Chapter 65 The Hidden Fate

It was his mother calling him, always calling him by his full name, unlike when she called his brother Li Yao, she would affectionately call him "Little Yao".

It might be because he is small.

Li Heng was born with dwarfism, and even after adulthood with shoes on, he was only 1.4 meters tall.

His limbs were short and deformed, and his face was ugly; he himself didn't want to look in the mirror.

When Li Heng was very young, he heard his parents arguing, and his father yelled:

"That son of a bitch is definitely not mine! Is he surnamed Han? You actually liked that short, ugly bastard!"

Li Heng didn't know if his father genuinely didn't know that dwarfism was caused by a gene mutation, or if he was simply using it to attack his mother and vent his emotions.

Both of them seem pretty stupid now that I think about it.

No wonder the Li family business has been shrinking and declining ever since his father took over.

Li Heng was born into an extremely wealthy family.

The family business was started by his grandfather's generation. The group mainly deals in machinery and energy engineering, has contracted many overseas energy development projects, and also engages in chemical and new materials, energy logistics, and so on.

His family was a glamorous upper-class family, and Li Heng was the only stain on that family.

Li Heng's father would almost always lose his temper whenever he saw him. His mother had maternal love, but not much.

His older brother, Li Yao, used to bully him when they were young, and during his teenage years, he was reluctant to admit to his friends that he had a younger brother.

After he came of age, Li Yao became nicer to him, occasionally sending him gifts or inviting Li Heng to dinner.

Even when it comes to giving gifts or having meals together, it's never done in private. Li Yao will let his relatives and friends see it, mention it to them, and at banquets, he will half-squat down with his tall frame, put his arm around Li Heng's shoulder, and smile with a gentle and tolerant expression.

This situation continued until Dr. Li Heng graduated and returned to China to work at a renowned research institute.

When his parents mentioned him again, they were less ashamed and their attitude towards him softened considerably, but Li Yao was no longer as close to him as brothers.

Li Heng's life can be divided into three parts: a childhood shrouded in gloom, a period of study and work that transitioned from overcast to cloudy.

Then a thunderbolt struck, opening a new chapter for the world and his destiny!

Li Heng recalled and dreamed countless times about the time he went with his team to the site where the underground lake was discovered.

The wasteland is a piece of earthy yellow silk, and the sky is bright blue; the two meet calmly on the horizon.

The massive drilling platform is like an oil-stained black thorn, deeply embedded in the earth.

The lake cavity, sealed for tens of thousands of years, resembles an ancient coffin. The surface of the water, without the slightest ripple, is like the smoothest black mirror under the spotlight.

Even though it had been several days since the discovery, workers were still looking down at the lake from the drill hole.

Li Heng understood them, because the lake possessed a captivating allure.

If there are ancient spirits on Earth, then the lake must be one of the spirits' dark eyes.

The eyes of the deity contained several previously undiscovered minerals, as well as a large number of fossils.

The geological research was handed over to a team from a local university, whose institute was responsible for testing the microorganisms in the water.

However, when the geological team examined the fossils, they found traces of organic matter in them!

Some of the fossils were also transferred to their research institute; that was Pandora's box!

Li Heng still remembers the tiny membrane of ancient water in the pore of the first fossil, as if it had sealed away time and a world!

The team immediately set about separating the micromembrane, extracting the organic matter from it, and then observing it with an electron microscope.

Li Heng was just a newcomer, so he wasn't the first person they looked at, but he had seen him too.

He saw the fibrous particles and intuitively judged from their size distribution and geometric features that they were a virus!

Li Heng paced back and forth in front of the dressing mirror, thinking that according to some philosophical concepts of quantum mechanics, fate is a "cloud of possibilities" that only collapses into a definite result at the moment of choice.

The pivotal moment in the fate of humanity occurred in that laboratory, the moment he saw the virus!

Li Heng's leather shoes clicked on the smooth floor tiles, and his chest heaved quite a bit.

He then thought that perhaps it wasn't at that moment, but the next day, that they discovered an ancient mollusk infected with a virus in the second fossil specimen.

The discovery of a completely new and ancient virus had kept Li Heng's heart pounding all night.

In his dazed state that night, all he saw were papers on authoritative platforms, and from those papers, he saw his own figure standing on the lecture stage, applause, and the surprised faces of his parents and friends.

When Li Heng saw the clearly inserted and fused segments in the amoeba host's genes, and also noticed the abnormality in the host's body shape, he truly glimpsed a corner of that vast, hidden destiny.

His heart was not just pounding wildly, it practically leaped out of his chest!

Team leader Director Xu was also terrified, because in the following days, when they used inactivated samples for sequencing, the samples showed signs of activation!

They clearly already chemically inactivated it!

Director Xu was so frightened that he immediately reported it, and the incident was immediately recognized as a "major national scientific research event".

The research was quickly halted, and all samples, equipment, and even the core members of the team were packed up and transferred to a secret military laboratory.

Li Heng was a newcomer and not a core member. He signed the strictest confidentiality agreement and was monitored for several months.

He was also forced to promise that he could not leave the country for three years.

A sigh-like smile appeared on Li Heng's lips as he thought about how he hadn't actually gone abroad; he had simply used his family's gray-market supply chain to smuggle research equipment parts into the country.

This happened relatively late. Before that, after he saw the virus's ability to alter the host's gene sequence, he placed an order on the dark web.

At that time, there were still several days before the research was called off, the area around the underground lake had not yet been sealed off, and the wilderness was still littered with messy drilling platforms and workers.

The person Li Heng hired at great expense quietly mingled among the workers, went to the fields late at night, retrieved a few new fossils, and brought them out.

The cloud of destiny collapsed completely at this moment.

Among the pile of stones they touched, two were indeed fossils, one of which contained a virus.