In the dense bushes, the snowy wind whistled through the air. Luo Ning was half-hugging Lu Xinghe, her hair brushing against his face in the wind, and his breath slowly enveloped her like thick amber.

This time, she felt that his blood seemed a little different. In her memory, his blood was as sweet as honey, but now, in addition to sweetness, it had another taste that she couldn't describe. She just felt an uncontrollable shiver running down her spine when she smelled it, and she wanted to get closer to him.

She immediately covered her mouth, sat up with her back to him, afraid that she would lose control and tear him to pieces.

But it wasn't the feeling of wanting to tear him apart, but rather another, more terrifying thought.

Luo Ning, are you crazy? What are you thinking at a time like this? She closed her eyes, which curved into two crescent moons. Her long, curled eyelashes trembled, and her face was flushed as if she had applied a layer of rouge.

But involuntarily, she remembered the night before when he tucked the scarf into her clothes, protecting her, and that was in a base under absolute restrictions against alien species. Her heart started beating even faster.

Strangely, when my heart rate increased, the hidden throbbing in my body gradually subsided, and the two seemed somewhat contradictory and erratic.

But Luo Ning didn't have time to think about these things. She only felt that she was in danger to Lu Xinghe and that she had to leave him as soon as possible.

She gestured to him that she would go back on her own, but Lu Xinghe quickly put a bracelet on her wrist. It was a locator; he couldn't watch her all the time, but he at least needed to know where she was.

She seems unaware of the dangers here. Non-experimental subjects are killed without exception at the alien base. Although Dai Wanglin said he would keep her for a month, Shen Ni would not allow it.

He had a headache thinking about the injection Dai Wanglin mentioned. Although he hadn't noticed any abnormal reactions from Luo Ning yet, the Gene Department's drugs had never failed before. What would he do if the drug took effect before she left?

If the attack occurred after she left the base, how would she cope with it in the outside world?

Images of those ferocious male mutants flashed through his mind. Thinking that Luo Ning might encounter them, he irritably unbuttoned his uniform.

Just then, his communicator vibrated. He glanced at it and saw that it was Du Lu calling.

"Major Lu, I see your car is still outside. Is there something you haven't finished taking care of?" Du Lu's voice came through the communicator.

Lu Xinghe said calmly, "Warden Du, I don't need to report to you what I do. However, as a former fellow student, I'd like to remind you that Subject Eleven is a very important experimental subject for the Gene Department. You'd better not let your personal grudges interfere with her studies."

Du Lu chuckled on the other end: "Major Lu, you've misunderstood. I've never had any personal grudges. The Genetics Department can take away a complete Subject Eleven at any time."

"That would be best." Lu Xinghe hung up the communicator and walked into the car.

Du Lu, still smiling in the prison office, had a cold glint in his eyes. He removed his right glove, revealing long, clean fingers, but there was a small but deep tooth mark on his palm, almost piercing through his hand.

He moved his fingers, but his thumb and index finger were still numb. The nerves in those two fingers had been severed and there was no possibility of recovery.

"Someone come here."

"Warden." A sergeant walked in.

Du Lu put on his gloves and resumed his gentle demeanor: "Go and get the inhibitor and bring it directly to my office."

"Yes, sir." The sergeant immediately went out to retrieve the precious reagent that could temporarily suppress the virus in the alien's body.

——

Luo Ning did not return to the military dormitory immediately, because she saw several wild animals in the woods on her way back. Although food was not plentiful at the base, no one was catching these wild animals to eat. On the contrary, they were cleaned up and burned for fear that they might carry the virus.

Luo Ning grabbed two buns and ate a meal, regaining much of her strength. When she returned to the dormitory, Lu Xinghe was already back and waiting for her.

She quickly grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down: "What's the name of the officer standing next to you today?"

Lu Xinghe was initially pleased that she returned on time, but he didn't expect that the first thing she asked about upon her return was another man. He asked coldly, "What, are you interested in him?"

Luo Ning paused for a moment, finding his words strange. Why was she interested in that terrifying person? "He told Wen Xi that she had to remember his name by tomorrow morning, or he would cut out her tongue."

Lu Xinghe read it word by word. It turned out that she was trying to help the eleventh test subject and didn't have any ulterior motives towards Du Lu.

“I told you before, don’t try to do anything in that prison,” Lu Xinghe said seriously.

Luo Ning continued writing: "I didn't mean to do anything, but she had helped me before, and I didn't want to see her hurt. Killing someone is just a matter of beheading them, why torture and abuse them?"

Lu Xinghe didn't continue talking about the prison but asked her, "Do you know why the genetics department injected you with vocal cord blocking drugs?"

Luo Ning shook her head.

Lu Xinghe replied, "Actually, at the beginning, the Gene Department did not inject the test subjects with vocal cord blocking drugs until your friend arrived. Although she was very weak, she was extremely good at bewitching people, especially during the breeding process. She actually persuaded her breeder to take her away and successfully escaped to the bridge. So, from then on, all the test subjects were injected with the drug."

Luo Ning was stunned. Wen Xi had actually conducted breeding experiments and almost escaped from the base.

“And then?” she continued writing.

"Later, her breeder was executed after being tried, because she..." Lu Xinghe suddenly stopped, he couldn't tell her the rest.

"Why?" Luo Ning asked anxiously.

"It's nothing. Just remember not to get involved in this. Her tongue won't actually be cut off." Lu Xinghe didn't think Du Lu would actually cut off her tongue, but he probably wouldn't treat the female mutant well, since Du Lu's hand was injured by her bite.

A security officer's hand is the hand that holds a gun; if the hand is useless, the mission ends. Du Lu was an excellent security officer back then; he should have been fighting the mutants head-on, not guarding them in the prison on the outermost edge of the base.

"Is it because she was pregnant that she survived?" Luo Ning wrote quickly. Even if Lu Xinghe didn't say it, she could guess that the most likely reason for a mutant used for breeding to survive was that the breeding was successful.

Lu Xinghe did not answer, which was taken as tacit agreement.

"And the baby, was it eventually born?" she wrote again.

Lu Xinghe shook his head: "Although the breeding was successful, the embryo did not develop completely and did not survive. She was also the only one among all the experimental subjects who was successfully bred, so you don't need to worry about her being harmed. The higher-ups will not allow it."

Luo Ning sat down, holding onto the table. She never expected that Wen Xi would encounter so many things in just three years. No wonder she felt sadness in Wen Xi's eyes when she saw her today.

But her sadness didn't seem to stem from imprisonment; rather, it seemed like the grief and sorrow of losing something very important.

She wanted to ask more about the breeding program, such as whether the children born could really save humanity, but Lu Xinghe didn't tell her anything more. He wouldn't tell her anything about confidential matters; it was his duty.

But even if he doesn't tell her, she has her own way. The gene department is only a few dozen meters away from here, and she can go and find the answer herself.

Although An Xiaoruo's genes awakened and she could fight off the alien species, she wanted to become human again, no longer living a life of eating raw meat and drinking blood, no longer having an uncontrollable craving for human flesh, and also wanting to rediscover the sweetness of sugar.

Even more so, if one day she meets someone she likes, she can kiss him sweetly instead of worrying that accidentally biting him will turn him into a terrifying alien.

Lu Xinghe's communicator vibrated again. After answering, he coldly said, "Whether he's dead or alive."

He left in a hurry, so there must have been another emergency. Most of the emergencies at the base are alien invasions, but I don't know how this alien got in.

After Lu Xinghe left, Luo Ning planned how to get in. She recalled the layout of the gene department and felt that she could still get in through the ventilation ducts. The laboratories were very airtight, and windows could not be opened for ventilation most of the time. The air inside was converted by machinery.

As night fell, the accumulated clouds began to snow again, starting with just a little, but then it snowed harder and harder, like goose feathers intertwined.

At eight o'clock, the base lost power again, plunging even places like the Gene Department, which are usually immune to power outages, into darkness. It must have been caused by the heavy snow and wind that disrupted the electrical circuits.

Taking advantage of this opportunity, Luo Ning entered the gene department. She could see even in the dark and quickly entered the pipes.

The genetics department had its own backup power supply, and the building was soon lit up again, but the light was flickering and unstable. The researchers and the security officers on duty remained at their posts, their attention focused entirely on the experimental subjects in the laboratory, and they did not notice anything unusual above them.

Luo Ning used her sense of aliens to pinpoint their location and crawled over. Looking down through the louver, she saw a male mutant imprisoned on a bed. He was wearing the same white clothes she had been wearing, and his deep blue eyes were coldly staring at the ceiling.

Standing beside him was a female security officer in her early twenties, who was feeding the man bloody meat from a plate to his mouth, but the male mutant remained unmoved.

But the woman didn't tolerate it at all. She directly pried open the male mutant's mouth and stuffed the meat in with a fork, even threatening, "You'd better eat properly when I feed you, or I'll cut open your stomach and stuff it in."

However, her voice was very soft, so even her threats sounded like coquettishness. But the male mutant started chewing, as if afraid that she would really cut open his stomach.

Luo Ning sighed in admiration. As expected of security officers trained in the hellish environment of the Red Gate, their mouth-pinching technique was as standardized as if they were produced on an assembly line. Lu Xinghe was like that, and so was the young officer in the prison.

She continued forward without stopping; her destination was the archives, where there must be relevant experimental data.

She didn't know where the archives were, so she could only walk around and look around. Finally, at the end of the ventilation duct, she saw rows of neat bookshelves. She opened the blinds and gently jumped down, searching for information about the experiments in the darkness.

However, after going through all the files, she couldn't find any information on whether the aliens could be turned back into humans. But it wasn't a complete loss; she found the document for Subject Eleven, namely Wen Xi.

She carefully took the file out of the folder and examined it meticulously, her expression growing increasingly serious and shocked.

Wen Xi was surprised to learn that she had voluntarily bred with the security officer named Zhuang Yu. She found it hard to believe, but the document clearly stated: "On May 21, 2102, at 1:17 AM, after the laboratory lost power, Subject 11 broke free of the robotic arm but did not harm the brooder. Instead, she actively engaged in brooding with the brooder, and the brooder survived without being infected."

Her heart was pounding. It was Wen Xi who took the initiative, and she didn't hurt the man named Zhuang Yu afterwards. She remembered that Lu Xinghe told her today that the fertilized animal had taken Wen Xi and even ran to the bridge. So, the man named Zhuang Yu was completely bewitched by her.

Continuing down, you'll find texts recording their breeding activities. The texts describe how their breeding progressed smoothly, took a long time, and was highly successful. They even use the phrase "as inseparable as glue."

Although the words were cold, serious, and professional, Luo Ning could sense a hint of sweetness between Wen Xi and Zhuang Yu. She immediately patted her face to clear her mind; how could mutants and humans possibly be sweet in this kind of thing?

After flipping through two more pages, she saw a record written in red font: June 21, 2102, embryo implantation successful.

It actually worked! She had always believed that there was a species barrier between humans and mutants, but Wenxi got pregnant, and she got pregnant on June 21st after they got together on May 21st. That is to say, they conceived on their first time, which was easier than conception between men and women in her previous modern society.

The following records document Wenxi's various postpartum reactions. According to the records, Wenxi's reactions were not much different from those of human pregnant women: morning sickness, loss of appetite, and hair loss.

Upon seeing the words "hair loss," Luo Ning was startled. She reached up and grabbed a handful of hair from her head, but when she removed her hand, her hair was completely dry. Before she transmigrated, she thought she had leukemia because of her hair loss, but after becoming a mutant, it seemed that hair loss had never happened. Her hair had always been black, thick, and smooth.

Wenxi is losing hair. Could it be that the embryo is affecting her?

Just as she was about to continue reading, the door suddenly clicked the keypad. She was so engrossed in her reading that she didn't notice anyone coming. She immediately put the file back and prepared to climb into the ventilation duct to leave, but it was too late. The light suddenly turned on, and the bright light made it almost impossible for her to open her eyes.

"Spread out and search. Bring out all the data related to gene interaction between humans and animals." Luo Ning recognized Song Pei's voice. She was really unlucky today, running into them who were also looking for data.

She carefully moved towards the back of the bookshelf, looking for a back door or something that would allow her to get out, but the space was enclosed with only one door, and Song Pei was standing right in the doorway.

Soon, footsteps approached her. Seeing that she was about to be discovered, she pulled up her hood and collar to cover half of her face, pressing herself tightly against the last bookshelf. There was a large pillar there, so as long as she didn't make a sound, it would be difficult to be discovered.

The footsteps stopped in front of her, and a girl's figure appeared before her. If the girl turned the corner around the bookshelf, she would definitely find her.

Luo Ning carefully walked around the other side of the bookshelf, avoiding the girl's line of sight. However, she did not expect Song Pei to walk towards her. Just as she was thinking about whether to rush out as fast as possible, a slender hand pulled her back behind the bookshelf.