The first four military doctors who had been stationed in M001 village for some time, and when they found that infected people could not transmit the virus to others, they boldly boarded the ghost ship and examined the corpses when the isolation equipment was insufficient.

It is likely that upon boarding, they found the paranoid military medical researcher - later records indicate that they were stationed together in the village of M001, and the paranoid began to act alone due to differences of opinion - at the time, it was believed to be missing.

Perhaps, they were surprised and suspicious, but because of their ignorance of the virus, they also made serious mistakes. On the paranoid man, the bearer had a special collector with the number of the medical unit on it.

The deaths of the four medics were horrific but relatively ordinary, all of them from rapid failure, and one of them was still holding the virus specimen collector.

At that time, the ghost boat had been towed to a shore and guarded by the local police, and the officers on the shore had to report the matter to their superiors again after seeing the death of the military doctor.

In addition to several top military doctors in M001 Village at that time, more than a dozen biological and virology experts were selected in universities and hospitals across the country to hold an emergency meeting.

This time, the military did not take the liberty of sending people to board the ship, but held a working meeting in advance based on the previous plague situation in M001 village and the problem of the ghost ship.

The situation on board was based mainly on the survivor and the oral accounts of the police officers who later observed the death of four military doctors on shore, and lacked reliable intelligence information.

However, everyone still came to a more scientific and credible conclusion, which made the high-level have to adopt - abandon the previous understanding of the infected person, define the entire ghost ship as the source of the virus, pay attention to it, there is not only the infected person, but the source of the virus, blockade the nearby waters, relocate and isolate all fishermen in the nearby waters.

After M001, M612 became an even more important base for the study of the virus for a period of time.

However, after a period of quarantine research, it was found that the villagers of M001 Village, except for the fishermen of the ghost boat, had only five infected people. In the nearby sea area, there are few results from the study of seawater, livestock, and plants.

The discovery of the ghost ship has only raised suspicions about the scope and area of the virus outbreak.

Both the Central Commissioner and Professor Zhang attached great importance to Masao Yamamoto's activities during this period, and they suspected that the secret base set up in Japan was probably the predecessor of the water supply force, or even the headquarters, and that the virus was very peculiar and very likely to have been brought to China for experiments on living people.

Unfortunately, during this time, Masao Yamamoto's memory loss was severe, and it was mainly collected by Wei Haoran's consciousness body, which was already very weak, and Wei Haoran had been out of his body for a long time, and the information obtained was very limited.

Series 1: Virus-induced symptoms

The main symptom of this virus is that it causes rapid aging of people, from various organs to muscles, bones, etc., as a whole.

However, this kind of aging is not a unilateral killing of human cells, but to promote the speed of their division and regeneration, however, the number of cell division and regeneration in a person's life is limited, simply put, it greatly shortens the original life cycle of a person, a person can live to be 60 or 80 years old, and after being infected with this virus, he will "live" his life in a very short time.

It was very, very short, with the longest recorded being one year and six months, and the shortest being a few minutes – as was the case with the few fishermen and medic who were infected on the ghost ship.

However, it was the virus's other traits that attracted attention — its ability to cause strange mutations in infected individuals, which was used by senior researchers at the secret base at the time to refer to the term "genetic mutation."

The theory of genes was first put forward by the American biologist and geneticist Morgan, who established a laboratory using fruit flies as experimental materials in 1909, engaged in research on evolution and genetics, proposed some ideas such as genetic mutations, and published the genetics masterpiece "Theory of Genes" in 1926.

Of course, there were very few cases of genetic mutations caused by the virus, less than one in a thousand known infected people, and judging from his memory fragments, they had only collected seven cases, but these seven cases alone were enough to excite the military doctors and biologists of the time.

In three cases, the symptoms were manifested as the giantization mutation of the infected person, and the infected person grew from about 1.5 meters in height to about 3 meters in 5 days, 34 days, and 78 days respectively.

Such a giant mutation is simply a dream for the Japanese who are as short as a dwarf, especially those right-wing militarists, who believe that once this virus is developed and refined to make people physically taller, it will greatly enhance national self-confidence, and the Yamato nation will become the world's first giant nation, and then conquer the world and dominate the earth.

The other four cases are even more peculiar.

One of them gave birth to wings, but unfortunately there is only one wing on the right, and the most important thing is the wingspan, which is about three meters per wing, and if it is possible to evolve two wings, the overall wing exhibition will be greater than six meters, and it is possible for humans to soar in the sky with their own wings.

One person had gills and a mutation in his lungs, but researchers at the time thought it was most likely a serious atavism, and according to Darwin, all land creatures evolved from sea creatures, so it was a kind of atavism.

However, some experts believe that if the infected can maintain the current level of human intelligence, it is not a bad thing to give birth to gills, and perhaps in the future, a new and completely different civilization will develop on the bottom of the sea.

The third case is more terrifying, his mutation maintains the general appearance of a human being, with a head and limbs, and it is difficult to say whether he can walk upright, and he was dead when he was found. However, his appearance was strange and ugly, and he was different from all the other races seen at the time, and even from all known creatures of the earth.

The fourth, even more alarming, was a sixteen-year-old middle school student who became incredibly intelligent and intellectually improved after being infected. However, the student also died of death from failure within six months of infection.

At that time, the main direction of Masao Yamamoto and others was not to prevent these viruses, but to extract from virus samples and infected people those substances that can cause benign mutations in people—similar to what is called a superhuman drug today.