357: Chapter 357: Contact was made.

The cordon around the aircraft wreckage had not yet been removed. In the distance, the transport vehicle carrying Zhang Xiaodong had completed its initial disinfection, and the doors were reopened to transfer him to a specially modified large transport plane.

Lu Jianchuan and Shen Mingyuan stood on the sand, watching as that azure giant snake slowly slithered out of the incubator. Its four white wings were folded against its sides, shimmering with a soft pearlescent glow in the sunlight.

It slithered toward the reentry capsule, circling the pile of charred wreckage. Its head was held high, its amber vertical pupils scanning every corner before it slithered back.

It stopped in front of Shen Mingyuan and looked at him.

Shen Mingyuan crouched down to meet its gaze. After a few seconds, he nodded.

"It's fine now," he said. "This counts as a success; I'll give it to you as usual."

There was no ripple in the green snake's vertical pupils, but its head nodded slightly. Then it turned and unhurriedly slithered back into the incubator, its four wings tucking tighter as its entire body coiled inside, leaving only its head exposed.

Shen Mingyuan stood up and nodded to the nearby staff. The incubator's lid was closed and carried back into the cabin.

When the transport plane took off, the desert was left behind, leaving nothing but endless yellow-brown terrain outside the porthole. The cabin was divided into two areas: the front was the seating area, while the rear had been temporarily converted into a simple isolation chamber—a transparent isolation cover, an independent ventilation System, and several personnel in hazmat suits standing guard.

Zhang Xiaodong lay inside the isolation cover, dressed in a clean set of hospital scrubs. His face had been wiped clean of blood, revealing a pale countenance marked by obvious exhaustion and terror.

About forty minutes into the flight, he woke up.

At first, he blinked blankly, then suddenly propped himself up. His gaze swept across the transparent isolation cover and the figures in hazmat suits, finally landing on Golden Bone, who stood outside the cover.

"Don't get excited." Golden Bone raised a hand, signaling him to stay calm. "You're safe now. I'm an official from GUPA."

Zhang Xiaodong's chest heaved violently as he stared at Golden Bone for several seconds before slowly lying back down, gasping for air.

"The space station..." he began, his voice so raspy it was almost inaudible. "Up there..."

Golden Bone took a step forward and stood beside the isolation cover.

"I need you to tell me exactly what happened on the space station. Start from the beginning; there's no rush."

Zhang Xiaodong remained silent for a long time.

His gaze was unfocused, staring at the transparent ceiling of the isolation cover as if looking at something far away. Then he began to speak, his voice low and halting, yet every word was clear.

It started with those two.

Zhou Heng and his girlfriend. During the handover, Chen Yuan had already warned them that the special sample area was not to be entered lightly; they needed to check the records and operate under the supervision of experienced personnel. Zhou Heng wouldn't listen. He thought Chen Yuan was intentionally making things difficult for him, that those rules were just for show, and that since he'd come up, he was the boss.

He took his girlfriend into the isolation zone.

Zhang Xiaodong didn't know the specifics of what they did. He only knew that when the alarm went off, the storage unit containing the unknown life form had already been manually opened.

That thing woke up.

It wasn't an ordinary bug. It was sentient. The first thing it did after leaving the storage unit wasn't to flee, but to parasitize.

It burrowed into Zhou Heng's body.

Zhou Heng's body didn't last three seconds. He lost control on the spot and frantically attacked everything around him—his girlfriend was the first to fall, killed by his own hands. Then came the laboratory equipment, the virus containers, and the chaos of the entire isolation zone.

By the time Zhang Xiaodong and Chen Yuan arrived, the woman was already dead. Zhou Heng was smashing the last virus storage cabinet.

They tried to control him. Locking doors, isolating him, using any weapon they could find—not to kill him, but to trap him. Zhou Heng's body was completely controlled by that thing, but his speed, strength, and reactions weren't that strong. Zhang Xiaodong later thought it might be because Zhou Heng hadn't undergone rigorous training; his physical body was too weak for that thing to exert its true power.

So they temporarily locked him in the isolation zone.

But just then, that thing discovered Chen Yuan.

It came out of Zhou Heng's body—to this day, Zhang Xiaodong doesn't know how it did it, but it did. It lunged at Chen Yuan and, before Chen Yuan could react, burrowed into his body.

Chen Yuan was different. He had undergone the most rigorous training; his physical fitness and willpower were top-tier. The moment that thing entered his body, he didn't immediately lose consciousness. He stood there, trembling all over, his expression contorted, but his eyes—his eyes were still his own.

He stared at Zhang Xiaodong and, with the last of his strength, pushed him toward the escape pod.

"Go," he said. Just that one word.

Zhang Xiaodong was pushed into the escape pod. Before the hatch closed, he saw Chen Yuan turn around, his back to him, and walk toward the isolation zone. His steps were unsteady, but he kept walking. His silhouette disappeared at the end of the corridor the moment the hatch shut.

Zhang Xiaodong didn't know what happened after that.

The escape pod was ejected, and the violent vibration caused him to hit the bulkhead, after which he lost consciousness. When he woke up again, he was here.

The cabin remained silent for a long time.

Golden Bone stood by the isolation cover, motionless. Lu Jianchuan and Shen Mingyuan sat in seats a few meters away, also silent.

Zhang Xiaodong's gaze returned from the transparent ceiling and landed on Golden Bone's face.

"What about him?"

Golden Bone was silent for a few seconds.

"We will try our best to contact the space station," he said. "But given the current situation, you should be prepared for the worst."

Zhang Xiaodong didn't say anything else.

He lay there, staring at the top of the cabin with hollow eyes. A thin layer of mist, his breath, formed on the transparent panel of the isolation cover.

By the time the plane landed, it was already dark.

Below was a cluster of buildings neatly segmented by lights—runways, hangars, a control tower, and over a dozen white domed structures of various sizes that looked like giant eggs half-buried in the sand under the night sky. This was the Northwest Aerospace Base, two hundred kilometers from the nearest town, surrounded by nothing but gobi and desert.

The transport plane taxied into a large hangar. As the hatch opened, a medical team that had been waiting on the ground rushed up, carrying Zhang Xiaodong and the transparent isolation cover away. Golden Bone stood at the hatch, watching them disappear through a side door of the hangar, then turned and beckoned to Lu Jianchuan and Shen Mingyuan.

"Follow me."

The three of them walked through the hangar and into a downward-sloping corridor. The walls on both sides were thick concrete, with a sealed door every few meters. At the end of the corridor was a brightly lit command hall where over a dozen people sat at their stations, facing dense arrays of screens and instruments. On the giant display at the front was a slowly rotating model of the space station, flanked by a string of jumping numbers—signal strength, altitude, orbital parameters.

A middle-aged man in a dark blue uniform came forward to meet them.

"Golden Bone." He reached out for a brief handshake, then looked at Lu Jianchuan and Shen Mingyuan. "These two are..."

"People I brought," Golden Bone didn't explain much. "Have you made contact?"

The middle-aged man shook his head.

"We've been trying ever since you sent back the message. The signal is intermittent, but we haven't established stable communication. The space station's attitude control System seems to have malfunctioned; the orbit is slowly decaying, but it's still within controllable limits."

He paused, lowering his voice.

"What that man you brought back said... is it true? Can that thing really parasitize?"

Golden Bone nodded.

The command hall fell silent for two seconds, save for the hum of machinery.

Just then, a young technician in the corner wearing headphones suddenly stood up.

"Report! The space station has responded! Establishing video connection!"

The entire hall fell silent instantly.

Everyone—Golden Bone, the middle-aged man, Lu Jianchuan, Shen Mingyuan, and the operating technicians—turned their gazes in unison toward the giant display.

"How is that possible?" the middle-aged man blurted out, his voice low but audible to everyone. "According to the news brought back, he should have been parasitized."

No one responded.

The young technician's fingers flew across the keyboard, his voice trembling with tension: "Signal... signal confirmed, it's coming from the space station. Synchronizing video, displaying in ten seconds."

The space station model on the display disappeared, replaced by a gray buffering screen.

"Five seconds."

"Four seconds."

"Three seconds."

"Two seconds."

"One second—"

The screen lit up.

It was Chen Yuan.

He sat in front of the camera, the background showing the familiar cabin environment with various equipment and pipelines. But he looked... off.

His face was pale, an unnatural pallor. There were fine beads of sweat on his forehead, his eyes were bloodshot, and his lips were dry and peeling.

He leaned against the bulkhead, breathing heavily, as if he were running a fever or had just recovered from a serious illness.

His eyes—those eyes looked at the camera with clarity; it was Chen Yuan's own gaze, without the hollow or manic look common in those who were parasitized.