April 1st, April Fools’ Day.

Ryukyu, Chiayi County.

A few dark clouds drifted across the sky, and the ground was damp from a recent light rain.

Wang Dafu had just returned home from paying respects to his ancestors. His seat hadn’t even warmed up before the ringing of the phone startled him. A glance at the number showed it was his son.

"Hello? Yongli, what’s wrong?"

"Dad! Something terrible has happened! Something’s wrong with the eels!"

"What!?" Wang Dafu shot up from the sofa as if he’d been jabbed with a needle. He pressed anxiously, "What happened?"

"The eels are dead! I just went to feed them and found eels floating in several of the ponds."

"What! I’m on my way now!"

Wang Dafu paid no mind to the meal his wife had just prepared. He grabbed his car keys and hurried to the farm.

Along the way, his heart sank as he considered all sorts of possibilities.

Twenty minutes later, the car screeched to a halt at the entrance of the aquaculture base, leaving behind a black streak and the faint smell of burnt rubber.

He wasn’t the only one there when he got out of the car.

The cars of the other two shareholders appeared at almost the same time.

The brutish-looking bald man’s face was as black as the bottom of a pot.

The other man, a bald-headed elder with glasses, was trembling slightly. He could barely walk steadily, and a deep unease filled his eyes.

The three of them bypassed any pleasantries and rushed directly into the farm.

Wang Dafu’s eldest son, Wang Yongli, was standing by a fishpond with six or seven employees. His face was a mask of anxiety, tinged with a sense of helplessness and resignation.

"What’s the situation!" Wang Dafu shoved a few employees aside to get to the edge of the pond.

Sure enough, the surface of the pond was covered with a vast number of belly-up eels. They were already dead. The few that remained alive looked half-dead themselves, breathing sluggishly near the surface.

"Wang Yongli! How the hell are you running this place?" the bald man roared, grabbing Wang Yongli by the collar.

Wang Yongli looked both innocent and distraught. He quickly explained, "Uncle Zhang, I don’t know either! Everything was fine when I came in this morning."

The old man with glasses stared at the vast number of dead fish on the water’s surface, his expression grim. "Could someone have poisoned them? Change the water, now! And hurry, get someone to run tests and find out what kind of poison it is!"

"Right, right, hurry!" Wang Dafu latched onto the idea like it was a lifeline. "Yongli, you arrange to have the eels sent for testing. Everyone else, change the water with me."

Although the bald man was burning with rage, he hadn’t completely lost his senses. He let go of Wang Yongli but warned Wang Dafu, "We don’t know the cause yet, but Wang Yongli is in charge of this place. No matter what, he has to take responsibility."

"You’re full of shit!" Wang Yongli’s temper flared. "Why would I sabotage my own family’s business? Zhang Biao, don’t you dare make baseless accusations!"

"Hmph! The fact is, you were negligent in your duties."

Seeing that Zhang Biao and his son were about to come to blows, Wang Dafu bellowed, "What are you two arguing about? We’re all in the same boat now! Hurry up and change the water!"

"Urgh..." Wang Yongli glanced at his father’s expression and had no choice but to hurry. He scooped up some fish, collected a few bottles of pond water, and also sealed up the feed from the past few days, taking a portion of it as a sample.

He rushed off with two employees, making calls as he walked to find someone who could run the tests as soon as possible.

"Hmph!" Although Zhang Biao was still fuming, he knew this was no time for infighting.

Wang Dafu had already summoned the other employees. But with just over fifty people facing the task of changing the water in more than four hundred ponds, progress was anything but fast.

However, more and more eels kept floating to the surface, their white bellies upturned.

More than a dozen water pumps worked ceaselessly.

CHUG-CHUG-CHUG...

The noise of the diesel engines grated on everyone’s nerves, making them all feel inexplicably irritable.

In less than an hour, the water in the first pond had been changed, and several surface aerators were working nonstop.

The company’s technicians braced themselves and prepared a mixture of antibiotics and immunity-boosting nutrients.

Inside a large plastic barrel were a dozen or so eels that had just been pulled out, all in a half-dead state. The technicians began attempting to treat them, while a small aerator kept the water in the barrel bubbling.

Watching the slow pace, Wang Dafu’s face turned deathly pale.

Under the scorching sun, he began to feel faint. He hadn’t had time to eat lunch, and the combination of emotional distress and physical labor from moving equipment with the others had left him completely drained.

"Boss, drink some juice. It’ll help," his assistant said, quickly handing Wang Dafu a bottle of orange juice.

"Huu... huu..." Wang Dafu’s gaze was vacant, and his hand trembled as he took the orange juice. The assistant didn’t know how to comfort him and was afraid of saying the wrong thing, so he could only stand aside and try to be invisible.

The other two shareholders weren’t faring much better.

Zhang Biao was checking the other ponds, cursing under his breath from time to time.

The old man with glasses was suffering from low blood sugar, aggravated by the extreme emotional stress. He was now lying down in the farm’s break room.

Tens of thousands of pounds of dead fish had already been pulled out, and everyone’s mood was grim. After all, many of the employees had worked for West Sea Company for over a decade. Seeing such a devastating loss, it was impossible for them to feel anything but somber.

At this point, Wang Dafu and all the employees instinctively assumed that someone had poisoned the water, causing the mass death of the eels.

This continued until sunset.

The retrieved dead fish were piled up like mountains. Bathed in the light of the setting sun, they emitted a foul stench mixed with a strong, fishy smell.

But after five or six hours, the work of changing the water had progressed very slowly. They had only managed to replace the water in just over twenty ponds.

Wang Dafu, Zhang Biao, and the old man with glasses stood on the bank of the first pond that had its water changed, their eyes glued to the new layer of dead fish that had floated to the surface.

Clearly, changing the water had no effect at all.

"What do we do? What do we do?" Zhang Biao’s fists were clenched, his voice trembling slightly. He turned to a technician at his side and roared through gritted teeth, "You’re the technical department! Think of something, fast!"

The technician cursed his bad luck internally and could only shake his head helplessly. "Vice General Manager Zhang, it’s not that we aren’t trying to save them. We just don’t know the cause. From noon until now, I’ve tried more than a dozen different solutions, but the eels keep dying. We need time to find the reason."

Zhang Biao roared back, "Time? How much time do you need to find the cause? In another day or two, all the fish will be dead! What damn good will finding the cause do then!"

About a quarter of the eels had already been pulled out dead, and the rest were still at the surface, half-alive and gasping for air.

They were running out of time.

What they didn’t know, unfortunately, was that the formula Jiang Miao had intentionally leaked to them was a specially doctored one.

One might find it very strange. As a company that cultivated fish fry, West Sea Company had tried to raise eel fry before. Logically, they should have known what shouldn’t be fed to eels.

The reason things turned out this way was that they had run into an exception: Jiang Miao.

Jiang Miao’s appraisal panel could not only see all the conditions required for eel reproduction, but it could also identify their genetic flaws.

It’s just like how dogs can’t eat chocolate, or how some people are lactose intolerant. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Eels also have their own genetic flaws. In a natural, wild environment, eels won’t eat foods that could potentially kill them.

But artificial feeding is a different story.

Jiang Miao had simply added two seemingly beneficial nutrients and minerals to the formula. Once the eels ate this feed, these two components would trigger a series of biochemical reactions, forming a chronic toxin within their bodies. As soon as the accumulated concentration reached a critical point, the eels would die of acute poisoning.

This was a "poison bait" designed specifically to target the eels’ genetic flaw.

In other words, Wang Dafu had personally poisoned his own eels.

This was the terrifying power of being able to read an organism’s genes.

If Jiang Miao wished, he could even create a special version of an "allergen food" or a "genetic toxin" for any species.

This customization could be for an entire species, or even for a single individual.

Stealing from Jiang Miao was never going to be that easy.