Chapter 165 – “Infection”?

The gunfire outside the carriage gradually grew sparse. It seemed the soldiers who had gone out to meet the attack had more or less been dealt with.

Su Lifeng glanced at Firebug. Firebug had already stumbled down to the floor. His entire arm gave the impression that it might burst open at any moment. In the extremity of his pain, he howled while staring at Su Lifeng as he approached, his eyes not entirely clear.

The feeling Firebug had given Su Lifeng before had been unpleasant, but it had not reached the level it just had. Clearly, those Black Threads were not only causing him pain, but also affecting his ability to think and his emotions.

Seeing Su Lifeng approach, a look of disgust and fear suddenly flashed over Firebug’s face, and the Black Threads on his arm retracted slightly as well.

“Did they sense the aura of Wisdom Species on me?” Su Lifeng keenly caught that change, then walked up to him with his scalpel raised. “No matter what I say now, you probably won’t understand it… Forget it. Let’s just begin.”

The reason he had sent the female soldier away was that he did not want what he was about to do to be interrupted. The gunfire outside had almost vanished too. Yu Zai and the others would probably come in very soon.

The time left for Su Lifeng was extremely tight…

“Ah!” Firebug seemed to realize what Su Lifeng intended to do. But just as he was about to struggle, Su Lifeng’s Bone Wings pinned him ruthlessly in place. Before Firebug could let out his next scream, Su Lifeng had already raised the knife and brought it down. The movement looked light, but its actual speed was extremely fast as he cut open Firebug’s arm along the split wound.

As soon as the flesh was opened, Su Lifeng saw a large number of Black Threads darting beneath the skin. If he had not already gotten used to sights like this, any ordinary person would probably have screamed and thrown the scalpel away.

Su Lifeng, however, did not even blink. His hands flew, and he soon peeled the flesh completely apart.

Inside Firebug’s arm, there was actually no real flesh and blood left. When those Black Threads moved through his body, they had already “digested” his flesh and blood, and when Su Lifeng began, that process was still continuing.

“These Black Threads feel very familiar…” Su Lifeng lifted one of them with the tip of his scalpel and examined it closely. A flash of inspiration suddenly came to him. Weren’t these the same kind of Black Threads he had first encountered during the accident at sea? If they were classified according to Xenospecies evolutionary rank, they could probably be called “newborn Xenospecies.” But the difference from true Xenospecies was that these Black Threads seemed to know only how to absorb. They did not have the ability to turn around and completely control Firebug.

After Su Lifeng threw it onto the floor, that Black Thread rapidly shriveled.

“These are… Xenospecies… ‘eggs’?” Su Lifeng froze for a moment. Suddenly noticing that all the Black Threads were burrowing into Firebug’s body, he hurriedly sped up.

All of the Black Threads had crawled out from the same place. When Su Lifeng completely opened that spot, his pupils immediately contracted.

A red lump was stuck there. The Black Threads were crawling out from that lump. Su Lifeng instantly thought of the piece in his own bag, but it was clearly still somewhat different from this one. This one was alive, while his was already “dead.”

“It must have been left in his wound when the Xenospecies rat attacked him…” By the time these Black Threads finished absorbing him, the threads would be dead, and he would definitely be dead too.

“It’s practically a biological bomb,” Su Lifeng thought. These two red objects should have come from the same source, and that source was what had produced such a large number of Xenospecies rats…

“Something happened to Firebug?” Li Heng’s voice came from behind him. Without a change in expression, Su Lifeng slipped the Red Lump into his pocket, then pulled out his Bone Wings and released Firebug.

After Su Lifeng dug out the “Red Lump,” those Black Threads immediately shriveled as if they had lost their life force. Firebug’s body, meanwhile, gave off an even thicker stench of decay.

The moment Li Heng saw Firebug’s miserable state, he fell silent. Firebug seemed to have recovered a little consciousness by now. He looked at Li Heng and the others with eyes full of unwillingness and longing, but his body had completely collapsed, leaving him unable to say even a single complete sentence.

“Firebug… Zhang Zhu, go in peace.” Li Heng called Firebug by his real name in a low voice, then raised his gun to Firebug’s forehead.

Firebug seemed to want to shake his head, but after a gunshot, his limbs twitched once. Then he stopped moving.

“If you’re wounded in the future, you’d better treat it as quickly as possible. You can understand his condition as a kind of infection,” Su Lifeng said on his own before Yu Zai and the others could ask. Yu Zai turned his head and looked at the female soldier. The female soldier nodded.

“Take his body back and let the experts examine it,” Yu Zai said. Then he turned toward Su Lifeng. “You’ve worked hard. If it hadn’t been for you this time, we might have suffered far greater losses, and we couldn’t have ensured success.” He glanced at the officer. “I didn’t expect the dignified Captain Zhang Jin to disguise himself as an ordinary guard. It seems Commander Lv’s analysis was correct. You didn’t come here simply for the obvious reason, did you? You had something else in mind.”

Zhang Jin stiffened his neck and said nothing. He only gave a bitter smile.

“We’ll leave the explanation of Shencheng’s situation and the actions afterward to you,” Yu Zai said.

What Lv Zifeng planned to do with Shencheng after this had nothing to do with Su Lifeng.

He turned his head and looked into the pitch-black tunnel, while his hand squeezed the two “Red Lumps” through his pocket.

With such a huge commotion just now, it must have attracted the attention of plenty of creatures hidden in the darkness, right?

At that moment, however, the subway had already started moving again. Watching the black walls slide quickly past the window, Su Lifeng vaguely felt that eyes seemed to be watching him from the darkness…

Meanwhile, in the sewer Su Lifeng had visited earlier, an enormous pitch-black figure was slowly crawling through sludge and standing water.

“Roar!” Its muffled roar echoed through the seemingly empty sewer. Then rustling sounds came from all around. In the darkness, countless pairs of red eyes seemed to light up.

“Don’t be noisy.” A very soft voice suddenly sounded from its body, and the huge creature, the mere sight of which would make a person’s legs go weak, immediately fell silent. Then a figure slowly sat up from the top of its head.

It was a little girl who looked only seven or eight years old. She wore nothing at all, with only her long hair covering her body. She seemed to have just been woken. On her delicate face, her eyelashes trembled slightly, and then she slowly opened her eyes.

A pair of blood-red, glowing eyes instantly appeared!

The moment she opened her eyes, the entire sewer fell silent all at once…

“I seem to have sensed a very familiar aura…”