Chapter 30: On the Scientific Method of Raising a Gu Chen

Brilliant white light flooded the hall the instant it switched on, accompanied by the crackle of electricity.

Gu Chen jerked his head up. 

One glance and his entire body froze as if struck by lightning. 

All his earlier nonchalance shattered in that moment.

The glass tanks did not contain aliens or mutated beasts.

Suspended in pale-green nutrient fluid were naked human bodies.

Some missing limbs. 

Some sprouting bone spikes from their backs. 

Some nothing more than lumps of rotting flesh that barely retained a human shape.

But what truly made his scalp crawl was their faces.

Every single specimen—no matter how deformed—shared the exact same face.

A man’s face.

High brow bones, thin lips pressed tight, eyes carrying the signature sharp edge of the Gu family.

It was Gu Chen’s face.

The face of the dead heir to the Gu family.

“Urgh!”

Gu Chen’s stomach churned violently. 

He couldn’t hold back a dry heave.

He staggered backward and slammed into the control console behind him.

The visual assault hit harder than facing ten thousand Black Knights.

“Specimen 003: genetic chain collapse. Discarded.”

“Specimen 005: fatal rejection reaction. Discarded.”

“Specimen 108: brain death. Discarded.”

Metal nameplates sat beneath every tank.

This place wasn’t a laboratory.

It was a morgue built specifically to display Gu Chen.

“Who am I?” 

Gu Chen stared fixedly at the nearest tank.

The Gu Chen inside looked no older than his teens, features not yet fully grown, yet already pale and swollen from long immersion in the fluid.

“What the hell am I, exactly?”

Gu Chen’s voice trembled. 

The pride that had kept him living like a man—he was the Gu family’s young master, wronged and framed, fallen on hard times—collapsed with a thunderous crash in this instant.

What if the real Gu Chen had died long ago?

What if his twenty-plus years of memories were nothing but implanted fake data?

What if he was simply Subject 001—the sole lucky survivor among thousands of failures?

“I’m a cloned monster… everything is fake…”

Gu Chen clutched his head. 

The golden-green vertical pupils in his eyes flickered wildly. 

The violent aura that Qin Hongyi had only just suppressed surged again. 

His nails lengthened uncontrollably, scraping across the console with a piercing screech.

The utter disgust toward his own existence drowned him in a single wave.

Disgusting.

Too disgusting.

Right as Gu Chen teetered on the edge of total mental collapse, a pair of warm hands suddenly covered his eyes.

Everything went black.

Those horrifying versions of himself vanished. 

All that remained was the cold fragrance at the tip of his nose—Qin Hongyi’s scent, mixed with gunpowder and a faint trace of blood.

“Shut up. Don’t look.”

Qin Hongyi’s voice sounded right beside his ear, domineering beyond measure.

“I forbid you from looking at other men—even if they look exactly like you.”

Gu Chen shuddered and tried to pry her hands away. 

“Qin Hongyi, let go! Can’t you see? The walls are covered with me! I’m not Gu Chen at all—I’m just…”

“You are Gu Chen.”

Qin Hongyi not only refused to release him, she wrapped her arms around him from behind in a death grip, chin resting in the crook of his neck.

“Those tanks only contain rotting meat—soulless protein.”

“The only one who argues with me, scams my money, humiliates Su Rou, and clings to me like an octopus sucking blood is you.”

“Listen up, little monster.”

Qin Hongyi bit down hard on his earlobe. 

The sting instantly cleared Gu Chen’s mind a fraction.

“No matter whether you were shaken out of a test tube or popped out of a crack in a stone, the one I’m holding in my arms right now is real.”

“Your life belongs to me. I won’t allow you to disgust yourself. Understood?”

Gu Chen’s rapid breathing gradually calmed.

The impulse to destroy everything miraculously dissipated under Qin Hongyi’s overbearing logic.

Yeah.

Clone or not, who cared?

The one who could still think, who could still feel pain, who could still feel Qin Hongyi’s body heat—that was him.

“Your way of comforting people is really one of a kind.”

Gu Chen pulled her hands down. 

His voice was still a little hoarse, but the confusion in his eyes had vanished.

“Fine. I’m real.”

Gu Chen turned around and looked past the nauseating tanks, locking his gaze on the main host computer at the center of the hall.

“Since I’m real, I’m going to find out exactly which bastard created all these fakes just to disgust me.”

He strode toward the host.

Qin Hongyi raised an eyebrow and followed.

She loved this unbreakable tenacity in Gu Chen—the harder he was stepped on, the harder he bounced back.

The host screen was black.

Gu Chen’s fingers flew across the keyboard.

“Eden System booting…”

“Identity verification: retinal scan.”

A red beam swept over Gu Chen’s eyes.

“Beep. Subject 001 confirmed. Authority: 50%.”

Half the screen lit up, but the core folders remained locked.

“Warning: Accessing top-secret archive Adam and Eve requires dual biometric authentication.”

“Second key missing.”

Gu Chen frowned. 

“Second key?”

He tried Old Master Gu’s birthday, the Gu family bank password, even Qin Mu’s name. 

All rejected.

“Stop wasting effort.”

Qin Hongyi suddenly spoke.

She crossed her arms, eyes fixed on the flashing fingerprint icon on screen. 

“That’s a fingerprint lock. And it looks a little familiar.”

Gu Chen paused and stepped back. 

“You try?”

Qin Hongyi walked forward, pressed her right thumb onto the scanner.

Gu Chen held his breath.

This was Eden’s deepest secret. 

How could an outsider like Qin Hongyi possibly have clearance?

Yet the next second—

Beep.

Green light flashed.

“Second key confirmed. Identity: Keyholder.”

“Full authority granted. Welcome, Miss Qin Hongyi.”

The screen instantly filled with a torrent of data. 

Countless classified files scrolled past like a waterfall.

But Gu Chen had no interest in any of them right now.

He turned his head stiffly toward Qin Hongyi, eyes complex as if staring at an alien.

“Eve?”

Gu Chen pointed at the screen, mouth twitching violently. 

“So I’m Adam and you’re Eve? This whole Eden Project—was it just a giant matchmaking scheme?”

Qin Hongyi was stunned as well. 

She stared at her own finger, expression unreadable.

“Open the gene-lock folder,” she said coldly.

Gu Chen clicked it.

A twenty-year-old sealed file popped up.

The photos inside showed a young Gu Chen and a young Qin Hongyi.

Experiment codename: Twin Stars

Description: Subject 001 possesses extremely unstable super-mutation genes. Once awakened, loss of control is highly likely. To ensure controllability, a female subject with 99.9% genetic compatibility (Qin Hongyi) was selected and implanted with a special induction enzyme.

Conclusion: Qin Hongyi’s blood, bodily fluids, and pheromones are the only sedatives capable of calming Subject 001. Furthermore, the subject’s abilities can only be fully unlocked when the Keyholder is present.

Note: This is the relationship of lock and key, as well as the destined fate of spear and shield.

Only the low hum of the host’s cooling fans remained in the hall.

After reading the final line, Gu Chen felt completely numb.

He turned to Qin Hongyi, expression like he had swallowed a fly. 

“So my entire life— this life, the next, the one after—is destined to be unable to leave you. Not because I’m cheap, but because I was designed this way?”

“Even my… reaction to you is just bottom-level code, like a cat instinctively hissing?”

This was too absurd.

The two of them had fought for twenty years, each wishing the other dead.

And now they were being told that all that mutual killing was actually another form of forced binding?

Qin Hongyi stared at the file for a long time, then suddenly laughed.

Her shoulders shook. 

Tears nearly spilled from her eyes.

“Hahahaha…”

She grabbed Gu Chen by the collar and yanked him close. 

Mad excitement glittered in her gaze.

“Gu Chen, do you see now?”

“In this life, the next life, and every life after, you can only be mine.”

“This isn’t overbearing. This is science.”

Qin Hongyi’s finger traced across Gu Chen’s lips.

“So that’s why Qin Mu never dared touch me—not because he feared the Qin family, but because I’m the remote control that keeps you, the monster, in check.”

“In that case, I definitely can’t let you go, my little Adam.”

Gu Chen slapped her hand away. 

The awkward feeling in his chest was impossible to describe.

As someone who had once been a man, the sensation of being inherently countered felt awful.

Yet on second thought, this absolute binding gave him a strange sense of security in a world full of betrayal—and that felt even more awkward.