Whoosh.
Blue flames raced across the ground at astonishing speed, instantly igniting the entire cultivation tank area.
The firelight danced and rolled in Gu Chen’s deep black eyes.
This fire burned away more than just the Gu family’s century-old foundation. It also incinerated the final lock named “mortal” on Gu Chen’s body.
The three of them walked up the stone steps back to the surface.
The underground fire had already spiraled out of control.
Terrifying high temperatures chased madly at their backs.
Stepping out of the ancestral hall and standing once again in the rain-washed courtyard, Gu Chen did not look back.
Thick smoke billowed up from underground, riding the night wind toward the clouds.
A century of schemes and mutual deception was completely reduced to ashes in this blaze.
Gu Chen slowly raised his right hand. Under the Maybach’s cold white headlights, he looked at his palm.
The red mark left by Subject 000 was still faintly burning.
It was a declaration of war.
“What’s the next step?” Qin Hongyi leaned against the car door and pulled out a cigarette pack from her pocket.
The firelight illuminated her wild, untamed face.
She didn’t care at all whether the Gu family was completely wiped out.
She only cared about what kind of massive game her perfect private collection was going to take her to play next.
Gu Chen walked over, plucked the cigarette from between her fingers, and put it between his own lips.
The bitter taste of tobacco circled through his lungs before he exhaled it all into the night wind.
“Nothing special.”
Gu Chen casually pressed the cigarette butt out on the scorching hood of the car.
He lifted his eyes and looked toward the deepest, most unfathomable direction of Beijing.
That was the coordinates of the Mo family’s old nest.
“We’re going to flip the Mo family’s table.” Gu Chen pulled open the car door. His tone was light and casual, yet carried a shocking madness.
“Since they ordered this tough dish called me, I’ll personally deliver it to their door and stuff them until they burst.”
The Maybach started up again, its tires rolling over the scattered wood chips outside the Gu family gate.
Qin Hongyi gripped the steering wheel with one hand and stepped on the accelerator.
“Going to the Mo family means drawing blood. Are you in any condition to do this right now?”
Gu Chen closed his eyes to rest, casually resting the hand with the red mark on the edge of the car window, feeling the damp, cold night breeze after the rain.
In the back seat, Su Rou hugged her knees like a fierce dog waiting for orders.
“As long as President Qin doesn’t feel bad about spending a little of your blood.”
Gu Chen’s voice was filled with unmasked arrogance.
“The thing the Mo family raised isn’t even qualified to tie my shoes.”
“You’ve gone completely insane with arrogance.”
Qin Hongyi laughed, her eyes overflowing with suppressed madness and excitement.
“As long as you dare to bite, I’ll give you this life of mine as fuel.”
In this crazy rainy night, mundane morality and hatred had already been burned away completely by the great fire.
Now, they were going to slay a god.
West Suburb, abandoned mining area.
Ahead stood a dilapidated coal preparation tower.
But under infrared vision, the high-energy heat source leaking from underground was absurdly massive.
This was the Mo family’s disguised air intake gate.
Gu Chen slammed on the brakes.
The wheels carved two deep grooves in the mud.
The three of them got out of the car.
Su Rou tore open the half-meter-thick lead-steel isolation door with her bare hands, revealing the bottomless vertical elevator behind it.
This specification was originally meant for transporting heavy shield machines or super-large mutated entities.
Gu Chen stepped into the elevator car. Qin Hongyi followed closely and pressed the button for Sub-level 280 with one hand.
The steel cables groaned under tension.
The elevator began its weightless descent.
The gut-wrenching sensation of freefall lasted a full three minutes.
Suddenly, a very faint hissing sound came from the ventilation vents.
Colorless and odorless.
It wasn’t a mechanical leak, but rather like a high-pressure spray valve being deliberately opened.
Click.
Qin Hongyi had been leaning against the iron wall of the car, loading bullets into her Desert Eagle. Her movements suddenly froze.
The brass bullet slipped from her fingers and clattered against the metal floor.
She raised her hand to her nose.
It was covered in scarlet.
Immediately after, two streams of blood burst from her eye sockets, flowing over her cheekbones and dripping onto her suit.
Her internal organs felt as if they had been thrown into a high-speed meat grinder.
The pain blurred her vision.
“Trojan gas.”
Qin Hongyi slid down the iron wall into a sitting position, her voice leaking air. “These old bastards really know how to play dirty.”
The Mo family not only understood the underlying logic of the Eden Project, they had also grasped its only fatal weakness.
This gas didn’t harm mutated beings. It specifically killed pure humans.
It was a blade designed to sever the inducer enzyme gene chain inside Qin Hongyi that controlled Subject 001.
The lock restraining the rampaging engine was being physically melted.
The instant the key’s suppression was lost, Gu Chen’s body gave the most direct reaction.
His core body temperature skyrocketed. Dense dark purple patterns surfaced beneath his fair skin.
The veins in his neck bulged violently, and horrifying cracking sounds of forced bone growth came from behind his ears.
The monster known as Subject 001 had lost its brakes and was now sliding at full speed toward out-of-control self-destruction.
Su Rou, huddled in the corner, pressed herself fearfully against the wall. She smelled the radiation of a high-tier gene collapse.
“The lock is broken.” Qin Hongyi spat out a mouthful of organ fragments.
She no longer had even the strength to stand.
She didn’t panic. Her rationality was terrifying.
Using the last of her strength, she raised her right arm.
The black muzzle of the Desert Eagle pressed against her own temple.
In this underground prison nine hundred meters deep, the moment her brain died, Gu Chen wouldn’t last three minutes before his genes overloaded and he exploded into a puddle of mush.
“This old lady isn’t going to make it.” Qin Hongyi looked up at him, her face covered in blood, smiling wildly and recklessly.
“Listen carefully. When I pull the trigger, dig out my heart and eat it.”
Her speech was extremely fast as she gave the optimal solution.
“The inducer enzyme concentration is highest in the ventricles. Eat it while it’s warm. It can help you survive tonight’s rejection reaction.”
There was no sentimental farewell. She had calculated her own life down to the last drop of blood.
Her index finger pressed the trigger.
The hammer pulled back.
In the one-tenth of a second before the hammer was about to strike the primer, a hand jammed into the gun’s mechanism.
Gu Chen’s five fingers forcibly stopped the mechanical structure.
The gun body, made of refined steel, twisted and deformed in Gu Chen’s hand, turning into a pile of scrap metal that smashed onto the floor.
His current condition was extremely bad.
Gu Chen grabbed Qin Hongyi by the collar and roughly hauled her up.
“Did I give you permission to die?”
His pupils had already turned into non-human dark golden vertical slits.
His skin was hot enough to fry an egg. Reason was being devoured bit by bit by bloodthirsty instinct.
But he didn’t reach for Qin Hongyi’s heart.
He turned around and smashed a fist into the elevator door.
The ten-centimeter-thick blast door caved in with a horrifying bulge. The entire elevator shook violently.
“I’ve never been anyone’s vessel in my life, and I have no intention of surviving by eating a woman’s rotten flesh.”
He turned back, staring into Qin Hongyi’s unfocused eyes.
Gu Chen then did something neither Qin Hongyi nor Su Rou could understand.
He raised his right hand, fingers pressed together like a blade, and without any warning, stabbed it into his own left chest.
No hesitation. No avoidance.
His nails sliced through flesh and pierced the sternum.
He grabbed hold of his own heart, which was racing at two hundred beats per minute.
“What are you doing…” Qin Hongyi’s eyes were bloodshot. She spoke while gasping in pain.
From the deepest part of the ventricle, Gu Chen forcibly extracted half a tube of extremely viscous blood that emitted a faint golden glow.
This was the highest-purity origin blood of Subject 001.
It could bring the dead back to life and regrow flesh from white bones, but it was also the most ferocious catalyst poison.
A single drop would cause an ordinary human to mutate and collapse.
Now, he was going to feed this to an ordinary person whose gene chain had been severed.
“Open your mouth.”
Gu Chen ordered.
Qin Hongyi clenched her teeth, fiercely resisting this mutually destructive act of madness.
Gu Chen didn’t waste words.
He pried open her jaw, inserted his blood-covered fingers directly into her mouth, and forcefully smeared the scalding blood onto the base of her tongue.
The temperature was frighteningly high.
It transformed into a tyrannical bio-electric current that violently surged into her failing meridians.
The blood dissolved the moment it met liquid and slid down her esophagus.
“My three-billion investment hasn’t even started making returns yet, and you want to quit?”
It had always been the master feeding the monster.
Today, the monster took out his own trump card and fed it back to his master in reverse.
The damage caused by the Trojan gas was nothing but a joke in front of the domineering recombination of Subject 001’s divine blood.
The chromosome telomeres severed by the gas were forcibly reconnected, tampered with, and overwritten by a higher-dimensional gene sequence.
Her failing internal organs were being reshaped during repair, becoming even tougher than before.
Qin Hongyi curled up on the floor. Her bones produced a series of bean-like cracking sounds.
She bit her lip hard, enduring the skin-peeling, tendon-pulling pain of genetic recombination.
Gu Chen knelt on one knee beside her.
The bloody hole in his chest was healing at a visible speed. Large amounts of sweat mixed with blood formed rivers on the floor.
Losing his origin divine blood had left his face deathly pale.
His suit was soaked with blood, clinging to his lean waistline, yet the arrogance in his eyes remained undiminished.
“Hold on.” Gu Chen used his blood-stained thumb to roughly wipe the filth from Qin Hongyi’s chin.
“If you can’t even handle my blood, how do you plan to control me for the rest of your life?”