He stepped barefoot into the puddles.
The troublesome high heels had long since been kicked off somewhere unknown.
“Together?”
Qin Hongyi also got out of the car, a Desert Eagle somehow appearing in her hand.
“No need.”
Gu Chen turned around, his back facing the car headlights.
An extremely cruel smile appeared on his devastatingly beautiful face.
Since they came for me as their meal, it would be impolite of the Gu family if I didn’t personally entertain the guests.
He raised his hand toward the pitch-black curtain of rain and made an extremely provocative gesture.
Thumb pointing downward, he pressed it hard.
Want to eat me? Then let’s see if you have the teeth for it.
Deep within the rain curtain, more than a dozen pairs of gray-white eyes lit up simultaneously, locking firmly onto the figure standing in the light.
The Maybach’s high beams tore through the dark rain.
The nineteen shadows approached rapidly.
They were not human.
It was a pack of monsters moving on all fours with their spines bent backward.
Their gray, withered skin hung from their bones like jerky dried for years.
Their eye sockets were filled with turbid white. Saliva mixed with rainwater dripped from their mouths, leaving disgusting trails on the asphalt.
Inferior goods.
They couldn’t even compare to the defective 002 specimens.
At best, they were garbage fished out of the Mo family laboratory’s sewers.
Their only advantage was numbers.
Nineteen mouths working together could chew through steel plates as easily as eating wafers.
Gu Chen stood in the pouring rain.
His black bodycon skirt was soaked through, clinging tightly to his body.
His hands hung casually by his sides.
He didn’t assume any fighting stance—it looked like he had simply come out for a walk.
“You must be starving, huh?”
Gu Chen’s voice scattered the moment it left his mouth in the heavy rain.
The monsters couldn’t understand human speech, but they could smell it.
The scent of Subject 001’s perfect genes was like pouring a bucket of fresh blood into a pool of starving sharks.
“Roar!”
The leading monster kicked off the concrete ground, charging straight at Gu Chen’s throat with a gust of foul wind.
That speed would be nothing but a blur to ordinary people.
But on Gu Chen’s current retina, it moved as slow as a slideshow.
This was the power of the second genetic lock.
The world had been dissected in his eyes.
He could see the trajectory of every falling raindrop, hear the sound of blood pumping through the monsters’ veins, and even feel the vibration of every molecule in the air.
It was annoyingly noisy.
Gu Chen raised his eyelids.
He didn’t dodge or block. He didn’t throw a punch.
He simply lifted his right hand and made a grasping motion in the air toward the monster lunging at him.
The dark red eye-shaped brand in his palm suddenly burned hot.
Pfft.
A dull sound rang out.
The monster still in mid-air seemed to slam into an invisible wall of air. Its body froze strangely for an instant.
Then, the blood vessels inside its body swelled and bulged violently, as if high-pressure mercury had been injected into them.
Genetic suppression.
The absolute command of a higher predator over lower lifeforms.
“Kneel properly.”
Four words left Gu Chen’s mouth.
This was not a request. It was a rule.
Bang!
The monster’s kneecaps shattered instantly. Its body slammed heavily into the puddle.
The momentum dragged its face across the rough road, carving out a several-meter-long bloody trench until it stopped right at Gu Chen’s feet.
It wanted to struggle. It wanted to roar.
But every drop of blood in its body had rebelled, pinning its bones and rendering it completely immobile.
The dozen or so monsters charging behind it slammed on the brakes and froze in place.
Their walnut-sized brains couldn’t comprehend what had happened, but their biological instincts made them tremble violently.
Fear engraved deep in their DNA.
Gu Chen looked down at the twitching pile of rotten flesh at his feet.
The Mo family only sent this kind of trash to receive me?
He shook his head in disappointment.
He lifted his foot.
The bare, delicate white toes lightly tapped the monster’s head.
It was such a slender, tender foot—blue veins clearly visible beneath the pale skin—yet the moment it made contact, it unleashed a terrifying hydraulic-press level of force.
Crack.
The sound of a watermelon bursting.
The red and white matter hadn’t even had time to splash before it was blocked half a foot away by the invisible aura surrounding Gu Chen.
The rain continued falling.
But with Gu Chen as the center, a ten-meter radius had become a vacuum zone.
The remaining monsters finally reacted. They let out miserable cries and turned to flee.
“Did I say you could leave?”
Gu Chen smiled.
A bewitching, cruel smile.
He spread his fingers and raised his palm upward.
A gravitational field originating from the depths of bloodline erupted instantly.
The nineteen monsters felt as if invisible iron hooks had pierced their spines.
Accompanied by a series of crisp cracking sounds of bones dislocating, they were violently dragged back in front of Gu Chen and piled up like a mountain of flesh.
Gu Chen didn’t even glance at the monsters. He simply tilted his head slightly and called out to the woman leaning against the car door.
“President Qin.”
“Borrow a light.”
Qin Hongyi leaned against the door, a cigarette between her fingers while her other hand played with the Desert Eagle.
She looked at the figure standing in the rain.
Elegant.
Bloody.
Yet breathtakingly beautiful.
This was the monster she had invested three hundred million in, even using herself as the medicinal primer to raise.
The old Gu Chen had been a blade kept in its sheath—sharpness hidden, killing without drawing blood.
The current Gu Chen was an unsheathed demon blade, drinking blood and radiating overwhelming evil energy.
Snap.
The windproof lighter produced a flame.
Qin Hongyi didn’t hand it over.
She took a deep drag and blew a puff of smoke toward Gu Chen through the nine meters of pouring rain.
“As you wish.”
Gu Chen turned his head back.
“Make it quick. I don’t have time to waste.”
The red mark in his palm instantly turned a near-black dark red.
The monsters piled into the meat mountain stopped screaming entirely.
Because their blood was boiling.
Boiling in the literal, physical sense.
At the microscopic level, Gu Chen had forcibly rewritten their chaotic gene chains, triggering a chain reaction of cellular self-destruction.
A continuous series of explosive sounds rang out in the rainy night.
The nineteen monsters exploded into clouds of blood mist, like popping a bunch of plastic bags filled with rotten tomatoes.
The rain instantly turned black-red.
The stench rose for a moment before being suppressed by the heavy downpour.
Only one remained.
The previous leader—the largest and slightly more intelligent one.
Its limbs had been reduced to powder, but its torso was still wriggling stubbornly in the muddy water.
Gu Chen walked over and squatted down.
The monster’s eyeballs rolled wildly. Deep within its pupils, a blurry shadow was faintly visible.
It wasn’t the monster’s own gaze.
It was peering from thousands of miles away.
Some higher, colder entity was watching this scene through the connection.
Subject 000.
Gu Chen pinched the monster’s chin, forcing it to look up as if staring into a mirror.
“Enjoying the show?”
A mocking smile curved Gu Chen’s lips.
He leaned close to the ugly face, but his voice was clearly meant for whatever was on the other side of the “screen.”
“Tell that old thing for me.”
“This piece of meat of mine is too tough. It’ll break your teeth.”
The shadow in the monster’s pupils flickered violently, seemingly provoked by the direct taunt.
An obscure, cold spiritual fluctuation tried to drill into Gu Chen’s mind along the line of sight.
“Scram.”
Gu Chen snorted coldly.
This time, he didn’t use any fancy moves.
His right hand exerted force.
Squish.
The monster’s head was ripped off like pulling a radish out of the ground.
The signal was cut.
Gu Chen shook his hand in disgust and tossed the head into the roadside drain like garbage.
He stood up, letting the heavy rain wash the blood off his arms.
The footsteps that had been light and unsteady from the high fever earlier were now firm and steady.
The second lock had been completely opened.
He now felt like he could tear a tank apart with his bare hands.
Gu Chen walked back to the Maybach.
In the corner of the back seat, Su Rou was shaking like a sieve.
As one of the same kind, she could sense the dimensional suppression from the life level far more clearly than Qin Hongyi.
If she faced the current Gu Chen, she probably wouldn’t even have the courage to resist.
She could only obediently lie down and expose her belly.
“Wipe yourself.”
Qin Hongyi tossed him a towel.
Gu Chen caught it and roughly rubbed his hair a couple of times.
The golden vertical pupils slowly faded back into deep human black.
“Not bad technique.”
Qin Hongyi opened the car door. She didn’t show any fear toward the inhuman scene earlier. Instead, she reached out and stroked his wet cheek.
Her fingertips carried a faint scent of smoke and felt slightly hot.
“Just a bit wasteful,” Qin Hongyi glanced at the minced meat on the ground.
“This is top-grade biological fertilizer. The flowers in the garden would bloom explosively.”
“Too dirty. Not worthy of President Qin’s garden.”
Gu Chen tossed the towel to Su Rou and sat in the passenger seat.
Inside the car, the air was thick with a mix of ambiguous tension and the smell of blood.
Gu Chen looked down at his palm.
The eye-shaped brand had sunk beneath the skin, leaving only a faint red mark.
He leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes.
“Where to?” Qin Hongyi started the car.
“Since the Mo family dared to reach out their hand, we’ll chop their claws off.”
The car started, its engine roaring as it drove into the rainy night.