Two months passed before he knew it. All of Huaxia was steeped in the joy and excitement of the New Year's festival.
However, no one knew that, during the snowy night of New Year's Day, when dazzling lights and a merry mood filled the air, a single young man with disheveled hair and sunken eyes was still hard at work on his research.
That young man stood alone in his lab, bent over a microscope, staring intently at a slide.
Under the microscope, he saw a lifeform with several tentacles, looking somewhat like an octopus, moving slowly through the microscope slide. It was approaching a far larger lifeform at the moment, one with a translucent body and an irregular, roundish shape. Zhang Heng could see some kind of pulsing core in the translucent lifeform.
The huge lifeform in question was a cell, and a very healthy one at that. That octopus-like creature gradually made its way to the entirely oblivious and unguarded cell. Its tentacles kept wiggling about, making it look ferocious.
That octopus-like lifeform was none other than the new modified T-Virus that Zhang Heng had developed over two months of experimenting.
The T-Virus was an RNA virus and a not-so-aggressive type. It had a double helix-shaped RNA chain and was wrapped in a protein membrane. As for the eight tentacles, those were its 'spikes'.
Zhang Heng kept his eyes trained on that octopus-like T-Virus while clenching his fists tightly. He seemed very anxious, yet that T-Virus was simply just moving about at its own leisurely pace.
The virus finally made its way to the unguarded cell, and it acted as if it saw its prey and began to speed up its movements. All eight tentacles of the virus clamped down hard on the membrane of the cell as soon as it got close enough.
"Come on, latch onto it, make yourself part of the cell!" He looked like a gambler who had bet it all, panting and throwing his eyes wide open. His fingers were clamped onto the edges of the table, knuckles turning white, as he locked his gaze at the virus's next move.
The T-Virus began to break through the cell membrane bit by bit, with its spikes breaking in first, before submerging its entire body into the cell. It took about five to six minutes to completely invade the inner parts of the cell.
The virus then began to act like an ill-mannered thief, cautiously taking part of the chromosomes within the cell and rearranging them into RNA structures like its own, before sneakily taking apart the protein molecules on the cell's membrane, covering them with those newly formed RNA chains. Four or five T-Viruses of identical structures were put together before long, and they began to take over the host cell.
That was the moment when the T-Virus finally became the master of the place. Abandoning the caution it had displayed before, it began to go on a rampage inside the cell. It took only about a dozen minutes for them to tear that unlucky cell almost to pieces, before breaking it apart altogether, killing it.
"Goddamn it!"
Zhang Heng slammed hard on the table and had to admit that he had failed yet again. That was his 13th failure in the past two months. Things worked decently for the first several times, as the T-Virus only replaced the RNA structure at the center of the cell, before controlling the cell to manufacture viruses that looked identical to it. While the cells in question eventually died, all the same, they were nonetheless able to stay alive for several hours.
But the virus that seemed rather benign at the start turned extremely aggressive at that time, it took only a little more than ten minutes for the T-Virus to begin latching onto the cell to finally tearing the cell apart completely from within.
"Yurianne, what the f**k is wrong with this Research Support System eh? I did as you said, combining the T-Virus with the H7N9 Avian Flu Virus and this is what became of it?? You goddamn explain to me just what the f**k is going on here!" Zhang Heng berated her right away.
"This shouldn't be…" Yurianne appeared innocent as she bit at her fingers looking sheepish. "Yurianne did provide a plan according to what you asked for, host dude, doing away with the virus' ability to infect and reducing the virus' ability to multiply, enabling the human immune system to resist the virus. Things shouldn't have turned out like this…"
"You told me that the infectious ability of the T-Virus could be negated by just combining it with the Avian Flu Virus. I thought that was madness right from the start. The Avian Flu was caused by a highly infectious virus in the first place, how would combining it with the T-Virus make either one less infectious or deadly, eh?"
He continued berating her, "And, by the way, regardless of the formulas I used for the calculations, I found no reason why the product of combining the two viruses, would have its ability to multiply reduced. Now, there you have it, the seemingly benign virus turned extremely aggressive right away. Infectiousness is indeed reduced, because the virus would end up killing its host within an hour after infection. Just how could infectiousness not be lowered, huh!"
Yurianne's eyes became watery as he berated her, looking like she was about to cry. "The Dimensional Star absolutely can't be wrong with its calculations. As to why did things turn out like that… Oh right, why did you insist on using the cells of lab rats? Their cells are weak. Just use that of humans instead!"
"Human cells?" Zhang Heng was stunned and shook his head right away. "What the f**k are you getting at? The lab rats couldn't even take it and you're asking me to try this out in humans? Who would volunteer for that experiment, huh? You, or me?"
Yurianne pouted and continued, "No one is asking you to test it on yourself. Can't you just use your cells for experimentation instead…"
He was silent for a bit, then finally nodded again. "Okay, sure, I'll trust you one more time."
He knew well that if he were to research the T-Virus with his level of knowledge, it would have taken him 30 to 40 years and he still wouldn't be able to understand the virus, much less modify it the way he had. The biological knowledge and technical capability contained within the T-Virus was far beyond what contemporary science was capable of achieving. As such, the Research Support System provided by the Dimensional Star was the only thing he could truly rely on.
If the system asked that he use human cells for experimentation, he had no choice but to do as it asked. The Dimensional Star was something that even Ikari Gendo acknowledged to be the product of a civilization of immeasurably advanced technology, which meant that it was definitely far more knowledgeable than Zhang Heng, who was but a half-baked researcher in biology.
He cut his finger and took some blood, then dripped a drop of said blood on the petri dish. He put the blood sample under the glass pane with the modified T-Virus, and began observing again. That demon-like modified T-Virus began to make its way to his red blood cells.
Just as it had done previously, the octopus-like virus quickly attacked the cell's membrane, yet it didn't begin to tear down the insides of the cell as soon as possible that time. The virus began to take apart the cell's DNA and replace it with that of its body, rendering itself a parasite within that cell.
Zhang Heng held his breath and watched carefully, not moving a muscle. Before long, that cell, with its modified DNA, began to vibrate excitedly like it had taken some kind of drug. The cell quickly took in huge amounts of nutrients and split into two identical cells, and those new cells had DNA that looked like the ones modified by the T-Virus.
The experiment was a success.
He was elated and began taking out other types of viruses and bacteria from other petri dishes, throwing them one by one into the dish with the modified cells. He initially thought that the modified cells wouldn't be able to last long, under the attack of an army of so many different viruses and bacteria. However, that modified cell quickly displayed its impressive fighting prowess, rendering all those other viruses and bacteria completely unable to break through the membrane of the modified cells.
That really is some super-cell indeed!
Zhang Heng was overjoyed. None of the viruses and bacteria he put in the dish were small fry. There was the Avian Flu Virus, the SARS Virus, the tuberculosis virus, rabies virus, and even an HIV sample. As for bacteria, there was Clostridium Tetani, Streptococcus Pneumoniae, Neisseria Gonorrhoeae and many other big names among known, powerful bacteria.
That was to say that, if his entire body consisted of cells that were modified by that strain of T-Virus, he would have been completely immune to all diseases caused by all known viruses and bacteria.
But, then again, he definitely wasn't about to just inject himself with that modified T-Virus after just one experiment. Any experiment conducted had to be done with the utmost caution, and he definitely wouldn't dare to say that he had succeeded before repeating these experiments several hundred times over. At that moment, he turned his attention to the white blood cells.