Alfonso lay topless, lying on his side on the soft bed on the second floor of the laboratory building, falling into a deep sleep. He may have been a radiant man in the past, but now his face is pale and emaciated, with a slight expression of pain.

"It's the first time I've seen the head's face...... Varton pouted and whispered to Leslie beside him.

Todd half-crouched beside the bed, looking at the two rows of small, evenly spaced holes in the knight's spine, carefully disinfecting them one by one with the medical alcohol in his hand and applying the powder.

These are puncture wounds formed by the "keel" parasite sucking the host's spinal fluid. Although it is minimally invasive, the wounds are extremely deep. If not treated properly, it can cause myelitis and even paralysis.

Adlina sat at the head of the bed, wiped Alfonso's forehead with a cloth towel soaked in water, and asked worriedly, "Lord Todd, when will the boss wake up?"

"Normally, it's three to four hours. But I think it's a little strange, I only anesthetized the 'armor' on his body, and he didn't inhale anesthetic gas through his mouth and nose, so why did he fall into a coma?" Todd looked at Alfonso again with a puzzled face, and in addition to the wound on his spine, what worried him the most was his physical condition.

As a result of relying on the "dragon bone" for a long time to complete daily operations, the muscles of the knight's limbs have gradually atrophied. It's like a normal person who has been relying on a wheelchair for a long time, and when he takes out of the wheelchair one day, he finds that his lower body can't use any strength.

After explaining to Adlena, Walton, and Leslie how to help the patient with strength recovery. Todd returned to the halls of the lab, focusing on the "dragon bone" parasite he had just taken off.

In the huge wooden barrel, two parasites, one female and one male, lay quietly in the nutrient solution, and the "skeleton" originally used to bind and support the host's limbs slowly shrank one by one.

Using the abilities of "Perspective" and "Eagle Eye", Todd repeatedly examined the strange giant parasite. The outermost part of the insect body is a layer of horn skin that is as hard as steel, and further inside is a space similar to an "air sac", which can be called a "skin muscle capsule" in technical terms, and then a layer of soft skin and muscle.

This three-layered parasite can not only resist the huge impact of the outside world, but also provide a certain degree of cushioning in the cutaneous muscle capsule and muscle layer, which can protect the host's body.

Looking inside, Todd saw something strange, grayish-white medullary bodies that looked a bit like human nerves. This nerve-like substance is found throughout the parasite's inner body, even the spiky hooks that are used to penetrate the host's body and absorb nutrients.

Seeing this, Todd thought for a while and came up with a bold hypothesis. Did ether, which was originally only used to anesthetize parasites, enter Alfonso's spine through the "nerves" of these parasites?

If this hypothesis is true, then the fact that the knight fell into a coma even if he did not inhale ether would be able to explain it.

But this hypothesis is only a hypothesis, and it does not seem to be provable at this time.

Well?

Todd looked over the female's tail vertebrae and saw something like an egg. Full of curiosity, he put on gloves and carefully reached for the male and female parasites while praying that the parasite would not wake up at this time.

First, use your hand to open the male's mating umbrella, then pull out the mating spine, and finally squeeze the female's genital tube with your hand, and expel the eggs that can be seen by the "clairvoyance" ability one by one.

There were six white eggs, about the size of dates, and the larvae inside could be seen in the sunlight.

It seems that the reproductive mode of the "keel" parasite is heterogamete reproduction (a reproductive mode in which the parent produces a sexually differentiated reproduction), and the eggs are viviparous (the reproduction mode in which larvae have formed in the eggs produced by the female).

Todd found the glass trough originally used to cultivate the sprouts of the moon branch in the laboratory, first disinfected it with about 70% alcohol, and rinsed it with sterile water 3-4 times, then created a darkroom in the laboratory to isolate the sunlight, then sealed the whole space with wax paper and glass to make a sterile environment, and finally used sugar, coconut milk, oxygen scavengers and biological amino acids to make the "double lactose peptone culture medium" commonly used in embryo farming.

Place the "keel" eggs in it and observe them every 2 hours.

After doing all this, Todd remembered another parasite that he had kept all along—the "hive".

After the Battle of Fort Watch, Todd brought the severed Hive parasite back to the lab for culture.

Now, the "hive" has grown to six times its original size in the flask, and from the outside, it looks like a huge black jellyfish floating on the water, and the tentacles below have been growing, and the longest one is even more than a meter long, piled up at the bottom of the flask.

The "hive" is completely different from the "keel", and its mode of reproduction is "budding reproduction" (first splitting a child from the edge of the mother's body, and then gradually growing larger).

On the tentacles underneath the jellyfish, black earthworm-like nematodes are born (used to infect the host and turn it into a puppet), and over time, these nematodes can grow into new "hives".

Taking advantage of the growth of the larvae of the "dragon bone", Todd first analyzed the "hive".

The test subjects were four mice, a small "hive" was transplanted into the spine on the back of one of the mice, and three black nematodes belonging to the former's mother were fed to the remaining mice.

Honestly, the result of this experiment was a nightmare that Todd didn't want to think about again.

The result of the experiment was that the mice transplanted with the "hive" could control the movements of the other three mice through the vibration sound of the mother's body. But at the end of the experiment, all four mice died without exception.

Mouse fed black nematodes dies of neurotoxin. Black nematodes are in mice and can emit a toxin that destroys the host's nerve center, turning it into a walking corpse.

The horrific death of the mouse carrying the mother of the "hive" was that it was a black nematode that sprouted and reproduced in large numbers, and it broke through the body shell and died. Tens of thousands of nematodes, accompanied by blood and internal organs, blew up the entire glass box in a mess. Every time Todd thinks about that scene, he always feels a feeling of tightness in his chest and nausea.

After examination and dissection, Todd also got some information. Black nematodes have strict requirements for the environment, when the temperature is higher than 40 degrees and the humidity is less than 40%, when the average difference between acid and alkali is large under the sun, it will lose its vitality and eventually die.

Observation of the Hive parasite has been put on hold.

In summary, there are the following points:

1. The "hive" parasite adopts "budding reproduction", which is divided into the mother (similar to jellyfish) and the child (black nematode).

Second, there is a vocal sac-like sounder inside the mother's body, which can make a rattlesnake-like sound to control the host infected by the progeny.

3. The host infected with the mother will erode the body of the budding reproductive offspring, and eventually explode and die.

Fourth, the host infected with the child body will destroy the nerve center with the neurotoxin secreted by the child body, and eventually become a thoughtless walking corpse.

5. It is speculated that as time progresses, when the offspring grow into the mother, the fate of these walking dead is expected to be the same as that of the maternal host, and eventually the body will be eroded by the progeny of the mass reproduction, and the body will explode and die.

6. The offspring has poor environmental adaptability and is extremely sensitive to light, temperature, acid, alkali and humidity.

Todd wrote the final note of his observation, looking at the "hive" parasite in the flask and sighing. This thing is simply a biochemical nuclear bomb-level weapon, but fortunately in the world of the previous life, there was no such parasite, otherwise the scene in "Resident Evil" might really appear.

Glancing at the "keel" larval culture tank and the "hive" culture flask in the laboratory, Todd blinked and smiled bitterly, can he be regarded as a professional parasite breeder?

——————————————

With the parasite experiments over, Todd walked out of the lab to visit Alfonso, who had woken up and was recovering from his strength in the hills.

According to the servants, the first thing the knight asked for when he woke up was something that no one expected - to take a hot bath.

Alfonso, who had been soaking in the bathtub for almost a whole day, did not need a little strength in his limbs, and even climbed out of the bathtub to change clothes, he had to rely on others.

But at least he looked in good spirits, and the smile he hadn't seen for a long time reappeared on his face.

"I felt like I had a load lifted. Alfonso rubbed his legs and said to Todd with a smile, "The power of the 'dragon bone', as if from the shackles of hell, has imprisoned my soul for years. Now, I'm finally free. ”

Hearing this, his subordinates looked a little depressed.

Adlina accompanied Alfonso back to the cabin, while Walton and Leslie accompanied Todd on a walk outside.

The short and fat man glanced back at the door and said slowly, "The boss has said more than once that he is no longer a knight since the day he lost his family and became a different species. ”

Leslie found a clearing and sat down, "Unlike us, the leader was forced to become a xenomorph. He had tried countless ways to take off the keel. ”

Todd leaned over and asked curiously, "Can you elaborate on that?"

Leslie glanced at Todd and nodded, as if he had made up his mind: "There seems to be a strange disease in the family of the chief's wife, and exertion and tiredness can cause physical failure and death. A traveler gave the leader a brass pipe, saying that it contained the contents to save his wife. Unexpectedly, the contents of the brass pipe were the "relics of Sutherland", and the wife of the leader became the heir, and he also killed the children of the family. When the leader returned home, he happened to witness this scene. At that time, he was defeated by the heir and was about to be killed, but the traveler reappeared, not only blocking the monster's attack, but also giving him the set of "dragon bones". With the ability of "Dragonbone", the leader killed the inheritor, and when he tried to find the traveler, the other party was gone. ”

Todd recalled Huggins' words and asked, "Who is that traveler?"

Leslie shrugged: "I don't know, the boss has been looking for that guy for so many years." ”

Walton suddenly interjected: "For the leader, whenever he sees the 'dragon bone', he thinks of his dead wife and children, he actually doesn't want to be a xenomorph at all." Perhaps he felt that the xenomorph's ability had tarnished the knight's honor, so he would give up his position and become the hunter of the xenomorph inquisition......"