Bright Sword starts with the grenade flat.

Chapter 407: Terrible Mutated Iron Wireworm

In fact, Liu Xiu had seen the wireworm in a biology textbook a long time ago, and he also knew that this black line-like worm liked to parasitize mantises, but Liu Xiu was not afraid of this parasite at that time.

It was not until Liu Xiu saw a weird disaster movie "Invasion of Iron Wireworms" before he traveled through time that he felt strongly uncomfortable. In the movie, a group of men and women who were infected and mentally controlled by iron wire worms rushed into the water one after another, and then groups of black iron wire worms floated to the surface from under the water, leaving a deep psychological trauma on Liu Xiu.

Although humans know that wireworms can control the behavior of insects, after the release of this imaginative disaster film, everyone began to involuntarily think of a question: Can wireworms really control human behavior!
The iron wire worm, like the well-known roundworms, belongs to the class Nematoda, but is much larger in size. The distribution of the iron wire worm is very wide, with more than 2 species worldwide. The length is approximately between 1 and centimeters. The longest iron wire worm discovered so far is more than meters long. It is hard to imagine how these worms with a diameter of about mm can curl up in the host's body.

In many places, the iron wire worm is called hair-shaped snake or iron wire worm, just like the classic line "A person's name may be wrong, but the nickname must be right", whether it is "hair-shaped" or "iron wire", it vividly describes the characteristics of the iron wire worm.

The iron wire worm's hard shell is due to a layer of dark stratum corneum. Humans have always known that the iron wire worm controls the host to find water sources. In fact, not all hosts can find water sources before exhaustion. Some hosts will even die halfway. In these cases, the iron wire worm needs to rely on itself to survive. Therefore, the hard structure can not only ensure its continued survival after leaving the host, but also control the rate of water dissipation in the body, allowing it to stay in water.

The life of the wire worm is very simple. It lives and reproduces in swamps, rivers and ponds. The eggs laid by the female worm hatch into larvae in the water. The larvae will attach to aquatic plants or small aquatic animals, waiting to be swallowed by predators. When these larvae are eaten by animals such as mantises and grasshoppers, the real nightmare begins.

The larvae of the wireworm will stick tightly to the host's digestive tract, madly absorbing nutrients and growing rapidly. The host will begin to be "squeezed dry" step by step. Before the wireworm matures, the host will not die prematurely from malnutrition. Instead, the gonads will be destroyed by the wireworm. The sterilized host no longer has to worry about reproduction and becomes a competent host who only thinks about eating.

Since the host has an exoskeleton and does not become skinny, it is not possible to directly identify which insects have iron wire worms in their bodies. One has to soak the insects in water and observe whether there is anything unusual in their abdomen. When the parasitized host is immersed in water, the iron wire worms in the body will receive signals and become active. With the rapid twisting of the hard body surface, they can easily break out of the body. This scene is really uncomfortable.

When the iron wire worm matures, it no longer needs to continue living in the host's body, but prepares to return to the water to reproduce. At this time, the iron wire worm begins a mysterious ritual. They seem to be able to control the host's mind, forcing the host to run to a water source. The desperate host can only step by step towards the abyss of drowning.

So what kind of ritual does the iron wire worm perform to force its host to jump into the water?

When scientists were studying insects parasitized by wireworms, they found a special protein in their brains. This protein is not found in the bodies of healthy insects of the same species, but there is another protein that is extremely similar to it. This means that wireworms produce this special protein, and it is a "high imitation" that simulates the normal protein in the host's body. These "high imitation" proteins will have special effects in the host's body, thereby affecting the host's central nervous system.

In order to verify this conjecture, scientists repeatedly conducted a number of comparative experiments and finally concluded that the iron wire worms secrete this "high imitation" protein that is indistinguishable from the real thing, inducing apoptosis of nerve cells in the host's central nervous system without stimulating a strong immune response, and at the same time changing the signals sent by the brain and nerve centers, thereby controlling the host's behavior. In the study, the content of this special protein was associated with the host's abnormal behavior. The content of the special protein in the host's body reached its peak when it was actively looking for water. The iron wire worm used this to manipulate the host's behavior.

Of course, as humans, what we are naturally concerned about is whether the wireworms will infect and control humans like they control praying mantises in the movies. This is what humans care about most. After all, if the wireworms are like roundworms, it would be a huge disaster for humans, just like in the movies.

However, there are symbiotic relationships and parasitic relationships between parasites and hosts. To put it bluntly, it is a relationship of whether or not the host will be killed. Parasitism is a very ancient survival strategy. When choosing a host, the parasite considers whether it can ensure its own growth and normal reproduction, otherwise it cannot establish a parasitic relationship.

The class Nematodes to which the iron wire worm belongs has many members that parasitize the human body, such as roundworms. The parasitic level of roundworms is much higher. After the roundworm eggs are hatched, the larvae will enter the human digestive tract along with food. The larvae will grow in the wall of the small intestine for a period of time, then pass through the intestinal wall into the veins, and enter the lungs with more oxygen. After continuing to grow in the lungs, it will cause coughing in the human and return to the digestive tract again, developing to maturity and laying eggs in the small intestine.

Compared to the parasitic level of roundworms, iron wire worms are simply incapable of doing so. At the same time, the various structures evolved by iron wire worms are not suitable for the human body structure. Therefore, even if the larvae of iron wire worms occasionally invade the human body, cases of disease are very rare. Before Liu Xiu traveled through time, there were only a dozen reports on iron wire worm parasitism, and none of them endangered human life as in the movies.

If this is the case with the simplest physical effects, how can the iron wire worm control human thinking? The human brain and central nervous system are much more complex than those of insects. It is indeed unrealistic to control thinking through just a few "high imitation" proteins.

However, this is just a choice made under the normal evolution of nature, but now it is different, because the Zerg Queen is not the result of natural evolution of nature. What the Zerg Queen created is obviously a modified version of the wireworm.

According to what the drone observed, the wireworms that broke out of the humans' stomachs were very large, and were exactly the same as the mutated wireworms shown in the movie "Wireworm Invasion" that Liu Xiu had seen.

It is obvious that this must be the Zerg queen who absorbed the genes of ordinary wireworms and then transformed them into the current mutant species, which is the same as the mutated wireworms in the movie.

In other words, it is even more terrifying than the mutated wireworms in the movies, because the wireworms in the movies have no brains and only know how to control the parasitized humans to jump into the water.

(End of this chapter)