The warning from the northern base was concise and to the point.

Polly said: "They found it too."

An Zhe looked outside.

The Highland Research Institute is located on the top of the highest mountain. Looking down, the abyss is unobstructed. The huge fault zone is like a hideous wound on the gray-white skin of the earth, and the layers of dense forests and swamps are the plasma and pus of this wound.

.In the distance - the far east coast is the sea, or a huge lake. In short, you can't see the end at a glance. When everything is completely silent, the sound of wind is mixed with whispers, and there is a faint sound of huge waves in the mist.

In short, it looks like a monster sitting quietly on the ground.

This was not the abyss that An Zhe was familiar with, and he had experienced it before. The abyss in the past was a place full of blood and plunder, and there had never been such a peaceful moment.

A black shadow appeared in the distant sky. The shadow grew larger and closer, and finally stopped above the white building.

With a swish sound, Tang Lan folded his wings, landed directly on the corridor outside, and pushed open the laboratory door.

"I'm back, sir." After he finished speaking, he turned to Rum and said, "Has there been any enemy attack recently?"

Rum said: "No."

Polly Joan raised his head and looked at him from top to bottom, as if to confirm whether he was in normal condition. If the person doing this was Lu Feng, An Zhe would feel that he was trying this person to decide whether to shoot him or let him go.

, but Polly's gentle gray-blue eyes looked at Tang Lan, and he was sure that this was just a kind elder who was concerned about whether Tang Lan was injured outside.

Sure enough, Polly asked: "Are you in danger outside?"

"There is danger, but no injuries." Tang Lan said: "I have more experience there."

Polly said: "You have always made me feel at ease."

Tang Lan smiled, his eyebrows were sharp and beautiful, and he had a cold and murderous aura. An Zhe remembered that Hubbard was the most outstanding leader of the mercenary team, so his deputy team must not be ordinary people.

Polly Jean said: "How's it going outside?"

"It's almost as you expected." Tang Lan replied: "They are balanced."

As he spoke, he pulled out a data cable from the drawer and connected the miniature camera in his hand to the computer. Hundreds of pictures were loaded and projected onto the large screen nearby.

At first glance, there is nothing in those pictures, only the indescribable and strange landscape unique to the abyss, as if they are just landscape paintings taken by curious tourists. However, if you look closely, you can't help but hold your breath.

The most eye-catching chapter is an overhead shot of a huge lake. It is frozen. The frost-white ice surface has frozen the brown algae, floating limbs and fallen leaves. However, on this empty ice surface

Underneath, a huge irregular black shadow was revealed - it was the back of an aquatic creature. It was just sitting quietly under the water, and its shadow was like an abstract painting.

Just on the shore of this lake, the dead branches of the dense forest are all wrapped with large groups of gray-red vines. The next photo is a close-up of the vines. Its appearance is as smooth as an earthworm, and there are densely packed radial star-shaped patterns under its skin.

The black blood vessels seemed to be beating again and again. An Zhe immediately realized that this was no ordinary plant. The vines in the entire jungle were all the same tentacle-shaped monster.

"There was only one photo taken here, and it found me." Tang Lan said.

Pauline used the remote control to flip through the photos one by one.

"They have gone through a three-month killing period. Now all the survivors are large monsters, and the scattered small creatures are completely invisible." Tang Lan said, "I fought with them a few times. Sir, I am sure that I am the only one in the entire institute now."

I'm strong enough to escape from them. But I can't fight them head-on. Moreover, most of the monsters in the abyss are polymorphic, and I'm not sure how scary they are now."

"I understand." Polly nodded slowly, with a solemn expression in his gray-blue eyes: "If genes are a kind of resource, they have completed the integration within the abyss. Now, the monsters have reached the level of each other.

In order to maintain the balance of strength, their IQs have also been greatly improved during the integration process, and they understand that fighting may bring losses to both sides. If this guess is correct, some monsters should have begun to leave the abyss and hunt outside. Humans must also be the same.

One of their hunting targets, but they haven’t noticed it for the time being, so we have to defend ourselves against collective attacks by monsters at any time.”

"That's true." Tang Lan said: "But there is one thing that is different from your guess."

Polly asked: "What did you find?"

Tang Lan controlled the computer and switched to a picture. It was hard to imagine how ugly this picture was - An Zhe did not have a systematic aesthetic, but he was sure that this picture could be described as "ugly" because it was the largest

It shocks people's senses to a certain extent. All the organs that can be described and cannot be described in human language grow on the surface of two densely packed molluscs. Their tentacles dripping with mucus touch each other. In the next picture, their tentacles are separated.

In the next picture, one of them went away in the other direction.

"Six cases of the same situation were observed. The monsters did not occupy their own territories and start a stalemate as you originally predicted. They walked around in the abyss, tested each other, and then separated." Tang Lan's voice also became solemn and low: "I

I suspect the worst has happened, sir. They seem to be communicating - I don't know the content of their communication. Whenever there is contact between them, I can feel that the fluctuations in them will become stronger.

"

He continued: "I suspect they are sensing each other and testing each other to see if they have the genes they need."

"It's very possible." Polly said, "You are the one with the most sensitive senses in the institute when it comes to 'fluctuations'."

"I've become more and more sensitive to it recently," Tang Lan's face turned slightly pale. "It's everywhere in the air, and on every monster. Sometimes I feel like even the stones on the ground are vibrating. I'm getting more and more sensitive.

The harder it is to keep thinking, I shouldn't have come back so early, but I feel that my own fluctuations are being integrated into them. Sir, I...my mind is a little abnormal."

Polly held his hand, and his voice was calm: "Don't be afraid."

"A hundred years ago, when biological gene sequences were the most stable, there were some species that were particularly sensitive to changes in the magnetic field. You happened to be fused with this kind of creature." He said.

"But that's not a magnetic field. I can feel that the magnetic field is another kind of wave." Tang Lan closed his eyes. He knelt down and pressed his forehead against the back of Polly's hand. His voice was hoarse: "Sir, do you already understand?

What? You didn't feel any surprise when I said this."

"But you won't tell us, because the truth is something we can't bear." He said, "But I really..."

The more he spoke, the more raw and hoarse his voice became, and finally he could no longer continue.

"Don't be afraid, don't be afraid...children," Polly's right hand slowly held Tang Lan's shoulder, his voice was like a gentle and vast ocean, "I will protect you until the last moment of my life."

Tang Lan raised his head and looked directly at Polly Joan, as if making a solemn oath: "We will protect you and the institute until the last moment."

"I have never asked you, but if the day comes when the institute ceases to exist," Polly said slowly, "I ask you not to join the torrent of alien species and monsters, but to go north to protect

Human base."

Tang Lan: "But the judges will kill all alien species, and the base will never accept us."

Polly looked out at the vast dusk.

"But at the last moment, I still want to believe in human kindness and tolerance to the greatest extent." He said.

Tang Lan twitched the corner of his mouth and looked up at Polly Joan: "That's because you have noble moral character and are upright."

Polly smiled and shook his head.

After Tang Lan left, the power reserve of the Simpson Cage also reached a critical value. A dazzling scarlet light lit up on the wide platform below the white building, and a heat wave hit his face. If it wasn't clear, this was a machine made to capture the vibration frequency of elementary particles.

With the high-energy field interacting with the trajectory, An Zhe almost thought that downstairs was a blazing sea of ​​fire.

The large screen in the laboratory is the terminal and operating table of the Simpson cage. However, due to design flaws, in order to adjust the parameters of the Simpson cage, sometimes one has to go downstairs to manually adjust the pull rods of certain precision devices.

On the big screen, those lines are still messy, but they are not static. Every time Polly adjusts a parameter, those tangled lines will change from one kind of mess to another - and eventually become a mess.

But Polly still analyzed the lines again and again, calculated functions, adjusted parameters, and changed the receiving frequency. The ever-changing lines just jumped on the screen.

The sound of music interrupted Anzhe's thoughts. The old-fashioned tape recorder in the corridor played the ups and downs of "Symphony of Destiny". Rum stood by the window with a staff in front of him. He played the harmonica against the music score, imitating the symphony.

The melody of the song. After an unknown amount of time, he stopped.

"Do you know music?" he asked.

An Zhe shook his head.

Rum pointed to the tape recorder: "After listening to a song, can you know how to play it?"

An Zhe slightly increased the frequency of shaking his head. For such a complex symphony, it was already the limit for him to be able to appreciate one ten thousandth of the ups and downs, let alone reproduce it.

"There must be music scores." Rum turned over a page of music and whispered.

While saying "music score", he looked at the screen in the center of the laboratory.

It was as if a string was playing gently in the void, and the chaotic and complicated thoughts suddenly became clear. Suddenly, An Zhe's eyes widened slightly.

"The fluctuation is a symphony." He said: "Sir, I want to decipher its music score. Then...then you can do a lot of things."

Rum looked at him deeply with his dark eyes and said, "You are smarter than me."

An Zhe also looked at the screen. Can the secret of the distortion disaster be analyzed from these lines? His eyes were confused.

Or perhaps, this never-ending chaos is already the truth in another sense.

An unspeakable silence enveloped the laboratory. An Zhe lowered his head. The fate of mankind was as vague as the lines. All of this may have nothing to do with mushrooms, but sometimes he would find it difficult to breathe.

It was difficult to explain the reason, but he placed his fingers on the keyboard facing the communication channel with the northern base.

The movements of his fingers are no longer flexible, just like his hyphae can no longer stretch. When tapping the keys, the fingertips will tremble uncontrollably.

Without optical fiber and base stations, communication costs are very high. Just like humankind's ocean telegraph communication for more than ten centuries, words must be saved.

He issued.

&n-->>

bsp;"How is the situation at the base?"

As if it was a ridiculous coincidence, almost at the same time, the communication channel lit up, and the same message was sent from the northern base.

"What's the status of the institute?"

The Northern Base will sacrifice everything for the purity of human genes. They hate monsters, and the Inquisition will never tolerate alien species. It seems that only Dr. Ji, a kind-hearted scientist, will tolerate the existence of the fusion faction and care about the situation here.

An Zhe replied: "Everything is fine."

Whitewashing the peace seems to be a unique human skill, and he learned it.

A few seconds later, the other party replied: "The same goes for the base."

Facing the communication interface, An Zhe pondered for a long time, and then slowly typed: "Is the judge okay?"

After thinking for a while, he pressed the backspace key and deleted it a few more times.

While he was editing, a message came from the northern base.

"Has the institute discovered new mutated individuals recently?"

An Zhe thought for a moment and replied: "Not yet."

After replying, he sent the revised sentence.

——"Is the Inquisition okay?"

The other party replied: "The Inquisition is operating normally."

An Zhe relaxed a little.

"Best wishes." He politely sent the closing words: "Good night."

The other party's reply was only a few words.

"Good night."

Looking at those two words, An Zhe removed his fingers from the keyboard and took out the silver badge. His body was weakening faster and it was reaching the final moment. The joints of his fingers were stiff, and he tried hard to remove the badge.

Hold it in your hand.

There was a noise on the stairs, and Polly went upstairs, but instead of going back to his room, he stood silently on the corridor railing, with his back to here.

An Zhe stood up and pushed the door open and came to Polly's side. The music stopped. Downstairs, the Simpson cage was burning brightly. Night rushed in, and a long howling came from the distant dark sky.

Polly said: "Aren't you going to stay inside?"

An Zhe shook his head, thinking about what Tang Lan said before.

"Sir," he said, "Have you understood anything?"

Polly looked at him.

"Sometimes, I feel that your ability to accept is higher than everyone else," said Polly. "You are very special. You seem to be more fragile than everyone else, and you seem to be not afraid of anything."

An Zhe lowered his eyes slightly.

He said: "Yeah."

"But I haven't gotten the final answer yet," Polly stretched out his hand to fasten the first row of buttons on Anzhe's coat, "Would you like to hear me tell a very simple story?"

An Zhe said: "Yes."

"It was a scientist's imagination a long time ago." Polly's voice was gentle in the cold wind.

"If today, you traveled through time and space and came to a year later. There, you traveled through time and space again and went back to a year ago and came here." Polly said: "Then there will be two identical people in front of me now.

of you."

An Zhe thought for a while and said, "Yeah."

"You know that one unit of matter is an atom, and there are electrons in atoms. There are no two identical leaves in the world, but all electrons are exactly the same. In this case, how can you tell that two electrons are two different individuals?"

An Zhe thought for a moment and said, "They are in different locations."

"But space is not a measure of position, and neither is time. These two things are only meaningful to four-dimensional humans. In higher dimensions, time and space are just the abscissa and ordinate on a piece of white paper, like this

." Polly took out a piece of chalk from his pocket, drew a dot on the railing in front of them, and said: "An electron moves freely in time and space, the left is behind, the right is forward, and now it crosses

Time has moved forward one second."

As he spoke, he drew a diagonal line to the lower right with his pen, marking: "After traveling through time, it is here."

"Then, it traveled through time again, walked backwards for a second, and stopped here." Draw a line with chalk to the lower left and mark it.

There are now three points and two lines on the railing. They form an acute angle that opens to the left. The two points on the left are on a vertical line. Polly drew this vertical line: "Our time is here

Seconds. What did we see at this time?"

An Zhe thought about it for a long time.

Finally, he said: "Two electrons."

"Yes, we saw two identical electrons. But they are actually one, they just appeared in two places at the same time." Polly clicked on countless star-like electrons next to them: "

Inexact estimation, our earth has 10 to the 51st power of identical electrons, making up the matter we can see. How can you prove that this is not the result of the same electron oscillating repeatedly on the time axis billions of times?

?”

"Similarly, how can you prove that the existence of the entire universe we see is not the result of one or a few elementary particles dancing in space and time?"

An Zhe frowned, he couldn't prove it.

He struggled to digest this sentence with limited knowledge.

"So my husband and I are both the same electron?"

Polly smiled gently and put his arms around An Zhe's thin shoulders, like an elder hugging an innocent young child.

"This is just one of the countless conjectures that humans have about the nature of the world. It is not the truth, or it is completely different from the truth, but it is difficult for us to verify." He said, "I only gave this example to illustrate that our bodies and minds

And the short-lived existence of will, the existence of the entire earth is, in a grander measure, smaller than an electron."

An Zhe looked into the distance. He was just a mushroom with a simple structure. He did not have the mind of a scientist, such rich knowledge and far-sighted thoughts that transcended dimensions. He could not understand such a system. He only knew that the world was truly before his eyes. He whispered

Said: "But we are all real."

After the words fell, the expression on his face suddenly went blank for a second, his brows furrowed, and his heart hurt sharply.

He clung to the railing, his body shook violently, spit out a large mouthful of blood, and fell forward.

With his arms shaking, Polly caught An Zhe's limp body and held him in his arms.

"Rum!" he shouted in the direction of the laboratory, his voice anxious.

Anzhe knew that Polly wanted to treat him again, or find the cause of his illness, using temperature, antibiotics, defibrillator... those things.

He spat out another mouthful of blood, and Polly reached out and wiped it away with his sleeve.

The blood stained the corners of the snow-white shirt sleeves red. Anzhe looked at Polly and forced a smile.

"No need." He slowly grasped Polly's arm with his fingers, breathed a few times, and said softly, "...it's really no need."

Polly grabbed him tightly: "Hold on a little longer."

"I..." An Zhe looked into his eyes, and he seemed to see the boundless sea and sky.

He is actually doing okay, he has not reached his weakest moment yet, at least he can still move and his thoughts are clear.

But he will die eventually, either today or tomorrow - he could just die like this. Polly is the best elder in the world. He regards him as his beloved child and treats him so well... At the end of his life,

He can die with such tender love, which is something that other people in this era dare not expect. But if he dies like this, Polly will accept his unexplained death. He can't find the cause of the disease.

, he was powerless. Anzhe knew that for human scientists, such unsolvable problems and unexplained truths were the deepest frustrations.

He can also die as a monster - he is not afraid that Polly will hate him, Polly has given him enough.

"I'm sorry...I'm sorry," he looked at Polly. After making that decision, he felt much more relaxed. The pain in his body was nothing, and he said again, "I'm sorry, Polly."

Polly stared at him.

"I..." An Zhe smiled. He coughed a few times and tears fell down, which were exactly the same temperature as his blood. He breathed hard and said to Poli: "I... lied to you. I wasn't...

People infected by monsters. I am originally a monster, I am not a human, I just... just ate a person's genes, I just... look like a human."

Polly seemed stunned for a second, and the next moment, his gray-blue eyes showed more gentle sadness: "No matter what you are, just hold on, okay?"

An Zhe shook his head.

"I'm not sick." He said, "My lifespan... is only so long, and it can't be changed... don't save me."

When the words fell, Polly hugged him tightly. They looked at each other and fell into a sad silence.

Compared with disease and pain, the established life span of a species is something more irresistible. It is destined to end from the moment of birth, and no one can cross that threshold, the threshold set by God - if there really is a God

.

In this speechless silence, the cold wind howled, and in the sound of the wind, Anzhe heard Polly say something.

——The moment the words fell on his ears, his heart suddenly trembled. This sentence was so familiar that he felt as if he had returned to that night three months ago, facing Lu Jie, and the wind was very strong that day.

Polly Jean said: "What's in your hand?"

Facing him, Anzhe had nothing to hide anymore, and he slowly opened his fingers.

Lying quietly in the palm of his hand was a silver badge, which was a token of the judge's identity.

Polly's eyes fell on the badge, and Anzhe swore he saw some distant sadness in those gray-blue eyes.

Then Polly Jean reached out, took out something from the pocket of her coat, and held it in the palm of her hand.

Anzhe opened his eyes slightly.

That is also a silver badge.

——Almost the same badge.

"You..." An Zhe was stunned: "Are you... the judge?"
Chapter completed!