Cows with mushroom-shaped tumors, whose milk smelled like rotten herring.
Apples that swelled to the size of a human head but refused to ripen, their cores filled with nuclear radiation.
Snakes with two heads, frogs with an extra leg on their backs, piglets with an ear growing on their bellies.
Jiang Ye frowned as he looked at several photos of mutated animals. Most of them were bizarre and grotesque, oozing pus and bleeding, their forms distorted and discolored, like undead creatures crawling from hell. Their very existence seemed to be a challenge to the world. If people lived in an area overrun by these mutated creatures, their daily lives would undoubtedly feel like a horror game.
Next came the report on biological weapons.
According to intelligence, the Zerg had intercepted several passing human spacecraft in space before the war, obtaining human genes to produce biological weapons.
In the past decade of war, the Zerg had deployed biological weapons a total of 12 times. Four were intercepted or quickly contained, while eight caused widespread outbreaks.
The Zerg had manufactured almost every type of biological weapon: bacterial weapons, viral weapons, rickettsial agents, environmental toxin agents, fungal agents, and insect weapons.
The first Zerg biological weapon to cause widespread death on Salu Star was a marine fungus named "Erosive Algae." It was bright red and turned a dark, blackish-red when it covered the water's surface.
The Zerg deployed four tons of Erosive Algae into Salu Star's oceans via high-speed projectiles. Within half a month, these algae covered forty million square kilometers of water and successfully spread from the ocean to some inland rivers.
The oceans and rivers flowed with a viscous, dark red fungal matter. This matter began releasing toxic gas every midnight, a colorless, pungent gas that attacked coastal cities and riverside villages. Within a mere week, it caused twenty million deaths and left three hundred eighty million injured with eroded skin and respiratory tracts, including five million blinded victims. The majority of these would die within three years.
During the peak of the Erosive Gas outbreak, bonfires were built on the streets of many Salu Star cities, burning the bodies of stray cats and dogs that had died from erosion and birds that had fallen from the sky. Da Ying City reported the incineration of 670,000 stray dogs and cats, while Lawrence City's crematorium handled the cremation of 102 tons of bird carcasses. Concurrently, the prices of meat products like pork, chicken, and lamb soared twentyfold, leading to shortages in some regions.
The second biological weapon that caused widespread death among Salu Star's population was a bacterial family named "Frozen Pear Brain Fungus."
The Zerg deployed over forty thousand ultra-high-speed projectiles, each warhead containing two hundred jin of bacterial culture medium, all launched at Salu Star within half an hour. Salu Star's aerospace, naval, and ground forces unleashed full firepower, intercepting a total of thirty-nine thousand bacterial projectiles. Only a thousand bacterial projectiles, however, streaked like meteors into the land.
But a thousand was more than enough. This bacterium could spread through water, contact, and insect vectors, such as mosquito bites. The attack coincided with the summer in Salu Star's Southern Hemisphere, where 70% of its cities and population were concentrated. Mosquito swarms and the mobile population quickly swept through over seven hundred cities, causing one hundred forty million infections within a single month.
To control the pathogen, Salu Star imported massive quantities of insecticides and antibiotics.
That summer, the air in residential buildings, schools, office buildings, subway stations, and airports across major cities was filled with the scent of various brands of insecticides. Mosquitoes and flies were almost eradicated, and even insects like bees died in large numbers, leading to the collapse of ecosystems in some areas and the widespread wilting of plants.
However, the antibiotics proved ineffective. Before developing the bacterial agent, the Zerg had conducted extensive experiments using large amounts of antibiotics, cultivating the "Frozen Pear Brain Fungus" into a near-superbug.
Hospital medical staff on Salu Star were horrified to discover that most antibiotics were almost useless when treating patients. Beta-lactams, macrolides, lincosamides, polypeptides, aminoglycosides, and other classes of antibiotics failed to alleviate the patients' symptoms.
Most terrifyingly, infected patients quickly developed contradictory symptoms such as difficulty walking or frenzied rampages, incontinence, or bladder rupture with rectal bleeding. Within a day of onset, they began experiencing confusion, convulsions, screaming, and incoherent speech. The atmosphere in hospitals during that period was extremely terrifying, with patients occasionally lunging and biting other humans or objects, or even jumping from windows. This necessitated the deployment of troops into hospitals to maintain order. Some individuals spread panic online, claiming the Zerg had developed a "zombie virus," and indeed, the behavior of some infected individuals was very similar to that of zombies.
Three days after the onset of symptoms, patients would experience a surge in their condition, with blood pressure and heart rate soaring to terrifying levels, followed by rapid death.
Pathological dissections revealed that the brains of most deceased individuals were severely damaged, blackened with accumulated blood clots, and had become soft and fluid. This explained the patients' various abnormal reactions. The pathogen aggressively attacked human brain tissue and neural tissue, causing patients to gradually become frenzied and lose control of their bodies.
The first medical expert to perform autopsies, Zhen Ning Tian, casually remarked after observing a victim's brain, "It's like a thawed frozen pear." This comment was recorded in the report submitted to superiors, and thus the pathogen was named "Frozen Pear Brain Fungus."
It is worth noting that 1% of individuals infected with the Frozen Pear Brain Fungus survived. However, medical examinations found that these survivors had undergone slight changes in their brain genes and some of their body genes. Although the Frozen Pear Brain Fungus was a bacterium, it contained a protein organelle. This protein organelle was specially manufactured by the Zerg, operating on a principle similar to viruses, capable of inserting small amounts of genetic garble into target cells.
In other words, the Frozen Pear Brain Fungus had contaminated the genes of these survivors.
The documents brought by Cen Zi to Jiang Ye also contained photos of infected individuals and autopsy photos. These photos were not displayed openly but were sealed in small yellow paper bags, labeled "Top Secret - Photos may cause severe discomfort."
Jiang Ye directly pulled out the photos and examined them one by one.
Cen Zi watched Jiang Ye, dumbfounded.
"Brother-in-law, you're so calm," Cen Zi blinked, looking at him as if he were a monster.
"I've seen worse photos than these. This is nothing," Jiang Ye smiled. "Don't forget, my troops have fought major wars. During the war, boxes of photos of various dead bodies were sent to me, and I've seen over a thousand living corpses myself."
Cen Zi murmured confusedly, "Living corpses..."