Chapter 51: The Strange Aquarium (Part 8)

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A demon-hunter team had no need for the Cleaners’ help, of course. With Chu Ling absent, even reduced to four members, they were more than capable of handling a Class B contaminated zone.

They had already completed a third of the mission. Zhu Ning had purified one source of contamination, and the Cleaner team was containing the contamination spores. Once they finished dealing with the Mechanical Jellyfish Pavilion, the mission would be over.

Tang Ke worked with great efficiency. He did not waste time regrouping the team. After confirming that the others were safe, he led them into the Mechanical Jellyfish Pavilion.

They had a duty to finish as quickly as possible. The longer the Cleaners remained inside a contaminated zone, the greater the danger.

A moment ago, Chu Ling had sent word that she was willing to lead a team to the curator’s office later to search for clues. Having someone help was a good thing; it would make it easier to determine what had happened in the Mechanical Jellyfish Pavilion.

Tang Ke told her to be careful. The contaminated zone outside had already been purified, and with Chu Ling and Zhu Ning among his team, he was not too worried about danger appearing outside the pavilion.

There were even more corpses in the jellyfish pavilion, floating facedown in the water, their bodies streaked with blood. They were all visitors who had failed to escape in time.

Prometheus announced, “A total of 278 visitor corpses detected.”

Tang Ke frowned. There were far too many. Even for experienced demon hunters like them, it was difficult not to react upon hearing the number of victims.

Including the people from the Mermaid Pavilion, as well as those they had encountered along the way, the death toll in this contaminated zone exceeded five or six hundred.

The Mechanical Jellyfish Pavilion looked much as it had in the final moments of the video. Its glass walls had shattered, and several mechanical jellyfish had been stranded inside.

Once mechanical jellyfish left the water, they lost their vitality. Their mechanical tentacles had withered, and they lay at the bottom of the pool, twitching faintly. There were at most a few dozen of them left in the pool. The video had shown at least hundreds, perhaps thousands. Since they were no longer behind the glass walls, the most likely place for them to have gone was the floodwater. The water had now risen above a person’s thighs.

“This place really gives me the creeps,” Cao Wei said despite himself.

“So do I,” team member Liu Zhiwei replied. “I keep feeling as if someone’s watching me from behind.”

Team member Yang Shu was walking behind them. He could guarantee that no one was there. “That’s right. I’m watching you. Have you two been mentally contaminated?”

“Get lost,” Cao Wei said. “I’m not that weak.”

They were not Li Nianchuan, after all.

“Let’s finish quickly and get out,” Tang Ke said. “Everyone, stay alert.”

They had already suffered a setback in the Mermaid Pavilion. They would not make the same mistake twice. The remaining three demon hunters spread out in a disciplined formation, keeping constant watch on the water while beginning their search of the jellyfish pavilion.

“Captain.” About two minutes later, one of them called out. “Come take a look.”

Yang Shu turned over a corpse. It was a man, with a hole the size of a fist in his chest. It looked as though something had once taken up residence where his heart had been. Now his chest was hollow, and both the parasite and his heart were gone.

While waiting to enter, the demon hunters had seen visitors escaping. Some had suddenly collapsed just as they reached the entrance. A mechanical tentacle had writhed violently inside their chests, and an employee outside the pavilion had finally shot it dead.

It was probably a mechanical jellyfish. They could not survive for long after leaving the water. To them, human blood was another form of water.

After the glass walls collapsed, some of the desiccated jellyfish had desperately burrowed into human bodies, feeding on blood to power themselves.

“I found the guide,” Cao Wei reported from the other side.

He turned over a corpse. It was indeed the guide. He wore the aquarium’s uniform: a blue suit, a red tie, and a small earpiece tucked beside one ear.

His clothes had been soaked through, making the body look swollen to three times its normal size. The guide still wore the expression he had died with: utter disbelief. He too had a hole in his chest.

“Is this what killed them?” Cao Wei asked.

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Before coming here, they had watched the surveillance footage. The intense water pressure and the sudden collapse of the glass walls would have drowned or crushed some of the visitors.

The guide in particular had not escaped until the very end of the footage. Yet now, it was difficult to determine the true cause of death.

Tang Ke fell silent for a moment. “Look for the little girl and her family.”

The footage had not shown what became of the little girl’s family. The girl was extremely strange, and the clue to resolving the source of the contamination should lie with the family of three.

The three demon hunters immediately began searching. They were highly efficient.

Tang Ke approached the glass wall of the Mechanical Jellyfish Pavilion. The few jellyfish remaining inside looked docile and harmless, just as the brochures had described: friendly toward humans and incapable of attacking them.

Without seeing the video, it would have been hard to imagine them bringing down the glass wall. There was something deeply strange about this contaminated zone.

Tang Ke had undertaken countless missions and entered Class A contaminated zones more than a dozen times. This was only a Class B mission. By rights, it should not have felt strange to him.

Yet after years of experience, his sixth sense kept urging him to leave immediately. A demon hunter’s instincts told him not to remain here any longer. The other team members seemed to feel the same way. It was rare for all of them to be so tense.

Suddenly, Tang Ke narrowed his eyes. Something black was floating in the floodwater. It was a professional camera.

Ordinary people could meet their photographic needs with an auxiliary brain. Only a small number of demanding users bought professional cameras.

In this era, cameras had to compete with auxiliary brains. The market was fiercely competitive, and the products had become extremely compact, as well as resistant to water, impact, and fire.

Many camera companies advertised that even if the world ended and the last human became extinct, their cameras would still record humanity’s final moment. The recordings could supposedly be preserved for decades, leaving clues behind for extraterrestrial civilizations.

The advertisement was somewhat exaggerated. When Tang Ke had first seen it, he had merely laughed it off.

He fished the camera out of the water. Contrary to all expectations, it was in perfect condition, exactly as the advertisers had promised, and it still worked. When a camera was switched on, it generally displayed the last photograph taken.

Sure enough, it belonged to the little girl’s father. The moment it opened, the girl’s innocent smile appeared on the screen. She wore a bright scarlet dress and stood before the glass wall, watching the jellyfish.

The girl’s name was Lin Xiaofeng.

Lin Xiaofeng was actually very pretty. In an age when artificial beauty was everywhere, she could still be called exceptional. If her face was truly natural, she might well become a little star when she grew up.

“What class of citizens are they?” Tang Ke asked.

Prometheus replied, “Second-class citizens. Lin Xiaofeng is descended from artificial humans.”

After the disasters, the population had declined sharply. Many artificial humans had retained the ability to reproduce, but their descendants could only be second-class citizens. They were denied the treatment afforded to natural-born humans.

Tang Ke began looking through the photographs stored in the camera. It had not captured the final moment. The last image taken showed the girl backing away in terror. After that, her mother had carried her away.

Her father, Lin Tianqi, was not a particularly skilled photographer. He relied purely on quantity. Out of several hundred photographs, he might capture one attractive image, which he would then further edit afterward.

Thus, after looking through more than a dozen photographs, even from Tang Ke’s thoroughly unsentimental perspective, he could not tell what distinguished one from another. After staring for too long, he began to wonder whether his eyes had gone blurry.

They all showed the girl standing innocently behind the glass wall, with jellyfish behind her. Several photographs were so blurred that they were barely recognizable.

There was not much time, so Tang Ke browsed through them quickly.

Then he suddenly stopped. The image froze on one particular photograph. The content was still much the same: the girl and the jellyfish, reaching toward each other through the glass wall.

At that moment, the girl had drawn a swarm of mechanical jellyfish—at least hundreds, perhaps thousands. It was a panoramic photograph, and the scene was breathtaking. It would not have looked out of place on the cover of a magazine about the wonders of nature and humanity.

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Tang Ke paused the image and enlarged it. Then he enlarged it again. Technology had advanced to the point that magnifying a photograph no longer caused distortion. A professional camera could reproduce even the tiniest details.

As the photograph expanded, the girl occupied an ever larger portion of the frame: first a full-body image, then a half-body image, and finally only her head.

The lighting inside the aquarium was complicated, and the glass wall reflected the surroundings. Beneath the girl’s hand, within the glass wall itself, was a blurred human face.

Tang Ke enlarged the photograph further. He had not been mistaken. It was a face, extremely indistinct, like the shadow of a transparent person revealed under peculiar lighting.

Whose reflection was it?

A glass wall in an aquarium could reflect a person’s shadow. It might belong to a visitor, or it might be an optical distortion that merely resembled a human figure.

Tang Ke did not dare draw a conclusion. He examined the photograph again.

He rapidly flipped through the images. When photographs were turned quickly, they created an animation effect. This was how early animated films had been made. Many bored students had done something similar by drawing little figures in the lower-right corner of a textbook, creating an ancient kind of flipbook.

With the magnification mode still active, Tang Ke flipped rapidly through the photographs.

This time, the shadow in the images moved.

It was not an illusion. Nor was it the reflection of a visitor.

It was a person.

He was concealed inside the transparent glass wall, with countless jellyfish drifting behind him. The jellyfish had not been drawn there by Lin Xiaofeng. Had this person drawn them instead?

At first, he had been five meters away from Lin Xiaofeng, seemingly observing her and finding the little girl interesting.

Then he had looked at her and, in a gesture of great benevolence, decided to display a few “miracles,” allowing the little girl to experience a glory she would never know again in her life.

After that, he had moved closer and closer to the glass wall.

Closer.

Closer.

Finally, he placed his hand against the glass wall, and his hand overlapped with Lin Xiaofeng’s.

The mechanical jellyfish were drawn toward him. One, then two, then three. Soon dozens, and finally an uncountable swarm, surged toward him.

The visitors exclaimed:

“How magnificent. It’s beautiful.”

“This trip was worth it.”

“They’re so cute. So soothing.”

Cute? Soothing?

The transparent person inside the glass wall smiled. It was the smile of a higher-order life-form, seemingly mocking creatures of a lower order.

More mechanical jellyfish surged over. The soft-bodied creatures pressed themselves against the glass wall, while the person leaned close as well, studying the little girl through the glass. They were only ten centimeters apart, appearing almost cheek to cheek.

At last, amid the flowing ripples of water, Lin Xiaofeng saw his shadow.

A face suddenly appeared before her.

That was why Lin Xiaofeng had retreated step by step as though she had seen a monster. She had not been frightened by the mechanical jellyfish. She had been frightened by the person inside.

There was someone in the aquarium.

A transparent person.

He was watching her.

He reached out from within the glass wall.

He was the one who had pushed the wall down.

The wall was immensely thick, and the pressure it endured amounted to tons. Without using a weapon, simply pushing it over would have required a force measured in tons.