Chapter 131
Serpent Staff Gene adopts a job ranking system from SA to F.
Level A employees are already regarded as honorary partners of the company and is often awarded to employees who have made outstanding contributions to the company.
When Si Chen first joined the laboratory after graduating from university, he wasn’t even given any rank. Later, he became an Evolutionary, joined the production department and became a Level E employee.
If one were to look only at Steps, an Evolutionary on the Fifth Step corresponds to Level B.
But because Si Chen was also Song Bai’s student, they’d made an exception and made him a Level A employee.
But in the eyes of Dr. Sheng, this matter can only be summed up in one word: unacceptable.
While Dr. Sheng was sizing up Si Chen, Si Chen was also sizing up Dr. Sheng.
Thin red lines were spread out all over Shen Yanxing’s body, like white marbling on beef. Si Chen even saw a lot of hyphae growing out of his ear canal. Dr. Sheng’s body must be these red hyphae. They used this method to directly control Shen Yanxing’s body.
The energy fluctuations coming from Dr. Sheng’s body did not exceed the upper limit of Shen Yanxing’s.
In other words, Si Chen was still facing a Fifth Step Evolutionary.
This was also the reason why he could still stand boldly in front of Dr. Sheng.
Si Chen took out the dog tag he had picked up before from his backpack. “I am here to return this. If possible, I hope you can return my companion’s body to him. If you aren’t willing, I think he probably doesn’t want his body to exist in this way.”
When saying the latter part, Si Chen’s voice had already taken on a vaguely threatening tone.
Dr. Sheng was a little angry at first, thinking that a minor employee like Si Chen would dare to threaten him, his boss. But then he thought about it. After so many years, only this kind of car has arrived at the Gene Museum. He had no choice but to endure his anger.
“Any living creature here will be assimilated by the mycelium over time. I know you want to get out but I also need some help.” Dr. Sheng said slowly, “Right now, we share a common interest. I’m just borrowing your friend’s body temporarily. You don’t have to look at me like that.”
Even through a layer of goggles, Dr. Sheng could feel the vague murderous look in Si Chen’s eyes.
And his biological instinct actually had him on guard. It meant that there was indeed something in Si Chen that could kill him.
He turned around and turned on the holographic image beside him.
The lights in the hall on the second floor automatically turned off and a circular aperture lit up next to Dr. Sheng. From bottom to top, a virtual shadow was projected.
This image was of a young, somewhat cold-looking man. He wore half-rimmed glasses. His face could be considered handsome.
“Hello to the person who opened this video. My name is Sheng Wu.” The man’s voice was calm, devoid of emotion, “If you are seeing this video, my research has probably failed. I do not know what has happened to my world. The best outcome is that it has been eliminated by evolution and has disappeared from every parallel world. The worst outcome is that it has become an out-of-control Realm Gate fragment during the high-dimensional invasion, spreading disasters to other universes.”
“Allow me to say that I hope you had encountered a red mycelium that calls itself Dr. Sheng. That is indeed what is left after my body died. But I am unsure how much of my memory and sanity it has retained… Let me think back to when this tragedy started. That was 317 years ago.”
**
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
317 sfjgr jub. Vtfcu Qe pera ugjvejafv ogbw tlr wjrafg’r vfugff qgbugjw. Lf tjv wjpbgfv lc ylbibus, tjnlcu tfjgv mbecaifrr qfbqif jgbecv tlw rjs obg wjcs wjcs sfjgr atja atf 2W mfcaegs kbeiv yf atf mfcaegs bo ylbibus. Dea atlr rtla mfcaegs cfnfg mjwf.
Ktlr sbecu raevfca ojmfv atf rjwf yifjx rlaejalbc jr jii ugjvejafr, ecjyif ab olcv j relajyif pby.
In the talent market, the surplus labor force has reduced them all into leeks ready for harvest. They were like the stock quotes on the stock exchange, so green that it caused panic in people's hearts.
After being rejected again after he’d asked HR for “a monthly salary of 15K,” Sheng Wu threw away his job resume, bought a mountain bike with the money he had saved from three years of graduate school and started traveling around the world.
“I saw the snow-capped mountains at four in the morning, the mists rolling at five and the rising sun at six… That year, I was 25 years old when I was trapped in the mountains due to heavy rain.”
It rained heavily and flooded the way down the mountain.
Sheng Wu thought that the rain would last only a day or two. He hadn’t expected it to last an entire three months. The area he was in was sparsely populated and no one knew he was in the mountains. The phone had gotten water in it and it couldn’t be turned. He had just quarreled with his family a few days ago and had blocked his parents’ numbers.
Of course, no one would be coming to his rescue.
“I quickly ran out of food. I started to dig out bird’s nests, rat dens, snake lairs and rabbit holes. But within the few kilometers around me, food was very limited and I didn’t always find something to eat. I was running out of food. To make matters worse, I had fallen from a tree while I was stealing from a bird’s nest. At that time, my vision had gone dark. I don’t know how long it took before I regained consciousness. It was still raining. I lay there for a long time before struggling to get up and start looking for food again.”
“I had to go farther and father to find food. The umbrella I had couldn’t protect me from the heavy rain. I was soaked. There could be leeches in any puddle. Sometimes I couldn’t feel the pain but when I take off my sodden clothes, I would find leeches clinging to my calves, swollen full with blood. I used a lighter to burn them one by one…”
“I couldn’t find food or clean water. I got a high fever. My wounds were infected. I had anemia. I was hallucinating and I felt like I was going to die.”
Dr. Sheng narrated very calmly but Si Chen could still hear the faint despair in his tone.
Any modern day person, thrown into the wilderness of a deserted mountain, would be lucky to survive more than a week. Sheng Wu’s ability to survive for so long proved that he wasn’t as weak as he appeared.
Just when he was ready to die, Dr. Sheng discovered that mushrooms were growing in the cave where he’d been taking shelter.
This mushroom grew on the remains of a snake, one that Sheng Wu had beaten to death with a stone. When he’d cut the snake open, parasites crawled out of fresh snake meat. At that time, Dr. Sheng had just been starting feel the pangs of starvation. He wasn’t yet desperate enough to eat that. The snake was then left to rot in a corner.
But now, an orange mushroom had grown on the rotting snake meat.
Within the holographic image, a projection of this mushroom appeared.
It had a very thin stipe and was orange-yellow overall. Its cap looked very strange, with a black dot in the middle of the orange cap; a black dot that looked like a goldfish’s eyeball.
There was also a layer of mucus on the surface of the mushroom.
Sheng Wu knew very well that most colorful mushrooms are poisonous. But he couldn’t care less about the poison. For him, at the time, being poisoned might even be a relief.
He crawled over and stuffed all the mushrooms into his mouth. It actually had a faint sweetness.
A miracle happened. After ingesting the mushroom, he fell into a coma. But when he woke up, the pain had disappeared.
It was as if Sheng Wu had never been injured. His physical condition was better than ever.
If it weren’t for the heavy rain still falling outside, Dr. Sheng might have even thought that everything had been a fantastical dream.
“Relying on this wild mushroom that kept growing continuously, I finally managed to survive until the weather cleared. I knew that this mushroom, which was practically like an elixir, would be tsunami-like sensation in the outside world. The entire biomedical world would be turned upside down.”
Sheng Wu left the mountain, taking the mushroom’s mother plant with him. He returned to modern society and began to search for this mushroom in every biological database. He discovered that it was a hitherto unknown species.
And by then, the mushroom had colonized the bathtub of his tenement room.
“I named it Serpent Staff Mushroom and it served as the original raw material for the ‘mycelium capsules’…”
Si Chen pressed the pause button at this time.
He turned his head and looked at Dr. Sheng standing to the side. “I have a question.”
“What is it?”
“Did these mushrooms really grow from snakes?” Si Chen said slowly, “What I mean is, I don’t want your prettifying your family history to cause me to lose key information.”
Dr. Sheng raised his eyebrows slightly. “Why do you ask this?”
“Intuition.” Si Chen said, “Would you believe me if I said that?”
Si Chen simply felt that a scientific research dog like Sheng Wu, who was most likely holed up in a lab all year round, wouldn’t have survived alone in the wild for so long. Especially, faced with that extreme environment.
You must know that during the time of Dr. Sheng’s narrative, their social environment had been very stable and peaceful and Sheng Wu was nothing more than an ordinary biology post-graduate.
Sheng Wu raised Shen Yanxing’s face and smiled slightly, “Yes. I was with my friend, trapped in the mountains.”
Because he had just taken control of this body, his smile looked somewhat stiff.
There were times when one needn’t get to the bottom of matters.
Si Chen pressed the play button.
Dr. Sheng’s holographic image continued on to describe his entrepreneurial experience.
He was so fascinated by this mushroom that he quickly developed a drug and applied for a patent. He founded the Serpent Staff Gene Group and after several years of operation, it finally began selling medicines all over the world.
All physical ailments could be solved with a mycelium capsule, including cancer.
There was a touch of nostalgia in Sheng Wu’s eyes. “At that time, money that other people would take several lifetimes to earn, I could earn in a single breath. But what I didn’t know yet was that all the gifts of fate came with a secret price.*”
At the age of 50, Sheng Wu woke up early one morning and found that a layer of hyphae had grown on the surface of his body.
At first he thought it was merely some white hairs and hadn’t paid much attention. Until mushrooms began to grow on his hands.
No one could explain this strange deformation on his body.
According to tests, his human genes had undergone irreversible changes!
All color drained from his face, Sheng Wu entered the laboratory and began dissecting himself.
He chopped off his deformed hand. However, not a drop of blood flowed from the sliced wrist. Only hyphae emerged one after another.
Sheng Wu hadn’t even felt much pain.
The next day, his severed hand grew back on its own. And it had even grown back younger and stronger than his original aged hand.
He locked himself in the laboratory and began to study this fungus with his team.
Over the years, Sheng Wu had kept a tight hold on the mother plant of the Serpent Staff Mushroom. The cultivation base of the Serpent Staff Mushroom was regarded as Serpent Staff Gene’s most important production base. Now, he began to use the Serpent Staff Mushroom to conduct a large number of animal experiments and develop variants.
A few more years passed.
People who had taken the mycelium capsules began developing fungi on their bodies one after another.
Paper cannot contain fire and the situation continued to ferment. The frightened patients began to demanding Serpent Staff Gene for an explanation.
The people’s goodwill towards Serpent Staff Gene, which by now had become an oligarch, crumbled. The company was unanimously criticized by everyone from all walks of life.
At this most critical moment, Dr. Sheng, who had been stayed out of the public for many years, finally delivered a response.
Dr. Sheng held a press conference that was broadcast simultaneously around the world.
What was utterly shocking was that on TV, the 62-year-old Dr. Sheng, looked like someone in his early 20s.
If not for the fact that he hadn’t married or had children, the people would have even suspected that the person who appeared was his son.
Over the years of continuously dissecting himself in the laboratory, Sheng Wu’s whole body had changed.
He had even, despite his co-researchers’ dissuasions, cut off his own head.
The next day, his headless body regrew a brand new head.
Dr. Sheng met the angry crowd in front of him with an excited smile on his face.
He opened his arms wide and announced boldly, “Friends, congratulations, for today, we welcome in the era of biology! Here is a brand new form of life! This is a great evolution of nature!”
“We are about to usher in rebirth and eternal life!”
Another crazy suspicius bitch
yeah… something so good is not happening
Si Yuan is planning the mushroom dishes they can make
Big Mushroom has a secret THEY don’t want you to know about! (It’s mushrooms.)
Wow, new life
Thank you for your translation 💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙
What’s normal about living even after your head is cut off wtf dude?
Thanks for the update 🌹