Parallel world.
Arizona.
8 PM, Chinese restaurant.
"Drink more, you're going back to China next week. No need to intern at the mental hospital anymore, or put up with that old man's attitude," my friend said, raising his glass to celebrate with Li Qing.
"Ugh! I'm going to the restroom."
Several friends were drinking, singing, and their faces were flushed.
Suddenly, Li Qing's phone rang.
He put down his glass and answered a call from a mental patient he had lost contact with two months ago: "I want to explain some last wishes, I have a world to give you before I die."
Li Qing: "."
He knew the person on the other end of the phone very well. He was a mental patient he had treated before, who used to call himself the first zombie in the modern world. Now he owns a world? It seems his condition is getting worse.
"Why did you give your personal phone number to this patient? Didn't you resign? Are you still seeing him?" a friend asked curiously beside him.
Li Qing said helplessly, "I secretly helped him a bit. After all, we are both Chinese, and he is quite pitiful, with no one to rely on. I have to see him tomorrow so I can be at ease after returning to China."
The next morning.
Li Qing finished his final handover and drove to a small house in the suburbs of Phoenix.
The patient's name was Ning Guochang, an overseas student who was often bullied and extorted by other students at school.
A year ago in China, his parents, who worked hard to support his studies, died in an accident. Under various blows, he became taciturn and mentally unstable.
Ning Guochang received mental treatment for a while, but it did not improve. Instead, it became more serious. He gradually began to have nightmares, saying that he saw another version of himself in another timeline, where a zombie crisis had occurred and he became a zombie.
He described a very ordinary zombie story.
A Resident Evil, Raccoon City, remake.
The apocalypse first broke out in this free country, which is in line with the source of various movies and novels.
In order to save a girl, he was bitten and became a zombie, constantly eating people and gradually regaining his sanity. He turned into a mental-control type zombie with twenty-eight large eyeballs, becoming a zombie monarch in the Phoenix area, frantically besieging survivor gathering places.
I also constantly tutored and treated him, always acting as a listener.
One day, Ning Guochang suddenly ran away and could never be found again.
The address he sent was not far.
Half an hour later, after entering the door, Li Qing felt strange.
The entire bedroom had been transformed by Ning Guochang into a sterile workshop like a pharmaceutical factory.
Behind a large piece of glass, Li Qing saw Ning Guochang, who was self-isolating on the opposite side, as if he were visiting a prisoner.
This honest and simple young man was as thin as a skeleton, wearing a pair of large sunglasses. The exposed skin was covered with fine cracks like white paint, and every move conveyed an aura of fear.
Behind him was a huge shelf, filled with mineral water, canned food, and various foods, densely packed throughout the bedroom.
"How long have you been self-isolating, locking yourself in here?"
After a long while, Li Qing suppressed the strangeness in his heart and couldn't help but say, "Do you think you are a zombie? Are you afraid of infecting people?"
"You won't believe it, but you will after seeing this."
He stretched out the back of his hand, and a strange rhomboid gem surrounded by skin, wrapped around blue veins and flesh, wriggled on the back of his hand.
"This is my zombie crystal core."
He said very calmly through the opposite window, "I ran away because of this. I don't want to be experimented on. It is said that the zombie virus in another world also broke out in a neighboring state's laboratory."
Li Qing stared silently for a few seconds.
Terminally ill, does he think Raccoon City exists in reality?
But what is this crystal core wriggling on his skin?
A magic trick?
Li Qing didn't know if it was true or false, but he immediately showed a gentle smile and said, "I have always believed you. Running was the right thing to do. My mentor is very devious. I also think he is secretly conducting various experiments on patients in the mental hospital. If you continue to be treated inside, he might really experiment on you!"
Li Qing took the opportunity to slander his capitalist mentor.
This is a psychological empathy operation, to make the patient feel that you are in the same camp as him, let go of his vigilance, and feel that everyone is on his side.
Ning Guochang said, "The zombie lord in the dream can control large zombies, animals, beasts, and mutated humans with a glance, and has telekinesis that can lift a ton of cars."
"My current superpower level here is very low. After experiencing some space-time mutations, I must stare for more than three seconds to give control to bacteria and grant them intelligence, and my telekinesis can only lift a small piece of cotton."
Li Qing said smoothly, "The span is too big, right? Originally controlling humans and large animals, now it's so weak that it can only control some bacteria?"
Ning Guochang pointed to a piece of fine black mud wriggling on the table, "This is my current bacterial army. It hasn't reached the nanoscale, but it has definitely reached the micron level, about 0.0023 grams."
This wriggling black mud, is it magnetic sand?
Li Qing had seen too many severely delusional mental patients who regarded themselves as novel protagonists and couldn't distinguish between reality and fictional stories.
"Look at this, my telekinesis."
He really took out an ant-sized piece of cotton and controlled it to fly in the air, but it seemed very strenuous.
Li Qing was silent for a moment.
He quickly came back to his senses and said, "In other words, you are now a zombie lord, and this sterile workshop is to prevent your zombie virus from spreading outside?"
"No."
Ning Guochang shook his head, "Dr. Li, you are overthinking it. I am not preventing the zombie virus. We high-level zombies do not have the ability to infect. We are already a new extraordinary species. I have also done experiments myself, and it is not contagious."
Li Qing immediately put on a relieved look and said, "Then what is this workshop for..."
Ning Guochang suddenly shuddered, "I made this sterile workshop to protect my eyes. It can control bacteria and see very clearly, as clearly as a microscope, and can be adjusted larger or smaller at any time."
He suddenly became mentally unstable, revealing a painful expression.
Like most mental patients, Ning Guochang suddenly became emotionally agitated and erupted.
"Do you know what this microscopic ability feels like?"
"Your normal human world is like watching a pixelated movie, but in my eyes, it's all 4k ultra-high-definition image quality. I can clearly see the mites crawling back and forth on your face!!"
"The wall behind you looks smooth to you, but in my eyes, it's a wall of insects that triggers trypophobia, composed of mold, worms, dust mites, and mites, forming a disgusting billion-dollar empire."
Li Qing opened his mouth wide.
He inexplicably felt itchy on his face.
Disgusting mites were crawling densely.
But fortunately, medical students are not afraid of this, and have seen more disgusting things.
But theoretically, if his eyes reach the level of an electron microscope, wouldn't I be a furry humanoid monster covered in various microbial blankets in front of him?
I don't quite understand this level of visual accuracy.
Perhaps they are already eye structures of two different creatures. He has gone to the mysterious and bizarre.
"You know, I have trypophobia! I have severe obsessive-compulsive disorder!"
Ning Guochang, sitting opposite in the isolated sterile workshop, became agitated, with an anxious tone, at a loss, and said very painfully:
"I started washing my hands like crazy, spraying disinfectant every day, and taking showers with pure water, rubbing my body until it was wrinkled and sore!"
"I even built this sterile workshop. I want to live in the cleanest world!"
"Even when I go out, I wear a bubble helmet and a special protective suit! Have you seen One Piece? I want to be a Celestial Dragon!"
He was like a patient in extreme mania, exuding a crazy aura, and endless pain was deeply rooted in his distorted facial expressions.
And if it came to this point, Li Qing would just think it was a story about a germaphobe evolving into a new human.
He even fantasized about a sci-fi future.
Thinking from a tricky angle: cultivators in a high-definition world who see this mundane world also develop such trypophobia, because the bacteria everywhere in the human world are so disgusting that they want to vomit. They immediately hide in the sterile room of the cave to practice, secluded in the immortal mountains, and don't want to enter the mortal world...
This is not about immortal heroes and myths, but about modern technology.
In the future, hundreds of years later, when the new humans with the explosion of technology reach this level of eyesight, won't they also go crazy?
Not to mention the future.
Even the visible mites on the quilt are starting to be taken seriously as people's lives get better and better, and they feel disgusted.
The degree of civilization is linked to the degree of cleanliness.
The old people of the old era didn't care if you were dirty or not. If it's not dirty, you won't get sick, and even think it's protein and nutrition.
However, the story of obsessive-compulsive disorder gradually began to turn into a ghost story.
"If it's just that the eyesight keeps increasing and seeing the high-definition world of bacteria, that's fine."
"But my eyes can control and give wisdom."
Ning Guochang suddenly had a bitter expression: "I'm so scared, these microorganisms have wisdom, it's so terrifying now! Their development of civilization is like our ancient apes building tribes in the distant Earth era."
Li Qing tried to follow his line of thinking.
If what he said is true, even if microorganisms build civilizations and have wisdom, so what?
Their structure is destined to be low-level creatures.
What can a group of low-level creatures relying on flagella do with wisdom?
Build bonfires? Plant and graze? Build machines? Develop the steam age? Enter the electrical age?
They cannot.
They can't even make a fire at all.
Because of their size, even if they have wisdom, they cannot achieve the human civilization process.
Having wisdom is still the same as not having wisdom.
"I thought so at first too."
Ning Guochang said bitterly: "But later I discovered that humans are just monkeys who know how to use tools, using their arrogant cognition to measure other unknown civilizations, which is too ridiculous."
"Do you know?"
He looked at the little bit of bacterial army on the table through the workshop,
"They don't have eyes, but they have a mysterious spiritual perception, grazing other microorganisms without wisdom, as my dependents, using even weaker telekinesis than me, painstakingly disassembling RNA structures, compiling, transcribing, and building their own biological robots, flagella, shells, directly entering the era of biological grazing."
"They build flagella mounts and use giant mites to build giant biological houses, forming microscopic cities."
"Humans have evolved from microorganisms in the ocean to today in 3.5 billion years, but they are re-experiencing this process at an extremely fast speed."
"These single cells are self-evolving!"
Watching this patient confide in great pain, Li Qing realized what he was saying.
This patient, he saw the terrifying history of life evolution.
When the microorganisms that we cannot see with the naked eye have human-like wisdom, their civilization far exceeds our modern human civilization.
They are naturally a group of great creators in the microscopic world