67
Ch.67 It's Artificial
Gu Seo-ryong picked up a struggling bug with the tip of her fingernail, made a face as if she didn’t like it, and then put the bug into her mouth.
“Are you eating it?”
“I’m not eating it because I want to. I’m eating it to analyze it with my ability.”
“Analyze?”
“Venom Alchemist. I can meticulously analyze any component with the tongue.”
After chewing for a moment, Gu Seo-ryong spat out what was in her mouth and pointed at Sagugu with an intrigued expression.
“Gugu? Can you clean up the rest of these?”
“Nya!”
“And, bring me just one of those.”
Crunch. Sagugu, who had been chasing the insect monsters, erased the space where the corpses were.
After freezing the remaining bugs with icy mist and dropping them, Sagugu brought back one monster corpse in its mouth.
Gu Seo-ryong patted Sagugu’s head and took the ice block.
“Good, good. You’re such a good girl, Gugu.”
“Grrrr…”
“Yeah, yeah. Go play over there.”
“Nyaaao!”
Sagugu, in the form of a black panther, rubbed itself against Gu Seo-ryong’s body before darting off to chase the bugs again as soon as permission was given.
Frowning, Gu Seo-ryong bit down on the palm-sized bug trapped in the ice, crushing it. She chewed for a moment before spitting it out.
A pale, thread-like worm weakly crawled out of the disgusting, mud-like mass.
“As expected… These things are weird.”
Gu Seo-ryong sprayed an acidic poison on the mud-like mass, dissolving it, then pulled out a flat metal bottle from her jacket pocket.
After rinsing her mouth with strong alcohol, she absentmindedly twitched her fingers out of habit.
“These big beetles are definitely monsters. They have cores, albeit tiny ones. A swarm of insect-type monsters just below Terror-grade, weak enough to evade detection by alarms—pretty common for bug-type monsters, right?”
Alarms detect wavelengths emitted by Terror-grade or higher monster cores. Monsters below Terror-grade, weak enough for ordinary humans to resist, go undetected.
If a swarm of insect monsters gathers in large enough numbers, they can trigger the alarm, but the swarm isn’t big enough for that.
“And these thread-like worms… Their bodily fluids share the same composition as monsters, but they don’t have cores.”
“Monster bodily fluids? So these worms are monsters?”
I thought it was strange for bugs to crawl out of a human body, but monster bodily fluids?
Still, if they don’t have cores, they aren’t monsters.
Even to my senses, the tiny thread-like worms don’t feel like monsters.
“Well… Can we even call these things monsters? I don’t know. How are they alive without cores? How do they have the same bodily fluids as monsters despite having no cores…?”
“Could the cores just be too small to detect?”
“No. I chewed and ate them to check, remember? These worms definitely don’t have cores. They’re neither bugs nor monsters. What even are they? Where did they come from? Oh!”
Neither monsters nor bugs… At that moment, Sagugu landed in front of Gu Seo-ryong with a beetle in its mouth.
Startled, Gu Seo-ryong smacked Sagugu’s head.
“Nyyaa!”
“Didn’t I tell you not to eat that? Spit it out. Now.”
“Nyaaa…”
“Ah, hey, ah—”
Ptui. Sagugu spat out the beetle monster’s corpse, and Gu Seo-ryong forced its mouth open, pulling out thread-like worms one by one and crushing them.
Surprisingly, in that short time, the thread-like worms had already burrowed into the Despair-grade monster’s mucous membrane.
“Fascinating.”
“Right? Parasites on a Despair-grade monster—ridiculous.”
“Parasites?”
“What, you don’t know what parasites are? Bugs that burrow into other creatures and live off them.”
Shrugging, Gu Seo-ryong sighed and sat on Sagugu’s back.
“This is insane. Sagugu brought these beetles after eating them somewhere, then suddenly started acting up.”
“Acting up?”
“Not enough to be a real concern. Just whining about being ticklish, hungry, thirsty… Throwing tantrums, not listening, being stubborn, breaking things?”
“Nyaaang!”
Sagugu, its cheeks pinched, cried out in protest and rubbed its head against me.
Sagugu, who thinks of me as its older brother, whined, but I just pushed its head away in response.
“Thanks to that, the hideout I barely set up got wrecked again. Seriously, why do kittens love breaking things so much?”
“I’m not a kitten.”
“Nyao?”
“…Anyway, if you accidentally swallow these parasites, they’ll latch onto your core and stimulate your monster instincts, so be careful. I managed to extract all the parasites from Sagugu’s body, but if they latch onto you, I can’t do anything.”
“Hmm.”
Stimulation of instincts… Meaning they amplify the hunger to devour humans.
If that happened to me while I was suppressing my instincts, I might end up eating humans.
Just in case, I picked up one of the beetles and put it in my mouth.
“Ah, what are you doing?!”
“Checking if these things can burrow into me too.”
As the warmth in my mouth spread, the weakly squirming thread-like worms tried to burrow into me.
The worms secreted an anesthetic and, astonishingly, dissolved my oral mucosa without any pain.
It was fascinating that something so weak could harm my body. I transformed into a phoenix.
Surprisingly, the worms maintained their form briefly even in my flames.
Whoosh. Watching the worms burn to ash, Gu Seo-ryong spoke incredulously.
“You really went for the dumbest way to check…”
“The most certain and fastest.”
“Hmph, well, at least you don’t seem to need to worry. I’d rather not get hunted down by a CXI gone berserk from instincts.”
Gu Seo-ryong seemed relieved seeing me easily exterminate the thread-like worms.
In the end, they were weak bugs. No matter how much they burrowed inside, turning into an energy form like fire or lightning made them easy to destroy.
But the brief moment they maintained their form was concerning.
“No, these things… They tried to synchronize with my monster core.”
“Huh? So that’s why Sagugu couldn’t shake them off even in shadow form?”
When using the ability to transform into an intangible shadow form, the core synchronizes with the monster’s body.
The parasites interfered with that synchronization, trying to transform into energy alongside it.
Even though they couldn’t withstand my output and burned away, an ordinary Despair-class monster… Once these parasites take root, they wouldn’t be able to remove them on their own.
“Fascinating.”
How could something like this exist?
As a monster, I can’t comprehend such a creature.
Then, another swarm of beetle monsters rained down from the sky.
A swarm just large enough to avoid triggering the alarms, the beetle monsters rapidly devoured the corpses of people who had committed suicide.
The sight felt… Off.
“I came out to do some pest control, worried Sagugu might get infested, but humans are out here killing themselves, chanting ‘Black Cat, Black Cat’… Weird. The Samwankyo I knew didn’t aim to die by monsters—they spouted nonsense about how even dying to monsters was God’s will and comforted each other. Why are they even crazier now?”
“They called me God’s apostle and begged for salvation.”
“They’re asking you to kill them, right? Their corpses teem with parasites, and after a while, the beetles come down to feast… Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
I nodded at Gu Seo-ryong’s words.
Humans harboring thread-like worms, swarms of beetles descending in numbers just below alarm thresholds, thread-like worms burrowing into the beetles to escape.
The corpses of suicides are devoured without a trace by the beetles, which then flee skyward instead of attacking other humans.
Humans, parasites, and insect monsters—interlocked like cogs in a machine.
“Their goal seems to be getting eaten by you, doesn’t it?”
“Seems that way.”
“Meaning, someone’s trying to fill your body with these parasites… Who could it be?”
This setup is far too artificial.
It’s hard to believe it’s driven by monster instincts.
Something—or someone—is controlling these insect monsters.
To feed humans infested with thread-like worms to me.
“The fact that only numbers below alarm thresholds descend is way too blatant, right? These bugs couldn’t possibly know about the alarms… Something is definitely controlling them. Probably someone high up in the Samwankyo? The leader? The Samwankyo’s leader is human, though—how could they control monsters? Even if they’re not even Terror-grade, they’re still monsters.”
“Maybe they’re controlling them with the parasites?”
“But those parasites are like monsters too, right? That just makes it weirder. How do you control something with barely a speck of intelligence?”
Gu Seo-ryong picked up a piece of a dead human’s corpse and chewed on it.
Ptui. She spat out the meat and wiped her mouth.
“I really don’t get it. No traces of mind-control components in the blood… But they’re definitely being manipulated into these impulses.”
Listening to her explanation, a thought occurred to me, and I asked,
“Are the people killing themselves being controlled too?”
“Probably? Humans have suicidal impulses, right? If they can control Sagugu’s impulses, humans would be easy.”
“Is there a way to remove the parasites from humans?”
“No. They’re not like Sagugu, who can regenerate endlessly. Do you know how hard it was to extract each parasite from its body? I had to anesthetize it, inject luminescent fluid, tear open wounds, and chase down the fleeing parasites inside… Only I can do that, and only monsters with strong regeneration can endure it.”
“Huuuaaah…”
As Gu Seo-ryong described the extraction process, Sagugu trembled in fear.
Meaning, these humans may look human… But they’re already nothing more than moving nests for parasites.
Not human, something I can’t distinguish.
“Sigh… For now, Sagugu and I will have to help the humans too.”
“Help the humans?”
“I hate having these things in my territory. I’ll have to quietly go out and do some pest control for a while. Humans infested with parasites, bugs… Gugu, come here.”
“Bye, big bro!”
With those cryptic words, Gu Seo-ryong stood up and pointed at her shadow. Sagugu sank into it.
Gu Seo-ryong approached a corpse the beetles hadn’t eaten and spat acidic poison on it.
“I’m saying this for your sake—from now on, it’s best to kill these things on sight.”
Sizzle. Amidst the unpleasant fumes, Gu Seo-ryong left her warning.
“These things… Seems like they’ll be even more troublesome than the bad cats to deal with.”
***
The night after meeting Sagugu and Gu Seo-ryong near the corpses of suicides, I began patrolling the underground for monsters while keeping an eye on the skies.
Perched on high rooftops, catching beetle monsters, I occasionally sensed Sagugu’s spatial manipulations in the distance.
But like ordinary bugs, the beetle monsters were endless—no matter how many I killed, more flew in from afar to replace them.
Unlike underground monsters, which stayed away for a while after being cleared, the flying beetles kept coming.
Where the beetles gathered, Samwankyo members congregated, killing themselves the moment they saw me, begging to be eaten.
I burned the corpses before the beetles could devour them, destroying the parasites.
But no matter how many I burned, the Samwankyo members and beetles kept appearing.
After repeating this cycle countless times, I understood the meaning behind Gu Seo-ryong’s warning.
“Ooooh… Black Cat…!”
“Black Cat! Please!”
A W-City citizen, tired of heroes interrogating him for calling me Lord Black Cat, had hung his citizen ID around his neck.
He climbed onto the rooftop and took his own life.
Pale threads crawled out of his cooling body.