Chapter 17

"Zhou Zhi, wake up!"

A large amount of primal energy enveloped the white figure. These things, which were invisible to humans, became a blurry black mass in Xiao Shengyun's eyes.

Just as each small animal has a different scent, each pollutant source also has a different smell.

When Xiao Shengyun sensed the other person's aura, his mind went blank.

Because the scent was exactly the same as his own. If described in human language, that scent would be like the damp, grassy smell of a forest after rain.

The power of an awakened human being comes from the pollution within him, and this pollution comes from the pollutants he encounters.

The other person's aura is the same as his, which means that the pollution on the other person originated from himself.

This guess left Xiao Shengyun completely bewildered.

He considers himself a law-abiding pollutant who has worked diligently in human society for twenty years, not only without causing any pollution incidents, but also contributing significantly to the country's GDP due to his long hours of overtime work.

Could this be some mistake I made when I was young and ignorant?

But he couldn't worry about that now. He lightly pressed his fingertips together, and a black thread flew out, gently piercing the artery in Zhou Zhi's neck, absorbing all the source energy overflowing from the other's body.

...

Venomous snakes

The sudden appearance of the man startled everyone. His face had been on the top ten of the wanted list for years, and everyone present was familiar with him.

Sure enough, what I killed last time was just a shadow of him. A corruptor of this level is not so easy to kill.

"Long time no see. Everyone here is an old friend, so I don't think I need to introduce myself."

The venomous snake bowed slightly, as if removing its hat in a gesture of respect.

Ye Ting's face instantly turned ashen, as if he had swallowed a fly. If it weren't for his leg injury, he would have rushed forward by now.

"To be honest, I don't want to fight you either. I haven't done anything heinous, so why are we turning on each other with swords?"

"How dare he speak like that!" Xiao Shengyun was amazed by this person's ability to blatantly lie.

They privately raised pollutants and released them into residential areas, forcibly turned ordinary residents into polluters, and repeatedly broke into research institutes to steal data... Putting all that aside, they didn't really do anything bad.

Zhou Zhi's condition gradually stabilized, and Xiao Shengyun hid at the back of the crowd, quietly watching everything.

The venomous snake bent down, took a red crystalline object from the corpse on the ground, and then threw the corpse on the ground like trash.

dad……,

The girl sobbed, and Yang covered her eyes, pulling her tightly to his side.

"Little girl, you must be very sad. Your father did all this for you."

“He changed voluntarily; we signed an agreement.”

Yu Wenliang originally had a happy family, but his daughter was suddenly diagnosed with an incurable disease, his wife left him, and with nowhere else to turn, he accepted the contract proposed by the church.

He volunteered to be one of the test subjects, and his daughter recovered thanks to the church's techniques.

No wonder he would still come into contact with his child after the contamination, since the child had become a contaminant from the very beginning.

But this is like a honey trap. The girl's contamination was brought by him, while Yu Wenliang's contamination came from the factory. The doctor he sought was also the executioner who caused the illness.

"You see, human technology has its limits. In these thousands of years of evolution, we have survived attacks from wild beasts, natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods, and continued to reproduce and grow, but ultimately we have succumbed to aging and disease."

The emergence of "pollution" is a crossroads in the process of human evolution. Aren't you all polluters? Can't you feel it? Greater power, longer lifespan, spared the suffering of birth, aging, sickness, and death. And yet, you insist on forcibly stopping human evolution.

The aroma reappeared.

Xiao Shengyun felt the source essence within his body recovering at an extremely rapid speed.

He suddenly realized that this substance was similar to growth hormone in the human world. No wonder Yu Wenliang had fallen into a mindless pollutant in the blink of an eye. This fragrance caused the amount of source matter in his body to rise rapidly, but the human body could not withstand such a large amount of source matter.

The people in the Operations Department regularly take suppressive drugs and, through training, can also control the source matter in their bodies to a certain extent. Therefore, under the same environment, Yu Wenliang became a pollutant first.

"The game is over, and everything is proceeding as expected. A new era is about to begin, and you will become its sacrifices."

Clearly, the venomous snake wants to turn everyone here into pollutants, and transform the agents who have been protecting humanity into mindless monsters. How interesting that would be!

His eyes gleamed with madness, but at that moment, the pollutants behind him suddenly retaliated.

It was Yu Wenliang; he regained his senses the instant his chest was pierced.

The two men began to fight, leaving the officers in the action department dumbfounded. But they quickly recovered and seized the opportunity when the snake made a mistake to finish him off.

In the chaos, a bullet, from an unknown source, pierced his chest, and this high-ranking church official died in an extremely ironic way.

Yu Wenliang's body was already tattered and barely recognizable as human.

“Kill me!” the father roared, tears streaming like blood from his already clouded eyes.

this……

The officers from the operations department supported each other, staring at each other blankly, with no one stepping forward.

This is too cruel.

Yu Wenliang is a good man, a good father, and he even fought alongside them.

“I’ll do it.” Zhou Zhi walked from the back of the crowd to the front. He seemed to have regained his senses, and the knife in his hand was still dripping with monster blood.

"Do you want to watch him die?" He said this to the little girl next to him. His eyes were calm as he said this, and the team members around him felt a chill as he gave the warning.

Asking a girl if she watched her father's execution was a bit too inhumane, the team members thought to themselves.

"What nonsense are you talking about? How old is she?!"

Yang shielded the girl to his side and scolded her with displeasure.

When handling cases, if there are young children present, the officers will try their best to choose a reasonable solution to minimize the impact on them. This is an unwritten rule of the Operations Department.

Soon, his hand was grasped by something warm, and then gently removed.

“Dad.” The girl walked up to her father. She was so small that she looked like a tree and a blade of grass next to Yu Wenliang, who had become a monster.

"I love you." She gently hugged her father, her dress stained with red blood and black slime.

A long black blade pierced his heart, blood spurting out and staining the ground beneath his feet.

The room was completely silent...

After the case was closed, Ye Ting and his group were taken to the hospital, and the scene was quickly cleaned up by specialized personnel.

As for Yu Wenliang's daughter, although the girl repeatedly emphasized that she could live independently, she was too young and had been in a particularly turbulent situation recently, so she was eventually sent to a special shelter.

After completing his mission report, Xiao Shengyun walked out of the operations office and saw a familiar car at the entrance.

The person inside lay on the car seat with their eyes closed, it was unclear whether they were dead or alive.

They had shared life and death during the day, after all. Xiao Shengyun stepped forward and knocked hard on the car window.

Zhou Zhi's slash was clean and swift, and he remained expressionless throughout, but Xiao Shengyun noticed the trembling hand he held the knife.

"Hey, Dean Zhou, if you want to sleep, you should go home to sleep. The car seat is adjusted so high."

Not afraid of getting a stiff neck,

Zhou Zhi opened his eyes, rolled down the car window, and the night wind that hit him head-on blew away the lingering confusion and sleepiness.

Have you finished your physical examination?

"It's done. Apart from a slight drop in blood sugar because I didn't eat, everything is normal." Xiao Shengyun was a little surprised, not expecting that the first thing this person would say was about his health.

"That's good." Zhou Zhi nodded, still looking somewhat disoriented. "If you haven't eaten, would you like to eat together?"

"ah?"

Before Xiao Shengyun could react, his mouth had already agreed before his brain could.

It's not his fault. Any curious cat would be eager to try out a mysterious ball of yarn. When someone hands him a loose end of the yarn, he instinctively grabs it.

Xiao Shengyun initially thought the two of them would just find a restaurant to eat at, but once the car drove out of the city, he realized something was wrong.

The entire area is now under martial law, most of the roadside restaurants are closed, and the area around the city is heavily guarded.

"Where are we going? It's already dark, how am I going to get back?"

Xiao Shengyun looked outside. This was already the suburbs. Most of the residents had been moved elsewhere, leaving only rows of silent high-rise buildings shrouded in the night.

"Go to a research institute over here. It has a small kitchen, so they definitely won't treat you badly. After that, you'll need to undergo another comprehensive test. Every awakened person has to do this test, but I've been too busy lately, so I haven't been able to find the time."

"Huh? Is this some kind of trap? You could have just said so from the start. Why beat around the bush like this?"

"It's just a routine check-up."

The research institute is about 20 miles from the city center, surrounded by undeveloped land with piles of brown soil everywhere.

This institute is just one of many branches of the Institute for Life Sciences. Almost every major city has branches like this, which are mainly responsible for collecting pollutant data and temporarily storing samples.

This place is much livelier than the deserted commercial street we just left. All the floors are brightly lit, and the air is filled with the smell of chemical reagents.

The two went straight to the cafeteria upon entering. The cafeteria is open 24 hours a day, as there are plenty of research dogs who work until the early hours of the morning every day.

Inviting someone to dinner at the canteen might seem impolite, but in recent years, the institute has received a large amount of funding, and the canteen has been built to be quite luxurious, with three floors, resembling a small shopping mall.

The two ordered four dishes, filling the small table in the cafeteria to the brim.

But Xiao Shengyun found the meal utterly tasteless, like a prisoner about to be led to the guillotine.

He wasn't sure if his identity would be recognized. The medical department of the operations unit only conducted simple physiological tests, while the research institute was able to truly analyze the structure of pollutants from the inside out.

"What will happen to that child, Ye Ting and the others?" Zhou Zhi suddenly asked.

“She was sent to a special shelter. The girl is very sensible, but she's still too young. I'll visit her every week from now on. After all, I've known Lao Yu for a while…”

Xiao Shengyun choked up halfway through his sentence. He suddenly realized that Old Yu, who used to chat idly with him every day, was dead.

Perhaps because so much has happened, we only now realize how many waves have surged forth.

Perhaps it's because of the difference in species, but he always finds it difficult to truly empathize. Even when a colleague he had a good relationship with died, he would only express his feelings.

Humans will eventually die; after all, they are such tiny and fragile creatures.

"Really? I was thinking that if she had nowhere else to go, she could come to the research institute."

"Is your research institute so short-staffed that the director is poaching people from other institutions, even child laborers?" Xiao Shengyun said speechlessly.

As the two ate, people came in one after another. Zhou Zhi had almost never been here before, but almost everyone engaged in related research recognized that face.

The researchers were initially incredulous, thinking they were hallucinating during their experiment, then their faces showed fear. They then deliberately moved to the diagonal corner opposite the two, much like college students scrambling for seats in the last row.

"That person, is he the legendary one? Why would he come here?"

"Keep your voice down. There must be important experimental samples involved; the city has been under lockdown recently."

The term "experimental sample" is a pronoun, and what it refers to is self-evident.

The researcher lowered his head.

Zhou Zhi is a legendary figure in this circle. He earned his PhD in biology at the age of 22 and became a member of the "Darwin" program. He then became a student of the former dean. Whether in terms of academic qualifications or career, his promotion speed can be described as rocketing.

If these achievements could still be explained by connections and financial resources, then his subsequent series of results can be seen as a stark contrast. In the field of pollutant research, Zhou Zhi was arguably unparalleled in his abilities.

Some people even say that he does not belong to humanity, but to another race, otherwise it would be impossible for him to achieve so much in such a short time.

The Awakened Ones also have very keen hearing. The whispers of these people reached their ears, and Xiao Shengyun couldn't help but chuckle.

"They all seem afraid of you?" He smiled, his eyes clear and innocent, like a student just entering the workforce.

"Then you must not be afraid."

Why should I be afraid?

I'm not afraid of you, I want to eat you up.

Of course, Xiao Shengyun wouldn't do that now. He needed to figure out why the pollution on Zhou Zhi's body seemed to originate from the same source as his.

After lunch, the two went inside the research institute.

"Come with me."

The iron gate in front of them suddenly opened, releasing a burst of cold air that instantly turned icy and bone-chilling.

Everything inside was exposed to the stark white light, and Xiao Shengyun stared wide-eyed.