Inside the revolving door compartment that separated the hotel interior from the street outside.
A mass of pitch-black liquid rolled and squirmed across the floor.
Suffocation, oppression!
A sensation Xi Nian had never experienced before surged through his body and mind.
Difficulty breathing? No, he simply couldn't breathe!
At that instant, Xi Nian felt as though he was no longer suited to survive on this planet!
There was no mistake—it was the Lord of Kin ability activating, to the point that his body had been altered by some transcendent power!
"If this keeps up, will I die?" Xi Nian, like a mass of boiling liquid, lay sprawled on the ground, his entire body restlessly writhing.
"Meow!"
The cat's cry caught Xi Nian's attention. A Little Orange Cat crawled out through the gap in the zipper of the backpack that had fallen beside him.
It was Little Huang!
Xi Nian shuddered. In that instant, as if driven by bodily instinct, the black liquid he had become lunged forward, enveloping the Little Orange Cat before swiftly merging with and clinging to her tiny feline body!
At the hotel front desk.
"Welcome." Seeing the revolving door being pushed open, the receptionist instinctively raised her eyes for a glance, only to see an entirely black kitten.
"Where did this stray cat come from?!" The receptionist hurried forward to chase it away.
The Black Cat froze where he sat for a moment. Then, reacting swiftly, he grabbed the backpack from the ground in his mouth and darted through the still-spinning door onto the street outside.
On the bustling street.
Seeing the Black Cat suddenly rush out of the hotel, pedestrians stepped aside one after another, watching him vanish into an alley at the street corner with the backpack.
A short while later.
On the open rooftop of a five-story building.
The backpack lay off to one side. The Black Cat stood on the rooftop railing, blankly gazing down at the neon-lit modern streets below.
"Who am I?"
"I'm a symbiote, Venom... No, I'm an Essence Devourer Beast, a juvenile..."
"No, no, no! None of that is right!!"
The Black Cat clutched his head in a human-like manner. After struggling for a moment, intelligence soon returned to his eyes. "I remember now. I'm Prince Xi Nian, an ordinary human middle school student living in downtown Washington."
"What exactly happened to me?" Xi Nian, now a Black Cat, took a deep breath and sensed a jumble of chaotic voices speaking in his mind.
A hoarse, evil voice cried out, "What is going on with this human's body?"
"Why is he the one in control?! Damn it, damn it, damn it!!"
Another young and innocent voice said, "Xi... Nian, are you okay?"
"Ah, I can't control my body anymore. I've been locked in a little dark room..."
"All of you, quiet down and let me sort this out." Xi Nian rubbed his temples and crouched down to organize his thoughts.
Because their thoughts and information were shared, Xi Nian soon understood exactly what had happened to his body.
Everything began with a voice in his mind—the symbiotic lifeform named Venom.
Venom had come from a planet in outer space and had accidentally arrived in the current world of Earth aboard a spacecraft from a New York biological research company.
As symbiotes, they were physiologically incapable of surviving alone and could only parasitize other living organisms.
The symbiote Venom discovered that certain humans had physiques exceptionally suited for symbiosis. After searching for some time, it ultimately chose Xi Nian as its host.
Then came an even more complicated issue.
Symbiotes had no male or female sex; they were sexless. Yet in a certain sense, they could also be considered both male and female.
When the symbiote parasitized Xi Nian, it naturally fulfilled the conditions for "intimate contact." Furthermore, when the liquid merged with Xi Nian in symbiosis, fluids within their bodies were shared and exchanged—
Thus, Xi Nian's Lord of Kin ability was triggered.
Xi Nian gained the traits and abilities of a symbiote like Venom, resulting in the scene from earlier where his body melted into black liquid.
What happened afterward was easier to understand.
Driven by parasitic instinct, Xi Nian parasitized Little Huang, the Little Orange Cat, and coexisted with her.
Simply put, Venom parasitized Xi Nian, and Xi Nian then parasitized Little Huang.
A symbiote, a human, and an Essence Devourer Beast—three living beings of different races had accidentally fused into one. Among them, Xi Nian was the dominant one, though Venom and Little Huang's thoughts could still be shared and conveyed.
"Humans actually possess such extraordinary abilities."
With their thoughts shared, the symbiote Venom also understood the current situation and asked in confusion, "Since you became a symbiote, why can I still parasitize you?"
Symbiotes could only fight and devour one another; they could not coexist.
"I think I know what happened." Xi Nian sighed.
He had indeed gained the abilities and traits of a symbiote, but fundamentally, he was still human. That was why the current three-in-one state of "symbiote parasitizing Xi Nian, Xi Nian parasitizing an Essence Devourer Beast" had formed.
"Three creatures living together in symbiosis—I've never encountered anything like this before." Venom's hoarse, sharp voice rang through Xi Nian's mind.
Suddenly, it said excitedly, "Wait! Though I can't control it, I can sense that the body formed by our parasitic coexistence is exceptionally powerful!"
"Powerful? I suppose so." Xi Nian's mouth twitched as he looked at a pudding-sized cat paw, unsure how to describe his current physical state. His body seemed to be wrapped in a layer of dark clothing, with white lightning-like markings across his lower abdomen.
"That's right, that's right!" Venom said excitedly. "In that case, we can defeat those guys!"
Xi Nian tilted his head. Through their shared thoughts, he quickly understood what the symbiote Venom meant.
Venom was not the only symbiote that had descended upon Earth.
There were three others.
Those three symbiotes were hostile to Venom. Their colonizing instincts were strong, and they apparently intended to control humans and lead more of their kind in an invasion of Earth.
"Destroying Earth again? Does it ever end? Did Earthlings eat your family's rice or something?" Xi Nian rolled his eyes, unable to resist complaining.
But suddenly.
The Black Cat's body trembled slightly. Sensing something, he turned to look behind him. On the other side of the building he stood on, a model had climbed up the outer wall from more than ten meters below.
The model moved like a puppet on strings, her motions somewhat stiff. Her eyes were lifeless, and her bare hands were covered in brown barbs.
"It's one of my kind! We symbiotes can sense each other's locations!" Venom shouted a warning in Xi Nian's mind.
"Why didn't you say so sooner?!" Xi Nian moved all four limbs, transforming into a streak of black lightning as he fled backward.
Seeing this, the model immediately pursued him at inhuman speed. The brown barbs on both her arms rapidly swelled, smashing toward the tiny cat body like two gigantic, vicious warhammers!
In midair.
"You think you can push me around?"
The Black Cat suddenly turned around, his mouth splitting open in a demonic, savage grin. His tiny tail lashed backward, instantly slicing through the air with its sharp edge. The tail had clearly transformed into a four-meter-long sword, over a dozen times larger than his own cat body!
Slash!
The two warhammer-like limbs were cleanly cut in half!
The symbiote parasitizing the model was startled. It had never expected worthless Venom, who had parasitized an Earth cat, to be this powerful.
She was just about to retreat.
The jet-black, icy four-meter sword slashed down, cleaving the model in two from head to toe!
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