Chapter 618

"You mean, laser surgery?"

"@￥%*#！%......"

Luján answered with a few incomprehensible syllables and walked away quietly.

"Black rectangle? That giant tombstone can still exert this kind of influence on the world?"

"3125 started making trouble?"

"Something's wrong, something's very wrong; the world is starting to get weird, and Adam's reaction is also wrong..."

"No, it's not the tombstone; it's the anomalous entity that exterminated that ancient civilization and turned their names into rectangles! 3125 has started to become active!"

"Is this what it feels like to watch the world become unfamiliar bit by bit..."

The auditorium opened, and the house was full.

As usual, the symphony orchestra waited in place until all the equipment used to assist the performance was fully activated.

Today, this sense of anxiety was particularly strong, as if an invisible hand had tightly grabbed him, and an unusual impulse made him want to run away.

"That's right," he thought to himself, "I can ruin my career with my own hands at any time."

Confirmed, he thought. I can destroy my career right now, right now. .

As his thoughts flew, he even imagined himself packing up quickly, rushing to the stage exit; the taxi that brought him might still be stuck on the road.

But he soon pushed this thought back; this was just a childish fantasy.

The long tour had come to an end, and only this performance remained to draw a period.

Finally, the curtain opened, and Adam took his place under the spotlight.

Tonight's opening piece was a work by Shostakovich; the first movement was like a quiet, lingering, and slightly sorrowful nocturne.

Adam was in excellent condition tonight, devoting himself entirely to the performance.

As time passed, the melody became intense, and even wild.

And just at this moment, something different happened; the atmosphere of the entire venue changed abruptly, and the air seemed to become hot, as if someone had turned off the air conditioning.

Adam didn't care at first, but the melody behind him began to weaken, and the conductor's movements stopped.

In confusion, Adam continued to play for a second or two.

However, soon, he realized something was abnormal; a change that only he couldn't perceive, but which was seen by everyone, was happening.

He lifted his gaze from the strings and caught a glimpse of Luján staring at him intently.

In fact, every musician in the orchestra was looking at him with the same cold, irrepressible expression of anger.

Adam blinked, and then his pupils dilated sharply.

The entire orchestra, all seventy people, had been replaced by a pink-brown mass of flesh from another world with a distorted shape.

Every place that used to be a head had become a thick protrusion, covered with dull eyeballs and soft cracks, and various disgusting and mixed-colored fungi grew on the brims of their hats.

They were draped in black and white cloth, covering their mottled, irregular bodies.

Through strange tailoring, they either covered or highlighted their bodies, which were full of spots and lacked any consistency.

Adam stood up in extreme fear, stumbled a few steps, and almost fell off the front of the stage.

His stomach cramped, and a strong desire to vomit hit his brain, but a crazy corner of his heart was still warning him:

"Wait."

"Nothing has changed, right?"

"Humans were originally like this, weren't they?"

"What happened? Is there a problem?"

No, it's not like this... something is wrong... humans are not like this...

In a trance, Adam came to his senses and witnessed the "truth" once again, this crazy scene that looked like a ritual site for the Great Old Ones' kin.

In terror, he tried to find half a person who could still be called "normal" and fit his consistent cognition of "human."

But sitting in the auditorium were the same disgusting masses of flesh, without exception, no one survived.

They were also replaced.

Compared to this terrible fact, there was an even worse problem waiting for him—they knew he hadn't been replaced.

When a person, a person without any 3.0 transcendent power, refreshes in the nest of man-eating monsters, what will his end be?

Run!

Run!

The desire to survive awakened Adam's mind, making him stop trying to figure out whether the world had broken down, whether his eyes had a problem, or whether he was the real lunatic.

Adam hugged his violin tightly, stumbled across the stage, crossed the conductor, and ran wildly toward the side wing.

At this moment, the musicians stood up from their seats one after another, letting their instruments fall to the ground, making noisy and messy termination notes.

The conductor took the lead, and the other musicians followed.

When Adam arrived at the side wing, two backstage staff were already waiting there; they had that calm and angry expression, with terrifying, man-eating, strange giant mouths open.

No way out! No way to escape!

Adam stopped, trying to turn around and run back to the main hall, intending to escape through the door where the audience entered.

But as soon as he turned around, his heart almost stopped beating in extreme fear.

Luján, or the upright two-legged monster that used to be Luján, was walking toward him.

Adam instinctively raised his violin, as if it were a sharp sword or an indestructible shield.

However, the monster easily snatched the instrument, threw it on the ground, raised the part that used to be a foot, and stepped on the neck of the violin, breaking it as easily as destroying a matchbox.

Adam backed away, but bumped into the flesh that should have been backstage staff; they tried to grab Adam's arms.

He struggled to get rid of the entanglement, struggled out with difficulty, plunged into the backstage corridor, and then ran for his life.

"Huh? The anti-memetic entity is also contagious?"

Herta had to admit that even as powerful as she was, she was still scared the moment she saw those non-human entities.

With these monsters as a contrast, the pile of alien life forms Ruan Mei tinkered with in the space station suddenly became quite pleasing to the eye.

But then, a question arose in Herta's mind.

"Are the aesthetics of supreme divinities so weird? As incarnations of pure concepts, shouldn't their creations be full of mathematical beauty?"

From this perspective, these flesh monsters didn't follow the sacred "five" at all; they didn't have five hands, five feet, five eyes, five mouths, five faces...

"So, why can the anti-memetic entity do this? Why can He infect creatures that have never touched Him or known Him?"

What's even more headache-inducing is that the "Fifth Starfish" is still alive...

Herta felt it was necessary to discuss with others to see if research in the anti-memetic field could be carried out, or to request the Foundation's assistance through diplomatic channels.

"Wait, don't I have a ready-made external aid..."

Herta leaned back slowly, raised her hand and tapped a few times on the virtual light screen, called up the chat box with Bai Bai Xuan, recorded a few photos full of aesthetic beauty, and then listed a few questions about anti-memetics.

Before long, Bai Bai Xuan's reply came.

Herta was excited, and just as she was about to switch into research Protection Protection Mode, she saw that what Bai Bai Xuan sent was a photo.

The photo was of a place like ruins, with huge stone pillars standing high, and the seawater on both sides showing an anti-gravity state.

[Bai Bai Xuan: Just preparing to catch the "Lord Ravager" Phantylia, don't be in a hurry.]

[Bai Bai Xuan has gone offline]

19:00.

Concert hall, fourth floor.

Run, run, no goal, only running can survive.

"Hoo—hoo—hoo—"

Adam had never hated his physical fitness as much as he did today.

Musicians are decent people in the traditional sense; if their parents lived in poverty, their children, even if they had musical talent, could not be discovered in time, thus missing the golden age of training.

In other words, from the day he could remember, his body and his soul were shaped in the form of a musician, without the need for heavy physical labor, and without a connection to heart-pounding chase scenes.

If Adam were made to sit on a folding chair and play the violin for an afternoon, he would complain at most a sentence or two about back pain.

But if he were made to sprint, to cross-country run, to be chased by a group of monsters, to push past obstacles and keep running, then he would suspect that someone wanted the old gentleman's life.

There was no time to feel sad for the broken violin; Adam escaped to the fourth floor.