Apocalyptic Island - Chapter 58

Chapter 58

In the bottom-left corner was a tiny display screen that was mostly dark, with occasional flickers of current and slivers of light appearing on the screen.

Wen Yishu placed the cursor on this screen. The image initially displayed full-screen static, like an old television set, before stabilizing into a clear picture.

This was Zhao Kangcheng’s memory. In the footage, he was very young. He was located in a laboratory of a research institute, focused and diligent in conducting experiments. Human experimentation was strictly prohibited, but his research topic happened to lack such test subjects. He could only start with mammals like dogs and monkeys.

A monkey connected to a neural link was having bizarre dreams; from the screen, she saw the monkey swinging frantically across the steel racks inside the lab. This was a monkey that had never seen the outside world, born and raised entirely within these walls. Its dream research value was not particularly high. Most of the experimental dogs, monkeys, and other mammals here were breeds from cultivation centers and had never seen the outside world.

Zhao Kangcheng went from being high-spirited and ambitious at the beginning to becoming dejected and gloomy later on. The day-to-day experimental progress, yielding no results, gave birth to a bold idea in his mind. He wanted to request permission from his superiors—higher-level leadership—to conduct more daring experiments.

Thus, one day, the old professor entered the lab as usual but did not see the student who always arrived earlier than him. Not long after, the instructor’s nameplate on the lab was completely replaced; the lab became more hidden, and the personnel underwent a thorough reshuffle. Zhao Kangcheng shed his former shackles, released the desires deep within his heart, and completely devolved into a power-hungry lackey who stopped at nothing to achieve results, obliterating his humanity.

Wen Yishu frowned as she watched the laboratory begin to feature wild monkeys grown outdoors and captured stray dogs. It started that way, but eventually, even living humans appeared in the lab.

There was no shortage of “black-account” homeless people in every city. One day after work, while passing a park, Zhao Kangcheng spotted an elderly scavenging woman. He flashed a cruel smile and brought her back to the lab under the guise of hiring her for cleaning work. He arranged a place for her to stay first; the poor old woman was filled with joy, thinking she had finally found a job, and settled into the accommodation provided by Zhao Kangcheng.

Surveillance monitored her every move. Wen Yishu saw Zhao Kangcheng sitting behind the monitor, watching the old woman use an old communication phone to send messages to her family. She told them all to come over, saying she had found a place to live and a decent job. Zhao Kangcheng smiled with satisfaction. He had stepped into the endless abyss with one foot. After tricking the old woman’s entire family into coming over, he assigned them easy cleaning tasks. Amidst the family’s profound gratitude, he sent them onto the operating tables.

At the moment they were at their happiest—when the bitterness of life had turned to sweetness—he personally strangled their beautiful dreams and plunged them into an even more bottomless abyss. Zhao Kangcheng applied all his previous experimental results to the old woman and her family. The neural-link interface was used to manipulate and change their dreams; under the interference of the neural link, beautiful dreams turned into the most terrifying nightmares.

Human imagination was enough to scare them to death. Their deepest inner fears were infinitely magnified. In the day-after-day torture, these experimental subjects died one after another.

After that came the arrival of the apocalypse. Zhao Kangcheng relocated his experimental base. He felt no fear regarding the apocalypse; instead, he became even more unscrupulous in using humans as test subjects. He sought out the most active areas of the cranial nerves, attempting to transfer human will and memory into another body—this was what he called “switching to a new body.”

Wen Yishu felt bewildered by this. She pulled the somewhat dazed Bai Mi and asked: “Is this real? Can you really exchange bodies?”

The brain is the most sophisticated instrument in the human body; even top-tier surgeons cannot guarantee absolute safety in brain surgery. Let alone exchanging brains and allowing someone to inherit memories—this was simply an impossible feat.

Bai Mi shook her head: “It’s just his wishful thinking. Look at his experimental footage; it’s all failures.”

The brain-swapping experiments had failed before they even concluded. How could Zhao Kangcheng, a man researching subconscious science, solve the greatest challenge facing humanity? The experiments he conducted were nothing but self-delusion, stubbornly believing he was right.

“I really can’t stand this kind of poser. If I had half his confidence when I was doing experiments, I’d be world-famous by now.”

Wen Yishu couldn’t help but complain. How could there be such a stupid pig? When Wen Yishu first heard him say with such certainty that bodies could be swapped, she thought it might be true. It turned out he was just a half-wit. His own legs had atrophied due to long-term neurotoxins. Even after amputation and fitting mechanical prosthetics, he couldn’t stand up. As she watched Zhao Kangcheng, whose memory reading was complete and who had begun to dream, a plan formed in her mind.

She wanted Zhao Kangcheng to die in the nightmare he feared most, letting him taste the feelings of those people as they died.

Bai Mi accepted her suggestion and skillfully began using Aix to crack the program, implanting a nightmare into his dreamscape. Usually, one must wait for the hallucinogens to metabolize before a neural link can be implanted, but Zhao Kangcheng didn’t need that. With such a weak body and fragmented will, he deserved to be scared to death by a nightmare.

The two set up a program to release everyone. Once they left, the people in those nightmares would all wake up. Those robots, once the power was cut, would also fall into an eternal hibernation.

Wen Yishu scavenged the town for food, found a sightseeing cart, and set off once more with their luggage and Bai Mi. The seats of the sightseeing cart were very comfortable. They folded down the back seats so one person could lie down and rest while Wen Yishu drove in the front, heading out along the flat roads of the town.

At the same time, Zhao Kangcheng felt sensation returning to his legs. He was wandering through a beautiful dream, finding that after his research project was released to the public, it was met with widespread acclaim. Not only did he gain both fame and fortune, but he also had many companions. He lay on a luxurious king-sized bed, living a life of extravagance he hadn’t dared to imagine before. His legs were fitted with the latest model of prosthetics; he was no longer that atrophied, limping waste. The person who had poisoned him was caught, and he easily executed them, living the life of a social elite, handling human lives at his whim.

Until… he opened his eyes in the bed and realized everything around him had changed. The scene before him was very familiar. Looking at the low ceiling and the cramped room, he began to feel an inexplicable panic. He wondered if he was in some secret chamber, until someone knocked on the door outside. He looked up and saw the camera at the peephole. Only then did he realize where he actually was.

Zhao Kangcheng ignored the knocking and rushed to the nearby bathroom. The face in the mirror, covered in deep wrinkles, was full of terror. Looking at himself in the mirror, Zhao Kangcheng fell to the floor in fear. The knocking outside became increasingly impatient.

“Time for work, Auntie. Hurry up and come out. I’ll take you to your new workstation to get familiar with the environment.”

It was his own voice. He looked at his own rough hands in horror, stood up in disbelief, and stumbled to open the door. Outside, the face of “Zhao Kangcheng” had turned into his younger self. He wore a white lab coat from the testing area, with two maintenance workers in black tactical suits standing behind him. Seeing him open the door, the two behind “Zhao Kangcheng” stepped forward without hesitation and hoisted him up.

Zhao Kangcheng roared desperately, screaming in despair, but what came out was actually the hoarse voice of an old woman: “What are you doing! What are you doing! I am Zhao Kangcheng!”

The people around him turned a deaf ear to his words, practically dragging him into the laboratory and fixing him firmly onto the rack. That familiar face looked at him with a distorted and manic expression, chuckled twice, and placed the neural link on his head. Metal interfaces burrowed into his head like twisted roots. Subsequently, his consciousness fell into a brief paralysis. When he woke up again, he was back in that room.

This time, it seemed something had been added to his memory, and his body was in immense pain. This feeling was like being run over by a car, making him feel terribly unwell even while lying in bed. Every patch of skin was searing as if burned. Zhao Kangcheng listened to the knocking outside, opened his eyes in a daze, and fell once more into the loop.

His desperate screams echoed through the entire monitoring room. This was the painful wailing he once loved to hear most, but now it had become a nightmare from which he could never escape. In this loop after loop, Zhao Kangcheng marched toward the final exhaustion of his life.

Wen Yishu drove along the small path, humming a song in a good mood. The surrounding plants all consciously made way for her. The String of Pearls, which had been swinging on her neck like a swing, was grabbed by Wen Yishu and placed on the vehicle’s potted plant rack. It had no choice but to settle its clump of soil inside, swaying left and right with the sightseeing cart.

The cart’s top speed was 60 km/h. The navigation showed they could reach the city area by this afternoon. Bai Mi was sleeping soundly in the back; it seemed she was truly exhausted. Wen Yishu tried to drive as smoothly as possible. The road ahead looked like a well-vegetated botanical garden, surrounded by lush green trees. The leaves were covered in water droplets. Wen Yishu’s sharp eyes noticed something: the rainwater seemed to have started freezing, not falling as it usually did.

Sitting in the car, Wen Yishu was surrounded by glass that blocked the oncoming wind, so it wasn’t very cold for now. Although there were a few bumps along the way, the two arrived safely outside the city in the afternoon.

The towering city walls were silent. The two found a hidden corner, parked the car in dense bushes, and asked the shrubs to hide the sight of the sightseeing cart. The String of Pearls extended its branches and carried Wen Yishu up into the high tree canopy.

Stepping on the fork of a large tree, she adjusted her goggles to the appropriate magnification and looked into the city. The streets were deserted, littered with trash, and there were even corpses that hadn’t been processed in time. Wen Yishu narrowed her eyes. Could it be that the rats in the city hadn’t been cleared out yet? Then how were they supposed to get in?

Wen Yishu packaged the footage she saw into a short video, jumped down, and asked Bai Mi how they should enter. On the communication network, the news was still about the rat infestation. Bai Mi looked at the city layout and turned her gaze toward the sewers at the city gate.

Wen Yishu swallowed nervously, following her gaze: “We aren’t going to take the same path as the rats, are we, Team Leader?”

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