Universal Soldier

At that,

Alexia rose to her feet, casually saving the file she had been working on halfway through. She then walked to Sui Yang's left, folded her hands before her, and pondered for a moment before saying,

"Boss, my team and I are about to complete our research. At most, another six months, and the first batch of Universal Soldiers can undergo testing. Once they pass, they can officially be deployed to the battlefield. There's no need..."

"Don't worry." Sui Yang raised a hand to dismiss her concerns. "I won't cut off your research funding. Don't forget, I was the one who first proposed the Universal Soldier Project."

As he spoke, Sui Yang's tone grew slightly heavier. "You may have overlooked the key point I mentioned. What I want are super soldiers that can be mass-produced, created using my genes and those of those two children.

In my vision, they will be ten times, perhaps even a hundred times stronger than Universal Soldiers."

"More than a hundred times stronger than Universal Soldiers..."

From the moment Alexia joined Atlas's core team, she had begun work on the Super Soldier Project according to Sui Yang's intentions—the Universal Soldier Project.

Moreover, the one who had provided the project's "ideas" and guided its overall direction had also been Sui Yang.

As a genius girl, Alexia had not thought much of Atlas at first. Although Atlas's pharmaceutical business ranked among the world's top ten, its...

The advertising content and wording for its nutritional supplements had simply been unbearable to watch or listen to.

However, the salary Atlas offered was indeed tempting, so Alexia chose to accept and decided to give it a try first.

No one had a grudge against money.

But after passing a series of evaluations and tests, successfully entering the core team, learning that their boss was an Immortal, and discovering the truth about Compound V, her entire worldview had been overturned.

Fortunately, Alexia already looked down on Vought's group of freaks, and learning that most "superheroes" were scum made her more than willing to take on the task of bringing Vought down.

After that, Sui Yang explained to her and a group of experts in biology and chemistry how highly concentrated drugs could support and "revive" the corpses of soldiers who had been dead for no more than three hours.

Combined with genetic-level modifications and the "reprogramming" of their brains, such soldiers would feel no pain and possess no compassion or morality, knowing only absolute obedience to orders.

With cloning technology, their limbs, torsos, and other parts could also be "replaced" after suffering severe damage.

Only complete dismemberment, total bodily destruction, or catastrophic damage to the head could completely deprive such soldiers of their ability to fight and move.

Yet among every step of this plan, the most crucial was the "highly concentrated drug." Without a drug capable of "reviving" corpses, everything else was merely theory and hypothesis.

And their boss just so happened to be an Immortal with extremely powerful regenerative abilities, which meant they could attempt to extract this so-called "drug" from the blood samples he provided.

From 1988 to 1993.

Over five years, Alexia went from a sixteen-year-old PhD fresh out of school to the youngest department head in all of Atlas.

On August 30, 1990, the Bioengineering Department led by her successfully extracted a "serum." After extensive experiments, it was confirmed that the serum could "revive" corpses that had been dead for no longer than five hours.

However, the revived bodies possessed only a certain degree of physiological function. Other than the brainstem, sixty to ninety percent of the brain remained dead.

Furthermore, the serum could not be used on living humans.

Experimental results showed that injecting the serum into a healthy adult would cause the immune system to become extremely overactive, resulting in massive edema, necrosis, and other symptoms until death.

As for the experimental materials...

Atlas—or rather, Sui Yang—did not oppose human experimentation. To improve the feasibility of the Super Soldier Project and ensure Atlas's military strength could continue advancing, live human testing was necessary. But Sui Yang was not some heartless madman.

It had to be said that Vought International was not the only one. Many major pharmaceutical companies secretly abducted homeless people, illegal immigrants, and other unfortunate souls without identities or records for testing and experiments.

In contrast, Atlas's Disposable Human Experimental Materials, abbreviated as DHEM, or "D-Class Materials," were actually serial killers, rapists, and other scum who had committed every evil imaginable, whose crimes were proven beyond doubt, and who had been sentenced to prison.

As a company that ranked among the top in both wealth and influence in the American Midwest, Atlas had conducted highly successful and pleasant "transactions" with prisons in Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and other regions, acquiring large numbers of scum for experimentation.

As always, in the United States, as long as one was willing to pay, almost anything could be bought.

Thus, after the serum had been successfully extracted, Alexia led the research team in continuing to tackle the issue of brain "reprogramming."

By December 21, 1992, the Universal Soldier Project had developed a highly refined set of procedures;

1. Freeze a corpse that had been dead for no more than five hours in low-temperature nitrogen →

2. Inject the serum →

3. Stimulate the thyroid and pituitary gland to accelerate the corpse's repair and regeneration until it was "revived" →

4. Perform brain surgery on the "revived" body, implant chips and corresponding equipment developed with assistance from the R&D Department, and attempt to link them to the brain's nerves.

Thus far, the Bioengineering Department had successfully "revived" two bodies.

These two bodies possessed remarkable resistance to physical damage. At close range and without armor, they could withstand multiple bursts of 7.62 x 51mm full-power rounds and still retain a certain degree of mobility.

However, the brain programming still needed improvement, because the two bodies could only carry out simple movement commands and did not yet meet the true standards of "Universal Soldiers."

As for Sui Yang, who had proposed the Universal Soldier Project and provided its overall developmental direction, Alexia had grown increasingly respectful of him. She believed accepting Atlas's invitation had been one of the best decisions she had ever made.

Still, even though she knew her boss would not pause or cancel the Universal Soldier Project over other matters, Alexia had devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to it, so she could not help but worry.

It was just that...

Alexia believed there was still a long road ahead before super soldiers could be "mass-produced."

After all, at Atlas's current stage, setting aside the funds required to "create" a Universal Soldier, the surgery alone had to be personally handled by Alexia and her team.

Including the subsequent calibration period, turning a corpse into a true elite who knew neither pain nor fear would take at least a month.

Not to mention that the subsequent calibration procedures had yet to be completed.

At that moment.

The office fell into a brief silence.

As if sensing Alexia's worries, Sui Yang looked at Sanguinius and Roboute, who were sleeping even more deeply, and said, "To mass-produce super soldiers modeled after me and those two, we'll need to use an organ called the Gene-Seed."