Chapter 219: The Undying

Equipment Test Facility, underground six floors, monitoring room.

Four middle-aged men in white coats had ashen faces, their eyes hollow as they stared at the monitor screens.

Of the three hundred monitor screens, only a small portion lit up, while the others flickered with gray garbled code.

The red alarm light in the monitoring room flashed, and the overhead lighting was also turned off.

"Warning--Warning--"

A mechanical sound rang out.

No one paid attention to the piercing alarm; it had practically become a habit.

"Director Zhang, he's getting closer..."

The unshaven, disheveled-haired man looked weakly at the screen before him, his eye sockets sunken.

On the screen, a man in military uniform with a shaved head stood before a safety door.

Zhang Hai weakly propped himself up, staggered to his feet and looked:

"How many safety doors is this?"

"Can we calculate the time of his breakthrough..."

The disheveled-haired researcher remained silent for a moment before uttering the conclusion:

"1 hour, 12 minutes, 44 seconds."

"Assuming he has no other means."

"Bang."

Zhang Hai angrily pounded the desk, but had little strength.

"Damn it!"

"Why can he become deputy director again!"

Having said that, Zhang Hai despairingly clutched his head and lay prone on the monitoring console; the three beside him wanted to comfort him but could find no words.

A brief silence fell, breathing heavy.

A slightly younger researcher opened his mouth, hesitating before asking:

"Can't we continue using the fire control system inside the passage?"

"He is still seven safety doors away from the lab core; aren't these seven passages equipped with a large amount of weaponry?"

"It's meaningless..."

The disheveled-haired researcher took off his glasses, fingers digging into his messy hair like a bird's nest:

"You've been in the rear all along, so you don't know."

"We've tried every means to kill him, but it's all been pointless."

"At first firearms could stop him, but later on..."

"Wounds from gunfire healed quickly."

"Even under continuous machine-gun fire, his healing speed grew faster and faster."

"Even as a bullet just pierced his body, the wound vanished instantly..."

The young researcher heard this, stunned, and quickly spoke up:

"What about laser weapons? Infrasound, ultrasound, even flame-spray devices?!"

"I've observed him closely; what he shows is clearly still a flesh-and-blood body!"

"I refuse to believe he could survive thousands of degrees of heat, or being shaken to pieces!"

The glasses-off researcher gave a bitter smile, weakly looking at him:

"Do you think we haven't tried?"

"Laser weapons had no effect on him; even in the laser corridor, when we sliced him into 720 chunks of meat, he still regenerated."

"And it was Director Zhang who first proposed using sonic weapons, hoping to shatter him."

"But despite our continuous four hours of alternating infrasound and ultrasound, he could still return to his original state."

"In the end, he simply ignored the sonic attacks."

"We strongly suspect he has adjusted his bodily structure to match the frequency of the sonic weapons."

(Astonished, speechless.)

The young researcher swallowed hard, instinctively unwilling to accept, and asked:

"What about... the liquid flame injector? Thermite bombs?!"

"At over six thousand degrees, even steel melts and vaporizes easily!"

"Flesh and blood could leave no trace under thermite!"

Zhang Hai, slumped on the monitoring console, gave a bitter smile, his voice hoarse:

"What you say is correct."

"Not to mention flesh and blood—even alloys would evaporate and break their chained structure at such heat."

"In fact, it worked well; we really did destroy his body, leaving him no time to recover."

"But..."

Zhang Hai, out of the corner of his eye, saw the soldier in the monitor performing facial and iris recognition to unlock.

He couldn't help but shudder all over.

"But he has been reborn again."

"He has been reborn using the deputy director's corpse..."

"He is simply an unkillable monster!"

Zhang Hai looked at the monitor, at the face of a colleague he had worked with for years.

His eyes were bloodshot, his spirit nearly collapsing.

They had known each other for over thirty years, almost able to be called bosom friends, not brothers but even closer than brothers.

Watching that monster brutally slaughter while pressing its face against his, Zhang Hai felt a nameless rage well up inside him.

He took a deep breath.

He slumped weakly into the chair and slowly spoke:

"Notify the remaining researchers and staff."

"The base will initiate the self-destruct procedure in 1 hour and 10 minutes."

"Write your last will..."

"No, just record a final video instead."

"Then send it out later."

"Director!!"

The three remaining people in the monitoring room shouted in panic, trembling all over:

"Director, must we really go this far?!"

"We still have over seventy people!"

"Let's try again! Think of another way!"

"Weren't we able to contact other military regions via the channel before? They can't help, but we can still reach a higher level!"

"If you send another message, you'll be drained dry, so I'll go, and let Xiao Teng come. The two of us will send it!"

Out of survival instinct, the remaining three could not accept the director's arrangement.

The self-destruct procedure is the last resort to ensure the test facility's information is not leaked.

On the ninth underground level, the test facility had been installed with a lightweight tactical nuclear bomb.

Once the self-destruct procedure is activated, everything within a one-kilometer radius will be instantly destroyed.

And as the detonation point, the research institute will, in an instant, under high-energy radiation and ultra-high-temperature explosion, be reduced to basic matter, retaining only its atomic structure.

Zhang Hai gave a grim smile as he looked around at everyone, his eyes dim:

"There's nothing we can do..."

"I have already had someone contact the higher-ups."

"The order to activate the self-destruct procedure came from them."

"The other few research institutes that managed to make contact also have no alternative."

"Even under their judgment..."

"The monster inside our research institute very likely possesses extraordinarily strong adaptability, evolution, and regenerative traits."

"If we continue to try to stop him with various weapons, that would merely accelerate his evolution."

"Once he adapts to any extreme condition, there will truly be no means left to kill him."

"Moreover, we cannot escape from here."

"The higher-ups, including the advanced research institutes, share the same opinion: the monster must absolutely not be released."

"We cannot guarantee that while fleeing, we won't carry fragments of this monster on our bodies, or worse, become possessed by it."

Some of the younger researchers, unable to control their sanity, began to cry with trembling voices:

"Director, even those major research institutes, and even the most mysterious Huaxia Safety Department, have no solution?!"

"Didn't they claim to have studied all kinds of extreme phenomena, even supernatural occurrences, long before the apocalypse?!"

Zhang Hai shook his head regretfully.

He dared not tell everyone the truth.

If those major research institutes, and even the Huaxia Safety Department, were willing to help them wholeheartedly.

Perhaps there would still be hope.

But the private chat channel made the other side's stance very clear.

Their crisis is indeed terrible, but in the recent reported incidents it is insignificant.

Other departments responsible for such incidents no longer have the energy to help them.

The backlog of supernatural incidents, memes, special events, extreme disasters, mutants, and so on has piled up like a mountain.

Therefore, the other side's meaning is very clear.

We are powerless; please rely on yourselves.

Compared to your problems, the horror we face is even more thorny.

So.

For the Huaxia war zone, please sacrifice yourselves.

As a half-soldier, Zhang Hai had no choice but to obey the order.

Just...

A flicker of fear flashed in his eyes.

What if even the nuclear bomb cannot destroy "him"?