Sang Ling stepped off the train, the enormous army-green backpack on her shoulders.
By the time the public train reached this stop, the carriage was empty except for her.
This was the Task Force Training Base on the city outskirts—classification level extremely high. The moment she stepped off, she counted sentries outside the base walls, at least one every ten paces.
The land around the base was all wasteland, not a soul in sight—yet those silent sentries stood ready at every moment, rifles cradled in their arms, expressions grave.
Sang Ling had absolutely no interest in gambling on whether the guns in their arms were loaded.
Nervous and scrupulous, she presented her training-camp admission notice to the sentry at the gate.
The sentry—bronze-skinned, tall—saw the words “Commander Jiang Yunzhao” and her brows moved slightly, but her face quickly returned to blankness. She extended a white-gloved right hand and made a gesture toward the surveillance camera on the opposite wall.
Only after the soldier behind the surveillance saw the gesture did the gate begin to open.
The base’s massive iron doors rumbled open, and Sang Ling walked in, backpack on, heart in her throat.
The first thing to meet her eyes was a vast, empty training ground, divided by wire fencing into one combat ring after another. Walking past the wire wall, she could still smell the lingering gun-smoke on the mesh.
Behind the training ground rose a huge gymnasium, painted white, its entire exterior coated in anti-radar material, giving off a metallic sheen.
The moment Sang Ling stepped inside, she was hit by a roar of human voices—and for an instant thought she’d wandered into a Saturday-morning wet market.
No wonder it was deserted outside. The entire training camp was probably crammed in here.
She listened carefully for a while before realizing: this was no market. This was a Colosseum.
A great arena had been raised on the green turf at the very center of the stadium, and the crowd around it was packed tight as a wall, everyone shouting in excitement, low animal-like growls rumbling from their throats.
“GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!”
“KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!”
Restless hormones churned through the air, and Sang Ling’s scalp went numb in an instant.
Her blood began to boil at the sight of so many battle-hungry Alphas. Her muscles tightened on raw primal instinct, adrenaline flooding out, her whole body priming itself for a fight that would draw blood.
The Alpha genes were already roaring, readying themselves for battle.
Even though she had lived through one Zerg attack, this was the first time Sang Ling truly felt that she had changed sex. Alpha—the meaning of that word went far beyond “became strong” or “high social status.”
The word meant belligerence, ambition, and the instinct to seize—etched directly into DNA.
On the arena, two Alphas—one red-haired, one black-haired—were locked in a fight neither could finish. The ring was covered in a thick layer of white plush pelt, the hide of some enormous alien creature, its white fur now stained red with both Alphas’ blood.
Sang Ling took a step back, scalp prickling, instincts screaming that this was bad.
She messaged Jiang Yunzhao to say she’d arrived.
No reply. Probably busy.
So Sang Ling climbed up into the stadium stands, putting as much distance as she could between herself and these Alphas drunk on war fever, and sat down on the steps, looking down on it all from on high.
On the ring, the two Alphas were locked together, hammering fist after fist into each other’s faces, taking fist after fist in return—and neither yielding a single step.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Just watching those full-force punches, Sang Ling could almost hear the sound of boxing gloves meeting flesh—a call from some ancient, wild place.
The blood still thundering through her was howling; that dizzying rage, that trembling, came surging back. Clearly, a mere few dozen meters of distance was nowhere near enough to escape the fighting spirit.
The far-too-young Alpha suddenly thought, with arrogance, If I went down there, neither of them would be a match for me. I’d beat them both senseless, beat them until they trembled, until the mere sight of me filled them with fear.
Their blood would be my medal.
……
Her teeth itched. She wanted to bite through something. The aggression hidden in her genes had been awakened.
Sang Ling parted her lips slightly and bit down hard on empty air, then slapped her own head to snap herself out of it.
A moment later, finding herself still hot-blooded and rising, Sang Ling abruptly raised her hand, drew a thin, razor-sharp blade from the inner pocket of her uniform, and gave the tip of her left finger a cut.
Blood welled. Healed fast.
The pain cleared her head for a moment—but she knew the Alpha instinct would come surging back soon enough.
She sat on the steps, opened her Light Brain, and messaged Lin Jinxu. Lin Jinxu’s avatar was an adorable little bunny—exactly what the general public expected of an Omega.
“You there?”
The bunny replied fast, as if she’d been waiting all along.
“Did you arrive safely?”
Such an ordinary sentence—and yet Sang Ling suddenly went calm. The muscles across her shoulder blades loosened, and her fingers tapped lightly at the Light Brain.
“Mm. Made it.”
She thought for a moment, then added: “Alphas are terrifying.”
Reading the message, Lin Jinxu’s brows shot up. Isn’t she an Alpha herself?
Lin Jinxu: “Did someone do something to you?”
Sang Ling: “No, they’re fighting on the arena, and the spectators are all completely frenzied. The audience is about to start brawling among themselves.”
“The Alphas at this base are all so fierce. Feels like they’re going to bully me.”
“Oh, right—this is a military base now, not a school. Feels like they’re going to hazing-bully me.”
Lin Jinxu recalled Sang Ling’s frame. Thin, yes—but that thin layer of muscle concealed explosive power not to be underestimated.
Especially considering that last time, she had held off two Giant Zerg with nothing but her body—and killed one of them.
Even Lin Jinxu, an Omega who had no business caring about military affairs, knew how staggering that was. The youngest Major General in the entire Human Federation—the most famous feat to her name was killing two Zerg bare-handed, and she’d been so badly wounded afterward that she’d retired for a year, only recently returning to service.
Sang Ling could already rival that Major General. She could honestly be described as a born killer.
It was a pity that this Alpha—whom virtually everyone who met her pegged as a sweet, gullible darling in one second flat—had no conception whatsoever of the idea that she might be the one doing the brutalizing, and no one else had the skill to brutalize her.
She was even still saying: “This place is saturated with a cult of violence. Honestly, I’d rather just stay with you.”
On Lin Jinxu’s grave face, an extremely faint smile suddenly surfaced.
But an Alpha was an Alpha in the end. Sang Ling happened to glance at the arena—and found the fight had reached a new crescendo.
She fired off a message in excitement: “OHHHHH! A chokehold! Someone went for the chokehold!”
Lin Jinxu looked at the glowing Light Brain screen, and could almost see Sang Ling’s excited face between the lines.
Her eyes must be shining right now. That hint of green hidden in the black would stand out all the more—like the eyes of a wolf in a night forest.
She smiled faintly. Her right hand trembled, just slightly—and a single drop of liquid fell from the syringe’s needle tip in her palm, landing on the wooden table, instantly raising a wisp of white smoke.
Lin Jinxu’s smile vanished. The Omega’s delicate face held nothing now but cold.
This table was one Sang Ling had picked out with her on moving day, bought on the spot at the furniture mall. Now it was ruined.
She felt a flicker of grief for the table, and decided to finish this quickly.
Lin Jinxu was still in her own bedroom, window open, curtains drawn back, door open too, letting the air circulate.
Sang Ling had hoped this table would serve her as a vanity or a desk. Now it was a makeshift laboratory bench.
A dozen beakers stood on the table; a test tube rack held seven or eight liquids of different colors.
A high-precision electronic scale, several strips of test paper, and two or three paper packets of unknown powder, torn open.
Lin Jinxu had already prepared everything she needed. Loading it into the syringe was only for testing.
Wearing thin white laboratory rubber gloves, she opened the pet carrier beside the table—the kind normally used to transport animals—and lifted out a fat white rabbit.
Stuck to the carrier was a note in the Orchid Mantis’s hand. The uncultured insect had controlled a pen awkwardly with her forelimbs, scrawling: “The lab rabbit you requested.”
Lin Jinxu gripped the rabbit by the base of its ears. The vigorous animal kicked and thrashed with all its might, surprisingly strong.
But the Omega who normally looked bonelessly delicate held the rabbit’s ears with absolute steadiness. She set it on the table, pinned its spine with her elbow, raised the syringe in her other hand, and drove the needle in one clean stroke into the blue-green vein below its ear.
Her hand was steady. Not a tremor in it—as if born to hold precision instruments like scalpels and laboratory equipment.
She pushed the plunger slowly. As the liquid level in the syringe fell, the rabbit’s struggles weakened. Its legs kicked less and less, until there was no movement at all—as if it had simply fallen asleep on the table.
The rabbit that had been bursting with life thirty seconds earlier died without a sound.
Lin Jinxu let go.
This was not the first rabbit she had executed. In her biology lab days, countless white mice and rabbits had died at her hands. But perhaps it had simply been too long since her last experiment—she suddenly felt like a stranger to it.
And yet, in her blood, something long extinguished rekindled. A feeling that could not be spoken of to another soul.
Her hands, ordinarily so perfectly steady, were trembling faintly now.
Lin Jinxu decided to attribute the trembling to excitement.
Sang Ling chatted idly with Lin Jinxu, the topic drifting from complaints about Alphas’ frenzied bloodlust to this and that—Little Yao’s math grades, whether they should renovate the new place a little more.
She smiled as she typed, humming some vague tuneless melody.
Then the wall of noise in her ears abruptly stopped.
Sang Ling felt it at once—something wrong. She looked up, and before she saw anything, a shadow fell over her.
