The highly corrosive acid rain dripped onto her skin, sending a sharp, burning sting through her.
Jiang Yue reached out and tore the prison uniform from a nearby dead criminal, draping it over the back of her neck to prevent her skin from being exposed to the acid rain.
The acid rain fell in a steady drizzle, pattering against the fabric of their prison clothes. Zhang San struggled to press his head into a corpse, trying to shield himself from the corrosive rain.
The truck jolted violently. Jiang Yue, dizzy and lightheaded from hunger, saw her vision dim in waves of black. She reached out and pressed her palm against a corpse. At this point, she didn’t care about propriety; she knew it was a little improper, but if she didn’t absorb some energy soon, Jiang Yue would truly die.
Red threads began to seep from the eyeballs. Jiang Yue dared not make it too obvious, she absorbed just a little energy from each corpse beside her, careful not to leave any extremely shriveled bodies that might draw attention.
She thought of how she had once been a soft, timid girl who would cry at the sight of a cockroach. And now, she could boldly strip the clothes off the dead, drape them over her head without so much as a change in expression, and even consume their energy with her eyes.
The path of growth was truly full of hardships and unexpected events.
Her weakened body absorbed the energy, and the familiar sense of power returned to her once more.
The truck drove westward, cutting through gray plains and rugged, uneven mountain roads, until it finally arrived at a garbage dump that reeked of filth.
The overwhelming stench made Jiang Yue roll her eyes. She reached up to cover her nose, nearly fainting from the smell. Mixed in with the stench was a faint hint of fragrance; a scent that had long been etched into her very bones: the smell of blastozyme.
The truck rumbled through the garbage dump, and the stench gradually faded. It stopped in front of a massive, deep pit.
In front of the pit stood several gray five-story buildings, along with structures resembling guard posts. It looked like a rather crude secret base.
Two prison guards jumped down from the truck. Jiang Yue withdrew the threads she had been using to absorb energy, closed her eyes, and once again pretended to be barely alive.
Two people walked past the edge of the pit. A massive crane stood in front of the deep pit, and next to it were numerous gray metal cages, large enough to hold adult Alphas.
Someone asked, “How many prisoners are being transported this time?”
The guard in charge of the bodies replied, “A total of 166 people this time.”
The person asking the question seemed satisfied. “Hmm, not bad. We can hatch another batch of Zerg eggs.”
The truck bed tilted and opened, and the prisoners—alive and dead alike—slid out in a heap, forming a tall pile of bodies.
A group of people stepped forward to start moving the corpses. During the process, another team wearing biohazard suits approached, pulling out tubes of blue injections from their medical kits.
Most of the prisoners on the truck still had a last breath of life. The bio-suited figures approached with the syringes. The prisoners’ eyes were vacant, and as the blue liquid was injected into their bodies, they could only instinctively flinch slightly, driven by the faintest flicker of survival instinct.
After the injections, the prisoners were locked into waist-high metal cages.
These cages looked very familiar. Jiang Yue remembered the massive pit she had seen at the base; inside, spiral staircases twisted downward, and these metal cages had been placed atop the steps, connected by countless threads that stretched deep into the abyss.
The blue injection coursed through Jiang Yue’s body. She then locked the people here into the cages; once secured, the crane’s mechanical claw lifted a cage.
Suspended in midair, a huge pit glowing with a soft pink luminescence suddenly came into Jiang Yue’s view.
The air inside the pit had a faint, dark blue hue. Beautiful pink threads stretched throughout the pit, with countless pink specks of light flickering and moving within them, extending all the way to its deepest reaches.
The scene was eerily beautiful and yet strangely familiar.
Jiang Yue had never imagined she would see such sights on the Garbage Planet.
The crane’s mechanical claw slowly lowered the cage, setting it onto the spiral staircases. Beneath the cage lay a massive blue-eyed millipede, coiled and deep in slumber.
As soon as Jiang Yue’s cage touched the ground, Zhang San’s cage was delivered, placed one behind the other with only a meter of space between them.
A faint, ghostly white glow emanated from the bottom of the pit, leaving Zhang San utterly stunned.
“How… how can there be Thousand Threads here? Aren’t these supposed to be extinct? And that glowing white thing at the bottom of the pit, what is it? Why does just looking at it make my head spin?”
Jiang Yue said nothing.
It was truly strange. In Liyue, there had been a massive mutated specimen, and here on the Garbage Planet, there was a pit that looked exactly the same. The only difference was that, judging by the size of the glowing mass, the spiritual energy here was clearly inferior to the one in Liyue.
Amid Zhang San’s exclamations of awe, Jiang Yue snapped back to reality and gave the heavy lock on her cage a tug.
Zhang San cursed, “Plans can’t keep up with change. I never imagined I’d end up locked in this iron cage, facing such a bizarre scene.”
He grinned wryly. “Good thing I’m a perfect parasite.”
Suddenly, he reached for his throat and gagged. After a dry heave, he pressed his head between the bars and spat a mouthful of stomach acid onto the lock.
The acid ate away at the lock, and a thin wisp of white smoke rose from it.
Jiang Yue was dumbfounded, she never expected stomach acid could be used like that.
She did the same, reaching into her throat, wedging her head between the bars, and spat a large mouthful of stomach acid onto the lock.
The lock corroded away. Jiang Yue gently pushed the cage open and stepped out. The eyeball hidden in her wrist began to stir restlessly; she gripped her wrist tightly, and only then did it gradually calm down.
In the darkness, Jiang Yue released red threads and began siphoning energy from the Thousand Threads. The beautiful threads gradually withered, turning into a bundle of dry pink straw.
Her body recovered rapidly. Flattened muscles plumped up, sunken cheeks smoothed out. In just a matter of ten minutes, she transformed from a skeletal figure into a slightly slender female Alpha.
Feeling the fullness of power in her body, the first thought that crossed Jiang Yue’s mind was whether she should eliminate Zhang San.
After all, only the dead keep secrets.
The gaunt, sickly Zhang San was easy to deal with. If she just pierced him with the threads from her eyeball, in less than five minutes he would be drained dry.
Jiang Yue lightly rubbed two of her fingers together, torn with indecision.
By the time she had come this far, she could no longer be called a good person.
But this was a living human being. Unlike Lei Xi, he hadn’t done anything to harm her, at least not yet.
Two opposing thoughts battled fiercely in Jiang Yue’s mind. She grit her teeth and decided she should strike first.
She made up her mind to let the eyeball consume Zhang San. Her fingers spread slightly; an almost imperceptible filament of red thread slid out from her palm. But as if stung, she panicked and clenched her hand shut.
When it came down to it, she sadly discovered she simply couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“All right,” she told herself. “If Zhang San actually tries to harm me, I can kill him immediately.”
If no one provokes me, I won’t provoke anyone; but if someone does, I’ll cut them off at the root.
Jiang Yue felt oddly mournful.
What had she used to worry about most? Which of her hundreds of lipsticks to wear that day, and which necklace to pick from the jewelry stand.
She had bought out Van Cleef & Arpels and Tiffany, necklaces in every style, and inherited many more pieces from her mother and grandmother. So many beautiful accessories never even got a chance to be worn.
She still had a whole cabinet of classic-doll-brand lolita dresses, so many spring-and-summer limited pieces she’d bought on a shopping spree at Hang Lung, and hadn’t even worn yet.
And her walk-in closet couldn’t hold her collection of bags anymore, so they had to be piled in the guest room.
Every day her concerns were simply how to dress up prettily and where to go to eat, drink, have fun, and shop!
And now?
Every day she found herself thinking about whether she should kill someone.
Was that a bit too perverse?
Jiang Yue wiped her face.
Ah, whatever, the past is over. Now she was Niuhuru Jiang Yue1“钮祜禄” (Niuhuru) is a Manchu clan/family name. In Qing Dynasty China, Manchu names often had this multi-syllable structure, different from the usual one-character Chinese surnames like “Li” or “Wang.”.
Jiang Yue pushed her worries aside and began to survey the surroundings. The concentration of blastozyme here was very high, but she felt no dizziness. She guessed that the energy inside the white crystal had altered her physiology, giving her strong resistance to blastozyme.
Zhang San, rubbing his nose and still dizzy, looked over and said, “This seems to be a mutated specimen. Maybe the experiments the Garbage Planet ran back then are related to this mutation. After all, the Thousand Threads don’t belong to this era, perhaps both the threads and the mutant were experimental creations by Sacrede.”
Jiang Yue said, “That’s all speculation. Let’s first figure out how to get out of here.”
“How do we get out? There are guards above, and there’s no way out below either.”
Zhang San said, “We can go deeper and look for a passage below. A mutant that big might have split the ground with its limbs, there could be cracks we can follow to climb out.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Jiang Yue replied. “This pit is huge. How are we supposed to know where a crack might be?”
Zhang San grinned, a trace of pride crossing his sallow face. He opened his mouth and suddenly broke off a tooth.
Jiang Yue was baffled. Zhang San, beaming, said, “This isn’t just a tooth.”
He lightly fiddled with the tooth. The bright white enamel trembled, and two tiny transparent wings sprouted from its sides. The shape of the tooth began to change, transforming into a small white mechanical insect. Its wings vibrated rapidly as it flew toward the depths of the pit.
“This is a micro-robot,” Zhang San said. “A secret ace I left for myself before entering the First Prison.”
Jiang Yue shook her head, recalling the Liyue base. “The device won’t work once it gets deep into the pit.”
Zhang San glanced downward. “We don’t need to probe too deep. The pressure in the deep crust is so high, the mutant’s limbs might not even be able to hold a passage open.”
Although both were abyssal pits, the two had very different conditions. The pit at the base was extremely deep, with the mutant rooted far below the surface. But the mutant on the Garbage Planet hadn’t anchored itself nearly as deep.
The blue-eyed millipede beneath the cage remained motionless. Zhang San cautiously stepped over it, nervously saying, “Even though I know the blastozyme concentration here is too high for this thing to suddenly wake up, it really tests a person’s nerves.”
Because of consuming the white crystal, Zhang San’s body had undergone some mutations, giving him strong resistance to blastozyme, yet he still felt dizzy.
He quietly studied the unresponsive Jiang Yue, secretly wondering how much energy she had absorbed from the white crystal without him knowing.
Jiang Yue’s origins had to be extraordinary. There was something uncanny about her, and her physical constitution was definitely beyond what a perfect parasite could match.
After a while, the small white flying insect emerged from the bottom of the pit and flew toward them. It twirled in front of their eyes before beginning to guide them.
Zhang San looked at Jiang Yue earnestly. “I don’t have the strength anymore, and my resistance to blastozyme isn’t as strong as yours. If we go any deeper, I won’t be able to hold on. So I’m leaving the escape to you. If we make it out, I’ll give you half of the assets in my account.”
Jiang Yue’s eyes flickered. She instinctively rubbed her fingers together and asked, “How much?”
“At least ten million star credits.”
Ten million wasn’t a huge sum, but times had changed. Even Jiang Yue now had to bow for a handful of rice.
She pondered for a moment, then spoke in a low, ominous tone: “You’d better keep your word. If you dare lie to me, I guarantee you’ll have money but no life to spend it.”
Zhang San raised both hands in surrender. “No, no. Money is precious, but freedom is even more valuable.”
Jiang Yue felt a flicker of unease in her chest, yet she forced a look of cold efficiency onto her face, fitting perfectly with her current persona as a fugitive on the run.
The two of them descended along the spiral staircases. Around the stairs were numerous dark caves and fissures of varying widths. Within the rocky walls of the cracks, many white veins ran through the stone. Having spent a month and a half mining, Jiang Yue immediately recognized them as white crystal veins.
Just how large was the mutant on the Garbage Planet? If the crystal veins belonged to a dead mutant, how could there still be a living one in this pit? Could it be that this mutant had somehow come back to life?
But how had it revived?
After a long while, the small white mechanical insect stopped in front of a narrow fissure.
The fissures were filled entirely with white crystal, leaving only narrow gaps. Even a slender Alpha would have difficulty squeezing through.
Jiang Yue looked at Zhang San. “Can’t we try another route?”
Zhang San shook his head. “If we go any deeper, the instruments will fail. That energy will interfere with the detectors, and with the blastozyme so concentrated below, I won’t be able to hold out for long.”
He staggered, crouching to catch his breath. “I can’t resist blastozyme as well as you can. In five minutes, I’ll pass out.”
At that moment, a look of desperate resolve flashed in Zhang San’s eyes. He gritted his teeth and said, “Jiang Yue, I’ve spent 138 days in prison. I, Zhang San, am not an ungrateful man. If you get me out of here, I will repay you one day.”
Jiang Yue said, “You’d better make sure there really is ten million in your account.”
With only a minute left, Zhang San forced his eyes open a slit, his voice weak: “I really do have ten million. Rest easy!”
Jiang Yue nodded. “Don’t worry, I’m not the kind of person who goes back on her word.”
Zhang San let out a long breath and then rolled his eyes upward, fainting.
Jiang Yue glanced at the crystal in the fissure. She raised her palm, and countless red threads shot out violently from her hand, piercing the white crystal.
Drained of its energy, the white crystal crumbled into powder, falling to the ground. Jiang Yue was about to lift Zhang San and start climbing when suddenly, all the Thousand Threads in the pit lit up at once, emitting a dazzling pink glow.
The dim pit was bathed in light. The white glow from the depths surged violently, and the psychic energy formed a powerful wave, roaring like a tsunami as it swept over everything.
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Sam Williams On TYMIMA Chapter 152