Little Mushroom

An Zhe closed his eyes.

He knew what had just happened to humanity. The disappearance of the mothers and children meant this human base had completely lost its future. In this case, he wouldn't be surprised no matter what the senior colonel did.

—Just then!

"Senior colonel!" A familiar voice rang out from the end of the hall. It was the doctor.

An Zhe looked over.

"He is from the Garden of Eden and now he is helping the Lighthouse with a study." The doctor said. "Please let me handle him."

"Everyone is infected and only he is alive. He is also wanted tonight for taking the sample." The senior colonel's voice was low. "Is the Lighthouse covering for him? What research are you doing and why can people be infected without contact?"

"Regardless of whether this matter is related to the Lighthouse or not, you have to give him to me. At least I can discover something. If you kill him then there is nothing."

The senior colonel chuckled. "Then you will continue with the dangerous experiment?"

"Tonight's events have absolutely nothing to do with the Lighthouse's experiments." The doctor stated coldly. "On the contrary, we will investigate why this happened."

"Your group have been saying this for more than 100 years that you can find the cause of the infection. Yet you're still in the dark and no clues have been found. How can the Lighthouse guarantee that it won't be more dangerous to leave him alive?"

"I can't guarantee it." The doctor stared at the senior colonel. "However, I know that the base can be no worse off than it is now."

After this brief sentence, the senior colonel's hand holding the gun trembling. The doctor's words seemed to make him lose all his strength. He spoke slowly, "There has to be progress after an hour."

"Okay," the doctor said.

There was a bang as the door of the interrogation room opened and the soldiers escorting him stood guard outside. Through a layer of glass, An Zhe and the doctor stared at each other. The soldier's actions were rough and An Zhe was almost slammed in. His back and shoulders were still in pain.

However, the doctor didn't greet him. There was no time and perhaps he wasn't in the mood. His first words were the same as the senior colonel. "What happened tonight?"

An Zhe truthfully told him. Unlike the senior colonel, the doctor believed him after a brief period of thinking about it.

"You're saying there was always a different gene lurking in her but it only showed up now?"

An Zhe nodded.

"She killed the women and offspring of the base. Was this out of hatred for the base? Are you saying that she developed a contactless infection because she was in a certain range while awake?"

"No, that's not it." An Zhe shook his head. "When she first became a bee, she just wanted to leave here. Then the bee came back."

"You think her mind was replaced at that time?"

"Yes."

The doctor suddenly laughed but his laughter was hoarse. His eyebrows furrowed, the corner of his eyes sagged and it was more like an ugly cry than a laugh. "She isn't immune either."

An Zhe watched him quietly.

"Don't look at me like that." The doctor took a deep breath.

An Zhe told him, "I don't know anything."

"Sinan… the fact that Sinan can occasionally be sober is already a one in a millionth chance."

Then the doctor asked, "Do you know the fusion faction?"

An Zhe shook his head.

"100 years ago, the scientific research strength of the base was very high. Many scientists believed that other organisms could acquire a large body and stronger power through the mutation, adapting to the environment using mutual infection. So why can't humans?" The doctor started explaining.

"The first looked at the radiation's effect on the human body but the more complex the genes of the organism, the lower the chances of a favourable mutation. Humans exposed to cosmic radiation could only get multiple body cancers or other genetic diseases."

"Later, they thought that genetic infection was a means of human evolution and the 'fusion faction' developed. They did a lot of crazy experiments, infecting monsters with various monsters or infecting humans with monsters. They created countless heterogeneous species in order to observe how human genes changed and how to keep the human will. Then they discovered the fragility of the human will and also found that human intelligence was easily obtained by the heterogeneous species. However, some individuals were able to stay away and control the mutation with human thoughts—albeit for a limited time."

An Zhe listened quietly and saw the doctor make a self-deprecating smile. "This was good news. They applied for more samples and finally eliminated all influencing factors, coming to a conclusion. There is no external way to help a person keep their will. Whether a person can wake up after being infected doesn't depend on the person's tenacity. If a person is infected, there is a one in 10,000 chance of retaining consciousness. The other 9,999 will lose their will. It is just a matter of probability. Everything is random, everything is irregular and everything is uncontrollable. Randomness is the most terrible thing for scientists. On the day this conclusion was reached, three scientists in the fusion faction committed suicide."

"However, some people didn't lose heart and continued their research. They believed this wasn't a random result. We just hadn't found the determining factor or that the determining factor exceeded the range that human technology can understand."

"…And then?"

"Then there was no fusion faction. All the samples were killed and the research called off." The doctor's voice was soft. "In that year, a humanoid water heterogeneous species polluted the water source of the outer city and the entire outer city was exposed. The Trial Court was established and blood flowed like a river for 10 days… That heterogeneous species was a fusion experiment that had acquired human intelligence."

An Zhe tried to think about and digest the meaning of the doctor's words. Then he heard the doctor suddenly say, "I have spoken to him for a sufficient amount of time. Have you made a judgment?"

An Zhe froze. He looked up and saw a door on the other side of the glass open. Seraing and another judge came out and stood behind the doctor. He stared at the side of his interrogation room that was a smooth mirror.

"It is a one-way mirror. Seraing has been watching you," the doctor explained.

Seraing watched An Zhe. "According to the rules of the Trial Court, I still think he is human."

"I think so as well." The doctor seemed to finally sigh with relief. "Even Lu Feng left An Zhe safely by his side."

"Lu Feng…" Suddenly, the doctor's eyes widened. "If Madam Lu was already infected and gradually became stimulated, infecting Sinan without losing her mind completely, why didn't Lu Feng see it?"

"Sorry," Seraing lowered his eyelids and stated, "The Trial Court can never judge if the ladies of the Garden of Eden are infected or not."

The doctor hesitated. "Why?"

"The environment in which they grew up is so different from ordinary humans that no woman would meet the standards of the Trial Court."

The doctor was startled. Five seconds later, he burst out laughing. He bowed his head, his body trembling as his hands clung to the armrest of the chair. He laughed for three minutes before his expression became blank. The colour in his cheeks faded, leaving only paleness.

"The source of the disaster in the outer city not long ago, do you remember?" The doctor suddenly asked.

"I remember." Seraing replied. "It was the arthropods' breeding season."

"This can explain why Madam Lu infected so many people. She wanted to leave the Garden of Eden, whose sole purpose is human reproduction. Even if she abandoned her human form and consciousness for this purpose, so that she could be free… the moment she completely got rid of her human body, she was controlled by the biological instincts of the queen bee… now it is the breeding season of the arthropods. What she did as a human and what she is doing as a queen bee, she…"

The more the doctor spoke, the more intermittent his voice became. In the end, he closed his eyes in pain. "She can never get rid of it."

After a long silence, his voice was hoarse. "She can't escape."

An Zhe's eyes widened as he realized what the doctor was saying.

A creature's instinct was to live and to reproduce. No one could escape it. The lady had fallen into it forever. Perhaps it was only in that moment, the fleeting moment when she had become a bee but wasn't a bee, that she briefly got what she wanted. Then the eternal, ignorant black curtain fell over her eyes.

"The Rose Declaration is an inevitable choice for the long-term development of the base but it does violate the standards of human nature. The Trial Court, the mercenaries, the emergency response system… many systems violate this. If I wasn't looking at it from the perspective of the base, I would support her resistance." His voice became very low. "However, does her resistance make sense? She even… took all our embryos."

"No one has done anything wrong. The ending is the same." He stared at the blank wall, his eyes looking like he was on the verge of breaking into pieces. He could only maintain his sanity by murmuring, "This… this fucking era."

This era of the geomagnetic field disappearing wasn't a disaster for humanity, it was simply a trampling.

It first made humans aware of the fragility of their physical bodies, made them realize the futility of the technology they were so proud of and then denied the legitimacy of the base's actions, finally proving that even humans weren't independent of an animal's will.

However, it wasn't appropriate to say so. It was because the world didn't care about human existence at all.

An Zhe placed a hand on the glass of the interrogation room, trying to get close to the doctor to comfort him.

"Okay." He saw the doctor take a deep breath, regaining a certain degree of calmness. "Now it is your turn to explain two things."

"First, since Seraing thinks you're human, why weren't you infected by Madam Lu? Second, why did you go into the D1344 laboratory and take the inert sample?"

An Zhe lowered his eyes and didn't speak.

"You have to tell me." The doctor pleaded. "If I don't get any results, you will fall into the hands of the senior colonel."

An Zhe remained silent and shook his head.

"You haven't seen the military's interrogation method." Dr Ji got up from the chair, standing in front of the glass wall and staring at An Zhe. "If you don't know why you aren't infected, we will wait for Lu Feng to come back and for power to be restored before returning to the Lighthouse to do a thorough examination. However, you have to tell me where the D1344 sample is."

An Zhe still didn't speak and the doctor concluded, "Is it something that you can't tell me and Seraing?"

An Zhe nodded.

"Why? You're a good boy." The doctor's eyes were complicated as he repeated, "The sample is too important. Where is it?"

The author has something to say:

In my belly.