Chapter 116

Chapter 116

Lu Yan had never felt more like a corporate wage slave in his life.

On the map, the small dot representing Ning Huai flickered between green and red.

He wanted to end it himself, but he's lost control of his body.

Rainwater dripped into Lu Yan's eyes, stinging with a dull, acidic burn.

You look so pathetic running in the rain, the System remarked. But also kind of hot. I like it.

After crossing two city blocks, Lu Yan finally found him.

If Ning Huai had once been mostly human, now he was mostly aberration.

The intersection was a wasteland of a finished battle. The road was shattered, and one of the leaning high-rises had completely collapsed, as if an earthquake had ripped through. On top of the rubble lay a massive spider, its abdomen torn open. Countless smaller spiders crawled from the wound, swarming around their mother.

These hatchlings were already pollutants.

Some of the farther ones opened their pincer-like, ferocious maws and lunged at Lu Yan.

Lu Yan let scales ripple across his skin. The newborn spiders' pollution index was low—too low to even pierce his hide. For an ordinary person, they'd be lethal.

If Ning Huai completed his transformation into a full pollutant, he and the spider army fissioning from his body would sweep across the land like locusts, leaving nothing alive in their wake.

Ning Huai looked at him, a low growl rattling in his throat. "...Get away."

New, deep-purple eyes had sprouted on both sides of his face. Unlike the original three pairs, these lateral eyes had no whites. They were larger, savage, gleaming with the malice of something from the abyss.

The System's tone was flat. 99.1... 99.2... Ning Huai. Estimated time until complete aberration: two minutes, seventeen seconds.

Ning Huai was telling him to leave for one simple reason: he knew, given his current physical resilience, the odds of Lu Yan killing him quickly were almost zero.

He didn't want Lu Yan to die. At least, not by his hand.

Ning Huai had killed the pollutant Greenbird as an Awakener. He didn't want the first life he took as a pollutant to be a former teammate.

"I'm saving him," Lu Yan stated. "Tell me how."

He knew the System had a way. Otherwise, it wouldn't have sent him to this street. It would have found a way to make him evacuate, to minimize the losses.

Of the twenty-one Awakeners who had ventured into Changjia during the Divine Kingdom operation, only four still lived.

Lu Yan wanted someone like Ning Huai to see the outside world with his own eyes. Not just hear a second-hand account and reply with a wistful, resigned, "That's good."

The Divine Kingdom was a cage. It hadn't just imprisoned the Holy Spirit, but also the better part of these Awakeners' lives.

Bad boy, the System chided. Only coming to me when you need something.

It's been a while since you performed surgery. Remember the pollutant fusion procedure you learned in Tang Xian'an's dream?

That was in the First Research Institute, decades ago. He'd briefly interfaced with the top researchers of that era, gleaning inspiration and knowledge from them.

Grafting a pollutant's body part onto a human. After the fusion period, the human gains traits of the pollutant.

Through rational calculation, Gong Weibin developed the talent transplantation surgery. Transplanting a talent from another human has lower rejection rates and higher survival odds for the recipient. But transplanting a top-tier talent carries a high mortality risk for both parties.

If you want to suppress a rising lesion percentage, there's one simple method: remove the aberrant body parts.

Theoretically feasible, but rarely attempted. Because an Awakener and their aberrant parts are almost one entity. It would be like scraping all the scales off a fish. Could the fish still live?

Early experiments resulted in a one hundred percent mortality rate. The Institute abandoned this line of research, pivoting to high-concentration specialized drugs instead.

Their logic was sound. They just targeted the wrong things to cut.

Green and red halos appeared in Lu Yan's vision, mapping onto the spider-man before him.

Green areas can remain. Red areas are the lesions that must be excised.

Pick up your blade. I've been meaning to say—Hellfire looks just like a No. 26 scalpel.

It was still raining. The operating conditions were primitive, but they would have to do.

According to the System, if the surgery failed, there was a seventy percent chance a fully aberrant Ning Huai would swallow him whole.

"Captain Ning." Lu Yan kept it brief. "Surgery. Cooperate."

Ning Huai lay prone on the ground, tiny spiders streaming endlessly from his torn abdomen. These were the eggs that had been incubating inside him, now fully hatched.

The hatchlings were pitch black, their backs dotted with purple spots like glazed tenmoku pottery.

Lu Yan wasn't sure if Ning Huai even heard him. He drove Hellfire into one of the new eyes on Ning Huai's face.

Ning Huai's spider limbs trembled. He used every ounce of will to keep his eight legs anchored to the ground, claws digging into the asphalt, instead of lashing out and slicing Lu Yan open.

The eyeball was gouged out, leaving a raw, bleeding seam.

But the densest concentration of red was in Ning Huai's fully transformed abdomen. It was round like a spider's rear, swollen with tiny spider eggs. White, viscous fluid—unhardened silk—dripped from its end.

Lu Yan took a deep breath and crawled inside Ning Huai's abdominal cavity.

The stench of blood was overwhelming. Dozens of near-hatched eggs floated in translucent mucus. Many hatchlings had already wriggled halfway out of their sacs, limbs waving eagerly in the air.

Ning Huai has five egg sacs. Over a thousand spiders total. Half are hatched. Remove four.

"Logically, only female spiders have egg sacs," Lu Yan muttered, confused.

He was contaminated by a mother spider. Problem?

Lu Yan had no retort. He held the blade between his teeth and used his hands to peel back the layers of flesh inside Ning Huai's abdomen.

If not for the gill slits at his ears allowing him to breathe, he would have suffocated.

This distended belly was far more troublesome than Zhou Qimeng's had been, and he had even less time.

Removing the eyes will keep him lucid briefly, but the priority is the egg sacs in his abdomen. You have eighty-two seconds.

When the first sac was cut free, Ning Huai's abdomen convulsed in agony, gushing blood.

The severed sac split like a plastic bag, spilling its cargo of spider eggs. Dozens of unformed spider fetuses died on the spot.

Lesion percentage 96.4... Good. You've bought a little more time.

The second sac was tougher, connected by bits of cartilage and bone. For a moment, Lu Yan felt less like a surgeon and more like a butcher chopping ribs.

Avoid the spinal nerves and major vessels. This sac is too close to his aberrant heart.

Roughly ten minutes later, Lu Yan crawled out of Ning Huai's abdomen, covered in blood.

He was coated in a slime of transparent fluid from the cut sacs, with a few half-dead hatchlings clinging to him. In his hands, he held four egg sacs, thin as egg membrane.

He glanced back at the nearly two-meter-long incision, then slowly began plucking the spider eggs still clinging to the surface.

It was like harvesting grapes.

If his son were conscious, he'd probably be tempted to sneak a taste. Then Lu Yan would discover these eggs grown inside Ning Huai didn't just look like grapes—they tasted like them too.

The process was brutal, but it worked. Ning Huai's lesion percentage had dropped.

In a few days, Ning Huai will molt again. The new carapace will be tougher than before. I didn't have you remove all the sacs because they are the source of his fission talent.

Hatchlings jumped onto Lu Yan's legs and back, some trying to worm up his sleeves.

He shook his arm, addressing Ning Huai, who was in a post-operative recovery state. "Can you control your kids?"

Ning Huai turned his head to look at him. His hair was soaked with sweat, but his expression was lighter. "Can't. Pollutants don't listen to me... What kind of healing talent is that, anyway?"

Lu Yan thought for a moment. "Not a talent. The power of modern medicine."

Perhaps a side effect of overusing his abilities, he felt more talkative than usual.

His gaze fell on another spot on the ground.

There lay the corpse of a humanoid pollutant, its face covered by a uniform jacket—the old style issued by the Special Operations Department forty years ago.

Ning Huai had placed it there.

"Greenbird?"

"Yeah." Ning Huai shifted slightly, pain darkening his vision before he settled on his side. "Dead. I thought... maybe he didn't recognize me because of my face. But he remembered... What about the Holy Spirit?"

"Also dead."

Ning Huai let out a long, shaky breath, his senses reaching out to locate the two fission bodies from before. "Brother Tiger is still alive too. This outcome... it's far better than I imagined. This isn't a dream, is it?"

"It's not."

Ning Huai turned his head, his gaze settling on Lu Yan. "Thank you," he said, the words slow and deliberate.

This team's composition had been formidable, their peak combat strength far surpassing the operation that had entered the Divine Kingdom decades ago.

But without Lu Yan's critical actions at several key moments, Ning Huai knew his fate would likely have mirrored Greenbird's.

The white mist shrouding the Central Divine Court had dissipated. Dawn approached in the east, a faint line of light bleeding into the sky.

Lu Yan felt the crushing need for sleep, but there was no suitable bed to be found.

The System praised his caution. [You're right. A beauty shouldn't sleep on the street. Too easy for trash to pick you up. If you're that exhausted, just walk a bit. The Sacred Pool with the white souls isn't far from the Divine Court. You might even see Director Hu.]

Ning Huai was still in recovery, lying motionless on the ground. Lu Yan fed him several tubes of specialized medicine and painkillers.

After a moment, Tiger came bounding over on all fours, his arrival a small storm of motion. "Captain Ning! Ning Huai! Little Lu! You're both okay!"

Lu Yan transferred Ning Huai's care to Tiger. Then, holding onto the last shreds of his own energy, he walked—like a man on a casual stroll—toward the location of the Sacred Pool.

In the center of the pool grew a Brain Blossom tree.

"It wasn't here before, was it?" The pounding in his skull was so severe Lu Yan couldn't trust his own memory.

[No. It moved here on its own. The few blossoms you... forcibly harvested injured it.]

With its host dead, the brain blossoms were withering, hanging from the branches like shelled walnuts. Some, too small to retain form, had shriveled into black, unidentifiable lumps and fallen to the ground.

The System's tone was matter-of-fact. [Edible. Special item dropped by the Holy Spirit. Nourishes the brain. Consuming it grants eighty percent resistance to mental attacks—the nightmare of all psychic pollutants.]

[Additionally, it can temporarily restore calm to an Awakener suffering from ability backlash.]

A true treasure.

Lu Yan plucked the walnut-like fruits. He counted them. Only fifty-two.

He ate one, stuffing the rest into his pockets. Remembering the blossoms he'd crushed underfoot earlier, a pang of genuine loss hit him.

[Chop the tree down too. It's a pollutant. The pollution source that made the Holy Spirit an Awakener.]

[To put it precisely, it occupies a position on an evolutionary sequence, manufacturing these 'brains in a vat' that represent thought. It's both plant and animal.]

[But it's not difficult to deal with.]

As Lu Yan drew his blade, the tree wrenched its roots from the soil, clearly intending to flee.

Lu Yan caught up to it in three strides, grabbed the trunk, and cleaved it in two with a single horizontal slash.

The cross-section of the tree sprayed crimson blood, emitting a sharp, piercing shriek identical to the Holy Spirit's.

The wood blackened and charred rapidly under Hellfire's searing heat. The vibrant green leaves at its crown withered into a sickly yellow, all vitality extinguished.

Lu Yan pressed his fingers to his temples. "I need to sleep," he said again, his voice now dangerously thin.

Suffering two major psychic assaults in one day had left his head feeling split open. He could almost feel the fine, dense web of blood vessels spreading and throbbing inside his skull.

[Sleep then. Need a lullaby?]

Gripping his knife, Lu Yan found a concealed corner formed by collapsed debris—a triangular pocket of relative shelter. He curled into a tight ball, a posture that protected his vulnerable abdomen. Rainwater still dripped from the edges of the broken concrete slabs around him.

"No," he whispered.

[Then goodnight, my treasure.]