The viewers in the livestream room were still immersed in the arrow Wen Yuzhi had just fired.

【Our cub was so cool =w=!】

【Watching in holographic mode is seriously incredible! You can adjust the camera angle whenever you want. I could see every single one of cub’s eyelashes clearly. It felt like that arrow shot straight into my heart!】

【So cool! Seriously, that was so shocking! Did you all take screenshots? I recorded the whole thing!】

【I thought our cub was just a soft, cute little kitten who needed protecting. I didn’t expect him to suddenly flash his claws. The key point is, how can someone even look that good when he gets fierce...】

【Cub has wings! Do any of you know what race that is? Or is our cub really an angel descended into this world?】

The bullet comments in the livestream room completely boiled over. Without question, among all the survivors, Wen Yuzhi now had the highest popularity.

The child was good-looking, obedient, and well-behaved. Yet when something actually happened, he turned out to be so capable in a fight.

The image of Wen Yuzhi drawing his bow and nocking an arrow was screenshotted frantically by the viewers and posted all over StarNet.

In the image, the boy’s brows were slightly drawn together. He held the bowstring and lowered his head, firelight reflected in his pupils, his indifferent expression like that of a god high above, looking down on the human world.

And the star rain filling the distant sky had become nothing more than his backdrop.

At this moment, the sharp-edged boy was like a gem that had been polished to perfection. When his brilliance bloomed, no one could move their gaze away from him.

Those who could fight well were not as good-looking as him. Those who were good-looking... all right, there simply was no one better-looking than him.

The dazzling firework star rain, the beautiful and holy angel, and that grand, vast, songlike scene...

Any single one of these elements was already enough to leave people deeply shaken.

But when they were combined together, it could only be said that the right time, the right place, and the right people had created a battle scene beautiful to the extreme.

All the races of the Starverse were very honest. They pursued beautiful things, but what stirred their blood even more was a powerful person with ability.

And the boy in the image possessed an incomparably beautiful appearance, while also using this arrow to directly show everyone his courage and force.

It could be said that tonight, the entire StarNet was going mad for Wen Yuzhi.

Wen Yuzhi knew nothing about this.

He looked at the tall black mecha in front of him, stretching out its hand toward him.

The points of light that had burst out of the giant tumor were still floating in the air, and the black mecha was inevitably stained with those mischievous specks of light as well.

A mecha made entirely of metal should have been cold and hard.

Yet in this instant, its action of reaching its hand toward the boy, amid the falling points of light, seemed to carry a trace of tenderness.

Mecha and angel.

The former was pitch-black and cold; the latter glowed with dazzling radiance and brightness.

When they appeared in the same frame at the same time, the viewers in the livestream room also sensed an indescribable atmosphere.

Xi Heyan no longer cared about anything else.

At this moment, there was only that figure suspended in midair in his eyes.

He was waiting—

Waiting for that angel high above to give him a response, to favor him.

Perhaps because it sensed his emotions, the tall, cold mecha looked somewhat cautious at this moment.

Like a fierce tiger retracting its fangs and claws before a rose.

Wen Yuzhi’s eyelashes trembled lightly.

He lowered his eyes. Under the mottled halo of light, the boy’s gaze as he looked down at the mecha from above seemed to carry a detached compassion.

In this instant, everyone who saw the boy’s eyes had the feeling that, in the other party’s gaze, they were as tiny as dust.

Xi Heyan’s heart gradually became nervous as well. Just as his emotions grew more and more uneasy—

Suddenly, he saw the boy in front of him move.

Wen Yuzhi flapped his wings and flew toward him.

His snow-white wings stirred the golden points of light. The angel high above came before Xi Heyan, then slowly descended.

He landed in the open palm of the mecha.

The moment he saw Wen Yuzhi coming toward him, Xi Heyan’s eyes changed beyond his control, like ripples spreading across a calm lake. Even his usually dark pupils surfaced with a faint light.

The fireworks were brilliant, but at this moment, no matter how dazzling the star rain was, it could not enter Xi Heyan’s eyes.

Because he already had the sun he wanted to chase.

And at this very moment, his sun was resting in his palm.

Compared to the tall mecha, Wen Yuzhi’s figure looked very small.

The mecha gently lifted him up. That posture was like holding a fragile, exquisite porcelain doll.

Xi Heyan placed the boy on the shoulder of the mecha beneath him. That position had the best and steadiest view.

And Xi Heyan’s action was also a subtle expression of his own feelings.

Among those in the combat department, there had always been a saying.

A mecha companion was the most important other half. And the person who could sit on the shoulder of their mecha was naturally someone even more special.

Those who understood mecha had all heard this rumor before. So after seeing what the black mecha did, they all began to boil over.

# Damn it.

# Why are we all single dogs, but you get to find... #

# Show off love, break up fast! #

That was roughly the mental journey of this portion of the viewers.

Xi Heyan obviously could not hear their inner voices. He controlled the mecha and carefully carried the boy on its shoulder through this ruined area.

The battle just now had already turned this once-bustling, prosperous square into a broken wasteland.

When they reached the survivors, Xi Heyan first set Wen Yuzhi down, then put away the mecha.

Wen Yuzhi had only just stood firm when he was greeted by the survivors’ enthusiastic embraces.

When he was surrounded in the middle, the expression on the boy’s face was still a little dazed.

Everyone touched him here and there. By the time Xi Heyan rescued Wen Yuzhi, the angel who had been cold and beautiful just a moment ago had already become like a pitiful little kitten that had been held in someone’s arms and thoroughly ruffled.

His hair was messy, and on his snow-white cheek, someone had even kissed him at some unknown point, leaving an obvious kiss mark.

Xi Heyan almost pulled the boy back to his side with a dark expression. That damned kiss mark was wiped away by him with a clean handkerchief.

After being rescued, Wen Yuzhi was still somewhat shaken.

He had not expected everyone to be so enthusiastic.

It frightened him so much that he quickly put his wings away. Otherwise, after that round of touching, the feathers on his wings probably would not have survived.

The Saint Clan royal guards who had returned to his side also separated the excited survivors from him.

Only then did Wen Yuzhi have the courage to poke his head out from behind Xi Heyan.

“Um... everyone worked hard tonight. We’ve already dealt with the biggest trouble. There are still some that escaped into the streets, so I’m afraid everyone will need to work a little harder.”

The biggest threat in the square had been the giant tumor. Once it was gone, the remaining stray beasts had either been eaten or burned to death in the fire.

The portion that had escaped was clearly no longer much of a threat either.

Even if the survivors split into small teams of two or three, they would be able to handle them.

Wen Yuzhi did not interfere with that part any longer.

He had not forgotten the reason they had come here in the first place—to go to the building acquired by the pharmaceutical company.

Right now, they were standing below that building.

It was hard to say whether this was luck or something else. Most of the surrounding buildings had been destroyed, yet this building, despite being so close to the square, was still completely intact.

There was not a single light inside the building. Through the glass of the exterior wall, they could see that the inside was pitch-black. The exact situation could not be made out.

And the commotion from the battle just now had been so massive, yet it was still quiet inside, as if there were no one there at all.

For a moment, Fatty also began to wonder whether his earlier guess had been wrong...

Wen Yuzhi, however, thought of something.

“Have you noticed something...?”

A hint of nervousness appeared on Fatty’s face as well. “What?”

Wen Yuzhi lowered his eyes and said in an indifferent tone, “Ever since we came to this square, after killing stray beasts, there don’t seem to have been any supply rewards anymore.”

“Oh, right!”

After Wen Yuzhi said this, Fatty also reacted. No wonder he kept feeling that something was strange. So that was it. They had killed so many stray beasts, yet not even a single supply pack had appeared.

Although they no longer needed those things right now, the absence still felt a little strange.

“And our objective is so obvious, but the people behind this game have not reacted at all.”

Wen Yuzhi and the others had not shown the slightest intention of hiding their actions.

From the moment they mobilized the survivors to collect fuel and supplies for them, anyone with eyes could see that their goal was to resolve this game as soon as possible and get out.

If they were the game organizers, would they watch helplessly as the originally divided survivors united and killed the stray beasts?

The other side clearly would not be so tolerant and kind.

These people had trapped them here and deliberately created these kinds of game rules. Clearly, they wanted to watch them kill one another here.

If Wen Yuzhi and the others had not discovered the stray beasts in the square ahead of time, then the final result waiting for them would definitely have been all the survivors being wiped out while caught off guard.

Yet the strange thing was that even now, when they had almost wiped out all the stray beasts in the square, the people hiding behind the scenes were still completely silent. They had neither come out to stop them nor made any movement at all.

No matter how one looked at it, this seemed abnormal.

What Wen Yuzhi could think of, the others could think of as well.

Fatty swallowed and asked hesitantly, “Then... are we still going in?”

Wen Yuzhi thought for a moment, then finally made the decision.

“Since we’re already here, let’s go in and take a look.”

No matter what those people were thinking, they had already come here. They could not possibly go back and obediently wait until three days later, could they?

Lottie glanced at the dark doorway. Before going inside, she added a warning. “Be careful. This building gives me a bad feeling. Little cutie, you know how my intuition is.”

As she spoke, she winked at Wen Yuzhi.

The meaning behind Lottie’s words was clearly referring to that “whispered secret” they had talked about earlier.

Xi Heyan did not know when Wen Yuzhi had become so close to this mermaid, but that did not stop him from taking a slight step forward and walking in the middle, separating Wen Yuzhi from Lottie.

Lottie: “...”

Why was this human so unpleasant?!

Fatty did not notice the undercurrents on this side. Hearing Lottie’s words, he muttered, “There can’t possibly still be stray beasts hidden inside, right...?”

But after they went in, the good news was that they did not encounter any stray beasts.

The bad news was that near the elevators on the first floor, they discovered several corpses.

For some reason... Wen Yuzhi felt that this scene was a little familiar, as if it had happened before.

He and Xi Heyan exchanged a glance. Clearly, they had both remembered. When they found that laboratory on Blackrock Star, what they had seen was also such a pile of corpses.

However, the corpses here had died in an extremely miserable state.

The blood throughout their bodies seemed to have been completely sucked dry, leaving only shriveled husks.

Xi Heyan bent down and picked up one of the corpses on the floor.

Without the support of moisture, the other party’s face had already become completely unrecognizable. But on his neck, there was still a very large tattoo.

After staring at that tattoo for a while, Xi Heyan said with certainty, “These are all space pirates.”

“Space pirates?”

Wen Yuzhi froze. He had not expected that after entering, the first people they would encounter would not be from the research institute, but space pirates.

Xi Heyan explained, “To show their identity, these space pirates tattoo certain patterns on obvious parts of their bodies. This pirate’s tattoo is a shark. It’s the flag pattern of Blacktooth. Their boss is nicknamed Blood Shark.”

In truth, it was rather difficult to identify space pirates by tattoo alone. Many people who were not space pirates also tattooed various patterns on their bodies. Unfortunately, this Blacktooth pirate group was simply too arrogant.

Their boss, Blood Shark, provoked people on StarNet every few days.

As a result, many people could recognize Blacktooth’s shark symbol.

At this moment, the bullet comments were also all discussing the identities of the space pirates, and why they had appeared here.

Xi Heyan knew a little more. After all, the reason he and King of Spades had come to Blue Luster Star in the first place was because the Tribunal had posted a secret bounty on the black market.

Blood Shark was famous in the black market and was also a high-level bounty hunter. It was not strange for him to be among those who had accepted the bounty.

What was strange was why these space pirates had died here, and in such a state.

Just as Xi Heyan was feeling puzzled, the elevator in front of them moved.

The numbers above, which had originally been still, began to rise continuously. Then they stopped at the sixteenth floor. Immediately after, the number began to descend.

Sixteenth floor, fifteenth floor, fourteenth floor...

The elevator kept descending until it reached the first floor where they were.

With a ding, the elevator doors slowly opened to both sides, and a figure walked out from inside.

The newcomer was none other than the leader of the Blacktooth pirate group Xi Heyan had just mentioned, Blood Shark.

His appearance was also easy to recognize: fiery-red hair, one eye, and a scar across his face.

And his current state was somewhat strange.

His remaining intact eye was suffused with an eerie blood-red color. The veins all over his body bulged, and his body was trembling nonstop.

“So hungry...”

Looking at Wen Yuzhi and the others before him, he grinned, and saliva actually flowed from his mouth.

“You came to find Dan?”

Blood Shark asked in a strange tone.

But before Wen Yuzhi and the others could answer, he began laughing with a peculiar expression.

“Hahaha! We were all tricked! I was tricked too! He’s a lunatic! A lunatic!”

“I’m going to die...”

“So hungry... I can’t live anymore. Why do you still get to live? Die with me!!!”

He muttered to himself in a deranged, disjointed manner. No one could understand what he was saying.

And when he reached the final sentence, Blood Shark roared it out completely. That voice almost no longer sounded human.

Alarm instantly rose in Wen Yuzhi and the others’ hearts.

Who knew that in the next moment, Blood Shark would sprint wildly toward them.

And as he ran, his skin began to peel off. In the end, his body slowly elongated, his limbs gradually twisted in a bizarre way, and by the end, his appearance had completely transformed into that of a monster.

Most terrifyingly, after Blood Shark transformed into a monster, he still seemed to possess his own consciousness.

Its eyes stared greedily at Wen Yuzhi and the others, while its mouth kept shouting, “Die with me...!”

Where had Wen Yuzhi and the others ever seen a living person suddenly transform into a monster?

Fortunately, their reactions were all very fast. Xi Heyan did not use his sniper rifle. At such close range, a handgun was more useful.

He fired several shots in succession at Blood Shark’s head and heart.

But the other party merely paused slightly before continuing to charge at them.

Lottie chose to lash out fiercely with her enormous fish tail.

A fish tail that could slap stray beasts into meat paste still failed to kill Blood Shark. He fell to the ground, then shakily climbed back up after a while. In the end, it was only when two Saint Clan royal guards stepped forward that Blood Shark was killed.

This also made Lottie look at the bodyguards beside Wen Yuzhi in astonishment.

Wen Yuzhi had no time to care about other people’s shock. He walked up to Blood Shark’s corpse.

Thinking of how the other party had kept shouting that he was hungry, he glanced at Blood Shark’s teeth. There were bits of flesh and blood caught between them.

Xi Heyan also noticed Wen Yuzhi’s gaze.

Realizing what the boy was thinking, he went and dragged over one of the space pirates’ corpses. There were traces of biting on the back of the other party’s neck. Judging from the tooth marks, the pirate’s wound basically matched Blood Shark’s teeth.

In other words...

The expressions of Wen Yuzhi and Xi Heyan both turned rather ugly.

The boy said in a low voice, “These space pirates were all drained of blood by Blood Shark.”

Wen Yuzhi thought of Blood Shark’s strange appearance at the beginning, as well as the other party’s craving for flesh and blood after turning into a monster...

All these abnormalities made Wen Yuzhi think of the stray beasts outside.

Only, unlike those stray beasts, Blood Shark clearly possessed self-awareness.

He could speak, and could even think.

If he had undergone genetic modification just like the stray beasts outside, then his mutation direction should be another form entirely.

Blood Shark’s transformation clearly brought a huge shock to the viewers in the livestream room.

Before this, no matter what the stray beasts looked like, the viewers had treated them as monsters.

But Blood Shark’s existence was now plainly telling the viewers in the livestream room—

The monsters they thought they had been seeing might very likely have once been people!

This matter immediately caused an uproar on StarNet.

Pure monsters and monsters transformed from living people were two completely different things.

The former was easier for the audience to accept. After all, stray beasts were already existences everyone in the universe wanted dead.

But what if this stray beast had been modified from an intelligent species?

Then the nature of the matter was completely different.

This meant there was definitely someone secretly conducting research that was not only illegal, but utterly inhumane!

The viewers watching the livestream were completely enraged.

A wave demanding a thorough investigation into the people behind the scenes swept across StarNet. The degree of public outrage was almost unprecedented.

Even many racial leaders could no longer withstand the pressure and began stepping forward to express their stance.

Raymond An anxiously asked his assistant, “Can’t that livestream be shut down?!”

The bigger this matter became, the more it was practically roasting him over a fire.

The assistant was helpless as well. “It can’t be shut down. That account was specially processed. We don’t have permission to operate on it unless we shut down the network.”

But shutting down the network was not something easy. Judging by the current popularity of the livestream room, unless they could cut off the networks of all nine star regions, there was simply no way to stop those curious viewers.

And just thinking about it was enough to know that this was absolutely impossible.

Raymond An could only remain anxious while continuing to urge his subordinates to investigate everything as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

Meanwhile, the uproar outside temporarily did not affect Wen Yuzhi and the others here. It was just that another large wave of people had entered the livestream room belonging to Wen Yuzhi.

After seeing Blood Shark’s condition, Xi Heyan suggested, “Should we go to the sixteenth floor and take a look?”

Blood Shark had come down from the sixteenth floor. There had to be something strange up there.

No one had any objection. They entered the elevator and pressed the button for the sixteenth floor.

The elevator quickly arrived at the corresponding floor.

After the doors opened, what entered Wen Yuzhi and the others’ sight was a modified space.

This place should originally have been an office floor of the building, but at this moment, it had been transformed into something like a control center.

At the very center was an enormous screen.

It seemed to show a top-down angle, encompassing Central Square and the surrounding streets.

Wen Yuzhi saw dense clusters of tiny black dots moving across it, but he could not tell whether they were stray beasts or survivors.

That was right. This screen was clearly a giant surveillance display.

Their every movement had been monitored by the people here.

In addition to this enormous screen, there were countless small square screens scattered across one workstation after another.

These workstations seemed to be individual seats, and the researchers in white coats were sitting at them.

However, at this moment, all these researchers had already met with disaster.

Without exception, they were all thoroughly dead.

Some corpses lay collapsed over the workstations, while others had fallen to the floor. Their deaths were the same as the space pirates downstairs. The blood throughout their bodies had been sucked dry.

Xi Heyan went forward to check.

“It was Blood Shark.”

The bite marks and locations all matched the space pirates downstairs.

Only, the space pirates had nothing but tooth marks on their bodies, while the corpses of these researchers seemed to have suffered some extremely cruel treatment. Their faces had all been struck heavily.

One researcher’s corpse had even been arranged into a devout kneeling posture facing the enormous screen. It was a posture of atonement.

When Blood Shark killed them, he had clearly vented his rage on these corpses.

Thinking of the monstrous form Blood Shark had turned into, if his transformation was connected to these researchers, then it was not hard to explain why these researchers had died so miserably.

Blood Shark was a space pirate whose crimes were countless, and his desire for revenge was also extremely intense.

Xi Heyan guessed that Blood Shark’s mutation had been nearing its time. Otherwise, with that pirate leader’s methods, these researchers could have died even more miserably.

No one felt sympathy for these researchers.

With so many stray beasts outside, who knew how many lives their hands had been stained with?

After kicking aside a corpse blocking the way, Wen Yuzhi walked up to one of the workstations.

He opened the backend task panel.

Displayed on it were detailed records of what these researchers had been doing.

They had assigned a number to every stray beast. When a stray beast died, they would also put that stray beast’s number onto the death list.

And when one clicked on the numbers of these stray beasts, there was detailed information inside—body data, as well as the entire experimental modification process.

Looking at the little girl in the photograph smiling at the camera, no one could connect her with the hideous, terrifying stray beast shown afterward.

“These people... are simply not human!”

Even Fatty’s eyes had turned red.

Wen Yuzhi’s heart felt terrible as well. He did not continue looking. The other stray beasts were undoubtedly the same as this little girl. They were all victims of this modification experiment.

The other contents in the backend were the battle data between these stray beasts and the survivors.

They recorded every single conflict, then organized the data, analyzing how the stray beasts responded to different races, before adjusting the stray beasts’ next evolutionary direction according to the strengths of different races.

To put it simply, this game was one of their data tests.

And Wen Yuzhi and the other survivors existed to help these researchers find the flaws in the stray beasts. The combat data collected would then become precious material for perfecting their experiments.

They called this experiment the Soldier Ant Project.