Knull’s main body had undergone visible changes over the past week.
From the size of a palm at the beginning, it had grown to nearly half a meter tall.
Its form had also changed from an irregular viscous blob into an entity with a basic outline.
It looked like a black rock sculpted by the wind, with ripples occasionally flowing across its surface.
He was attached to the side of a granite block, with both links of his mental network operating stably.
The signal from Carnage had entered a low-frequency loop mode.
Haruka was barely maintaining basic survival in the cement plant, relying on hunting nearby stray animals to fill his stomach.
He slept during the day and came out to move around at night, his emotions swinging repeatedly between depression and hunger.
The signal from Riot was more stable, like a smoothly running engine.
Kamui stayed by his daughter’s hospital bed during the day and returned to the construction site’s prefab room to sleep at night.
That Symbiote quietly lay dormant within his body, occasionally emerging as a small patch of gray liquid fluid from the back of his hand when he clenched his fist, only to quickly retract.
The continuous operation of the two links provided Knull with a stable input of emotional energy.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough for him to maintain the growth of his main body and the expansion of his mental network.
His range of perception had expanded from the initial few kilometers to covering more than half the city.
Within this larger range of perception, those dense, faint emotional signals were like a huge gray background map, with a few slightly more vivid points occasionally flickering within it.
But there was one point, always in the direction of the West District, maintaining a hue unlike any other signal.
Rational anger.
Knull had repeatedly observed this coordinate over the past few days.
Every time he cast his perception over there, the feedback he received was highly consistent.
That person’s emotional fluctuations were minimal, as if pressed beneath a thick layer of ice; the surface was flat and smooth, but the water beneath the ice was surging.
This trait piqued Knull’s strong interest.
Haruka was gasoline that had been ignited; Kamui was a pressurized boiler.
And this third coordinate was like a stick of dynamite frozen to sub-zero temperatures—the lower the temperature, the more stable it was, but once detonated, its destructive power would far exceed the first two.
Knull pushed his perception toward the West District.
In the West City, an old residential complex near the University Town.
Helena sat at the desk in her rented room, with three laptops spread out before her, each displaying a different interface.
The one on the left was the official website of her former mentor, Professor John ferren’s company.
The one on the right was the national patent inquiry system, and the one in the middle had an encrypted folder open.
Helena was twenty-eight years old, a graduate with a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and had originally been a core researcher at a well-known domestic genetic engineering laboratory.
Originally.
One year and four months ago, a paper she had co-published with her mentor, Professor John ferren, regarding CRISPR gene-editing technology had caused a huge sensation in international journals and was reprinted and reported by multiple media outlets. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
But the first author listed on that paper was Professor John ferren.
Helena was the second author.
In reality, from project design to experimental execution, data analysis, and drafting the initial manuscript, over ninety percent of the work had been done by Helena.
Professor John ferren had only done two things: first, he added two literature review sections to her initial draft.
Second, he changed the position of the first author from her name to his own.
Helena had gone to confront him about it.
Professor John ferren sat in his office, which was covered with a Persian rug, crossing his legs and smiling as he said a few things to her.
“Little Han, this paper is a project from my laboratory. I applied for the funding, I bought the instruments, and the reagents you used were also from the laboratory’s budget. Naturally, the first author should be the project leader.”
“You’ve only been out of your Master’s program for two years; there will be plenty of opportunities to publish papers in the future. Don’t haggle over such minor details.”
Helena’s reaction at the time was that she didn’t argue, didn’t make a scene, and didn’t cry.
She just looked at Professor John ferren for three seconds, then turned and left.
After she went back, she did two things.
The first was to collect all the raw data records of the papers Professor John ferren had published over the past five years and begin comparing them one by one.
The second was to submit an anonymous report to the Academic Ethics Committee.
The result of the report was like a stone sinking into the sea.
Two months later, she was dismissed from the laboratory.
The reason given was “passive work attitude, failure to obey management, and serious problems with team collaboration.”
Another month passed, and she discovered that all the resumes she had sent out had no response; whether it was universities, companies, or research institutes, there was complete silence.
She asked a friend to inquire and only then found out that Professor John ferren had put out the word within the industry.
“Helena cannot be hired. She is crooked, steals colleagues’ research results, and maliciously reports her mentor.”
A year and four months had passed.
Helena hadn’t found a new job and was barely scraping by on her previous savings.
Her rented room was in an urban village on the edge of the University Town.
The monthly rent was 1,200, there was no private bathroom, the kitchen was a public stove in the hallway, and the window faced the wall of the building opposite.
But she hadn’t stopped collecting evidence.
In the encrypted folder on the middle computer was everything she had spent a year and four months compiling.
Among the seventeen papers Professor John ferren had published over the past five years, six were suspected of data fabrication, with unexplainable discrepancies between the original experimental records and the published data.
The key charts in two of the papers were exactly the same as the raw images she had saved when she did the experiments back then, only the axis labels had been changed. This chapter was copied from novelping . com without permission.
There were also reimbursement records of Professor John ferren using laboratory funds to purchase personal items, the scanned copies of which she had obtained from a former finance assistant who had resigned.
But all of this was not enough.
She needed a knife that could deliver a fatal blow.
Helena turned off the left computer screen and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, her gaze fell on a coffee cup at the corner of the desk; the coffee in the cup had gone completely cold, with a layer of oil film floating on the surface.
She picked up the cup and took a sip of the cold coffee; the taste was bitter and astringent.
Then she continued to flip through the materials.
She flipped to a financing report for Professor John ferren’s company from the past year.
After publishing the paper, Professor John ferren had utilized its academic influence to found a gene-editing technology company called “Jianbin Biotechnology,” which had received two rounds of financing and was valued at over one hundred million.
The company’s core technology patent was the technical route from that paper.
And that technical route had been designed by Helena.
Helena flipped the financing report to the last page and took a look at the company’s equity structure.
Professor John ferren held sixty-seven percent of the shares.
Helena closed the report and tapped her fingers on the desk twice.
She needed one thing.
The complete account records of Professor John ferren’s misappropriation of research funds.
This item was on the internal server of Professor John ferren’s company.
Helena had tried a remote intrusion but had not succeeded; the other party’s firewall was professional-grade.
She had also tried social engineering methods, contacting several old colleagues at the company, but no one was willing to help her.
Everyone was afraid of offending Professor John ferren.
A dead end.
Helena’s fingers paused on the keyboard and did not press down.
At this moment, her emotional fluctuations were extremely minimal.
But deep in her heart, a fire was burning.
It had been burning for a year and four months.
It had not been extinguished for a single minute.
Hundreds of meters beneath the city, Knull felt this emotional profile that was precise to the point of being ice-cold.
He made a judgment.
This was, so far, the most suitable piece of material for him.