Chapter 34: Don’t Die in My Car, Washing It Is Expensive

The car door opened.

Seven or eight Su family bodyguards charged out. Their extendable batons hadn’t even risen before a gunshot taught them manners.

Bang!

A bullet grazed the lead bodyguard’s scalp and blew the rearview mirror beside him to pieces.

Qin Hongyi leaned against the armored vehicle’s hood, the submachine gun in her hand still trailing faint smoke.

She ran a hand through her soaked long hair with one hand and smiled lazily. “Sorry, my hand slipped. The next shot might slip straight into your carotid artery.”

The whole scene fell deathly silent.

No one dared gamble on this crazy woman’s aim.

Gu Chen didn’t even glance at the bodyguards. He walked straight up to Su Rou.

Su Rou was shaking all over, pointing at him. “You… what do you want? I already gave you fifty million! This is a corpse! Have some respect for the dead, don’t you get it?”

“Respect for the dead?”

Gu Chen laughed like he had heard the joke of the year.

He shoved Su Rou aside, gripped the heavy trunk lid with one hand, and yanked it open.

Gu Mingzhe’s body lay quietly inside the body bag, eyes wide open in death.

“In biology there is no such thing as respect for the dead—only resource recycling.”

Rip.

Gu Chen unzipped the body bag. His gaze lingered on the corpse’s chest. “Miss Su, I’ll be borrowing your fiancé’s cousin for a bit. He won’t be needing it anymore anyway. No sense wasting it.”

“You’re crazy! What are you doing?!” Su Rou screamed and lunged forward to stop him.

Slap.

Gu Chen caught her wrist with a backhand and, with a slight squeeze, pinned her against the car door.

Their faces were inches apart. Gu Chen could even see his own eerie reflection in her pupils.

“Watch.”

Gu Chen’s voice carried a strange magnetism. “Watch carefully. This is the truth of the world. The weak—even their corpses—are just a buffet for the strong.”

With that, he released Su Rou, turned around, and twirled the scalpel in his hand with a beautiful flourish.

Squish.

The sound of the blade slicing skin was almost lost in the rain, but to Su Rou it thundered like a roar.

Gu Chen didn’t hesitate. His hand was terrifyingly steady.

The blade precisely avoided the sternum and slid between the ribs. His technique was so practiced it looked like that of a chief surgeon who had dissected hundreds of cadavers.

Blood gushed out.

Since death had come recently, the blood was still warm and carried a fishy-sweet scent.

“Ugh.”

Su Rou covered her mouth. Her legs gave out and she knelt in the muddy water.

Too cruel.

This woman was a demon straight out of hell!

Gu Chen’s eyes stayed focused, automatically blocking out all external noise.

His pupils contracted slightly as he entered the super-sensory state granted by the Eden Project.

In his vision, Gu Mingzhe’s chest cavity was no longer a bloody mess but a crystal-clear high-definition anatomical diagram.

Blood vessels, nerves, muscle fibers—every detail stood out.

“Found it.”

Gu Chen reached into the chest cavity.

The slippery, wet heat made the bloodthirsty genes inside him riot, but his hand remained steady as a rock.

It had to be heart blood.

That was the final surge pumped by the heart right before it stopped, packed with the highest concentration of active enzymes.

Gu Chen pulled out a sampling tube and precisely pierced the left ventricle.

Dark red blood flowed through the soft tube into the glass vial.

One milliliter. Five milliliters… enough.

Gu Chen withdrew the needle. He was about to stuff the disposable tool back in when his gaze suddenly locked onto Gu Mingzhe’s heart.

He hadn’t noticed it earlier because of the congestion.

Now, with the blood drained, the heart surface had shrunk, revealing a coin-sized blue-black mark.

It wasn’t a birthmark.

It was a tattoo.

An imprint etched directly into the myocardial fibers with some special biological ink.

The pattern was a twisted black sunflower with an open eye at its center.

Gu Chen’s eyes narrowed slightly.

How could something like this be on Gu Mingzhe’s heart?

Wasn’t this guy just a worthless playboy who only knew how to chase models?

Unless…

A lightning bolt of realization struck Gu Chen.

Unless Gu Mingzhe was also a subject.

A low-tier observation sample planted with a mark over a decade ago and hidden inside the Gu family.

“Heh.”

Gu Chen suddenly laughed. The sound was especially chilling in the pouring rain.

“Old man, oh old man, you really played one hell of a long game. Besides me—Subject 001—how many people in the Gu family aren’t even human?”

“Done?”

Qin Hongyi’s voice came over.

She had already dropped every bodyguard who tried to sneak-attack her and was stepping on one of their faces, lazily swapping magazines.

“Got it.”

Gu Chen stored away the tube of blood that was now worth more than gold. He took one deep look at the black sunflower imprint, then zipped the body bag shut again.

He turned and glanced at Su Rou, who was still kneeling in the mud and dry-heaving.

Her expensive trench coat was covered in mud splatters. Her hair clung to her face. She looked as wretched as a stray dog.

A tiny sliver of pity—the last remnant of Young Master Gu’s feelings for his fiancée—stirred in Gu Chen’s heart, but it was instantly crushed by Gu Qingcheng’s cold ruthlessness.

He walked over and gently patted Su Rou’s face with the hand still dripping blood.

The bloodstain instantly smeared across her deathly pale cheek.

“Miss Su, the fifty million was money well spent.”

Gu Chen leaned close to her ear and spoke in a voice only the two of them could hear. “Remember today’s disgust. In the future, no matter who tries to keep you as a naïve little fool, just think of this gutted piece of trash.”

“If you don’t want to end up as meat on the chopping block, learn to pick up the knife yourself.”

With that, Gu Chen straightened up and strode toward the armored vehicle.

“Time to go. Let’s head home and take the medicine.”

Qin Hongyi holstered her gun and gave a meaningful look at Su Rou, who seemed scared senseless. Her eyes, however, were shifting from fear into a strange hollow emptiness.

“You really enjoy playing the mentor.”

The car door closed.

The armored vehicle tore away through the heavy rain, leaving behind a mess on the ground and several bodyguards with broken limbs.

Inside the car.

Gu Chen opened the golden Perfect Agent and injected the freshly extracted Gu family blood into it.

Dark red and pale gold merged. A violent reaction erupted. The liquid boiled, then settled into an eerie transparent color, like liquid crystal.

Without the slightest hesitation.

Gu Chen tilted his head back and drank it all in one gulp.

Boom!

In an instant, Gu Chen felt every bone in his body smashed inch by inch and then reassembled.

“Urgh…”

He gripped the passenger armrest so hard the veins on the back of his hand bulged. It felt like countless tiny snakes were writhing under his skin.

Qin Hongyi slammed on the brakes and pulled over. She turned to look at him.

“Don’t die in my car. Washing it is expensive.”

Her words were venomous, but her hand was already pressed against his carotid artery, ready to transfuse blood and save him at any second.

“Fuck off.”

Gu Chen forced the words out through gritted teeth.

The next second, he snapped his eyes open.

The charming peach-blossom eyes that belonged to Gu Qingcheng had undergone a bizarre change.

Deep in the pupils, the monstrous golden-green vertical slits had completely vanished, replaced by a profound, abyss-like pure black.

Those were Gu Chen’s eyes.

They were human eyes.

The constant hunger to devour flesh and blood that had always haunted him was gone.

The ever-present sense that his body could collapse at any moment had disappeared too.

His strength, speed, and senses were still enhanced, but they were no longer volatile. Every muscle obeyed him like an extension of his own fingers.

“Is this the perfect body?”

Gu Chen looked at his own palm—slender and fair, yet brimming with enough power to crush steel.

He turned his head toward Qin Hongyi.

This time there was no urge to pounce and suck blood.

But he could still clearly sense her presence. The soul-level bond hadn’t vanished; if anything, it felt even clearer.

“Looks like I don’t have to be a vampire anymore.” Gu Chen’s arrogant aura as the capital circle’s crown prince had finally replicated perfectly in this female body.

The armored vehicle smashed through the underground barrier of Cloud Top Hotel, leaving a sharp, flamboyant black tire mark at the private elevator entrance.

The car door pushed open. Gu Chen stepped out first.

Puddles in the basement reflected his figure.

The black velvet long dress was completely ruined. The high slit had torn all the way to his waist, exposing legs so white they glowed. Yet there was no longer any pathological weakness—every inch of muscle was packed with explosive killing intent ready to erupt at any moment.

The agent had fully fused with his bloodstream.

This feeling was like every part of his body had been upgraded from a cheap van to a top-tier supercar.

Gu Chen clenched his fist.

The faint vibrations in the air, the breathing of the bodyguards at the end of the corridor, Qin Hongyi’s slightly chaotic heartbeat—everything formed a precise three-dimensional map in his mind, accurate to the millisecond.

“This is true power.”

Gu Chen muttered to himself. The corners of his mouth curled back up with the wild arrogance that belonged only to the capital circle’s young master.

He turned his head and looked at Qin Hongyi in the passenger seat. The desire in his eyes was completely undisguised.

No need to suck blood. No need to feed. His current state was so good he could punch through a load-bearing wall with one fist.

He did the math in his head: with his current explosive power, he was confident he could pin this woman—who had tormented him for days—against the hood in three moves and make her learn exactly what begging for mercy felt like.