mud falling painting beam empty

Chapter 1097: Return and Price

The morning light was like a dull knife, slowly cutting open his eyelids.

Zhao Wuji woke up in the work cabin, the hum of the air conditioner replaced the vibration of the spacecraft engine. His left hand was still holding the welding machine.

He staggered out of the work cabin and rushed to the bathroom. The vomit rushed into the vortex of the sewer, faintly emitting a mother-of-pearl blue light.

The man in the mirror had sunken eye sockets, and his pupils shrank into strange needle-like shapes under the sunlight - there was a silver-blue ring around the edge of his left eye's iris, like welded metal.

The mobile banking text message showed that a new amount of RMB 1 was added to the account, and there were only three letters in the remarks column: WY.

The TV was playing the morning news. The female anchor had her lips painted with rouge, and behind her was a holographic military technology exhibition - some new type of biological armor was crawling in front of the camera, and the surface of the exoskeleton was shining with a familiar pearlescent luster.

The moment Zhao Wuji reached out to touch the screen, the armor suddenly turned to face the camera, revealing Ripley's face covered in gelatin under the mask. He was so scared that he smashed the remote control, and when the plastic shell cracked, a micro data chip was stuck in the battery slot, with NS-001 engraved on the surface of the chip.

Pain erupted from beneath the ribs. He ripped open his shirt, revealing the winding silver-blue lines on his skin that had formed a complete circuit diagram, with a slight bulge in the center that rose and fell with his breathing. When he cut that skin with a fruit knife, the tip of the knife hit a hard curved surface—not bone, but a smooth, curved shell with a bioceramic texture. The news suddenly switched to a deep space rescue ship dragging a wrecked escape pod, with the camera deliberately giving a close-up of the hibernation pod: the inside of the glass was covered with scratches, and the coagulated blood formed the company's logo. The female anchor said cheerfully, "This well-preserved 21st century hibernation pod will provide valuable information for our country's bioengineering research..."

The liquid coming out of the tap suddenly became viscous.

Zhao Wuji looked up and saw himself in the mirror melting. His skin peeled off like wax at high temperature, revealing the silver-blue neural network underneath. Those fibrous tentacles stretched out from the mirror, wrapped around his wrist, and pulled his fingers toward the chest of the person in the mirror. The moment they touched, reality and the mirror shattered at the same time, and countless fragments of memory fell like hail - Ripley's last look at him, Parker's burnt work badge, Ash's human teeth stuck between the gears, and the coagulated blood on White's tie clip.

The phone rang again. This time it was a video call request from an unknown number. After the call was connected, the screen showed a pure white laboratory, where technicians in protective clothing were injecting pink medicine into the hibernation capsule. The figure floating in the capsule had golden hair like algae, and the shadow under the collarbone had grown a second pair of forelimbs. The camera suddenly turned to the observation window, reflecting the face of the photographer: that was Zhao Wuji twenty years later, with silver-blue lines all over his left face, and his right eye completely transformed into an alien compound eye.

"It's a painful choice, isn't it?" said my future self, his voice like a broken synthesizer, "but the company offered too much." The video suddenly interrupted, and the last freeze frame was the electronic clock on the wall of the laboratory: December 2122, 12.

Zhao Wuji looked at his calendar—today was December 2023, 12.

Pale yellow mucus oozed from the cracks in the bathroom tiles. He knelt down, dipped his fingers into some and smeared it on the broken mirror. The mucus immediately etched a familiar honeycomb pattern, exactly the same as the one on the Nostromo. Outside the window, a news helicopter was flying over the city, and the loudspeaker was broadcasting the latest notice: Citizens are requested to be alert to the new electronic virus. Those infected will experience metallization of the skin...

Zhao Wuji smiled. He raised his arm, and the silver-blue lines in the sunlight suddenly began to flow, gathering in the shape of a micro welder in his palm. The flame was no longer blue, but a kind of bright purple between matter and energy. When the flame licked the mobile phone screen, the balance number on the bank APP rose wildly, and the biological armor in the news screen suddenly curled up in pain.

The sound of a refrigerator opening and closing came from the kitchen. When Zhao Wuji turned around, he saw his childhood self taking out an iced cola. There were no lines on the boy's forearm, and his pupils were pure black in the sun. The child held up a drink can to him, and two letters were written on the can with condensed water: OK.

Before the TV automatically turned off, the anchorwoman’s last words echoed in the room: “It is reported that this technology originated from the black box data of a commercial spacecraft in the last century, and the main contributor was an Asian engineer…”

"Fuck, use the resurrection card and exit the script"

"Resurrection card minus 1, memory cleared, rewards cleared, "Alien" script forced to terminate"