Enforcer Manual
Chapter 213: Infection has its own strengths_1

Chapter 213: Chapter 213: Infection has its own strengths_1

"So, your answer is...?"

Medea stared at Song Lan and Lu Xiang, reminding them, "The sooner the parasitism, the better the integrity of the body can be ensured."

"Let’s go."

After thinking for a moment, Song Lan said.

He had considered whether to help "Scarecrow" earn a surge in bounty, but Medea had brought them another possibility.

Controlling Su Li’s dead body with a parasite - why did this sound like something out of a biohazard scenario?

"Mm."

Medea nodded, she moved on all fours with agility like that of a real Horn Bug, sprang forward with a push of her legs, and landed in front of Song Lan. Her opened arms instinctively wrapped around Song Lan’s waist as she said, "Close your eyes, what comes next might be a bit uncomfortable."

Lu Xiang, standing by the side, rubbed her eyes in astonishment. In the blink of an eye, Song Lan was dragged by Medea into the underground.

She found it hard to imagine what lay beneath the floor, as this place was not Ge Fu’s shop, but a high-rise building of 78 floors.

She seriously doubted whether the people living below them would be terrified to discover half a human body protruding from their ceiling.

Curiosity made Lu Xiang want to explore further, but she now had to stay in the room in case anything unexpected happened.

If they all left and the people from Kolo Film and Television Media couldn’t reach Su Li and came looking for him at the apartment, discovering the body would render everything Song Lan did useless, even if he did bring back the parasite.

The living room fell silent, the stench of blood still lingering.

Lu Xiang glanced at Su Li’s pierced corpse, sat down on the sofa, and began watching the Sponge and Starfish animation that she wasn’t interested in.

Her life had long since strayed from its course; as the head of the Law Enforcement department in the Seventeenth District and an honors graduate from the United Government military school, she was now helping a murderer cover up the crime of killing a three-star rescuer.

This made her feel a strong sense of guilt, and she needed to distract herself to calm her current emotional state.

Well...

On closer inspection, the talking cartoon sponge on TV actually seemed quite cute.

............

Meanwhile, Song Lan didn’t know how long he had been traversing through illusion and darkness. When his vision cleared, he found himself in the underground sewers of the Seventeenth District.

Only, this area clearly seemed a bit off.

The fluid flowing in the sewer was not sewage, but a very viscous blood. Bubbles continuously tumbled in the blood, occasionally a few eyeballs floated up, and when those eyes saw Song Lan, they sank back into the blood again.

The scene before him seemed familiar.

On the previous occasion when they met Scarecrow, they took the laboratory elevator downwards, and what ultimately appeared before them was a similarly sanity-draining scene.

Going further in, the flesh that spread like sprouts covered the walls; one did not have to approach to guess what horrors lay at the end of this tunnel.

This made him glance warily at Medea, who had crept down alertly. It seemed that she too was wary of whatever lay at the end of this tunnel, "I thought we came looking for a parasite."

He could never have imagined that beneath the surface of the Seventeenth District, such an unknown scene was hidden.

In his mind, the parasites should have been much smaller.

"The parasite is inside."

Medea looked up at Song Lan with her pupil-less eyes, "The ’Devourer’ is a type of organism similar to parasites. As long as it is provided with sufficient nutrients, it can grow rapidly. Biological, mechanical or inorganic matter can all serve as the soil for its growth."

"That name doesn’t sound safe at all."

"The ’Devourer’ is an extremely dangerous creature, which escaped from its container due to a mishap in handling, and in just three hours turned the entire laboratory into its own nourishment. I’ve been trying to contain its spread, but the other end must have been completely assimilated by it."

Song Lan immediately recalled the bounty notice’s description of Medea.

It stated that Medea was privately engaged in some kind of gene injection research, which resulted in an accident leading to the death of all the staff at the experimental facility.

It seemed that this thing called the ’Devourer’ was their research outcome.

He now seriously suspected that the genetic engineering of the Scarecrow and even the Barrosa Group was a continuation of ’Devourer’ research; after assimilating the objects around them, they all appeared strikingly similar.

In a way, this could be something even more terrifying than the T-virus.

Because this thing could not only infect living beings but also weapons, inorganic materials, and machines. In the fight against the Scarecrow, he had witnessed how the opponent had controlled unmanned war machines to launch an attack on him.

Indeed, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Medea certainly didn’t charge him, but she unexpectedly presented him with such a surprise. Moreover, it seemed that the ’Devourer’ had been parasitic in the underground sewers of District Seventeen for as long as two years. Even Medea had no idea what the situation was like at the other end of this path.

Before Song Lan could speak, Medea suddenly showed a look of intense pain. She covered her head with her left hand, her sharp nails piercing into her flesh. Blood flowed down the wounds, as if endowed with life, wriggling into the water as it fell, merging with the river of blood.

She took a syringe from her pocket and plunged it into her abdomen without hesitation.

About three or four seconds later, the pain on Medea’s face eased slightly. She gasped for breath and after a long time she said, "This is an α-blocker, which can temporarily block the ’Devourer’s’ communication with me."

"Hiss—Your body isn’t also infested with that thing, is it?"

Song Lan instinctively took a step back.

"I had no other choice."

Medea said, "The company installed a tracking system in my cybernetic body. If I didn’t let the ’Devourer’ parasitize me, they were bound to find and capture me sooner or later."

It was a desperate gamble.

The good news was that she successfully severed the cybernetic body’s tracking system and evaded the company’s manhunt.

The bad news was that a part of the ’Devourer’ got into the underground sewer and, because she was already infected, she would occasionally hear whispers from the Queen’s Nest.

The closer she got to the core of the Queen’s Nest, the more compelling the calls became, compelling her to use the blocking agent to isolate these calls.

Because the Queen’s Nest was calling her to return to the embrace of the mother, to become one with it.

"So that’s how it is."

Hearing this, Song Lan finally understood, "You brought me here because you’ve created a big boss hiding in the underground sewers, looking for a free fighter to help you beat the boss."

But if this thing is of the same species as the Scarecrow they previously encountered, then the bounty wouldn’t be coming down for anything less than several tens of millions of watts.

"I didn’t lie to you."

Medea said earnestly, "If you can control its behavior, inject a part of it into a corpse, it will come back to life... just as you have control over those Horn Bugs."