Chapter 53#

The Innocent and Naive Fool#

Although the atmosphere in the hall froze for a moment when Count Lian walked in, as exquisite dishes were brought out by robots one after another, the banquet’s atmosphere began to warm up again.

These former nobles were basically party animals, but during this time they had been arrested and imprisoned. Not only did they have to undergo interrogation to confess their crimes, but they also had to suffer what they called “inhuman torture”—which was watching with their own eyes as the property they had used various means to extort was confiscated and turned over to the national treasury.

Having finally gotten a chance to reunite, they immediately began to pour out their bitterness to their companions:

“You have no idea, those commoners actually didn’t just want me to hand over all the money in my house, they also wanted to take away my beautiful adopted daughter! She’s only thirteen years old!”

A portly noble next to him sneered: “Cut it out, like I don’t know what that ‘adopted daughter’ of yours was being raised for? But if you ask me, those bastards in the military are just putting on an act! What laws, what rules? I am a noble, I am the rule!”

“Exactly,” another echoed, “Nobles should be high and mighty, otherwise how can we distinguish ourselves from those commoners on the street? That mermaid was a fool too, already having curried favor with Gu Xi, yet she actually died for a bunch of commoners for nothing. It’s truly hilarious, hahaha.”

“You can’t say it like that.” Count Lian swirled the champagne in his hand, a look of disapproval on his face.

Although this was the imperial palace and there were no servants in the hall except for them nobles, Count Lian certainly didn’t believe that Gu Xi hadn’t installed surveillance here.

“This is where you’re wrong.” He said unhurriedly, “As nobles, we should be grateful to that mermaid. Not just him, but the other kind and beautiful mermaids as well. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be able to stand here properly and enjoy the banquet, would we?”

As he spoke, he raised his champagne high and shouted to the nobles: “Let us drink to the great mermaids!”

The nobles burst into loud laughter.

“Cheers!!!!”

And on the wall behind their celebration were the mermaids who had been sealed in cold, carved stone, never having obtained freedom even in death.

“This is great,” Count Lian didn’t take long to get drunk. He sat boozily in the seat of honor, squinting at the indulging nobles below, finally unable to resist speaking the truth under the influence: “Gu… Gu Xi is truly a great philanthropist! A big idiot! He… he and that mermaid were a perfect match! Hahahaha…”

Count Lian laughed until he was doubled over, with tears even leaking from the corners of his eyes.

Suddenly, a slender white hand reached out from the wall behind him and abruptly strangled his neck.

“Mmph mmph mmph!!!!” Count Lian’s eyes widened, and his drunkenness was instantly frightened away.

His face turned red as he desperately clawed at the arm constricting his neck with his fingers, but the other party seemed to have no sense of pain at all, and the touch of the fingertips was as cold and stiff as a corpse.

Count Lian’s body went rigid as he turned his head bit by bit with great difficulty.

He immediately saw the mermaid whose lower body was still embedded in the wall. That gray mermaid stared at him expressionlessly, the force in his hand tightening further, while two streams of bright red blood-tears slowly slid down from his hollow eye sockets, as if accusing the nobles of the numerous crimes committed against his kin and homeland…

“Ah!”

Count Lian was scared out of his wits, and coupled with the cerebral hypoxia caused by suffocation, he began to frantically kick and punch the mermaid: “Get away! Get… get away from me, you low-life creature!”

The nobles below were all stunned.

In their eyes, they could only see Count Lian, who had been sitting there fine, suddenly jump up, desperately strangle his own neck with his hands, and start fighting wildly against the air with a flushed face.

“Help! Someone come quickly! Help!”

While they were at a loss, another piercing scream suddenly came from the crowd.

This time it was an elderly female noble. She was a famous philanthropist in the empire, claiming to have helped countless girls from poor star systems come to the Central Star to realize their dreams. But in reality, she was also the head of the largest underground human trafficking organization in the entire empire, possessing a complete industrial chain.

A young girl who was working hard to become a model on some unknown small planet yesterday might be kidnapped the next day, packed into a box naked, and sold to some middle-aged noble on the Central Star with special fetishes, until she was tortured to death; her family would never find her whereabouts.

She had even proudly declared to other nobles at a banquet once that as long as it was a human body part or organ, regardless of age or gender, there was nothing she couldn’t get. However, now she held her dinner knife high and, without even blinking, aimed it at her own body and stabbed down hard—

“Aaahhhhhh!!!”

The screams grew more and more frequent.

The dead mermaids had come back to life in their eyes. The fear of being retaliated against sent the nobles fleeing frantically through the hall, only to discover in despair that all the exits had been blocked at some point—

Only then did they understand that the theme of this banquet was the mermaids’ revenge.

A bloody carnival began, with wails as background music and tearful pleas for mercy and apologies as entertainment. Hundreds of mermaids watched this scene silently from the walls, without sorrow or joy, without emotion or desire.

Regrets can be smoothed over, and hatred can fade, but trampled lives ultimately cannot be resurrected.

When all sounds gradually ceased, Gu Xi, wearing the alliance’s most advanced gas mask and black boots, stepped through the blood covering the floor and walked step by step to the Wall of Sighs that symbolized human ugliness and evidence of crime.

He stopped a few meters from the wall, silently bowing his head, as if mourning for the innocently deceased mermaids.

Xu Feng, behind him, was also wearing a matching gas mask. He waved to the soldiers coming to clean the scene, and immediately someone brought high-power purification fans to suck away all the hallucinogens lingering in the air.

“Save…”

A weak plea for help came from a corner.

“Oh, there’s still one that slipped through the net.”

Xu Feng walked over and looked; it was actually Count Lian. He pulled out his gun while sighing: “Your vitality is actually stronger than a brain bug’s, I’m truly impressed.”

But even though he was still alive, Count Lian’s consciousness was still immersed in the illusion. He struggled to lift his head, and the last image he saw in his worthless life was Lin Xiaodong standing in front of him, giving him a slight smile:

“Go reflect in hell.”

“Bang!”

With a gunshot, everything returned to silence.

Soldiers brought buckets of oil and splashed them on the floor, the walls, and the corpses of the nobles. When all the preparations were complete, Xu Feng walked to Gu Xi’s side and said softly: “It’s time to go, Marshal.”

Gu Xi’s closed eyes flickered slightly.

He opened his eyes, took one last look at the Wall of Sighs, and silently took the silver lighter Xu Feng handed him, turning to walk out of the hall.

The moment he stepped out of the palace gates, he tossed the lit lighter behind him without looking back.

The flames instantly leaped over two meters high, and soon, the entire hall was burning and collapsing in the raging fire… until it was completely turned into a pile of useless ruins.

The hot, bright light of the fire was reflected in Gu Xi’s dark eyes, but even a temperature of thousands of degrees could not melt the ice formed by hatred and grief in the depths of the man’s gaze.

“What did you say!?” In his shock, the Doctor actually accidentally knocked over his teacup. “Gu Xi burned down that mermaid palace? And that bunch of nobles, they’ve all…?”

“Yes,” the subordinate said, “They are all dead.”

But the Doctor quickly regained his composure, or at least a superficial composure.

He immediately asked: “The lab wasn’t discovered, right? I’ve been watched very closely by the military lately, and I finally managed to get them to lower their guard. We can’t afford any more mistakes.”

The subordinate shook his head: “No. And Doctor, just two days ago, we finally had a breakthrough!”

“Really?” The Doctor’s eyes lit up. “Tell me in detail!”

The subordinate said: “The mermaid we’ve cultivated now has autonomous consciousness and has successfully passed basic personality tests and sensory checks. Doctor, do you want to go see him?”

Hearing his words, the Doctor nodded without hesitation and ordered: “Take me there.”

He followed the subordinate onto a flyer and headed all the way to the location of the secret lab.

Passing through Central Park on the way, the Doctor, who hadn’t been out in a long time, suddenly asked: “What is this smell? A floral scent?”

“It’s lilies,” the subordinate replied. “I don’t know who first spread it on the Star Net, but they said the last mermaid in the world loved lilies most. Now all the lilies on the Central Star are gathered here.”

The Doctor frowned and had him hover the flyer in the air, while he leaned out to look down at the massive mermaid statue covered in pure white flowers.

Now the area around the statue was crowded with people, and blooming lilies spread from the base in all directions, even covering the entire lawn of the park. The once lush green Central Park had now completely turned into a sea of lilies.

There are good and bad humans in this world; some are fallen beyond redemption, but most still possess a heart capable of perceiving kindness. Their voices could not reach the other side, so they could only use these bunches of pure, flawless lilies to express their gratitude to the mermaid.

The Doctor watched them with incomprehension, and after a while, hmphed: “Truly having too much time on their hands. Boring, let’s go.”

He thought back to the unpleasant conversation he had with Lin Xiaodong in this park.

That was their first and last meeting.

Although he had an extraordinary obsession with mysterious species like mermaids, the Doctor still felt very uncomfortable with the way Lin Xiaodong had looked at him back then. It was as if in the other party’s eyes, a scientific genius like himself with double degrees and high intelligence wasn’t even as valuable as a weed by the roadside.

Afterward, Lin Xiaodong had even had someone bring him a message, saying that those who toy with genes will only end in destruction, which the Doctor had scoffed at.

Shallow, he thought.

The flyer continued on, carrying them to a hundred-story building that towered into the clouds.

This was a building disguised as a bustling shopping mall. The first and second underground floors were normal parking lots, but only by pressing the elevator buttons in a specific sequence could one reach the deeper underground experimental sites.

After layers of verification, the final door finally slowly slid open.

Under the deathly white lab lights, the incubation pods filled with biological nutrient solution glowed with a faint green light. Inside one lay a pure, flawless mermaid quietly. His eyes were closed, his limbs naturally relaxed, and a head of curly black hair floated gently in the nutrient solution. His fair, handsome face held a trace of peaceful serenity.

Looking at his features, he actually bore a striking resemblance to Lin Xiaodong.

A flash of excitement suddenly shot from the Doctor’s eyes.

He hurried down the steps and pressed his hand against the glass of the incubation pod with excitement. The man traced the mermaid’s face with obsessed eyes, unable to help himself from exclaiming: “So beautiful…”

Hearing the sound, the mermaid’s eyelids flickered, and he slowly opened his eyes.

His eyes were a light gray. Across the flowing nutrient solution, they inexplicably gave off a programmatic indifference, which made the Doctor freeze subconsciously—this feeling, why was it a bit like a robot controlled by an optical computer?

But the mermaid soon returned to normal. He blinked, tilted his head, and looked at the Doctor in a white lab coat with an ignorant and innocent expression. Seeing the young man’s hand pressed against the pod door, he followed suit and reached out, pressing his own palm against the same spot, then let out a delighted, soft laugh.

“Does he have a name?”

The Doctor listened entrancedly to the mermaid’s crisp laughter. With his long-held wish finally coming true, as a scientific genius who became famous in his youth, he felt an unprecedented sense of satisfaction and vanity.

“This is the greatest research in human history!” he said loudly to all the researchers in the lab. “Look at this! Obedient, well-behaved, possessing every trait you want him to have… countless people will be grateful to me!”

This wasn’t simple cloning, but manual control of genetic variables, pre-setting the cloned creature’s personality, physical traits, and appearance to perfectly customize one’s ideal “him.”

In the Doctor’s view, this wasn’t called a substitute; it was just that the lost loved ones had returned to their side in a different form.

The mermaid seemed to notice that he was distracted and, through the glass, gently tapped a spot on the incubation pod.

The Doctor snapped out of it, impatient to press the button to open the pod door.

He couldn’t wait another second!

The subordinate beside him hurriedly tried to stop him: “No, Doctor, he hasn’t undergone emotional testing yet…”

But by the time he spoke, it was too late.

The button was pressed, the pod door opened in response, and the finally free mermaid pushed off the floor to slowly stand up. The original gentle expression on his face instantly changed. Without hesitation, he grabbed the head of the subordinate who tried to stop him with both hands and gave it a sudden twist, like twisting a ball—

“Crack.”

a bone-chillingly crisp sound of a neck breaking rang out.

The lab fell into deathly silence.

The mermaid quickly let go, and the subordinate, who died with his eyes open, immediately slumped limply to the floor.

The smile froze on the Doctor’s face. He stumbled back two steps and roared in terror: “Security! Kill him, quickly!”

A group of armed guards immediately rushed out, but the mermaid was faster than them. With a stretch of his long arms, he had already seized the Doctor as a hostage in front of him. The Doctor’s eyes were nearly bulging out as he struggled desperately in his arms, asking haltingly: “How… how could you…”

How could a mermaid with no negative emotions programmed in suddenly undergo a genetic mutation and become a killing machine!?

The mermaid with the familiar face looked at him coldly, bared a mouth full of sharp teeth, and bit a chunk of flesh off the Doctor’s shoulder.

“Ah—!!!” the Doctor screamed, and the other researchers were also so terrified that their legs were shaking—this mermaid not only carried violent genes, he had even regressed to his ancestral state!

In the chaos, the mermaid destroyed the exit and the oxygen supply system. Now the once secret lab had completely become a sealed chamber. But before the oxygen in the lab ran out, what awaited them would be the hell they had created with their own hands…

“A-choo!”

In another world far away, Lin Xiaodong suddenly sneezed.

“Is someone talking about me?” He rubbed his nose and suddenly remembered something. “By the way, system, when those people drew my blood and extracted cells back then, are you sure they won’t take them and secretly clone a row of mini-mermaids?”

System: “I scrambled the gene sequence. Under normal probability, there’s only a 0.01% chance of cloning a living thing.”

“Then that means it’s still possible to succeed!”

“Don’t worry,” the system hmphed, “It’s like a building that happens to be built with stones without calculating stress and structure. It won’t take long for the genes to collapse.”

But there was one thing it didn’t tell Lin Xiaodong.

If it were just simple gene collapse, it would be fine, but if an already precarious chain was forcibly changed by external forces…

What consequences would be caused then, even the system could not predict.

“But you’d better worry about yourself first,” the system encouraged. “Look at the materials I prepared for you. They’re all classic secret manuals that fit this era and your current disguised identity. You might use them one day.”

Lin Xiaodong was suspicious: “Since when did you become so proactive in caring for me?”

It wasn’t quite normal.

He clicked on the data package displayed on the panel.

“The Making of a Lady,” “The Eldest Miss Arrives,” “Three Sentences to Make a Man Fall for Me”… and even one that practically blinded Lin Xiaodong’s eyes: “How to Wear a Cheongsam with Femininity.”

Are you insane!!!!