In the past, every time Ning Zhe's illness struck, waking up afterward always brought a wave of intense pain, not just his strength drained completely, but every inch of skin, flesh, and bone aching at once.
But this time, waking up, Ning Zhe felt no discomfort at all.
Lying on the kang, he caught sight of that conspicuous chest in Su Fei's house by the glow of the oil lamp and tried to sit up, but found he had no strength left in his body at all.
Looking around, he realized he was bare-chested, his wounds bandaged, a needle taped into his arm connected to a rubber tube fitted with a one-way valve. The other end ran up to a plastic bottle hanging on the wall, a pale green fluid dripping steadily into a drip chamber before flowing into his body.
Just as Ning Zhe looked around in confusion, Su Fei lifted the door flap and stepped into the room. Seeing Ning Zhe watching him, he smiled. "You're awake."
"Why am I in your house?" Ning Zhe eyed Su Fei warily, then glanced at the needle in his own arm. "What is this?"
"I mean you no harm. I just happened to be the one who saved you, that's all." Su Fei walked over and sat down on a nearby stool, flicking the rubber tube lightly to send a small air bubble drifting upward. "As for this, it's called an IV drip, a fairly common medical technique, just rare to see in the refugee zone. The reason you can't move right now is that the fluid contains a mild sedative, which is temporarily keeping your body from responding. Once your body finishes absorbing it, you'll gradually get your strength back. Should take about half an hour."
"You studied medicine?" A flicker of surprise crossed Ning Zhe's eyes at this.
He'd actually heard the term "IV drip" once before, from Old Man Lin, but only ever in passing. In this age, medicine was a scarce resource, especially in the poverty-stricken refugee zone, where the only way to deal with injury or illness was to grit your teeth and endure it. Only a lucky few could afford even the most basic medication, and whatever illness that medicine couldn't cure was, out here, a death sentence.
"I'm not a doctor, and I don't know the first thing about medicine." Su Fei looked at Ning Zhe, his expression calm. "What I injected into you isn't medicine at all. It's a biological compound, the latest product developed by the Oxygen Company. It repairs damaged cells and neurons in the body."
Oxygen Company. Biological compound. Cells. Neurons.
A string of half-familiar, half-baffling terms reached Ning Zhe's ears. He turned his head, meeting Su Fei's eyes. "Since you knew what to give me, does that mean you also know what illness I have?"
"To be precise, you don't have an illness at all. What your body's going through is more accurately described as a genetic mutation. The reason you black out during these episodes is likely because your body can't handle the sheer energy released by rapid cell division, so your brain issues a shutdown command, to keep you from dying under that much strain, or from your body's systems collapsing entirely. It's a survival instinct, a stress response." Su Fei gave a slight shake of his head, his tone matter-of-fact. "Since you call it an illness, I take it you can't control this power of yours, correct?"
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"I've never once thought of it as a power. It's never brought me anything but suffering." Ning Zhe only half-followed what Su Fei was saying, and stayed on high alert regardless.
"Your condition doesn't look like something you were born with. If it were, your body wouldn't reject it this violently. Did something specific happen to you?" Su Fei asked, seemingly offhand.
"I told you, it's just an illness. As for this power you keep talking about, I've never felt anything like that, only endless suffering." Ning Zhe suddenly remembered what Lin Xun had told him about the slaughter of the bandits, but the caution ingrained in him made him guard that secret closely, and he said nothing of the truth to Su Fei, even though, by all appearances, Su Fei had just saved his life.
"True enough, a genetic mutation sits at two extremes. It might grant someone great power, or it might just as easily be a fatal illness... Lately, people inside the city have been hunting down Mutant Seeds aggressively. Whether or not you actually have any ability, keep a low profile regardless, and be careful not to bring trouble down on yourself. Just yesterday, an entire refugee village was wiped out because of this." Su Fei, sensing Ning Zhe's guardedness, changed the subject on his own.
"Mutant Seed?" Ning Zhe suddenly recalled what Lin Xun had told him about the village massacre, and the refugee bound to the Hedgehog car and taken into the city. He narrowed his eyes slightly. "What is that?"
"These days, radiation levels across the Federation are already twenty times what they were in the old world, and the lands beyond the Federation's borders run even higher. Even though most of us seem outwardly unchanged, living under this kind of radiation for so long causes changes in the human body, one way or another. When a living organism is exposed to radiation, its DNA gets damaged, which can produce changes in physical form, and even affect the genes passed down to offspring.
In most cases, this damage kills off the genes entirely, triggering cancers, leukemia, and the like. But some organisms survive it, and pass the radiation-resistant genes on to their offspring. Since everyone resists radiation differently, though, the genes passed down differ from person to person as well. As these descendants keep reproducing, the sudden, unstable genes inside them keep getting rewritten further, and changes appear in hair color, bone structure, glandular function, even the body's own magnetic field, across generations.
When a cell divides, the DNA inside its nucleus copies itself first, and the new cell has to manufacture proteins according to that DNA's instructions in order to carry out its function. If the DNA's been affected by radiation, the newly produced proteins change too, taking on different functions. Whether this counts as evolution or mutation, there's no consensus on that yet." Su Fei paused for a moment. "Given all this, the human genetic chain has grown incredibly complex. In some people, an entirely new gene, sometimes even a whole new genetic sequence, has suddenly appeared at a position where an ordinary human gene used to sit. In simple terms, radiation has produced a new way for genes to divide and multiply, and in some people, their genetic makeup has become something entirely unrecognized by science. In others, the changes run even deeper, giving rise to what could only be called supernatural abilities."
"Supernatural abilities?" The term meant nothing concrete to Ning Zhe.
"You're a hunter by trade. You must have seen what the beasts out there look like these days." Seeing the hunger for understanding in Ning Zhe's eyes, Su Fei explained without dancing around the point. "Compared to the old world, today's beasts have changed enormously in size and form. That's one consequence of radiation, it can grant a living creature strength far beyond its original limits, and sometimes even stranger abilities, like sensing danger in advance, or exerting influence over others. It's something like what used to be called a sixth sense, which scientists in the old world had actually proven to exist. Now, radiation has changed the human body down to the cellular level, and it's altered the Earth's magnetic field as well. In simple terms, a certain degree of resonance has formed between the human body's own magnetic field and the Earth's. That resonance lets certain people draw on and align with the natural world in ways that look inexplicable to ordinary people, even something close to divine. Of course, the odds of this happening at all are extremely rare, vanishingly small, really."