Chapter 13: The Mission. Do What You Can and Leave the Rest to Fate.

The very first line of the file read: The cause of the species-wide gene mutation remains unknown, as does its mechanism. Judging by timing and location alone, a certain connection to the Ursa Minor Meteor Shower cannot be excluded.

Xing Lyu continued reading, his face blank.

[Based on analysis of information and samples gathered from all parties, gene-level changes can be classified into two types: Gene Contamination and Gene Mutation. At the present stage, the two changes appear to be isolated phenomena—that is, creatures that have undergone Gene Mutation will not suffer Gene Contamination from other species. However, the possibility of this situation changing again cannot be ruled out.]

[The following is a preliminary summary of current findings on Gene Contamination and Gene Mutation.]

[Gene Contamination]

[Cause: Current experimental results indicate that all living biological cells carry the potential to contaminate other species—including but not limited to raw consumption, bites, scratches, and all other behaviors resulting in tissue or bodily fluid contamination.]

[Phenomenon: Current experimental results indicate that roughly 10% of creatures show no obvious change after Gene Contamination; 60% die within 12 hours from runaway cell proliferation; 30% mutate into Gene-Fusion Creatures within 24 hours.]

[Note: On the night of April 9, the fusion-mutation phenomenon changed due to unknown factors, with cell proliferation accelerating at an exponential rate. To date, no successful case of mutation into a Gene-Fusion Creature has been observed.]

[Gene Mutation]

[Cause: Unknown. All living creatures, including but not limited to humans, are capable of undergoing Gene Mutation.]

[Phenomenon: Other species pending summary. In humans, main manifestations include degeneration of certain brain regions, enhanced bodily functions, and pronounced atavism; skin tissue thins due to muscle proliferation and can no longer withstand direct sunlight; dynamic vision improves dramatically while static vision degrades; smell and hearing show no obvious change; metabolism increases dramatically.]

[Note: The Gene Mutation phenomenon occurred between the night of April 9 and the early hours of the following morning; no further individual Gene Mutation has been observed since. Gene-Mutated individuals do not cause Gene Contamination. The mutation process in Gene-Mutated individuals has not stopped, and the final form and consequences of the mutation cannot presently be determined.]

Seeing Xing Lyu and the others close their folders, the Detachment Leader spoke. “Based on this report, Command Headquarters has decided to abandon the original plan of airdropping directly onto the signal loss point. Instead, you will carry sufficient ammunition and enter from the edge of Changling Mountain.”

Xing Lyu’s brow furrowed. “That’s too slow. Academician Wei may not last that long.”

The Detachment Leader was silent for a moment. “The directive from above is that sample recovery takes priority on this mission.”

Before Xing Lyu could respond, he continued, “Command Headquarters cannot locate Academician Wei. All we have are the coordinates of the last team member’s death. Your mission is to head for those coordinates and recover the samples, searching along the way for Academician Wei Fengtang and the bodies of your fallen comrades. But those last two objectives can be abandoned depending on circumstances. Coming back alive comes first. Understood?”

Xing Lyu looked at the team members around him, weighed it for a moment, then raised his hand in salute. “Yes sir!”

The Detachment Leader visibly relaxed, a faint smile surfacing. “Get proper rest. Departure at 0600 tomorrow.”

“Yes sir!”

Leaving the Command Headquarters, Xing Lyu’s four-man team walked toward the barracks in silence. In the end, it was Little Bear who couldn’t hold it in.

“We’re really giving up on him? I looked Wei Fengtang up. Academy of Sciences Academician, national medal recipient… He has to be brilliant—why else would they dispatch a rescue team the moment he went missing… He’s a Doctor of biology too. He should be exactly the kind of talent we need most right now, shouldn’t he?”

A stretch of silence. Then Dazi said in a low voice, “If he could be saved, they would never give up on him. The optimal plan was helicopter transport with a direct drop at the site. The current plan is to go in from the perimeter…”

Dayu, whose injuries had fully healed, said nothing, but his eyes stayed fixed on Xing Lyu.

Xing Lyu remained silent until they reached the barracks. Only then did he say quietly, “The Detachment Leader is right. Too many unknowns, and the forces have taken heavy losses these past days. It’s only natural Command Headquarters has concerns. Do what we can, and leave the rest to fate.”

This disaster sweeping the globe made no exceptions for anyone—not even for soldiers with their superior conditioning. In fact, the only reason the nation had detected the disaster early and prepared at all was that several cases of Gene Contamination from field training exercises had surfaced within the military.

And even so, no one had imagined the disaster would spread this fast, this violently.

On the night of April 9, in the Fourth Military Region alone, several hundred men underwent Gene Mutation, and a further portion suffered Gene Contamination from unknown causes. The final count showed that nearly a quarter of their personnel had died in that single night. Factor in the losses from the rescue and cleanup operations that followed, and the number would only climb.

Their own Dagger Squad had lost two comrades that night.

Was Wei Fengtang important? Of course he was—otherwise Command Headquarters would never have dispatched an entire Special Forces squad to rescue him the moment the initial chaos subsided. But manpower was stretched thin and missions piled high; the military simply had neither the time nor the people to grind away at one man of unknown fate in a vast, lethal forest.

Thinking of how much emptier the barracks had grown, Little Bear and the other two stayed silent for a long while before finally murmuring, “Yes sir.”

At the same time, deep in Changling Mountain, Su Ze and Lin Xiuzhu sat stuffed and silent, neither quite looking at the other.

Sleep? Too early. Stay up? Nothing to do. Not that the two of them had a single topic of common interest to begin with—if anything, they found each other mildly insufferable.

Lin Xiuzhu drained the last of the water from his cup, stood, and headed for the bed. “I’m sleeping.”

Su Ze glanced at him and asked, thoughtful, “You’re just going to sleep like that?”

“What else?” Lin Xiuzhu rolled his eyes.

“No danger?” Plenty of forest animals hunted at night. Lin Xiuzhu planned to sprawl in a wide-open cave, unafraid of being carried off by some beast in the dark?

Lin Xiuzhu snorted without answering. He picked up a sheet of black fabric leaning against the stone wall, gave it a few practiced shakes, and it sprang into a camping tent—one large enough to cover nearly the entire cave mouth, with room to spare.

The tent even had a viewing feature: pull the zipper, and the inner tent layer opened up, exposing a transparent outer layer that formed a picture window.

Lin Xiuzhu stood inside his tent and regarded Su Ze mockingly through the window.

Su Ze didn’t take offense. He nodded calmly. “Not bad.” It wouldn’t stop a large predator, but in relatively safe terrain, it was enough to fool most animals.

With that, he stood and walked straight out of the cave, and Lin Xiuzhu’s voice jumped an octave in alarm.

“Where do you think you’re going?!”

“For a walk.” Su Ze’s tone was exactly that of an old-timer in peacetime, finished with dinner in his hutong home, stepping out for a leisurely evening stroll.

The problem was, this was no friendly alley where every neighbor knew your name, and these were hardly peaceful times.

Lin Xiuzhu scrambled out of the tent, his expression frighteningly severe.

“Do you have any idea where you are?! This is fucking Changling Mountain! Not some neighborhood lane! ‘Going for a walk’ means picking a random spot to die, you understand me?!”

Su Ze said nothing, stepping around him and continuing onward.

Lin Xiuzhu was furious beyond words. He wanted to follow but was scared; he didn’t want to follow but couldn’t bear not to. Then he remembered the sight of Su Ze instantly killing Mutated Wild Rabbits at dusk, gritted his teeth, and trailed after him, voice pitched low. “Let’s get one thing straight: if anything goes wrong, I am not saving you!”

“Mm,” Su Ze acknowledged. “I probably wouldn’t have time to save you either.”

Lin Xiuzhu: “…Just shut up!”

Changling Mountain at night was quiet, uncanny, charged with the sense of hidden currents and lurking danger. And the night had always been the hunting grounds of countless beasts. Less than two hundred meters from the cave mouth, Su Ze and Lin Xiuzhu personally witnessed two hunts.

In the first, a tree that had looked perfectly ordinary by day extended Mycelium-like tendrils from its trunk. The moment they touched another living creature, they burrowed beneath its skin and began drinking its bodily fluids.

In the second, an owl mistook one of Lin Xiuzhu’s tentacles for prey and sliced clean through its tip with a single talon. Clearly, though, marine mollusk didn’t suit an owl’s palate: Su Ze watched it carry the severed tentacle up to a branch, take a single bite, drop the rest, and fly off without a backwards glance.

Lin Xiuzhu, who had witnessed the whole thing: “…”

Ten thousand curses jammed in his throat, none of them dared spoken for fear of drawing some larger predator, Lin Xiuzhu flushed scarlet and glared at Su Ze, blaming every bit of it on this bored idiot who’d insisted on wandering out to die.

Su Ze ignored him. Watching the owl disappear, a thoughtful look crossed his face.

That owl seemed not to have mutated at all—or if it had, its mutation was… enhanced vigor? After all, Lin Xiuzhu’s skin texture had changed after his mutation—visibly far more flexible at a glance. To shear through his tentacle in one strike meant this owl’s talons outclassed even the Mutated Wild Rabbit’s claws. And yet its appearance showed no anomaly whatsoever, and its hunting method hadn’t changed either.

Su Ze turned the question over without breaking stride—catching Lin Xiuzhu by the arm just as the man was about to step into a mutated vine trap, and casually assessing the texture of his altered skin while he was at it.

The feel of an aquatic creature, yet dry like human skin… Slightly gross. Wiping his palm discreetly on his trousers, Su Ze asked, “You’ve been in Changling Mountain this long. Has it always been like this?”

Lin Xiuzhu, still rattled from watching a giant net leap out of the ground at his feet, shot back blankly, “…What?”

“Except for the occasional sounds, it’s mostly quiet.”

“…Pretty much. Though the day before yesterday, I thought I heard explosions.”

“Explosions?” Su Ze murmured, puzzled, but asked nothing more. He simply kept walking onward with no particular destination, Lin Xiuzhu trailing behind him with every nerve strung tight.

Fortunately, nothing else happened. The forest at night was like a giant—silent and still, dreadful yet gentle.

As time passed, Lin Xiuzhu gradually relaxed and realized he’d been worrying over nothing.

It was true that many large predators hunted at night, but there were no wolves, leopards, or tigers in the stretch he occupied, and smaller animals generally didn’t put humans on the menu—the size difference made them avoid people on their own.

The truly dangerous ones were the bizarre plants. Any of them, once encountered, was happy to take a bite and see. But true to their plant nature, most disliked moving; stay outside their striking range, and they generally wouldn’t give chase.

The rest were vermin—insects and the like. Su Ze, with shoes and long pants, was fine; Lin Xiuzhu, meanwhile, got bitten countless times. Fortunately, octopus Regeneration and toxin resistance were both solid, so nothing serious came of it.

Actually, a night walk like this feels pretty nice… far better than hiding in a cave spiraling… Lin Xiuzhu was mid-thought when he saw Su Ze’s footsteps stop dead ahead.

Lin Xiuzhu snapped alert instantly. Before he could even ask, Su Ze snapped off a tree branch with one hand and said, “Wait here.”

The next second, the man shot off like an arrow loosed from the string!

Lin Xiuzhu was dumbstruck.

It had never occurred to him that Su Ze would just run, and run that fast, without the slightest pause for persuasion. By the time he came back to his senses, the man was long gone—and the forest that had been so quiet now bared its fangs, suddenly turning monstrous.

“…Fuck,” Lin Xiuzhu muttered. His eight tentacles writhed, his body sank slowly lower, the tentacles curling around him until he had rolled himself into a ball. “Su Ze, you bastard… come back soon…”