The sizzling sound and the aroma drifting into his nose left him slightly dazed.
It smelled a little like the youtiao being fried downstairs that morning.
Tang Xiao unconsciously licked his lips.
Just then, the armed forces finally stormed into the kitchen. The people leading the charge shouted:
“Raise your hands.”
Tang Xiao instinctively lifted the hand he had been holding in the wok, revealing skin that was already cooked and the remaining quarter of the hyphae weakly falling to the floor.
The horrifying sight made everyone instinctively raise their guns and aim them at Tang Xiao, who stood in front of the wok.
There was no other reason. He simply looked far too abnormal.
He was clearly in a miserable state. His white lab coat was covered in dust and large bloodstains, his hair was disheveled, and his glasses sat crookedly on his face. His arm was covered in terrifying pink-red burns, with even the skin peeling away. Yet despite the unbearable pain any normal person would have felt, his expression was almost calm. His lowered, dark eyes and pale, beautiful face gave him an eerie allure.
Some people were beautiful when healthy, others when sickly, and still others when battered and wounded.
Tang Xiao himself had no idea how well this state suited him, or how it inexplicably made people want to see him even more broken.
The armed personnel and surviving newcomers who witnessed the scene were briefly captivated. The blond man stared blankly at Tang Xiao, unable to look away.
“...Are you one of this batch’s newcomers?” The armed personnel weren’t sure what to do when the middle-aged man inside the protective circle behind them looked at Tang Xiao with interest. “Name, ID number, and a brief account of what happened.”
Tang Xiao licked his cracked lips and answered clearly, “Tang Xiao, DF203. As you can see, I was attacked in the kitchen and barely escaped using hot oil.”
This game had no character-creation or naming process. If Tang Xiao hadn’t idly checked his ID card during one of his previous runs, he wouldn’t have been able to answer.
“It’s quite remarkable that you survived an attack by 428.”
Tang Xiao lowered his gaze and said nothing. He simply didn’t know how to respond. Babbit, standing beside the middle-aged man, looked displeased, but before he could say anything, the man suddenly glanced at the hyphae beside Tang Xiao. “Capture it.”
The remaining quarter of the hyphae had coalesced into a mass that was quietly wriggling toward the vent in an attempt to escape. The armed forces’ attention immediately snapped to it, and after Tang Xiao had been checked over, he was allowed to move to the back.
He ended up right beside the man who had just questioned him. “You used the kitchen’s fryer?”
Tang Xiao instinctively glanced at his name badge.
[Bard, Level Five Scholar, Head of the Laboratory]
Babbit, who had been showing them around earlier, was still alive. He now stood behind the person in charge, bowing and scraping. The two or three remaining newcomers had gathered around him, including the familiar-looking blond man, who was watching Tang Xiao with a peculiar expression.
Tang Xiao merely glanced at him and paid no attention to his stare. Compared to some random passerby, he was more interested in this newly appeared NPC. It seemed this man was the laboratory’s lead researcher.
Tang Xiao answered cautiously, “Yes.”
Bard nodded and asked nothing further.
Tang Xiao had just breathed a sigh of relief when an enthusiastic voice came from behind him. “Hi, Tang! You’re incredible!”
He turned and saw a young man who looked about his age, with blond hair and blue eyes. His face was brimming with enthusiasm, and he gestured animatedly. “You actually managed to seriously injure that monster! That’s amazing! Oh, I’m Dexter Rocky. Nice to meet you!”
Tang Xiao gave the blond young man a simple nod. The blond man grew even more excited and stepped forward as if to say something, but the sounds of the fierce battle nearby drew everyone’s attention.
The monster seemed to be at a disadvantage.
The fryer’s high temperature was indeed lethal to it. It wasn’t dead, but it was badly wounded, and the armed personnel showed no mercy with their heat-ray guns, aiming to kill it on the spot.
The little monster Tang Xiao had wounded was gradually losing the ability to resist. It couldn’t even gather its hyphae into a solid form anymore, and its size had been cut in half. Even so, it still refused to give up the fight.
Through its one remaining orange-yellow vertical pupil, Tang Xiao saw a creature’s extreme will to survive. It no longer looked in his direction. Perhaps it knew that being captured meant immediate destruction, because it fought back fiercely, nearly breaking through the armed forces’ encirclement several times.
The monster was incredibly fast. Tang Xiao had confirmed that by dying several times. Even when he had managed to hit it with a weapon, it hadn’t been thanks to his eyesight, but to the experience and predictive instincts he had gained from dying more than a dozen times. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have stood a chance against it.
And yet these armed personnel were holding the monster back with only seven or eight people and weapons unlike anything he had ever seen, though they were clearly more advanced.
The laboratory’s armed forces were much stronger than he had imagined.
Little did Tang Xiao know that while he was seriously assessing the organization’s military strength, the people from the laboratory were also secretly astonished—especially Bard, who understood the monster’s strength better than anyone, and the armed personnel in charge of the fight.
...That newcomer had managed to keep the monster occupied all by himself for so long? He had even seriously wounded it?
Bard glanced at Tang Xiao’s calm face from the corner of his eye. He wasn’t the only one doing so. The remaining newcomers were even more blatant in their stares, and some looked at Tang Xiao with undisguised admiration.
The newcomers selected by the Third Eye were all intelligent people of their age. They understood all too well how difficult it was to face this monster alone. Unless someone had superpowers, an ordinary person was no different from a meal to a creature like this.
For an ordinary person to evade its pursuit in such extreme danger, then turn the tables on it with nothing more than the unremarkable fryer in the kitchen, would require luck, intelligence, decisiveness, and the ability to act. Not one of those could be lacking.
Bard had looked over this batch of newcomers’ records in advance, and there were no superpowered individuals among them. That meant Tang Xiao had bested the monster entirely on his own—and had even badly wounded it. He had to be the most outstanding newcomer in this batch.
Meanwhile, as Tang Xiao watched the battle, he felt more and more that something was wrong. Weren’t they supposed to capture it first?
“Shouldn’t you spare its life?” Tang Xiao asked hoarsely. “It is an experimental subject, after all.”
“Hm? No need.” Bard looked calmly at 428. “It was going to be destroyed anyway. The experiment has failed, so it’s of no value to us now.”
The experiment had failed?
Babbit, the one who had introduced the project, had indeed said in one of Tang Xiao’s earlier runs that it had failed. But Tang Xiao had been so preoccupied with getting past the instant-kill stage that he hadn’t paid much attention.
Wait, then what was he supposed to do about his main quest?!
Tang Xiao looked toward the little monster. It was now completely suppressed, with every shot aimed at a vital point. The blood-red mass of hyphae was visibly shrinking.
The little monster’s eyes were gradually losing their light. Its instincts screamed that death was near, but even so, it kept staring at Tang Xiao and Bard. In fact, when Bard said it was “of no value,” it fought back even more violently.
That still didn’t change the fact that it was losing. The little monster’s body was visibly shrinking, and large amounts of broken, grayish-white hyphae littered the ground. Its resistance was gradually weakening, but it still fought with the desperation of a cornered animal.
Its desperate struggle couldn’t slow its inevitable descent toward the abyss of execution.
“Wait.”
Then Tang Xiao’s hoarse voice rang out. Everyone present instinctively turned to look at him.
Suddenly the focus of everyone’s attention, Tang Xiao stiffened, his lowered fingers going rigid. Forcing himself to speak, he said, “It would still be better to keep it alive.”
Bard asked with interest, “Why? Do you know how much funding it takes to run a project?”
Although Tang Xiao had never worked in a laboratory, he wasn’t completely ignorant. His family had worked on similar projects, and his father had complained at home more than once that laboratories were money-guzzling beasts, while whether they produced any results was practically a matter of luck.
Li Mu had also complained to him more than once while drunk about how much pressure they were under.
If this project was doomed to fail, the little monster definitely wouldn’t survive, unless...
Tang Xiao closed his eyes and took off his glasses, struggling to grip the frame with his burned hand. He picked up the corner of his coat with his uninjured right hand and slowly wiped the lenses. The gesture both bought him time and helped him organize his thoughts.
Forget it. At worst, he could just try again.
To everyone else, the young man being questioned by such an important figure calmly wiped his glasses as though he had no sense of nervousness at all. Even Bard patiently waited for him to finish. The young man put his glasses back on and said coolly:
“PESA material.”
Babbit frowned. “So what?”
“PESA material has aerospace-grade hardness. Even a specialized factory would need quite some time to cut and reshape it.” Tang Xiao’s palms were sweating as he spoke. He didn’t know the first thing about this so-called PESA material. He had learned all of this from the blond man’s unsolicited explanations in earlier runs, or by asking questions whenever he got stuck. He was simply putting what he had learned to use on the spot.
[‘Fortunately, the experiment produced some extra output, so we’ve recently shifted our focus in that direction...’]
Li Mu’s words from that morning still echoed in his ears. Tang Xiao deliberately glanced toward the dormitory’s main entrance. “But how long did it take this monster to corrode the door made of that material? I doubt it was even a minute. I think something capable of corroding it that quickly must have some research value.”
At that, Bard immediately understood what Tang Xiao meant. His eyes lit up, and he lowered his head to operate his wristband for a moment.
A blue, translucent display appeared above his arm. It showed footage from the security cameras at the dormitory entrance. He stared at the image in the air for several minutes, his smile growing wider and wider, then turned and gave Babbit a long, piercing look.
Babbit lowered his head almost to his chest, nodding and bowing as sweat poured down his face. “I’m sorry, Doctor. I-I was too scared. I didn’t notice...”
Bard gave a cold snort. Then, when he turned back to Tang Xiao, his expression changed to a warm smile. His gaze seemed to drift toward Tang Xiao’s left arm as he asked tentatively, “Tang Xiao, right? You’re impressive. But can you really accept this? That monster nearly killed you, and your arm... you might even need an amputation.”
At that, everyone saw the young man freeze for a moment, his delicate brows knitting together. He asked coldly, genuinely confused, “What does that have to do with whether the experiment should continue?”
The others interpreted his matter-of-fact expression in another way.
It was as though, to him, his own feelings were the least important thing of all.
And on top of that, his arm had nearly been cooked by the hot oil, yet his face showed no pain whatsoever. He also possessed extraordinary intelligence.
Beta-type Scholar Syndrome.
The name of this condition appeared in their minds almost instantly.
As natural disasters and fungal invasions became increasingly frequent, humans had begun developing all kinds of new genetic disorders. Beta-type Scholar Syndrome was considered one of the milder ones in terms of side effects.
It usually manifested as an excessively developed intellect accompanied by insensitivity to pain. Unable to feel pain, those affected became excessively devoted to whatever they believed in. Once they decided something was their life’s work, they developed a powerful tendency to throw themselves into it like moths to a flame, even at the cost of their own lives.
If they were assassins, they would be top-tier terrorists. If they were soldiers, they would be selfless protectors in the hearts of the people. If they were politicians, they would stop at nothing to serve their party’s interests.
They were like selfless worker ants in an ant colony. Sometimes they could be heroes, and sometimes they could become demons.
And if they were scientists... they were practically synonymous with geniuses and madmen.
Throughout history, scientists with this condition had all been like comets, rising to fame early and dying young, illuminating human civilization with their unmatched intellect as they burned themselves away like candles.
The organization had really drawn a winning card this time.
Having found a reason to continue the experiment and recoup their losses, Bard naturally no longer ordered the little monster killed. He simply told them to capture it.
After 428 had been weakened to a certain point, the armed personnel brought over a transparent container that could be electrified at any time and put the shrunken blood-red monster inside. They carried it straight past Tang Xiao toward the exit. Tang Xiao casually glanced at the container and met the little monster’s gaze through its transparent walls. All its hyphae had been severed, and its orange-yellow eyeball was already charred black, but it stubbornly refused to close. Its deep, complicated stare seemed to have transformed into transparent hyphae of its own, clinging stubbornly to the young man.
Tang Xiao curled his lips into a cold smile and met the monster’s gaze without hesitation.
Just you wait. We have plenty of time.