creature’s body had already been absorbed and turned into rotten blood by Sun Hang, but this head was still "alive"—it tried to strike Sun Hang with a toothed, cactus-like tendril upon opening the container, but was immediately grabbed by a liquid metal-composed "iron hand" and forcibly ripped out from the mouth.

"What are you planning on doing?" Song Yarong couldn’t help but ask, while Shinkata Misaki beside her also looked deeply interested.

Sun Hang didn’t say anything and instead directed the mycelium to penetrate the eye socket of the head, reaching the brain.

The brain and meme are both carriers of the infected person’s memories, but the memories they bear do differ some.

"Are you planning to absorb it? But I think... if this head is kept, perhaps it will aid later investigation work? The research establishment could also leverage it to determine if Chimera 17 is indeed the instigator..." Song Yarong spoke, but her hands showed no intent to stop Sun Hang’s action.

"What I am doing now is investigating." Sun Hang offered no further explanation and continued to "browse" the memories lingering in the engineer’s brain.

The memory in the brain and the one in the meme were not much different, except some fuzzy details were a bit clearer... Sun Hang glimpsed today’s content briefly, quickly fast-forwarding the memory to the previous day, the point at which the girl’s birthday was celebrated.

He finally saw the girl’s face.

She was smiling, but that eerie smile... simply shouldn’t appear on a nine-year-old girl’s face.