"Got it, so this guy is planning to evolve in order to take me out?" Sun Hang nodded, "Doesn't this secondary transformation have any cost? Can you just become stronger whenever you want? If that's the case, I might as well squat in the deep mountains for a hundred years, set a powerful imaginary enemy for myself every day, and go for secondary, tertiary, quaternary... to a few hundred, a few thousand degrees of transformation. Wouldn't I be invincible then?"

"Of course there's a cost! The secondary transformation is very risky for supernatural entities. The higher the enhancement level, the greater the probability of failure... Like I said, Blood Mary, for example, iterates in a seed-like manner and absorbs the living sacrifices offered by those human followers, thus evolving the ability to be unafraid of flames... I also said, Chen Hongjuan just showed signs of secondary transformation, but she's still far from truly undergoing it."

"You could have said she's still far off earlier... I thought she was going to transform on the spot. Almost made me a little nervous." Sun Hang glanced at Chen Hongjuan, who was still struggling on the rack. The adjustable base of the rack was clanging as it shook, but the locks clasping her limbs were still as iron, making it impossible to break free with brute force.

"You don't look nervous at all."

"By the way, that day, was Mr. Wang considered a secondary transformation?" Sun Hang suddenly asked.

"Probably not... The concept of secondary transformation only applies to those entities that have completely transformed. It doesn't apply to the infected... Night Slayer's situation can only be described as a memetic adjustment at most."

"Oh..." Sun Hang nodded, a flash of silver light from his fingertips instantly cut all the locks restraining Chen Hongjuan!

"What are you doing?!" Yang Qi shouted immediately.

Once the restraints were removed, Chen Hongjuan didn't hesitate for a moment, directly lunging at Sun Hang... However, before she could even touch Sun Hang, she was kicked back, crashing heavily onto the rack that had previously confined her.

"Weird..." Sun Hang held his chin, scrutinizing Chen Hongjuan, murmuring.

"What's weird? And hurry up and lock it back! Don't mess around!"

"I remember back at the camp, it had the ability to alter its limbs," Sun Hang said. "It turned one of its arms into a long whip to attack me, then all sorts of aggressive organs grew on its body... Those organs should have been sliced up by now. I recall you packed over ten big bags with those sliced pieces... So why has it lost that ability now?"

Yang Qi was slightly taken aback and fell into silence.

Liquid nitrogen was very effective on Chen Hongjuan. Once she was placed in the Eternal Freeze Coffin, she stopped moving... But now she's been thawed for more than an hour. In theory, that ability should have returned to her by now.

With that being the case, just relying on those physical locks on the confinement device wouldn't be enough to hold her... unless liquid nitrogen was continuously sprayed on her.

"Not just that, her strength seems to be much weaker than when she first transformed."

Chen Hongjuan lunged again, only to be kicked back by Sun Hang once more.

"Don't move it yet! Let me look up the previous records... I remember the data should have been recorded when we first contained it. Comparing them should reveal the problem..."

"No need to go through that trouble..." Sun Hang muttered to himself, stepping forward and pinning Chen Hongjuan to the ground. Two fungal threads emerged like tentacles from his back, piercing into Chen Hongjuan's brain.

Sun Hang instantly identified the problem... Chen Hongjuan's internal meme seemed to be largely missing.

"Sun Hang, I found the problem!" Yang Qi's voice rang out simultaneously, "The length of the memetic fragments is incorrect! Compared to the records just now, every fragment unit of Chen Hongjuan's meme is at least one-third shorter now! Her meme is showing severe signs of depletion!"

A third?

Sun Hang couldn't help but chuckle internally.

It seems the precision of human civilization's detection equipment still isn't up to par...

The meme fragment that was shortened by a third was just the apparent layer that the equipment could detect, while beneath this apparent layer, Chen Hongjuan's internal meme had almost been completely hollowed out!

What was left in the lab, bluntly speaking, was just an empty shell!

Sun Hang began to receive the information carried in the absorbed meme, and some fuzzy images started flooding his mind.

These images seemed to be the memories after Chen Hongjuan was placed in the Eternal Freeze Coffin, blurred, abstract, intermittent... even time seemed to become extremely chaotic.

Yet within these fuzzy images, Sun Hang managed to capture a few frames of crucial information.

That was a pale figure, flickering across the frames.

Soon, a huge sense of fear enveloped him... This emotion stemmed from Chen Hongjuan's panic about her own demise... meaning that during that period, something nearly claimed her life.

"Looks like someone beat me to it." Sun Hang sighed, pulling out from those fuzzy memory fragments.

The pale figure was very likely the ghostly Anna wandering around Tianfu City.

At an unknown time, she had snuck into the research facility's underground containment zone, "ingesting" most of the memes within Chen Hongjuan, leaving the struggling empty shell here...

No wonder when Sun Hang first encountered Chen Hongjuan, he felt something was off.

The real Chen Hongjuan had long become a nourishment for Anna.

"So she didn't strike Chen Hongjuan that night, planning to wait until she fully transformed before having her meal?" Sun Hang muttered to himself.

Compared to human's negative emotions, the transformed meme of these entities clearly serves as a better delicacy.

But how did Anna foresee that Chen Hongjuan would become an entity?

At that time, Sun Hang hadn't even announced the plan to recruit refugees or designated the Sixth Settlement Camp as a pilot area.

If I hadn't come to the Sixth Settlement Camp for recruitment, if I hadn't had an impulsive conversation with Ling Xiao and learned about his family situation, severing his parental ties with Chen Hongjuan... then none of this would have happened.

Perhaps Chen Hongjuan and Ling Xiao would have continued living in the refugee camp; or maybe, Ling Xiao would have been taken into the training base, and Chen Hongjuan, by virtue of being a guardian and direct relative, could enjoy the generous welfare benefits alone...

In any case, it was unlikely for Chen Hongjuan to transform in a short period.

So why did Anna keep her?

Was she hoping Chen Hongjuan would transform during an argument with her neighbors?

Or could it be that Anna... had the ability to foresee the future?

Sun Hang couldn't help but recall the words Anna said to him when her "physical body died."

"This is not goodbye forever, in the river of time, we shall meet again."

At first, Sun Hang thought it was just a line Anna created to maintain her enigmatic persona, more for show than for substance...

But it turned out that they did meet again, with only a few days separating the last farewell.

And after this encounter, Anna would occasionally make her presence felt in front of Sun Hang, lingering like an obsessive and eerie ghostly woman.

So, what exactly does "the river of time" in this context refer to?

Does it imply Anna has the ability to traverse different timelines at will?

Is that how she can foresee the future?

Or does it mean that at different points in time, there exist countless different versions of Anna?

The Anna from the previous second died, yet the Anna of the next second is still alive?

If time is compared to a river, Sun Hang picking up a stone named Anna as he wades in the river... only to reach further down the river, stretch out his hand, and find an identical stone... is that what it means?

So what form does this Anna he just saw outside the operating room's window take?

A projection? Or a physical entity?

"Great, now my scalp is itching, and I'm about to sprout some brains..."

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