Chapter 52

Su Xing felt a chill creep up her spine under the woman’s crazed gaze. Naturally, she couldn’t agree with such words. She was more concerned about something else the other party had just mentioned.

Lowering her head to look at her own fingers, she found it hard to accept. “You’re saying I devoured… that mycelial monster?”

“Either you digest it, or it rapidly absorbs your flesh and genes, then madly divides and multiplies. In no time, it would have decomposed all your internal organs into a mass of threads.”

“…”

Shan Mingxin saw Su Xing glaring at her with a greenish-pale face but showed not a shred of guilt as the instigator. She crossed her long legs, her expression half-smiling. “But you can’t say you entirely won either. As long as traits are preserved, inheritance is the meaning and instinct of life’s existence. Now that you carry fragments of its genes within you, from a certain perspective, you’ve helped it achieve evolution and continuation. It could be considered a successful proliferation.”

Su Xing pressed a hand against her stomach. The more she listened, the stronger the inexplicable disgust grew. She laughed coldly in anger. “A victim like me has no say in winning or losing. The only one winning here is your sadistic hobby, built on gambling with other people’s lives!”

Shan Mingxin pursed her lips into a smile and spread her hands. “If you insist on seeing it that way, then sure.”

This nonchalant attitude instantly ignited a nameless fury within Su Xing. By the time she realized it, a strand of white filament had shot out from somewhere on her body, piercing through the air like a sharp arrow aimed straight at Shan Mingxin’s throat!

It happened so fast that even Su Xing herself was taken aback. Fortunately, Shan Mingxin’s perception of danger was keen. She swiftly tilted her head aside, narrowly dodging it.

“You actually tried to kill me! How terrifying!” Shan Mingxin “turned pale with fright,” hugging her knees and shrinking into the car seat, her voice raised in exaggerated surprise.

The flicker of panic and self-reproach Su Xing felt was instantly scattered by her melodramatic tone. She took a deep breath and realized the thread that had shot from the left side of her chest was still hooked onto the car seat’s backrest, having already burned and corroded a hole through it. The other end was still attached to her body, looking utterly bizarre.

She tried to relax, intending to retract these damn threads using the same method as before.

Wen Ruyao studied the disturbingly familiar white mycelial threads for a few moments before speaking. “The monster we encountered three times in the city center?”

Perhaps because she had “fed” today, the duration of her debilitated state from overusing her Psychic Power was much shorter than anticipated. She had awoken to find herself lying in a car parked on the roadside, already outside the city in a remote area. Only Shan Mingxin was awake, staring at her while leisurely chewing beef jerky. The woman clearly had no intention of seriously explaining the situation. Wen Ruyao had only pieced together a rough idea from fragments of conversation.

Su Xing briefly recounted the events after she had fainted. But Wen Ruyao’s question had reminded her of something. From the first encounter with this mycelial monster, it seemed the creature had never intended to let them go. From sabotaging the bunker’s air system to silently infiltrating the car’s undercarriage, this low-level variant’s intelligence clearly extended beyond mere instinctual hunting and feeding.

“Don’t underestimate it.” Shan Mingxin tilted her head closer to the strand of mycelium stuck to the seat beside her. The tip of her upright index finger extended a sliver of chillingly sharp bone. “Let me test if its resilience has improved—”

She moved to cut the strand with the bone blade, but Su Xing “whooshed” the white thread back into herself, shooting the woman a dirty look.

Shan Mingxin clicked her tongue in disappointment, smoothed the long hair by her ear, and continued. “When we first encountered it on that main road outside the mall, remember, it had already digested quite a few humans. It probably possessed an intelligence level comparable to a human toddler or above. And it knows what to eat to speed up its evolution in that area. It targeted her, which is why it clung so persistently.”

“Me?”

Shan Mingxin slanted a mocking look at Su Xing. “What are you thinking? Obviously, the one next to you—that freak Gen-2 Variant with further developed brain functions.”

“…” Su Xing wanted to explain it was an instinctive response, but she swallowed her words.

“If that woman surnamed Xu had caught you two, she’d be especially thrilled. What a pity…” Shan Mingxin stared deeply at Wen Ruyao, who was focused on driving ahead, for a long moment before turning her head to the increasingly desolate landscape outside the window. She spoke slowly. “We’re almost at the destination. You sense it too, right?”

They had set off in the morning. According to the distance shown on the map, a normal drive would take the better part of a day. It had been raining on and off since dawn, making it hard to gauge the time by the sky. Su Xing checked the GPS and realized they were indeed very close to the marked location.

The large light armored vehicle turned right onto another main road. This road was much wider than the secluded lane they’d been on previously, but…

Wen Ruyao slowed the car.

This main road was the only way to reach the coordinates. It was a wide, multi-lane road, but looking ahead, they could already see several overturned, burnt-out cars belching black smoke in the distance.

Cars meant people had passed through, but it also signaled danger nearby.

Wen Ruyao didn’t accelerate. The current speed was much slower than on the deserted side road. The vehicle weaved around several wrecked cars, burned to mere skeletons beyond recognition. The journey was, on the contrary, remarkably calm. They didn’t even see the shadow of a monster. The drive was even smoother than on their previous road.

As the destination grew closer, Su Xing felt a surge of excitement. But as the vehicle advanced, her heart began to fill with tension and unease.

Her peripheral vision suddenly widened. Frowning, she looked out the car window. The dense woods lining both sides of the road had toppled in swaths, reduced to scorched earth. It looked as though they had been deliberately burned.

“Something’s wrong.” Shan Mingxin suddenly sat up. “The concentration of pure human genes here is so high even I can sense it. It makes no sense for it to be this quiet. Unless…”

The vehicle suddenly jolted. Without warning, Wen Ruyao yanked the steering wheel hard to the right, driving the car off the road and into the charred forest. The massive, sturdy wheels of the armored truck easily crushed the fallen, burnt-black branches. It barreled straight toward the gap beneath several overlapping, collapsed tree trunks and stopped.

Before the other two could question her strange action, a familiar, dreaded “buzzing” sound came from high above.

In moments, an impenetrable, sky-darkening “blackness” blotted out the gloomy sky overhead.

Su Xing: “The hornet swarm? They’re black?”

The charred, blackened tree trunks didn’t obstruct the view through the windshield. The armored vehicle, wedged motionless among the trees, had found adequate cover. At the very least, the swarm currently flying overhead showed no intention of actively attacking them.

“Judging by their external form, they’re a bit different from normal hornets.” Shan Mingxin squinted at the swarm in the sky. Suddenly, she thought of something and started rummaging frantically. “Phone, phone…”

“Sigh, forgot the battery’s dead. Can’t take any pictures.” She slapped her face in frustration, muttering to herself, “I’ll just catch a few stragglers to study later.”

“Are they heading… for the temporary airport?” Su Xing began to feel uneasy.

After all, the previous two times they’d encountered swarms—whether hornets or ants—their mass gatherings hadn’t been without reason.

Wen Ruyao’s fine brows were tightly knit. Her narrow, phoenix-like eyes fixed on the sky above, her expression grim. “I’m afraid so.”

Shan Mingxin, however, seemed to think it was only natural. “That’s what makes it normal. That so-called temporary airport must have gathered quite a few people. How could such an abundant food source not be attacked by variants? It would be weirder if there weren’t any monsters.”

Su Xing glanced at the smile playing on her lips, displeased. “Is this something to be happy about?”

Shan Mingxin: “Getting angry won’t change anything. How else do you think the national rescue system collapsed so fast? Ordinary shelters simply can’t withstand the swarm attacks of variants that pour out, drawn by the scent. And humanity’s existing weapons can’t even reliably kill them. The only thing that could serve as a true super-weapon was canceled by the higher-ups citing safety concerns just as it was being approved…”

“BOOM—”

A deafening, sky-shattering roar suddenly exploded overhead. In an instant, a blinding red light seemed to engulf the entire world. The people hiding in the car could only instinctively clamp their hands over their eyes, not daring to open them for a long moment. After the red light flashed, the sound of impact came from the roof, as if heavy objects were falling onto it.

The sound of objects crashing down grew more and more frequent. The three cautiously opened their eyes to find numerous huge, broken body parts of giant hornets scattered across the car’s hood.

Not far away, red flashes continued to lance into the sky. Su Xing rubbed her eyes and once more looked carefully toward the center of the road ahead and to the left.

This time she was sure she wasn’t seeing things.

—Standing on the road ahead, standing there, were humanoid metal mechs, roughly three meters tall, pure white in color. And not just one.

“Heh, so someone was secretly conducting research all along. Manufacturing mechs was originally just a private custom order for a mega-corporation tycoon, basically an empty shell model. But with a power source made from the Alpha Life Form, science fiction movies have unexpectedly become reality.”

Shan Mingxin licked the corner of her lips, her eyes narrowing. “They’re even carrying pulse cannons. Seems the people assigned to guard this place aren’t ordinary.”