Chapter 80 – This material Is Still Fresh

When he got out of the taxi, the driver took the fare Su Lifeng handed him from the back seat, glanced in surprise at his stiff movements, and could not help asking, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Su Lifeng smiled faintly, gritted his teeth in private, and climbed out of the car.

The nearly half-hour ride had not been enough for the injuries he had suffered tonight to fully heal. Although he was no longer bleeding and the surface of the wounds had closed, the damage inside was still slowly repairing itself.

Fortunately, the Xenospecies he had absorbed had ensured he retained at least basic mobility. Once he finished digesting them, his speed would probably rise a little more. At this level, even the slightest increase in speed counted as a huge improvement. In his fight with Qin Moyun, Su Lifeng had deeply understood that the difference between being one second faster or one second slower might be the difference between life and death.

“Hello, President Su.” When the guard saw Su Lifeng approaching, he immediately stood up behind the window and saluted.

Su Lifeng smiled at him and did not correct the way he addressed him… though being called President Su still sounded rather awkward.

“Senior, you’re here!” As soon as he arrived at the laboratory, Qiu Yuming came over to greet him with her usual liveliness. “Yushi-Jie and the others came by today, but they left around noon. They said they were going shopping for supplies or something… That Jiang Qianqian didn’t come today. Only Liang Junyu stopped by once, and when he saw you weren’t here, he left…”

Seeing her voluntarily report these little matters, Su Lifeng could not help revealing a slight smile. She really was still a little girl after all… But wasn’t that expression of relief, as if she had finally seen family, a bit too obvious? Was working with Shen Fei really that painful…

For a moment, Su Lifeng silently lit a candle in his heart for Shen Fei.

“Team leader! Where did you run off to? What took you so long to get here?!”

Before Qiu Yuming could finish, Shen Fei rushed over with an excited look on his face and cut her off. Then, under Qiu Yuming’s resentful stare, he continued in great agitation, “I’ve finally made a new discovery about that ‘Virus’! I tried culturing this Virus, but unfortunately, every attempt failed. Logically speaking, a Virus like this should have extremely strong vitality. Some Viruses can even lie dormant in ice layers for tens of thousands of years… But these Viruses turned into corpses so quickly, yet showed no signs of decay. Since there was no other way, I simply treated them as corpses and dissected them… Of course, dissecting something this microscopic is very difficult…”

“Take me to see.” As Su Lifeng spoke, he walked to the coat rack at the side, hung up his backpack, then took down a white lab coat and put it on.

It was as if the instant he put on the lab coat, his entire state changed. His expression became exceptionally calm, and his gaze instantly seemed free of all distractions.

As expected of someone who did experiments…

Qiu Yuming glanced at Su Lifeng, then glared fiercely at Shen Fei, who was standing nearby with an uncontrollable look of madness all over his face.

Shen Fei sensed her gaze, turned his head, and asked in confusion, “What is it?”

“Hmph!” I finally got to say a few words to him, and you interrupted me!

Seeing Qiu Yuming roll her eyes at him and walk away, Shen Fei scratched his head, feeling a little wronged. “What did I do?”

“This is the result of your dissection?” Su Lifeng leaned in to look through the microscope, then picked up the large stack of photos sitting beside it.

Under photomicrography, the Black Thread mixed together with flesh and blood had been separated out. After Su Lifeng looked through more than a dozen photos in succession, the true form of the Xenospecies gradually pieced itself together in his mind.

“So this is a creature centered around the Wisdom Species, something like a Sea Anemone…” Su Lifeng thought to himself.

Countless “Sea Anemone” formed the native foundation of the Xenospecies world, and each individual “Sea Anemone” was itself a small collective.

Within this “small collective,” the Wisdom Species at the center was the most important part. The other Xenospecies served as tentacles that helped the Wisdom Species hunt.

Not only in terms of behavior, but even in appearance, they seemed extremely similar…

Judging from the photos, however, these strands of Black Thread were not truly thread-like objects. They were hollow, and their elasticity and toughness were both astonishing. They could extend, deform, and separate.

Rather than Sea Anemone, they were more like the most terrifying kind of tentacled monster.

“But this is probably only their most primitive form. Before long, these ‘tentacles,’ meaning the Soldier Types, will immediately scatter in every direction and absorb every living thing they come into contact with. Their appearance and the biological traits they display will continuously merge and change during that process,” Su Lifeng thought.

“What do you think, team leader? Incredible, right? But you already knew most of this, so there’s no need to pay too much attention to it. What’s truly incredible is this…” Shen Fei excitedly took out another sheet of paper, densely covered in all kinds of data and symbols.

“This ‘Virus’ has the characteristic of devouring everything, and the genes it devours recombine inside it into a complete genetic chain. But at the same time, it also has the characteristic of being devoured. The most interesting thing is that I discovered it possesses Death Memory. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a ‘Virus’ whose traits change because of the cause of its death…” Shen Fei said, sounding almost deranged. “A lot of the conclusions I’m stating may be ‘wrong.’ This discovery overturns many theories in biology. No one would accept it. But after verifying it again and again, I still couldn’t find a more scientific explanation…”

At this point, Shen Fei looked a little dejected… There were far too few samples and far too few conclusions.

“No. What you’re saying is right,” Su Lifeng interrupted, his tone certain.

Death Memory… So that was why a Xenospecies could be absorbed by the creature that killed it. Although he still did not know why the Xenospecies possessed such an unheard-of trait, trying to explain the makeup of alien life using biological knowledge from Earth was impossible to begin with. At most, they could use Earth’s biological knowledge to further analyze these Xenospecies…

“In addition, before this ‘Virus’ dies completely, it also has regenerative traits similar to an earthworm’s. I still can’t fully understand these biological characteristics, but at the very least, I can be certain that this is an extremely aggressive ‘Virus.’ If it can be absorbed, however, that would be equivalent to possessing the various abilities of other organisms at the same time. It might even be possible to fuse the genes of all living creatures into a single individual. Nothing this astonishing has ever happened in the entire history of life. What a pity. Such a pity. This is all I’ve been able to research…”

Su Lifeng felt a slight surge of anxiety, but then slowly calmed himself again. Research like this could not be rushed…

“Study this first. Since you’ve already reached these conclusions, analyze how this strand differs from the results of your research.” Su Lifeng took out the Black Thread from Qin Moyun’s body and said.

Shen Fei froze for a moment. Hadn’t he said the material was precious? Why did it look like he had just pulled it out of his pocket…

But his curiosity was quickly defeated by his interest in the experiment. Shen Fei carefully picked up the Black Thread with tweezers, then swiftly sank into a state of obsession. “My god, this… this is still fresh! I’ll dissect it right away…”

Just then, a car quietly stopped outside the factory…