Parallel world.
Arizona.
8 PM, a Chinese restaurant.
"Drink more, you'll be going back to your country next week. No more interning at that mental asylum and taking orders from that old guy." A friend toasted Li Qing.
"Ugh! I need to go to the bathroom."
A few friends were drinking and singing, faces flushed.
Suddenly, Li Qing's phone rang.
He put down his glass and answered a call. It was from a mental patient who had been missing for two months: "I have some affairs to settle. Before I die, I have a world to entrust to you."
Li Qing: "..."
The person on the other end of the call was very familiar. It was a mental patient he had previously treated, who used to claim to be the first Zombie in the modern world. And now, he owned a world? Apparently, his condition had worsened.
"Why did you give your private number to this patient? Haven't you already quit? Do you still visit him?" a friend asked curiously.
Li Qing shrugged, "I secretly helped him a bit. After all, he's Chinese too, and he's quite pitiful, with no one to rely on. I need to see him tomorrow so I can have peace of mind when I return home."
The next morning.
Li Qing completed his final handover, drove to a small house in the suburbs of Phoenix City.
The patient was Ning Guochang, an overseas student often bullied and extorted by others at school.
A year ago back home, his parents, who worked hard to support his education, died in an accident. With all sorts of blows, he became silent, introverted, and mentally unstable.
Ning Guochang received mental treatment for some time without improvement. It actually got worse. He began having nightmares, claiming he saw another version of himself in a different space-time where a zombie crisis occurred, and he became a zombie.
He described a very typical zombie story.
A reimagining of Raccoon City from Resident Evil.
In this country of freedom, fitting the origins of many movie and novel stories, the apocalypse broke out first.
He was bitten by a zombie while saving a girl, became a zombie himself, and by continuously consuming people, gradually recovered his pre-death intelligence, transforming into a zombie with 28 spiritual control eyes, becoming the Zombie Monarch in the Phoenix City area, relentlessly attacking survivor strongholds.
I continuously counseled and treated him, always being a listener.
One day, Ning Guochang suddenly ran away, and he couldn't be found again.
The address he sent was not far.
Half an hour later, after entering the house, Li Qing found it eerie.
The entire bedroom had been transformed by Ning Guochang into something like a sterile pharmaceutical lab.
Through a large sheet of glass, Li Qing saw Ning Guochang sitting in self-isolation on the opposite side, as if visiting him in confinement.
The once simple and honest young man had become skin and bones, wearing oversized sunglasses, his exposed skin covered in fine, cracked, white paint-like texture, each movement and gesture emanating an aura of fear.
Behind him was a huge rack filled with bottled water, canned goods, and various foods, densely packed to the ceiling of the bedroom.
"How long have you been self-isolating, locking yourself up in here?"
After a while, Li Qing couldn't suppress the odd feeling in his heart and asked, "You think you're a zombie? Afraid of infecting others?"
"I know you don't believe me. Once you see this, you'll believe."
He extended the back of his hand, revealing an eerie diamond-shaped gem beneath the skin, intertwined with veins and flesh, wriggling out onto his hand.
"This is my Zombie Crystal Core."
He sat across the glass, speaking calmly, "I left because of this. I didn't want to be experimented on. It's said that the zombie virus in the other world also broke out from a neighboring state's lab."
Li Qing stared in silence for a few seconds.
Already terminally ill, does he think Raccoon City has become reality?
But what on earth is this crystal core wriggling on his skin?
Magic trick?
Li Qing couldn't discern the truth, but he immediately smiled warmly and said, "I've always believed you. Running away was the right choice. My mentor is such a fraud. I also think he conducts all sorts of experiments on patients secretly at the mental asylum. If you continued treatment there, he might indeed experiment on you!"
Li Qing threw the capitalist mentor under the bus.
This was an empathy tactic in psychology to make the patient feel like you are on his side, lowering his guard and making him feel you're one of his own.
Ning Guochang said, "In the nightmare, the Zombie Lord can control large zombies, animals, beasts, and mutated humans with just a glance and has Telekinesis, able to lift a ton of car."
"In my current state, my superpowers here are very low-level. After experiencing some mutations from space-time transition, I need to stare for over three seconds to grant control over bacteria and bestow them with intelligence. My Telekinesis can only lift a small piece of cotton."
Li Qing followed up, "That's quite a leap, isn't it? Initially controlling humans and large animals, now it's so weak you can only control some bacteria?"
Ning Guochang pointed to a small fragment of black mud wriggling on the table, "This is my current army of bacteria. It's not at the nanoscale, but definitely at the microscale, weighing 0.0023 grams."
Aren't these wriggling black mud particles magnetic sand?
Li Qing had seen many patients with severe delusions who considered themselves the protagonists of novels, unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy stories.
"Now look at this, my Telekinesis."
He actually took out a tiny piece of cotton, the size of an ant, and controlled it to float in the air, though he seemed to struggle a lot.
Li Qing remained silent for a moment.
He quickly recovered and said, "So you're saying you're the Zombie Lord now, and this sterile lab is to prevent your zombie virus from spreading outside?"
"No."
Ning Guochang shook his head, "Dr. Li, you're overthinking it. I'm not preventing the zombie virus; we high-tier zombies don't have the ability to infect anymore. We've already become another new extraordinary species. I've done experiments myself and confirmed there's no infectivity."
Li Qing immediately put on a relaxed expression and said, "And this workshop of yours is..."
Ning Guochang suddenly shivered, "I made this sterile workshop to prevent my eyes; they can control bacteria and see them very clearly, as clear as a microscope, able to zoom in and out at any time."
Suddenly, his mental stability began to falter, revealing a look of pain.
Like most psychiatric patients, Ning Guochang suddenly became emotionally explosive.
"Do you know what this microscopic superpower feels like?"
"The world for you normal people is like watching a pixelated movie; in my eyes, everything is in 4K ultra-high definition. I can clearly see the mites crawling back and forth on your face!!"
"The wall behind you looks immaculate to you, but in my eyes, it's a wall of bugs fit for a trypophobia nightmare, with mold, worms, dust mites, all forming a nauseating empire of billions."
Li Qing's mouth opened wide.
A sudden itchiness crept across his face.
Nasty mites crawled densely.
Fortunately, since he studied medicine, he wasn't afraid of such things; he's seen worse.
But theoretically, if his eyes reached the level of an electron microscope, in his vision wouldn't I be a furry humanoid covered in various microbial blankets?
It's hard to comprehend this level of visual acuity.
Perhaps it's already the eye structure of two different species, he's stepped into something eerie and mysterious.
"You know I'm trypophobic, right? I have severe germophobia!"
Sitting in the isolating sterile workshop, Ning Guochang became agitated, speaking with an anxious tone, struggling with his helplessness and immense pain:
"I started obsessively washing my hands, spraying disinfectant every day, and bathing in pure water, scrubbing until my skin wrinkled painfully!"
"To the point where I built this sterile workshop, I want to live in the cleanest world possible!"
"Even when I go out, I wear a bubble helmet and specially made protective clothing! Have you seen One Piece? I want to be a Celestial Dragon People!"
He was like a patient trapped in extreme mania, exuding a breath of madness, with endless pain deeply rooted in his twisted facial expressions.
And at this point, Li Qing merely felt it was a story of a germophobic evolved new human.
He even pondered momentarily about a sci-fi future.
Thinking from an odd angle: for cultivators in a high-definition world to see this secular realm, it would indeed induce such trypophobia, human world rife with bacteria, causing them to feel so nauseated they'd immediately retreat to cultivate in a grotto heaven sterile room, secluding themselves on an immortal mountain, never venturing into mortal realm...
This isn't about immortal martial myths but modern science.
In the future, when technology advances explosively over the centuries, new humans with such eyesight wouldn't also go mad?
Not to mention in the future.
Now even the visible mites on this blanket are gaining attention as people's lives improve, deemed disgusting.
The degree of civilization is linked to the degree of germophobia.
In the old days, ordinary people didn't care if it was dirty or not, unclean or unsanitary, wouldn't get sick after eating, considering it even as protein and nutrition.
However, the story of germophobia gradually starts turning into a ghost story.
"If it were merely about enhanced vision seeing the high-definition bacterial world, it would still be tolerable."
"But my eyes can control and grant them intelligence."
Ning Guochang suddenly showed a bitter expression, "I'm so terrified, these microorganisms have intelligence now, it's so horrifying! They develop civilizations just like our ancient apes did in the distant Earth era, building tribes."
Li Qing tried to follow his train of thought.
If it were true, microbial civilizations, so what even if they have intelligence?
Their structure is destined to be low-level organisms.
A group of low-level organisms relying on flagella, what can they do even with intelligence?
Build fires? Farm and herd? Construct machines? Develop the steam age? Enter the electrical era?
They can't.
Not even the ability to create fire.
Due to their size, even with intelligence, they can't achieve the progression of human civilization.
Intelligence, in the end, equates to no intelligence.
"I initially thought the same."
Ning Guochang bitterly smiled, "But later, I realized humans are merely tool-using monkeys, arrogantly using their understanding to judge other unknown civilizations, it's laughable."
"Did you know?"
He looked across the workshop at the tiny army of bacteria on the table,
"They don't have eyes but possess mysterious spiritual power perception, herding other unintelligent microorganisms as my subordinates, using telekinesis weaker than mine, arduously dismantling RNA structures, compiling, transcribing, building their biological robots, flagella, and shells, directly entering the era of biological herding."
"They build flagella steeds, using giant mites to build massive biohomes, forming micro-cities."
"Humans took three and a half billion years to evolve from ocean microorganisms to today, whereas they are rapidly undergoing this process again."
"These unicellular organisms are undergoing self-evolution!"
Watching this patient painfully confess, Li Qing finally grasped what he was talking about.
This patient saw a terrifying history of life's evolution.
When the microorganisms invisible to the naked eye gained human-like intelligence, their civilization far surpassed our modern human civilization.
They, by nature, are a group of great creators in the microscopic world.