Chapter 644: How Frightening

As he gradually relaxed, Old Joe felt as if new sparks were leaping among his logic chips—a relaxed and pleasant neural impulse spreading through his body, the drowsy whispers like warmth from the border of half-sleep and half-wake. He felt he had some new inspirations and ideas, some new… processing plans and targets.

It seemed he had already forgotten the damage to this body, forgotten about repairs.

Old Joe’s vigilance was gradually worn away in this comfort that felt like sinking into sleep, and then after a while, in his half-asleep state, he suddenly heard some sounds.

Rustling noises came from across the room, and a figure swayed in front of his eyes.

Old Joe forced his eyelids open—his living metal face now had something like blood vessel bulges, and a membrane-like layer of skin covered the surface of his eye monitors, blurring his vision.

A figure with golden hair cascading down, wearing a white long dress, slowly walked between the display cases and biomass storage tanks. The spinal column trophies hanging from the ceiling clattered together like wind chimes, swaying and bumping behind her.

She turned to look at Old Joe. Her long dress still seemed stained with splashes of blood from the last surgery.

“Luo…”

A hoarse syllable squeezed out of Old Joe’s throat. He half-reclined on the sofa, his chest rising and falling rapidly, with a hissing airflow sound from his trachea.

“Old Joe, long time no see,” the golden-haired, white-dressed figure in his vision spoke, but her voice drilled directly into his mind. “Your taste is still as bad as before…”

“The biggest mistake I ever made was letting you leave the lab alive…” Old Joe muttered as if in a dream. He felt he should get up, but his body was as weak as if he had drunk cheap alcohol. The entire room in his vision seemed to be soaking in a layer of blood-red. The fluids in the containers began to slowly writhe under that red filter, and the things inside all came to life one by one. “I should have corrected that earlier… cough, cough, cough…”

He coughed violently. The trachea and lungs forcibly generated within his steel body were merging with the surrounding machinery into some bizarre co-existing structure. He vaguely felt something was wrong with his body, but couldn’t pinpoint it at the moment. After glancing blurrily at the woman in white a few more times, he frowned and mumbled, “Wait, that’s not right. How are you here?”

“I’ve been searching for this base all these years,” “Luo” seemed not to hear him, instead looking up to survey the surroundings. “You stuffed me into a container and sent me as a gift to Ursula’s lab, but until the day she died, Ursula refused to reveal where the original ‘shipping point’ was… You hid yourself too well. Even the best hiding rat I’ve ever seen couldn’t compete.”

Old Joe shook his head hard, as if trying to dispel the drowsy feeling in his mind. He struggled to think with his remaining rationality, trying to find what was wrong with his body and the surrounding environment—as for why Luo was here, he had no time to think about it.

“Traitors, traitors, all of you are traitors… Not a single one of you is reliable. Those with flesh, those without, those who breathe, those who don’t…”

He stood up unsteadily from the sofa, but the floor felt like soft fat beneath his feet. He nearly fell when his foot slipped. He saw “Luo” walking toward him, but halfway through, her face suddenly changed to another face—that of another “specimen” who had died in his lab long ago, and he had even forgotten her name—

“Are you leaving? Where are you going? Don’t leave me on the operating table… I can still be useful…”

The next moment, the figure changed again. This time it had no human form at all, only a mass of chaotic limbs and bones, swelling and shrinking, crawling on the ground. Faces turned out from within, wailing and begging for mercy, crying and howling:

“Have mercy! Let us go back, please—”

Old Joe waved his hand forcefully, and the shadows dissipated from his vision. Reason briefly broke through the blockade at this moment, as if he suddenly understood: “No, this is an illusion… this, and these, are useless, long dead…”

He jerked his head up. Tiny currents sparked inside his logic chips. The brief return of rationality alerted him to something. The next second, he suddenly raised his hand and grabbed his own face.

With a ripping sound, Old Joe tore a bloody piece of skin from his living metal face. The unfamiliar sharp pain further sobered him. Through the blood blurring his eyes, he saw the room’s scenery changing constantly—

Pulsing blood vessels and nerves grew on the silver-white metal walls, then instantly returned to normal; the organ specimens in the storage tanks regained their color, and sliced hearts began to beat as if revived; the limbs in the display cases twitched, pounding wildly against their surroundings like they had come to life.

Sometimes grotesque and horrifying, sometimes back to normal, like a distorted, inverted nightmare spreading endlessly at the edge of sanity.

“No, it’s contamination… I’ve been contaminated by something…” Old Joe struggled unsteadily, mumbling. Oil mixed with blood foam dripped from the corner of his mouth. “Psionics… I need a psionic…”

A strange noise came from within his steel body. While still lucid, he called out to the psionics stationed in the base, but only hollow echoes answered him. The environment around him kept shifting between nightmare and reality, yet no one rushed in to help their master.

Old Joe seemed to sense something. Hastily, he reached for his chest.

With a terrible cracking sound, he directly pried open a steel plate on his chest with his fingers and pulled out a bundle of “cables.”

There had originally been an encrypted communication module there, specially used to connect to the base’s internal lines.

But now those cables had become blood vessels and nerves. Amid the randomly growing flesh, only a single eye full of fear was rolling around wildly.

And deeper in his chest cavity, a heart mixed with flesh, bolts, cables, and metal tubes was thumping.

“Blood! I’m bleeding!”

A thin, high-pitched scream actually escaped the throat of this bulky steel giant. A kind of “fear” that seemed not to have been felt for centuries finally crashed into his mind. The fragile feeling of a flesh-and-blood body wrapped around his rationality like a suffocating net. He staggered back a couple of steps, not daring to look again at the beating heart in his chest, instead frantically fumbling at himself.

An emergency call device, a spare repair kit, a living metal storage tank—anything, anything to fix this body, or to get those idiots guarding outside to come in and save him!

Suddenly, Old Joe froze.

A strange object fell from some hidden pocket on his body to the floor—

It was a palm-sized piece of cardboard, painted with a suspicious red “pigment” in the shape of a triangular emblem, surrounded by seemingly meaningless runes.

What was this? Why was it on him?

The flame of reason flickered, and Old Joe felt his mind growing drowsy again. He recalled every detail, vaguely realizing that the only possible “window” for this thing to land on him was during the chaos when that “giant” had forced him out of the walker.

In an instant, he became alert. This thing was wrong—he must not touch it!

His body slowly bent down, carefully picking up the piece of cardboard as if handling a sacred object.

Stay away from it! Throw it far away!

He held the cardboard up in the air. On his half-biological, half-mechanical face, a trace of obsession and reverence appeared.

Shred it! Shred it! Shred—

A warm current representing vitality surged through his arm. The red emblem on the cardboard faintly glowed. Countless tiny red lines, like blood vessels, emerged from the edge of the card, grew rapidly in the air, and outlined the shape of a door.

The heart mixed with metal and flesh leaped out of Old Joe’s chest, bounced excitedly on the floor, let out tiny, shrill cheers in front of the door, and then stopped beating.

Old Joe slowly stepped back half a pace. His heavy body collapsed onto the sofa. He looked up at the door, and a strange smile gradually appeared on his face.

“Ah, beautiful…”

And then the door opened.

A small black figure flew out of the door like a cannonball, her feet together, slamming solidly into that steel shell’s face with a *clang*, kicking his head ninety degrees backward on the spot.

Then Aline jumped to the ground, patted her skirt, looked up rather politely, and said, “Thanks for the compliment.”

Next, Huli walked out, followed by Luna and Yu Sheng.

Finally came Luo, wearing a silver-white long dress, golden hair draping over her shoulders.

“Tie him up, tie him up quick. Don’t let him have a deathbed surge and jump up again,” Yu Sheng ordered as soon as he entered. “Luna, guard the door. Sweep the surroundings with radar and see what’s around. Huli, go help Aline…”

Huli let out an “eh” and stepped forward to press down on that still-twitching steel shell, while Aline quickly summoned black threads, lacing them up and down to bind Old Joe tightly. Luna was already at the door. Luo was the last to walk out of the doorway, still seeming a bit dazed—she stood blankly in the center of the room, her gaze sweeping the surroundings, a look of trance on her face.

Only when the new boss’s voice came from beside her was she startled out of that trance.

“Wow, that was really tough, we managed to coax and force him back to his nest… lucky the second half went smoothly,” Yu Sheng exclaimed beside Luo. He breathed a sigh of relief now that he saw Aline had that “iron lump” tied up, then turned to look around.

Jars, lockers, ceiling hangings—a dazzling array, abundant variety.

“…Holy crap!” Yu Sheng sucked in a breath of cold air on the spot and stepped back half a pace. “How frightening!”