Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 411 Old Xu
Is this good luck or bad luck?

Old Xu thought about it for a long time.

Surviving a situation where death was inevitable... that should be considered luck, right?
However, as a price, he turned into a weird creature...

When Lao Xu first started working as an investigator, he thought about this question many times.

If you have to choose between death and transformation, which one would you choose?
He has been thinking about this question since he first started working until now, but he has never come up with a clear answer.

Even so, on an emotional level, he was more inclined toward death.

He had seen colleagues who had been transformed into strange things after being infected by memes - they were either transformed into horrible monsters and eliminated by investigators and hunters; or they were taken back to the Weird Research Institute and rendered harmless after discovering that the infection process was out of control; or they were directly turned into research materials for those white coats, and after suffering all kinds of inhuman torture, they were sliced ​​or frozen for preservation...

Compared to these endings, death doesn't seem so scary.

When the weird meme completely erases a person's self-consciousness, that person can no longer be called a human being, and naturally will not enjoy any human rights.

However, what puzzled Lao Xu was...why he turned into a monster but still retained his human self-awareness?

Could it be that I haven't completely transformed yet and am still considered an "infected person"?

Old Xu sat up and looked at his "new body".

His body now looks like Frankenstein's monster. The whole body is stitched together from carbonized, swollen, and rotten body parts. In some parts, some "metal parts" can be seen. These parts seem to come from the wreckage of the amphibious motorcycle. Old Xu can even feel as if there are gears biting and turning inside his body.

The shape of this body is very different from that of a human, and Old Xu finds it difficult to describe what he looks like now - among all the strange creatures he has seen with his own eyes, there are probably no more than two handfuls of those that are more bizarre than he is now.

What made Old Xu most upset was that he discovered that the parts that made up his new body included not only his original body and the wreckage of the motorcycle... but also Wang Zheng.

Wang Zheng's head was like a piece of flesh and bone and a red brick, built into this new body. His face was facing outward, his eyes staring blankly at the ground, and there were still clots of blood in his nose and mouth. A sharp and long metal fragment pierced through the side of his head, and the other end of the fragment was stuck in Lao Xu's skin like a pin.

"Infected? No, there is absolutely no way I can be infected." Old Xu thought to himself.

Although the infected person is infected with the monster's meme, no matter what, before he is completely transformed into a monster, he is still a human being, a living human being.

And I...I was dead the moment those polymer explosives were detonated.

Old Xu knew very well that after he came back to life, he was no longer human.

Rather than saying that these memes resurrected themselves, it would be more accurate to say that they used these "materials" to create a brand new container, and then placed Lao Xu's consciousness and memories into this container.

"Am I a monster or a human being?" Old Xu fell into deep thought.

After thinking for about ten minutes, Lao Xu took a deep breath - he suddenly realized that he had lost his human respiratory organs. After he subconsciously told his body to "take a deep breath", the skin and flesh exposed to the air began to desperately absorb oxygen from the outside world. Not only oxygen, but even the flowing rainwater was inhaled into Lao Xu's body.

Old Xu's body suddenly swelled up like a balloon. The next second, the air and rainwater he had inhaled into his body shot out from every gap in his body. The force was no less than that of a heavy industrial water jet used to cut stone.

"Is this... my method of attack?" Old Xu laughed self-deprecatingly, but he found that he couldn't laugh at all.

He seemed to have lost all his facial features except his eyes.

He could hear the crackling sound of rain, but the sound was not "heard" by his ears. Instead, the vibrations felt by his body were converted into sound signals in a special way and presented in his head.

In comparison, it is Wang Zheng's head embedded in Old Xu's body that has preserved more complete human features.

Lao Xu had participated in several secret experiments. The contents of these experiments were all, without exception, related to the transformation of the infected. Not all of the infected people whose infection process was out of control and were about to be completely transformed would be "delivered harmlessly". A considerable number of them would be urgently sent to a secret experimental base in the Tianshu Tower to allow researchers to observe the process of complete transformation of humans, as well as the changes in various body parameters before and after the transformation.

As a security guard, Lao Xu was not qualified to look through the files of these experiments, but through the conversations between the researchers, he was still able to roughly understand the changes in the state of humans before and after they were completely transformed.

For most infected people, their thinking and cognition will begin to distort after the infection process exceeds the dangerous threshold... Their sanity is often on the verge of collapse, and their words and actions become unpredictable.

These infected people often see hallucinations that only appear in their minds, and they often believe in hallucinations. Not only that, in the eyes of some infected people, normal humans will become twisted and terrifying monsters. Coupled with the continuous erosion of their rationality, they often attack the normal people around them... or even massacre them.

Old Xu had never heard of an infected person who could still maintain his original human self-consciousness after being completely transformed.

Even though some of these humanoid monsters still have the ability to think, their way of thinking is very different from that of humans. The most important factor affecting this way of thinking is their memories of their "previous life".

Or rather, obsession.

After the infected are completely transformed, their obsessions in life will be magnified countless times... Some people have various desires, some people are obsessed with unfulfilled regrets as humans, and some people are dominated by hatred... Lao Xu once saw a female infected person who, after being completely transformed, turned into an extremely large uterus - from the conversations between those researchers, it can be learned that this female infected person had a miscarriage in her first pregnancy due to the meme infection, and after that, she never got pregnant again.

The reason is very simple. After becoming infected, her husband chose to divorce... Although her appearance did not look much different from that of a human being when the infection process was still stable, it was difficult for ordinary people to share a bed with an infected person who might turn into a monster when she woke up the next day.

This infected person does not have any special abilities and is a special type of "hidden infected person". The so-called "hidden infected person" means that this person is infected with the weird meme, but has not gained any abilities or characteristics brought by the meme... Of course, it cannot be ruled out that this person has indeed gained some abilities, but no one, including herself, has discovered what this ability is.

Latently infected people are unfortunate, but also lucky at the same time - they pay the price of infection but fail to gain any abilities beyond ordinary people. But from another perspective, the infection process of latently infected people is much more stable than those with powerful abilities.

Latently infected people can often maintain a stable state for decades. In fact, their "life expectancy" is not much different from that of normal humans.

But this infected woman fell into complete weirdness on her 30th birthday...and the reason for her weirdness was that she chose to commit suicide.

She cut her own veins with the pull ring of a can in a bathtub full of water. Although the monitoring system discovered the abnormality immediately and the paramedics rushed her to the emergency room before her blood loss reached a fatal level, researchers found that the moment she cut her own veins, her infection progression began to soar rapidly, and in the blink of an eye it exceeded the safety threshold.

When the infected person who is the host gives up the will to live, the memes in its body will naturally try their best to save the host's life out of the instinct of "survival" - and their method is to completely "transform" the host from an infected person into a monster.

This was said by a very young intern. After she finished speaking, she was ridiculed by her seniors: "Memes are not microorganisms, nor are they cells. They don't have any survival instincts. Most likely, the infected person's suicide behavior triggers some special mechanism, or breaks some balance in the body, which causes the infection process to get out of control."

But Old Xu still wrote down what the intern said.

His intuition told him that the intern was right... those memes turned their hosts into monsters because they were afraid of their hosts' death.

The transformation of the infected woman was very peaceful. Her body curled up inside the container, and her limbs and torso gradually began to dissolve, eventually turning into a large mass of flesh and blood. Then, this mass of flesh and blood began to differentiate and develop. It frantically absorbed the nutrients provided by the researchers, and its volume expanded day by day...

Until one day, an independent organ that was very similar to the human uterus appeared in the laboratory. In this uterus, a congenitally defective human fetus was gradually taking shape. Through the almost transparent capsule on the surface of the giant uterus, one could see more than a dozen things like "umbilical cords" connecting the fetus to the inner wall of the giant uterus.

As for the final fate of this strange creature, Old Xu had no idea - when the incomplete fetus inside the strange creature developed to the nineteenth day, another higher-level research team took over the observation project and replaced all security personnel with internal personnel of the Tianshu Tower.

Lao Xu’s security mission was naturally completed.

"It is impossible for a human to retain a complete and clear self-awareness after becoming a monster... But I am extremely clear-headed now, even clearer than before I detonated the explosives." Old Xu muttered to himself, "Not only that, my memory is also complete... and it is very independent."

After discovering that he had merged with a part of Wang Zheng's body, Lao Xu thought that there would be another personality or other memory fragments in his head, but facts proved that Wang Zheng merely contributed his body parts to Lao Xu, and did not participate at the thinking level.

"Obsession... Humans who have been transformed should all have obsession..." Old Xu seemed to have grasped some key point and became excited all of a sudden, but soon, the excitement subsided.

Because he found that he didn't seem to have any strong obsessions.

Old Xu became a formal investigator when he was 22. He has worked for the Chunming City Abnormal Investigation Bureau for 25 years and is 47 years old this year... Due to the special nature of his job, he has not married and has no children. Apart from his left and right hands, his only way of relieving himself is with the young girls he "accidentally" meets in the bar.

Investigators need to sign a lot of confidentiality agreements, but their identities are not a secret. Those girls who are looking for excitement are very happy to experience the feeling of a night of spring with a guy like Lao Xu - Lao Xu only needs to tell some half-true and half-false "adventure stories" at the dinner table, and a group of girls who admire the strong and adventurers will automatically come up to him, not to mention that among his peers in their forties, Lao Xu is one of the most outstanding ones in terms of temperament, figure and physical fitness.

Lao Xu didn't have much aspirations in his life. The reason he became an investigator was simply because the job paid a lot of money and had good benefits.

He has a house of moderate size in Chunming City and a car of decent performance and grade. He likes to drink but never drinks excessively, never smokes, and has no bad habits except hanging out in bars in his free time.

His parents passed away very early, and he seldom interacted with relatives and friends... Apart from work, Lao Xu didn't like to make private friends, and he never added the WeChat accounts of the girls with whom he spent the night.

Colleagues all say that Lao Xu lives a free and easy life, but only Lao Xu thinks that as an investigator, this is the most correct attitude towards life.

“Do I really have an obsession?”

Old Xu thought about it and it seemed that his only obsession was to "stay alive".

When he faced death several times, it was this thought that made him persevere to the end... Although Lao Xu attributed this to luck, if he had chosen to give up in desperation, his name would probably have been printed on the list of martyrs long ago.

"Could it be that my obsession with survival... has turned me into this?" Old Xu was suddenly at a loss whether to laugh or cry.

"My obsession with survival turned me into a resurrected monster? And my obsession with maintaining my human self allowed me to retain my complete self-awareness and memory?"

Old Xu raised his head and glanced at Chimera No. 17 which was nearby.

"Or is it that all this is due to it?"

(End of this chapter)